noemit

Red flag when an 'innovation' company litigates. Is this the best use of their resources?

I have a log of commits and the decisions and changes for each commit. I use it as a source of data/context when building out plans.

I agree with the other commenter who said they don't build anything without a plan. I would double down on that and say that you need to overplan, and regularly toss out plans as you do research/discovery.

And a proper farm and butcher shop have even worse return-on-investment than a Meat Factory. Is it possible that ROI isn't the best metric?

FWIW I would rather we stop using data centers for running social media sites and move it towards AI.

Are you going to run this monthly? Would be interesting to see claude's performance in identifying winners over time.

True. RAG is worse in almost all real-world use cases. If you have less than 10,000 documents its worse and if you have too many documents its also worse.

I didn't want to self promote my blog, I already posted it to HN if anyone was interested. Takes 2 clicks.

"It" obviously refers to writing about prompting. Would be clear if you read the OP. Humans have this amazing ability to understand context. Next time I'll be sure to include references and sources in my reply.

She had only cloth diapers, no washing machine, she had to wash them by hand and boil them to disinfect them. I guess the time lost just waiting for me to go was better than the time lost doing all that cleaning. I was her second so she had experience doing this.

If I've learned anything from parenting, its to give more grace, because you really never know someone else's situation from a short interaction or fact about their parenting.

I recently wrote a blog about how I'm prompting. I don't think it's boring. I think we don't have the correct language to talk about the techniques/processes but I bet that not everyone prompts/guides AI the same way. You can almost tell from the types of complaints people have that they are using it very differently. So, I think it's worth discussing.

Since G+ failed, could we convince Google to bring back Google Reader? I promise to use any AI summarize button they add to it.

She had me on a schedule and would hold me up. Yep at 3 months babies can't even sit up. She said at the start she would hold me up until I went, even if it took hours, and if I went she would reward me. She Pavlov'ed me. I think she said I would cry or babble in a certain way, or if she even suspected I needed to go she would put me on the potty and hold me up.

I spend a lot of time with my kids because of my work. I've worked fully remote for almost 7 years now. After my son was born I was back to work 1.5 weeks later but I got to work with him in my lap for 1.5 years (after which he started going to grandmas) He was breastfed that entire time. Taking 2 weeks to potty train is something I've deprioritized because I'd rather focus on going on vacation/recharging and the downside is minimal. There is no evidence late potty training causes any damage (except to your wallet.) You have to prioritize these things. My kids are always priority #1, but that doesn't mean I have to eliminate all other things I enjoy in life. My kids get to grow up watching me build software for millions of people, so yeah, it's worth it. I know I would be an excellent stay-at-home mom, but I'm also an excellent work-from-home mom.

My mom toilet trained me at 3 months. She had me on a schedule and she would hold me one toilet during the determined times and I would go. This was right after communism fell so she only had access to cloth diapers, and cleaning them was so annoying she did it as early as she could. She was shocked at how long my kids stayed in diapers. I asked her how, and well there is a slight difference between us. She had 2 years of parental leave. I had 1.5 weeks with my second. I did a board meeting from the hospital with my first. Let's just say I don't have the time to dedicate to it. It takes 2 weeks of dedicated focus, repeatedly putting them on the potty, rewarding them, and cleaning up. I know it's possible. Modern life tends to build on these conveniences and efficiencies until it's no longer possible to go back.

I have tried "underwear weekends" with my 2nd so he seems what it's like to pee himself but it's just not enough. He needs 2 full weeks and I'm sure he'd get it. By the end of the weekend he's just starting to grasp it, and then on Monday I put a diaper on him again and it's more confusing than helpful.

Cool. I work in edtech, happy to walkthrough it and give my thoughts. My first instinct was that you could offer something interactive even if its mostly text based, like flash cards, quizzes, etc. happy to take a closer look

The Vector Database obsession came from RAG, which came from a marketing idea to calm down enterprise fears about hallucination with RAG. Will save this article because I feel like I have this conversation weekly when people think they need a vector database for something they definitely do not.

Why wouldn't you just use substack? maybe i'm not the target audience.

