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ericyd

998 karma · joined November 19, 2022

eric@ericyd.com
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ericyd··on Democrats win control of the House of Representatives
I guess I feel like it's an example of eventual consistency in the real world lol
ericyd··on AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
You could make an analogy to getting a flu vaccine. There's a small up-front cost, but you're making a bet that it will prevent or reduce the severity of a larger issue down the road. There's no guarantee that the larger issue would ever occur, but "getting the vaccine" makes it less likely to occur, and less costly if it does occur. Skipping the "vaccine" is a reasonable choice if the business is willing to incur substantial damages in the case of a large event in the future. To put hard numbers to it, you could always show numbers like "X% of our customers are likely to leave if we leak all their data to hackers", and base it on documented examples from recent history.
ericyd··on Toit v2.0.0
I imagine high school boys saying "tight" in the style of Key and Peele saying "nice" [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/SAfq55aiqPc?is=b8MzZgaT7Yy9qNNR

ericyd··on Democrats win control of the House of Representatives
To clarify, you're complaining about the headline?
ericyd··on Nonna – TypeScript Dependency injection without the reflection tax
I feel like I haven't yet figured out the line to draw between disliking something because it's AI-generated and disliking something because it's lazy.

This line:

> Checked by a guardrail test, not just claimed.

Is such a meaningless statement to include in the marketing page, it immediately makes me feel like the entire effort was lazy because it seems like they didn't proofread their own page. I almost would rather they just have a page describing what they were trying to accomplish and the prompt they used to get there, and skip the ceremony of the generated library.

ericyd··on I went to Mexico to test-drive the cars Americans can’t buy
I thought for sure you meant Chinese as in Volvo. Damn, I sure was wrong.
ericyd··on Phone Is About to Stop Being Yours: 70 Days Until Lockdown
Could you elaborate? This tactic feels identical to the way apple locks down apps to the app store, which requires paid developer accounts
ericyd··on What Is Gridifcation
> What modern production calls “correction,” and mistakes for care, is really a form of epistemic violence against the record of human beings objectifying felt time for our understanding.

I hope this was written as tongue in cheek, otherwise wow, you are taking yourself too seriously.

ericyd··on Oregon lawmakers approve money to buy an iconic waterfall listed on Redfin
Lol yes. Though i graduated in 2016 so no idea if that's the current location.
ericyd··on Oregon lawmakers approve money to buy an iconic waterfall listed on Redfin
Studying geology in Portland as an undergraduate, I didn't appreciate how unusual it was to have widespread basalt formations. It's super common in the area due to some ancient flood basalt. I appreciate it more visually after leaving and getting some perspective from other landscapes.
ericyd··on Tsc-ts: TypeScript written in TypeScript
I would really love a "why" at the top of the readme
ericyd··on CFTC Staff Were Told to Retract Analysis of Suspicious Oil Trades
It is important to acknowledge and name corruption for what it is. It's just hard to continue to have novel reactions to it. It reminds me of an article I read once about cartel violence in Mexico, and how people typically become desensitized to the violence.
ericyd··on Character.ai has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy
Isn't the opposite of acqui-hired just... not acquired nor hired?
ericyd··on Why are coding agents so dumb?
Hard disagree: 1. Writing every piece of software you want to use yourself is unreasonable, 2. The power to change doesn't make it wrong to complain about valid shortcomings. If my ISP is unstable, I can probably change but it's still a reasonable human reaction to complain. "Never complain" is a nice philosophy but really hard to stick to forever.
ericyd··on Why are coding agents so dumb?
Aren't LLMs precisely "very good guessing machines"?
ericyd··on After bankruptcy, he was banned from betting sites. Then he discovered Kalshi
Strange response, do you believe that society has always had access to online gambling, in the same way that alcohol and drugs have been around forever?
ericyd··on Book of Shapes – Collection of minimal, generative and customizable SVG-patterns
Very nice collection!
ericyd··on America.gov goes crazy on "play Minecraft"
this is incredible, thank you for your service
ericyd··on The GitHub wiki is an anti-pattern (2022)
I disagree, requiring code review for docs changes sounds great but in my experience it's extremely hard to get a human to review docs changes. Either you get a rubber stamp with no real review (zero added value, adds useless friction) or you spend days bugging people to actually review your changes. All for docs!

The counter-argument i envision is: "update your docs and code at the same time in the same PR!" That works great, until you want to document something that isn't precisely tied to a single piece of code. In fact I think the most useful docs describe high level systems rather than being associated with specific pieces of code. Use comments for that; in contrast, docs should be easily editable by anyone at all times, otherwise they never get updated (an evergreen problem in any scenario).

ericyd··on What happened to the Snowden archive
[flagged]
ericyd··on Show HN: 1080p is 920px tall – 1k real browser viewports
There's some sort of browser automation software that defaults to this resolution and it's used by bots a lot. I used to work for a company that built a bot filter for form submissions largely based around this one data point.
ericyd··on RTK reports token savings, but our cost benchmarks disagree
> If it were possible to have such a simple pre-process step why wouldn’t the AI Labs upstream the optimizations themselves?

Not defending these tools, but one reason these might not be upstreamed is because it would negatively impact vendor margins, and they have no incentive to save their users money

ericyd··on Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
I see it now, thank you
ericyd··on Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
> Researchers estimate roughly half of human crashes go unreported, and up to one-third of injury accidents, because drivers hope to avoid insurance price hikes. That potentially skews safety numbers in favor of human drivers.

I am not understanding the phrasing of this section. If humans under-report crashes, and autonomous vehicles accurately report crashes, then that would mean the rates are more favorable towards autonomous vehicles rather than humans, right?

ericyd··on Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default
If my tree kept a log of all the activities that led to it being a tree, I wouldn't mind if that log included "Spear and Jackson". To me the closer analogy with software would be if the final web app interface was stamped with "built with Claude".
ericyd··on Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default
I'm not sure i see it as an ad. "Sent from my iPhone" is an ad because the iPhone is not a meaningful part of sending the email. Claude is a meaningful part of the commit though if you're using it, so to me it's more like clarity or transparency than an advertisement.
ericyd··on Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default
Most comments I read were positive, what kind of negative sentiment were you picking up in these comments?
ericyd··on Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default
What's misleading? Wouldn't the session corroborate that it was only used for the commit?
ericyd··on The turbulent AI era is here
Nice, way to be in both threads
ericyd··on The turbulent AI era is here
Related to the form of the article rather than the content: what purpose do pull quotes serve in an online publication? Especially on phones they are so goofy, you read the pull quote and then one or two lines later you read it again. I get it for scanability in newspapers but I think it should be deprecated in online publishing.
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