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ibejoeb

5,626 karma · joined September 28, 2009

joe at bokengroup dot com

https://keybase.io/joeb/chat

Technologist-at-large.

Recently: fractional CTO, LLM operations and automation, mobile apps, browser extensions, due diligence, business combinations and integrations.

Formerly: multiple CTO roles, head of product, chief architect, VP Eng., and many different IC roles. A few acquisitions including a cloud financial software company and an Inc. 500 startup. Also experience in healthcare, industrial engineering, transportation/logistics, and manufacturing. I studied maths-based computer science.

The things I like:

1. Pro bono technology implementation and management for charitable concerns.

2. Exigency: contact me if your situation might benefit from external support.

3. Data modeling, data migrations, and making your data systems work really well, i.e., not just fast, but correct. I can help you get the most out of the technology in which you're invested. "You bought it, so you ought to use it."

4. Green fields, end-to-end development.

5. Opportunities to employ ML-family languages for practical applications. (F# f#@<ks.)

6. Low-level odd/embedded platforms, like printers, fabrication machines, industrial automation controllers, and low-power devices, especially building drivers for newer connectivity like WebBLE and WebUSB.

I work a lot with React Native, Expo, React, TypeScript, Python, and Rails. I have a lot of practical, production experience in the cloud on AWS, Azure, and GCP. I'm also comfortable in a traditional datacenter after many years of building servers and running co-lo. My relational databases of choice are Oracle (ask me why) and PostgreSQL. My graph database of choice is Neo4j. I have a long history with Java and the EE platform, Spring, and all sorts of other things in that ecosystem.

I'm also somewhat of an expert in certain areas of financial reporting: FAS 109, FAS 123(r)/ASC 718, FAS 128, FAS 5, FAS 114, FIN 48, transfer pricing, GAAP/IFRS convergence.

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[ my public key: https://keybase.io/joeb; my proof: https://keybase.io/joeb/sigs/iywPxIUXq1g8UfPHGaDKhWNw5opq-mXsGfuK9W9PKAo ]

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meet.hn/city/us-Miami

Interests: Mobile Development, AI/ML, Fintech, Entrepreneurship, Martial Arts, Privacy

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submissionscomments
ibejoeb··on Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them
Laws like that are just going to give rise to new tortured wording. You're buying a revocable license to view the content under certain conditions. It was already in that territory even with physical media; that's what region locking is. Likewise, if bitrot set in and your disc became unplayable, the distributor didn't send you a new one. You never had a perpetual, irrevocable, and otherwise unrestricted license to view that content.

I'm not saying that it is not worth trying to fix this, but now that the technology enables content owners to more fully control your access, they're not going to be keen to relax that only to leave that money on the table.

ibejoeb··on Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
By provocation, I mean what motivated the port. I'm not suggesting that it was "provocative" like with intent to bother the zig team. That's why I ask if anyone thinks that bun would be ported to rust if not for the Anthropic deal. I doubt it, and I think that's why it took everyone by surprise.

Regarding zig becoming a risk: that's a reasonable line of thinking that I hadn't considered. I don't know how likely it is that zig will fail to progress and fall behind as a language compared to others that are assisted with AI, but it's a possibility.

ibejoeb··on LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
Good point. Then, if the contract lapses, who is responsible for that infrastructure? Does flock have to tear it down?
ibejoeb··on LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
I don't have the answer, but I wonder if they are considered a utility and operate on utility easements. Then we have to look at the county and state, too.

On the other side, I've read they operate a considerable number of private installations, too. Even that is suspect, too, in that there is existing case law affirming that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in "the whole of their public movements."

ibejoeb··on LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
>LAPD can just call them and access the data

Can they? Does anyone know the terms of these contracts? Does flock just look the other way if a licensee just gives away the data to some other entity without getting a fee for it? I can see arguments on both sides from flock's perspective, i.e., revenue vs lock-in.

ibejoeb··on Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
I didn't say or imply that it did. I just don't believe that the decision to port bun was based on innate technical merits of zig vs rust. I also don't think that it is entirely meritless, as I mentioned, because now that there's a par rewrite, there is clear delineation of the areas that need to be ported to safe rust. Still, does anyone really think that this would have happened without Anthropic's provocation?

I see it like this: Anthropic saw an opportunity to make a splash. Jarred made it happen without directly disparaging zig, but the implication is that zig couldn't cut it. Andrew made it more personal.

ibejoeb··on Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
Everyone is motivated. It seems to me that Anthropic went out fishing for something to blow up. As Ray puts it: "Management eagerly approved the Rust rewrite option because it was a great marketing opportunity to showcase their new Fable model, Anthropic already uses Rust, and Zig is openly against using Anthropic’s products." Sounds spot on.

