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grensley

733 karma · joined April 18, 2020

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grensley··on Mind-altering drugs played key role in rise of Andean civilization
The way I think of them is as a mulligan in a trading card game like Magic.

Sometimes you have a hand you can't keep, and it's better to draw a new hand with one fewer card. Don't want to do that too many times, or you will almost certainly have a losing hand.

grensley··on iPhone Duo
The Apple Vision Pro is basically a developer kit.
grensley··on ElevenLabs, TwelveLabs, ThirteenLabs
I think the logo is pretty nifty actually. It's both "41" and "AI"
grensley··on Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?
I have a number of theories for 4.7 onwards:

- Post autonomous weapons / DOD mess, I think they made some changes to make it more suspicious of what the usage is, particularly for malware. They also knew the government would be watching like a hawk, so its hedged to be extra safe.

- Because the tasks are running longer and more autonomously, they've raised the "self-confidence" level so it just makes decisions and stands by them more firmly.

- I think they've also slightly lowered the temperature so the outputs are more deterministic, so even if something has left context, it can make the same decision again with higher likelihood that it guesses the same thing.

- Lowering the temperature also makes it easier to sneak through some cached outputs (I think this likely only happens for first answers).

- They are deeply afraid of making sycophantic AI that creeps into the area of "addiction" like what happened with GPT-4o and opening themselves up to further legal liability.

grensley··on Americans Are Smashing Flock Cameras
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Adams
grensley··on OpenClaw had a rough week
OpenClaw's github is a thing of nightmares.

https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw

So many MRs

grensley··on I still prefer MCP over skills
The "only skills" people are usually non-technical and the "only CLI" people are often solo builders.

MCP makes a lot of sense for enterprise IMO. Defines auth and interfaces in a way that's a natural extension of APIs.

grensley··on Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
Absolutely textbook "Brilliant Jerk". Dude just whines and whines and whines. If you're so good, why can't you get anybody to work with you?
grensley··on MCP is dead; long live MCP
On the other hand, I've seen over-centralization completely crush the hopes and dreams of people with good ideas.
grensley··on Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
Same as it ever was: Either trade secrets or license files that are treated as suggestions.
grensley··on Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras
Here's a list of Flock's investors:

- Andreessen Horowitz

- Greenoaks Capital

- Bedrock Capital

- Meritech Capital

- Matrix Partners

- Sands Capital

- Founders Fund

- Kleiner Perkins

- Tiger Global

- Y Combinator

grensley··on Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs
Gemini really feels like a high-performing child raised in an abusive household.
grensley··on Nvidia's $20B antitrust loophole
A la carte in AI is going to be the name of the game for a couple reasons:

- Avoids regulatory scrutiny (for now at least)

- Nobody is actually entrenched enough for customers to matter

- Weird "celebrity" culture in tech, and AI especially. Everyone is looking for a "whisperer" or a "godfather" or whatever.

- Investors still get paid out

Smart operational talent will probably adapt by demanding higher salary, signing bonuses, severance packages in lieu of equity. Distribution of the true "lottery tickets" will get more uneven.

grensley··on A Proclamation Regarding the Restoration of the Dash
I was always looking for them because I was the weird nerd pointing out proper em dash, en dash, and hyphen usage years and years ago.

It's really only devs / engineers I see doing this, probably in some quest to create an indistinguishable voice in the name of productivity or something.

grensley··on A Proclamation Regarding the Restoration of the Dash
I've noticed people using emdashes more in known non-AI text in what I assume is a smokescreen to maintain plausible deniability when they wholesale copy AI text.

It's so interesting to me that human writing is subtly changing to mirror AI writing.

grensley··on Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet
The transmission network is underbuilt, so it's mostly best to generate closer to where it's consumed (especially for data centers).

We'll continue to see a mix though of Residential / Commercial & Industrial / Utility Scale

There are about 7,000 Utility scale sites in the US right now, so even the big boys there are fairly distributed.

grensley··on How Anthropic teams use Claude Code
Claude Desktop is one of the buggier applications I've ever used and one of our jokes internally is that it seems like it was very clearly vibe coded.
grensley··on OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive
More like they see the future as more multi-modal, and they're probably right to think that is the best value approach vs. throwing more money at large language models.
grensley··on Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings
I take screenshots because they're definitely going to forget to share the presentation.
grensley··on "Normal" engineers are the key to great teams
I agree with you, but in a different directions. Often the software is owned by the company, who are just renting the engineer's labor.
grensley··on “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
> Individual engineers don’t own software; engineering teams own software.

Very assertive, but almost always incorrect.

grensley··on String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
I don't know if these statistics are even kept, but the current social environment in the US feels like a ripe breeding ground for cults. I've had so many people in the past couple years be like "I just want to farm with my friends and family and get away from all this".
grensley··on Show HN: Don't let your billion-dollar ideas die
This site is basically the Target to 4chan's Walmart.
grensley··on Show HN: Don't let your billion-dollar ideas die
> Batteries that can store the internet in them for when your connection goes down.

This is now my favorite way to explain caching.

grensley··on GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic
I think there's a number of factors that make it work as well as it does for me:

- Mostly writing React

- Not using any obscure or new libraries

- Naming things well

- Keeping logic simple

- Leaving a comment at the point where I'm about to make a shift from what the common logic would be

- Getting a feel for when it's going to be able to correctly guess or not (and not even reading it if I think it's going to be wrong)

- Trusting short blocks more than long ones

grensley··on How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me
The KPIs of these people's own lives have failed to grow quarter-over-quarter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYvhC_RdIwQ
grensley··on California is torn between clashing Anglo traditions?
If you're a Californian who disagrees with me, tell me where your parents and grandparents lived.
grensley··on How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me
Sometimes you just want to expend energy in a direction that doesn't have consequences. I hold the opposite opinion from you in that people ought to be able to turn off the "any non-productive minute of my life is wasted" mindset.

You're on big space rock, dude.

grensley··on How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)
"C-Players" tend to keep "A-Players" out of legal trouble, so Jimmy might just now be learning their value.
grensley··on Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'
Some peak "Genius and Madness are next door neighbors" energy coming off Eric Schmidt from that talk.
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