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tedmiston

6,878 karma · joined April 15, 2011

Taylor D. Edmiston, Principal Software Engineer / Backend / DevOps / etc

I'm in the top 3% on Stack Overflow (all-time) [1] having helped over 8 million [2] software developers.

- web: https://taylore.dev

- email: tedmiston+hn@gmail.com

- stack overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/users/149428/taylor-edmiston

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/tedmiston; my proof: https://keybase.io/tedmiston/sigs/Q1_u0JHA3IxrPnlGfmtvPIzqSu2kR05Gsys9NZXWUks ]

All comments copyright © Taylor D. Edmiston, all rights reserved.

[1]: https://stackexchange.com/leagues/1/alltime/stackoverflow/2008-07-31/149428?sort=reputationchange#149428

[2]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/149428/taylor-edmiston?tab=topactivity

submissionscomments
tedmiston··on To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
"Anyone who uses < public cloud computing > is hypocritical" is a pretty insane take, even for HN.

All technologies have benefits and costs — choosing and using a technology does not imply the nonexistence of tradeoffs. One can give sufficient consideration to the downsides, and then determine that the upsides outweigh them. It's not rocket science.

tedmiston··on To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
Make Neo-Luddism Great Again! /s
tedmiston··on To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
> I know the technology, I understand what it's doing and I know the impact, so I am vehemently anti-AI.

Author: Goes on to demonstrate superficial (mis)understanding of the technology by proliferating misconceptions peppered with anecdata and heavy virtue signaling and calling it a blog post.

Hmm, okay, then...

Is anyone else annoyed by this kind of ironically [^1] weak thinking / writing that conflates: (1) one's own personal opinions and biases however long-standing or irrelevant; (2) limited working knowledge of the actual technology; and (3) virtue signaling / moral posturing / etc? ... and then ultimately just stirs that all up in a pot to not actually say anything more substantial than "AI bad". It's such an overstated, bland, lifeless, useless, uninteresting, intellectually lazy take.

Clutching onto a weak opinion, strongly held [^2] does not make one an "outcast" ... it just comes off as closed-minded and melodramatic. Is that even contrarian? Being on the majority side of an unnuanced opinion is about as far away from being an outcast as possible...

--

Very few of the moral panic type issues those vehemently opposed to LLMs are raising repeatedly are really unique to that field... because why? [Because LLMs are not the problem.]

- Where was said moral posturing when we were building the cloud computing infrastructure?

- Where is the concern of "wasting" compute resources when using 10–15 GB of bandwidth to stream a 90-min movie in 4k?

--

[^1]: Better not call the poorly written human authored post of poor quality "slop" though!

[^2]: Not a typo.

tedmiston··on To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
Reads like a post straight from r/iamverysmart.
tedmiston··on 81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone
> I’m terrified that there’s going to be a doctor’s office sometime that does the same, with more serious consequences.

they can send scheduling info, appt reminders, etc via SMS but (1) they must allow opt out, and (2) they cannot send medical info this way — that's where HIPAA requires encrypted "patient portal" messaging because SMS can be intercepted or accessed by others.

tedmiston··on 81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone
> From my quick research online, it seems they've gone digital-only for season tickets because they don't want people just reselling them to turn a profit. They want actual season-long fans, so now if you transfer too many games they can track it and ban you.

this is a common clause in season-ticket memberships, but it doesn't actually work all that well. for instance, resale on the ticket marketplace is tracked and counts, but in general transfers alone are not penalized. so people do transactions outside of the official platforms, sell / trade in fb groups, etc.

tedmiston··on Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat
RatGPT
tedmiston··on The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
> And as for the critics, tell me I don't get it

> Everybody can tell you how to do it, they never did it

> —jay-z

tedmiston··on The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
sure, but undo isn't the only path to a newer better version of the code

it's easy to see how the product (claude code) could be abstracted to spec form and then a future version built from that without inheriting previous iterations tech debt

tedmiston··on The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
ehh, as long as the overall starting architecture is decent, it's not hard to do tiny refactors across components

claude code, the app, is also not some radically complex concept (even if the codebase today is complicated)

but hey, that's why people do version breaking rewrites

tedmiston··on The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
they prioritize bugs based on what impacts the largest amount ($) of customers — fixing every bug of a huge complex project rarely makes sense if the impact of the bug on revenue is tiny
tedmiston··on The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
i think you are conflating anthropic (the startup) with claude code (the leaked source of one of said startup's products)

i.e., the claude code codebase doesn't need to be good right now [^1] — so i don't think the assumption that this is an exemplary product / artifact of expert agentic coding actually holds up here specifically

