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lesam

270 karma · joined December 7, 2021

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lesam··on Why didn't anybody tell me about Redis hash slots?
I'm confused how you find the data again in this cache? It seems like you're randomly salting your cache keys, so I don't understand how subsequent requests find cached data.
lesam··on California is chasing wealth that has feet
Note that I believe this comment was substantially edited after I replied.
lesam··on California is chasing wealth that has feet
Do you have data for this? The data I've seen in the past is that landlords are not in aggregate able to pass on mortgage rate increases as rent increases, possibly because their tenants are already squeezed to the limit and there is simply no more money to be had. So when mortgage rates go up rents stay roughly constant and property values go down.
lesam··on What even is an OS now?
If the phone injures or defrauds you, does it have to make restitution? If so, how?

'Transacting' requires not only identity but accountability, a completely controlled-by-you phone cannot meaningfully transact separately from you.

lesam··on California is chasing wealth that has feet
You would sell the development for as much as you can get, regardless of tax. The people buying from you aren't going to pay you more just because the government raised your taxes.
lesam··on Jev Can't Be Calibrated
So you want the probability that the answer is correct, but Jev is providing the probability that its answer is optimal?
lesam··on Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode
Why do you need jj for this? I'd usually make incremental commits with git, and I'm wondering how jj levels it up.
lesam··on Gloomberb
It's really useful to have a chat app that is gatekept behind a 20k/year+ subscription. It's a particularly useful signal if someone is offering you a million+ dollar asset for sale.
lesam··on Ask HN: Are systems ready for the first negative leap second?
Early in my career, I had to babysit our FX quoting app through the July 2015 leap second.

And some things do trade 24/7 (though I wish they wouldn't, one auction per minute during US east coast business hours would be totally sufficient for most US markets).

lesam··on Ask HN: Are systems ready for the first negative leap second?
Until you work in financial markets and you want to measure latency vs a bunch of other servers you don't own, all of whom pick different smears (and some of whom aren't sure in advance which smears).
lesam··on The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level
Assuming your labour contribution to these agents is 'minimal':

Why would you own them, instead of some well capitalized billionaire?

To the extent that you do have capital, why do you assume that your 'minimal direction and guidance' would outcompete a full time specialist working for that billionaire?

lesam··on Screen time can damage under-twos' development, landmark study suggests
'can damage' means 'sometimes causal'.

If there's no causal link, they should say 'associated with' or 'correlated with'.

lesam··on An oral history of Bank Python (2021)
Poetic that the most recent update is 6 months ago, a one line change adding a 'Lifecycle: Active' emoji to the Readme.
lesam··on Granularity comes at a cost
I'm pretty skeptical of the market argument - reading the linked article, it seems low granularity subsidizes market makers when there are many small orders (which often get worse prices than they would otherwise) and this subsidy allows market makers to be deeper, which subsidizes large orders. Which is a difference, but not an unalloyed good.

Surely price competition is more economically valuable than the queue position game, which is measured in economically meaningless nanoseconds.

lesam··on Smudging the game disc to make speedrunning 'SpongeBob' faster
'tech' in speed running is a reference to "technique" rather than "technology". https://glossary.infil.net/?t=Tech
lesam··on The Last Technical Interview
Why would you design a hiring process that scores unprofessional people (by your own definition) higher than professional ones?
lesam··on The Last Technical Interview
If you run an interview process where candidates who take 6-8 hours and claim to have taken 4 hours score highest, those are the candidates you will hire.
lesam··on Why airlines are always going bankrupt
This is capitalism working as intended. Only the best run airlines can survive, and investors are collectively subsidizing air travel for non-investors.
lesam··on Vera: a programming language designed for machines to write
I think AST aware code reading is criminally underused by agents - you don't need a header file if you can see a listing of all the functions in a library.

Similarly, I don't read the whole file a function is in while editing it in an IDE, why should a coding agent get the whole file polluting its context by default?

lesam··on Sloppy Copies
Except this isn't 'an app from a spec', it's the potemkin village of an app whose goal is to get ad impressions and a credit card number.
lesam··on Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
When your bridge falls down, you don't call an incident and ask your engineer to fix it, you sue them.

In software there's a lot more emphasis on post-hoc fixes rather than up front validation, in my experience.

lesam··on iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM
I think Adams was prescient, since in his story the all powerful computer reaches the answer '42' via incorrect arithmetic.
lesam··on ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
This is interesting, but doesn't have to be correct.

If Blockbuster had kept pouring money into the new service, maybe it would have lost it all - I see no reason to think Blockbuster's movie rental franchise business would have 'transferrable skills' to allow it to succeed at streaming.

If it had been trying to pivot into a pizza delivery business (perhaps more transferable, in terms of locating franchises etc) would Icahn still have been 'killing' it?

My point is, maybe it was already dead and Icahn just prevented it from wasting a lot of money on the way down the drain.

lesam··on The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying
If it's lasted 10 years and someone is still using it after all that time, that seems like a pretty good signal there's a lot of value in the 'garbage'?

I've seen a lot of 'fixes' for 10 year old 'garbage' that turned out to be regressions for important use cases that the author of the 'fix' wasn't aware of.

lesam··on Can you reverse engineer our neural network?
If markets were regulated to trade in coordinated 1s auctions, instead of nanosecond precision first-come-first-served matching of orders, markets would function just as well without needing a ton of what the HFT crowd does. It's a massive waste of brilliant minds.
lesam··on AIs can generate near-verbatim copies of novels from training data
That seems like a legal question - if the model weights contain an encoded copy of the copyrighted material, is that a 'copy' for the purpose of copyright law?
lesam··on Dead Internet Theory
Before photography, we knew something was truthful because someone trustworthy vouched for it.

Now that photos and videos can be faked, we'll have to go back to the older system.

lesam··on Drones that recharge directly on transmission lines
Depends. When millions are on the line between companies, people are surprisingly willing to take a hand-created excel file as 'proof'. For example: https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/tricolors-excel-g...
lesam··on Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions
If there’s anything I would want to run to verify, I ask the author to add a unit test. Generally, the existing CI test + new tests in the PR having run successfully is enough. I might pull and run it if I am not sure whether a particular edge case is handled.

Reviewers wanting to pull and run many PRs makes me think your automated tests need improvement.

lesam··on Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)
In fact ‘computer’ used to be a job description: a person who computes.
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