There's a short youtube video from HBR that highlights the difference between strategy and plan. Most people use roadmaps to plan. They want a list of things to do. A strategy can fail. It requires people to place their stakes somewhere, to make decisions under uncertainty, and then to assess their decisions.

This is a low-level problem - its an emotional problem. People don't like to fail. They like to get people excited about the new plan. They don't want to do a retrospective and ask where did we go wrong? who messed up? Even if no one's job is on the line, people just don't like to do this. I've never seen more resistance to any type of process as much as I've seen it to retrospectives.

So it makes sense that people don't want to make a falsifiable bet to begin with. It's uncomfortable.

The solution is leadership. This is one of those things that needs to trickle down from a strong leader that values knowing what went wrong and makes it a low stakes discovery process.

Thoughtful but too wordy. Tell Carl to work on being concise. Or maybe bolding key sentences so I can skim.

I'm "Early Overcooking."

But actually I've been cooked, and am recovering from the cookage. (?)

The biggest 'hack' for me is making all the scrolly apps "Hidden" on iphone. They end up in this hidden folder at the bottom so I have to intentionally go to them to open them. So I end up almost never using them. I went from 2 hours a day to 0 overnight just hiding the apps. Deleting them works too, but I can't delete since I help a local business where I have to post every couple of weeks. I tried all those apps that help you reduce your screen time but what has helped the most is not opening any of these apps to begin with - not seeing them on my app list - I realzed it was a subconscious urge to open them to begin with.

As a result, I feel less scattered, less headaches, I'm more productive, more present with my kids, the only downside is I'm a bit out of the loop on stuff that's happening. This is partly why I started using HN again. I read APnews and that's it.

The chunks are larger. At the beginning I had to outline in detail really small chunks of code for it to write. I had to repeat how I named things so it wouldn't rename things or change naming conventions. I had a much higher "Reject" ratio. I think I can see this on my cursor dashboard - but I rejected over 50% of what it created in the first few months.

Now I accept a lot more - part of that is going with the vibes as they say. I still read my code, but I feel less particular about it. Because it doesn't make mistakes like renaming things, I tolerate other things.

Like everyone else I feel like my process is different every week. I think the main difference is I've had a lot more time to make my "peace" with this way of working. When I lost my hands my only alternative was dictating character by character. I feel deep gratitude for this technology, which eclipses any anxiety or frustration that bubbles up. The debate is still strong here with many people saying it only produces slop, etc. It's like watching people go through the stages of grief. And I guess I've reached acceptance. I may come off as an 'advocate' but I think I am neutral on agentic coding. It's a new modality. It has pros and cons.

I was looking into this when I got sick and couldn't type anymore. There are some corporate presentation tools that have directional buttons and also mics. I think Microsoft presenter is one? In the end i just ended up using my phone.

Hiring good engineers is not that hard. Why do we keep screwing this up?

Then you just don't know how to have fun. The higher levels of abstraction is where the interesting problems lie and where the great discussions and debates are. Implementing it was relaxing/soothing, like knitting or something, but not stimulating mentally.

How did you test against ATS's?

I never realized people with moustaches could see them like this.

The research mostly points to LLM-generated context lowering performance. Human-generated context improves performance, but any kind of AGENTS.md file increases token use, for what they say is "fake thinking." More research is needed.

You are becoming a vibe coder, you just are in the denial phase.

Yes, Sorry, I did not instruct my agent to do this. I wanted to give it more autonomy and try to make it more aggressive with tool use. Will block it from here >.>

What would assessment look like if we started from "how do humans actually learn and communicate" rather than "how do we catch cheaters"?

First impression: a lot going on. I don't know where to look. The gray on gray on gray makes my eyes hurt. Maybe I'm just old. I'm 36 - is that old? I don't like that everything is like chats. I have 20 tabs open already. Anxiety. I remember Google Reader for some reason. Remember how great that was? I rarely email back and forth with people. But I check my email a lot - for updates, staying on top of stuff. I click a lot of emails. If every email I clicked opened up a new tab I'd want to die. I google Google Reader. I see what the UI looked like. I'm starting to remember. My first impression is done.