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bcjordan

2,367 karma · joined October 18, 2008

If you want to reach me, DM this same username on Twitter!
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bcjordan··on Ian's Shoelace Site
Been on the secure knot for nearly two decades. Looks great, perfect amount of grip (never unties) and easy pull to open.

Make sure you tie it balanced!

bcjordan··on KitForStartups – The Open Source SvelteKit SaaS Boilerplate
You know I'm a bit surprised Stripe has not put out more boilerplates that include integration with their platform. It's often a feature not added / coming soon in the OSS SaaS boilerplates I've seen.
bcjordan··on Ask HN: What low code platforms are worth using?
Pipedream is very good for a sort of medium-code Zapier like. Great for point and click hooking up web services but also being able to eject out into JS/Python/Docker with all the authentication done, debug/replay steps and production traffic errors, and generally nice magic support for npm dependency inclusion.

They also have nice repository integration and subdomain support now

Pricing is also super reasonable for anything other than eg high high volume analytics use cases.

bcjordan··on Show HN: TRS-GPT – ChatGPT client/server for the TRS-80
Could you have it write code and run it on the machine too?
bcjordan··on Finetuning of Falcon-7B LLM Using QLoRA on Mental Health Conversational Dataset
Author's writeup about the project: https://medium.com/@iamarunbrahma/fine-tuning-of-falcon-7b-l...
bcjordan··on GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?
Folks who are here and interested in parallelization for CI/CD may also be interested in Dagger.io — I had heard about it on HN over the years but not played w it. It's basically a more fine-grained Docker-like executor with better caching and utilities for spinning up services and running tests.

Curious if anyone else has experiences with it, honestly been surprised at how little I've heard about it

bcjordan··on Show HN: Rivet – Open-source game server management with Nomad and Rust
OK, this is awesome. As a fellow game developer who learned to navigate the complexities of matchmaking and server orchestration the hard way (and begrudgingly), seeing Rivet open source a matchmaker and server orchestrator is exciting and honestly refreshing. For those outside of games, the use of modern webdev / infra tooling is frustratingly nascent, and production-ready OSS usable by smaller-than-AAA-sized studios is even more rare, just beginning to come online (the efforts behind https://game.ci are a recent shining example in game infra).

I'm particularly encouraged here by the tools and approaches chosen — Redis for matchmakers, ClickHouse for analytics/logs, Rust for speedy backend operations were tools I eventually came upon as best for the job after a long and painful process of iteration with inappropriate cloud dev tooling (with basically any datastore other than Redis you will run in to issues matchmaking).

High traffic/concurrency in matchmaking is a hard problem when you need fast, consistent matches. Existing industrial-sized matchmakers (Google's OSS OpenMatch, AWS GameLift, etc.) require locking in to a very specific format or spinning up an entire K8S cluster, which for game devops teams already stretched thing is a tall ask). And for all that effort, you may discover the performance characteristics of their approaches aren't what you need, or (as has happened to us with different game web service/API/middleware providers) they may choose to abruptly deprecate the service upon which you built.

Appreciate the dedication to making this available and the focus on helping gamedevs get up and running as fast as possible. Looking forward to playing around with Rivet and seeing where it might fit in our stack — & would love to talk shop on this with anyone since I've been tortured by / interested in these problems while trying to simultaneously run a game studio / make new games / keep everything online the last few years!

bcjordan··on Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on
What a wonderful idea, would love to have this be a monthly thread.

Homebrew clubs style—bring the half-baked experiments you've been tinkering with, we'll all learn something from it

bcjordan··on Ts_zip: Text Compression Using Large Language Models
I'd be curious to check it out!

I've been wondering this last year about the use case of compressing highly repetitive logs in a streaming fashion, and whether fine-tuning a model or combination of LLM / datastore might make a sort of adaptive online compression perform well (e.g. allowing central versioned coordination of compression steps/layers as they evolve)

bcjordan··on The PhD Octopus (1903)
> With many men the passing of these extraneous tests is a very grievous interference indeed

I feel seen 120 years ago

I am hopeful massive LLMs/other models will be an enabler in recognizing and fostering everyone's talents, capabilities and interests in learning with detailed nuance. We'll soon no longer need to whittle down the education experience to fit through the eye of 20-40 needles[0] which all need to be snapshotted synchronized across a classroom like when TV episodes were only available at their exact weekly time slot. We've got like, I don't know, a trillion 32-bit resolution needles to work with now, I imagine we'll find significantly more nuanced and effective ways of learning[1] and organizing hiring/work collaboration with each other.

