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benleejamin

87 karma · joined November 22, 2025

ALL MY EM DASHES (AND EN DASHES!!) ARE WRITTEN BY HAND RAHHH benleejamin.com for more
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benleejamin··on GifCities
For some reason "mackerel" surfaces a lot of gifs of a dove? And a butterfly? [1]

1: https://gifcities.org/search?q=mackerel&offset=0&page_size=2...

benleejamin··on Redesigning source control at Anthropic
Does Scion permit atomic cross-repo changes? I was struck by the article's mention of potential intermediate states that seem to be conflicting - perhaps misunderstnading but it seemed to imply that you only get eventual consistency with this system?
benleejamin··on Show HN: Meanwhile Map – what else was happening in the world at the same time
Huh cool! I wish I could click on some of these ancient cultures - would be neat to read about them!
benleejamin··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
I really loved Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet! Very succinct. Currently working through The Tale of Genji (slowly) and Play It as It Lays (because I will read anything by Joan Didion).
benleejamin··on I have a theory that software drives people insane
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
benleejamin··on Haskell Foundation 2026 Update
How is the Haskell Foundation doing these days? Are we worried about its future?
benleejamin··on How ChatGPT serves ads
I'd always thought that ChatGPT ads would be indistinguishable from actual content.
benleejamin··on Is my blue your blue? (2024)
I think there's an anchoring effect in play here. If you select blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue -> green…, you land at the population median.

(The point being that, once you get to a somewhat ambiguous point (after two blue selections), you can say "oh, well, compared to the last one this is {opposite color}!", and it seems most people do that.)

benleejamin··on Claude Opus 4.7
For anyone who was wondering about Mythos release plans:

> What we learn from the real-world deployment of these safeguards will help us work towards our eventual goal of a broad release of Mythos-class models.

benleejamin··on All elementary functions from a single binary operator
I'm not too familiar with the hardware world, but does EML look like the kind of computation that's hardware-friendly? Would love for someone with more expertise to chime in here.
benleejamin··on 1D Chess
And if you like Mind Chess, you might enjoy Mornington Crescent, which has a similar flavor to it! [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lziCsPmlbZI

benleejamin··on Seoul World Model: Grounding World Simulation Models in a Real-World Metropolis
Paper linked from the top of the page: https://seoul-world-model.github.io/SWM_paper.pdf
benleejamin··on The Brand Age
I don't think the Brand Age is as bleak as this essay suggests.

Branding is not inherently unproductive, nor is it guaranteed to produce worse watches. They may be larger and less accurate, but consumers still (evidently) find value in the brand. A Grand Seiko or a Nomos or a Patek is perhaps now even more interesting & identity-productive than a watch was in the 60s.

As technologists I think we're prone to dismissing improvements that aren't engineering-backed. But all life is storytelling, and labeling that work as "button-pushing" is… dismissive, to say the least.

benleejamin··on Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
To further elaborate — NYC subway routing is not effective for some kinds of trips (notoriously: moving north-south through brooklyn/queens, east-west across much of manhattan, etc)
benleejamin··on Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
(Anecdotally) reliability is a huge factor for me — living in NYC, there are a few neighborhoods that would be much easier to reach by bus, but arrival times can vary by more than the length of the entire trip. Easier to just take a subway, even if it means an extra ten minutes of walking on each end.
benleejamin··on Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
I maintain a list of interesting personal websites. There's some link rot, but a good number of young people maintain personal sites, and some of them have blogs! (college CS/design grads, mostly.)

I don't think anyone's really optimizing for SEO. (it's not even really clear to me that that's very important any more.)

Submissions welcome ofc :) https://arc.net/folder/4A220E67-674A-456D-AEDB-796B5BE82034