[^1]: the startup graveyard is full of dead startups with good code

tedmiston··on The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
> ... but I have to push back on the idea that Anthropic will be acquired. Their most recent valuation was $380B, and even if they wanted to be acquired (which I doubt) essentially no company has the necessary capital.

isn't that pretty much why anthropic and openai are racing to IPO?

tedmiston··on The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
we really need some more precise terms here to make that line clear: something like "black-box vibe coding" vs "gray-box vibe coding"
tedmiston··on AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion
perhaps i'll have to try writing them in plaintext form like "---" [^1]

[^1]: proof that i'm not ai lol

tedmiston··on AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion
i'm not sure personally, but maybe this is a factor in the openai / anthropic IPO race.

but the biggest investor in openai is microsoft — 1 billion is nothing when your market cap is ~2.75 trillion.

if we are talking about the most recently announced softbank investments last month, well... my brain isn't ready to comprehend a $40B round yet.

tedmiston··on AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion
this is probably a nit, but i have avoided using the "…" most of the time because the way it renders on iOS is so smushed to me vs "..."

i truly wish the ellipsis just rendered like "dumb ellipsis" does

tedmiston··on AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion
> Have you ever given a generative AI model a short input, been really pleased with the output, and felt like you accomplished the result? I have! It's probably common.

i mean, you did. becoming good at writing succinct and clever prompts, adding constraints, choosing good models for your use case, etc are all skills like any other.

most people are really bad at it though.

tedmiston··on AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion
eh, that's a leap of faith assumption without knowing one's own dosage and personal effects.

someone who has 5 drinks a week and 5 drinks a day are going to have radically different longterm health consequences. but here we do not have said info.

light or microdose cannabis is way safer than alcohol.

tedmiston··on AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion
the notion that "contains —" ~= "AI generated" is a really dumb popular misconception: dashes have existed for hundreds of years. just because many people use them incorrectly or treat the hyphen as if it's some universal dash doesn't change that.

strunk & white taught me to use em dashes in something like elementary or middle school [1] — it's not hard to understand how to use them or type them... i'm baffled as to why people act like this is the case.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style

tedmiston··on AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion
critical thinking is alive and well
tedmiston··on AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion
AI guardrails continue to make safety improvements — comparing a rapidly evolving advanced technology to a drug is a broken analogy to me. One gets safer over time; the other gets more dangerous.

But also, the risk profile and statistics are radically different: alcohol is inherently dangerous (toxic) to everyone. Chatbots are just another tool — there are a small percentage of people with unhealthy relationships to any tool, but that does not make the tool a dangerous drug.

tedmiston··on Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
> b. related to a, how even small tidbits combined over time can build a pretty accurate picture of who someone is.

that's basically why clickstream analytics is so powerful

tedmiston··on Show HN: Atomic – Self-hosted, semantically-connected personal knowledge base
is your idea of granular control (roughly) a group of agents in separate containers writing back to their own designated store each sufficient, or more control than that?
tedmiston··on Meta acquires Moltbook

    Moltbook Valuation & Funding
    Deal Type              Date         Amount Raised to Date Post-Val  Status     Stage
    2. Merger/Acquisition  10-Mar-2026  -       -               -         Announced  Startup
    1. Early Stage VC      01-Mar-2026  -       -               -         Completed  Startup
tedmiston··on Meta acquires Moltbook
comparing an acquihire of two people by analogy to a $70B investment is a bit egregrious... this event is pocket change to big tech.
tedmiston··on Meta acquires Moltbook
it's high talent acquisition, the service is just a byproduct. this reads like an acquihire.
tedmiston··on Meta acquires Moltbook
it's just a fancified key talent acquihire of people on the edge. with the amount of cash in LLMs, i expect to see more of this given the pace of innovation in that field.

the story does sound ridiculous ostensibly, but that's the press spin.

tedmiston··on To understand our fascination with crystals, researchers gave some to chimps
now give them The Orb
tedmiston··on MacBook Neo
anybody else thinking of getting one just to have a mac in a fun color?

as someone who likes bold colors, the citrus is nice.

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