[0]: Or as the 1890 Scantron predecessor Hollerith Electric Tabulating System called the needle eyeholes, "keypunches"

[1]: Having worked over the years often on school/learning-supporting tech, and using GPT-4 to learn new things, it feels like, FINALLY! One-on-one instruction with direct attention has always been the most OP way of teaching/learning, but extremely cost-prohibitive. This could easily enable widespread hard-to-fathom outcome changes for students otherwise falling through the cracks of the one size fits all education model.

bcjordan··on Terraform best practices for reliability at any scale
I remember periodically coming across services/platforms that purport to make setting up secure AWS accounts / infra configuration easier and default secure — anyone know what I may be thinking of?
bcjordan··on Microsoft lost its keys, and the government got hacked
Played with writing a little script to format/sort that:

Microsoft takes pains to obscure role in 0-days that caused email breach - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36740133 - (64 comments)

Microsoft still unsure how hackers stole Azure AD signing key - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36731731 - (9 comments)

WSJ: China allegedly hacked Microsoft Azure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36693469 - (6 comments)

Microsoft Warns That a Chinese Cyberattack Breached Government Email Accounts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36697272 - (5 comments)

Thousands of Microsoft Customers May Have Been Victims of Hack Tied to China - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36692494 - (3 comments)

Microsoft government email compromised (and quietly fixed) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36696852 - (3 comments)

WSJ: China Hacking Undetectable from Less Expensive Microsoft Services - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36713560 - (2 comments)

Chinese Hackers Breached Government Email Accounts, Microsoft Says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36690598 - (1 comments)

China-based hackers breached US gov email accounts, say Microsoft, White House - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36694188 - (1 comments)

Microsoft mitigates 0-day, allowing forged AD tokens - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36708294 - (1 comments)

A cloud flaw gave Chinese spies a key to Microsoft’s kingdom - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36716028 - (1 comments)

Chinese hackers breach email of Commerce SEC Raimondo and State Dept officials - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36719412 - (1 comments)

13 posts with no comments: https://gist.github.com/bcjordan/b579960792ee146f905c3e66f39...

bcjordan··on Accessing Llama 2 from the command-line with the LLM-replicate plugin
Are there new system requirements known for these?
bcjordan··on LLMZip: Lossless Text Compression Using Large Language Models
Curious if this sort of trained compression could radically reduce the size of log files / analytics storage (or if there exist simple methods for that which perform well already?)
bcjordan··on LLMZip: Lossless Text Compression Using Large Language Models
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.04050

> We provide new estimates of an asymptotic upper bound on the entropy of English using the large language model LLaMA-7B as a predictor for the next token given a window of past tokens.

> Preliminary results from limited experiments suggest that our scheme outperforms state-of-the-art text compression schemes such as BSC, ZPAQ, and paq8h.

bcjordan··on A blocky based CAD program
Typo in title s/blocky/Blockly
bcjordan··on Show HN: Sortabase, a collaborative, visual database builder for communities
Right, maybe Airtable is to Slack as Sortabase is to Discord
bcjordan··on Launch HN: Metal (YC W23) – Embeddings as a Service
Super cool!

I'm curious, does Metal's version support do anything to solve the problem of "I originally embedded with model A, but now I'd like to take my same data and re-embed with a new model B"? I've heard from others this is a pain point and I've experienced it myself - it feels like there would be some value in storing the embeddings' source data in the cloud to one-click re-embed as well.

bcjordan··on ChatGPT is rendering other people's chat history in the sidebar
It sounds a lot like a cache issue (CDN caching something from the API layer? new cache sharding? run out of keyspace?).

In addition to users reporting other users' summaries, this user and two others report seeing someone else's email address in their pay-to-upgrade flow: https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/11wkw5z/has_chatgp...

> When I'm finally able to get the option to upgrade to Plus to work, the contact email is not the email address I used to subscribe. And you can't change it.

> EDIT: Got it to load again, and it's a completely different email address now. If I pay, who am I paying for?

Which all makes me feel like this could be APIs getting over-cached.

Incident status at https://status.openai.com/incidents/jq9232rcmktd

> We are investigating an issue with the ChatGPT web experience.

I swear every successful web company has had their cache leaking issues moment right after they've hit product market fit and began scaling up. They've made the big time!

bcjordan··on Floppydisk.com – Recycle 3.5“ Floppy Disks
It'd be neat if they had an optional "donate to archive" option which would let textfiles.com attempt to recover any non-personal software/resources from the past (as he wrote in 2011 it's nearly too late to recover anything from the heyday of floppies, but to send to him if possible - http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191)
bcjordan··on Dust XP1 switches to GPT-3.5-turbo, is now free to use
Not sure about their policy/internals myself, but since GPT-3.5-turbo is 1/10th the cost of the previous model it's really hard now to run up a significant (to a funded startup) bill via legitimate usage — especially since at this phase any legit usage may be worth its weight in lessons about how the tool can be used. May be worth rate limiting / DoS protection but even then, could just cap OpenAI spending and spend the time to patch it if/when it happens (e.g. import @upstash/ratelimit or adding a quick Cloudflare rule)
bcjordan··on Show HN: Visualize your Apple Health data in Grafana
Now someone's gotta mash up their production dashboard and Apple Health data to map their heart rate spike to receiving their production outage alert
bcjordan··on Podman vs. Docker: Comparing the two containerization tools
I'm not sure the actual ChatGPT chat interface is capable of measuring perplexity/burstiness yet (unless OpenAI integrated their recent detection work into the actual ChatGPT model which I don't think is the case).

Per GPTZero on the first few thousand characters https://gptzero.me/:

Average Perplexity Score: 632.205

A document's perplexity is a measurement of the randomness of the text

Burstiness Score: 1089.841

A document's burstiness is a measurement of the variation in perplexity

Its conclusion was "Your text is most likely human written but there are some sentences with low perplexities". There was only one sentence highlighted as possibly written by AI: "However, each tool has its pros and cons."

It's also possible to prompt ChatGPT to write with high perplexity and burstiness, so also decent chance of false negatives.

bcjordan··on Grep.app – Search across a half million Git repos
I'd be curious to hear how the ingestion/search pipeline works — the searches are incredibly fast!
bcjordan··on ChatGPT and the Enshittening of Knowledge
@dang title/link feels a bit misleading now, worth changing to the Google Cache/archive or something?
bcjordan··on Launch HN: IcePanel (YC W23) – Onboard engineers with explorable system designs
Couple UX nits from my first experimentation (though you may have already considered and have good reasons for current implementation!)

- normal scroll (instead of ctrl+scroll which is typically used for making text larger) for zooming in / out

- holding center mouse button to pan around (currently scrolls page instead)

bcjordan··on How to Build an Exchange (2017)
@dang could we get a (2017) added to this? Changes the context quite a bit given FTX folks worked at Jane Street previously and a modern version of this talk would have a much different context.
bcjordan··on Saying “sup” with `net send`
Same experience as OP and others here in discovering this setting (also in middle school). While sitting next to a friend I jokingly typed out "net send * [our third friend's name]" intending it as a "haha wouldn't that be wild. OK let's delete this now" quip, but my friend reached over and hit ENTER, we ran away from the computer like it was radioactive, and later discovered it was sent school district wide. We had used a non-user specific account but cracked under the pressure of being grilled as the obvious suspects for any computer shenanigans at our school and being good friends with friend #3.

The third friend's father was LIVID that our friend's name was besmirched by being placed in the contents of the pop-up, later threatened me over the phone, and put pressure on the school to throw the book at us (fulfilling his promise to "TAKE THIS TO THE MAT!"). My friend and I were suspended for a day and banned from visiting the high school computer club for some weeks.

From the district IT perspective the middle school's punishment somewhat backfired because news of our suspension resulted in many more students across the district learning about the command, greatly increasing the # of incidents and becoming a district-wide. They weren't able to figure out how to turn it off for a year+ after. As a temporary measure they made the printer in the high school library print out the originating computer of every net send message, which often backed up printer and caused the HS librarians (my mom happened to be the head one lol) to have to remove these useless sheets from the printer all day.

0/10 would not recommend glob experimentation

bcjordan··on JFK Assassination Records – 2022 Additional Documents Release
Might be a good application of Embeddings at least to be able to search for relevant snippets / information on a more free-text query: https://openai.com/blog/introducing-text-and-code-embeddings...
bcjordan··on New and Improved Embedding Model for OpenAI
The embeddings/search API seem super powerful, been meaning to play around with it more. I wonder how its performance compares to ElasticSearch / other text search/classification offerings out there
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