Others have pointed to some plausible technical benefits from the port, namely that it forces an enumeration of unsafe code boundaries. There's probably something to that, but the big idea is that Anthropic bet that its models could do a big job, and they needed to both demonstrate that and make hay of it. Everything aligned. They did the port. The artisans might call it slop, but it runs, they did it like 2 weeks, and they stuck it to the guy that shuns AI.

If you're the type of manager who picks farming out work to a body shop with 100 unskilled workers instead of hiring 2 legitimate FTEs, then this is speaking your language.

ibejoeb··on EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0
I have a question: who trains the CSAM model?
ibejoeb··on EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0
That was terrible. But then the NSA just started surveilling everything illegally anyway, laws be damned.
ibejoeb··on EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0
There can be, but this isn't it. In the EU, a company can't send you an email, but it can read your email.
ibejoeb··on EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0
You should be using AIM OTR: https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/
ibejoeb··on Grok 4.5
That's what they did.

> OpenAI invented a technique in July 2022 whereby its system would insert terms reflecting diversity (like “Black,” “female,” or “Asian”) into image-generation prompts in a way that was hidden from the user.

> Google’s Gemini system seems to do something similar, taking a user’s image-generation prompt (the instruction, such as “make a painting of the founding fathers”) and inserting terms for racial and gender diversity, such as “South Asian” or “non-binary” into the prompt

More links to primary sources, evidence, and official statements in the article at https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/googl...

ibejoeb··on Grok 4.5
That's certainly not a universal preference. There are people and even entire cultures for whom being surreptitiously manipulative is disrespectful.
ibejoeb··on Should DayQuil Be Legal?
Honey is also well established in medicine, especially in wound and infection management. I'm not sure of how much clinical evidence supports cough suppression, but it not huge leap to suspect that it could be a second order effect of its antibacterial properties, like in bacterial bronchitis.
ibejoeb··on What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)
> Those can all be addressed with disciplined use of views...

Totally agree. Views as a data API is the best way to take advantage of the facilities that the database itself offers and guarantees enforces consistency across disparate clients.

ibejoeb··on What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)
Wouldn't you consider defining the schema doing the domain modeling?

I think ORMs do too much. I want to control the querying, or, more precisely, I want to control the SQL that goes to the planner. The good ones largely do allow for this, but I can't think of one that has innate support for vendor-specific features.

What I do appreciate is that they handle the boilerplate like managing connections, preparing statements, setting parameter values, and mapping database types back to client types.

ibejoeb··on PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform
> Nobody is going to go to OP's personal site to watch videos

Unfortunately, I agree. It's not the algorithm for me, though. Rather, it's the capabilities of the platform. I use the cast feature almost exclusively. I rarely watch a video on a computer screen and never on a mobile device. YouTube's casting feature is constantly broken, but it's the only thing that even barely works. I have no idea how many others see it this way, but I don't think I'm particularly distinct.

I've been following https://github.com/futo-org/fcast for a bit, but it doesn't really have a viable receiver implementation that I know of.

ibejoeb··on What's wrong with EU age verification? (Nothing)
Not for the past 20 years. I also don't participate in Patronscan and other similar surveillance operations.

That is beside the point. I'm talking about the incoherent argument about a parent's supposed obligation to stop parenting and the government taking over. There are three premises here asserted by the author: 1) the child's need for independence, 2) a parent's duty to stop parenting, and 3) the government stepping in. Number 1 is contrary to 3, and I don't agree with either 2 or 3. What do you think?

ibejoeb··on What's wrong with EU age verification? (Nothing)
> When children are very young, parents can set strict boundaries. But as kids move into their teens, parents also have an obligation to loosen them. Teenagers need spaces where they can act independently

Parent have an obligation to loosen the restrictions, and, what, the government has obligations to tighten them and deprive them of the spaces where they can act independently?

I don't care to talk about the premise itself. This reasoning is absurd.

ibejoeb··on The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
It's not trick. We weren't before invoking collective responsibility. But if now we are, fine. (Leave it alone that Sweden has been in NATO for, what, 18 months? ) Two follow-up questions, then:

1. Does the "east" have the same responsibility, or should the "west" bear it all?

2. Are Middle Eastern and African countries that much more peaceful than western countries? If so, then I suppose you are right. If not, should we at least consider that as sort of an offset to the responsibility?

As far as the shirt made in Vietnam goes: I think that the manufacturer in Vietnam is getting paid for it. Am I wrong?

ibejoeb··on The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
I'm open to this argument. How much bombing and assassinating is Sweden actually doing?
ibejoeb··on Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast
Flock is a YC company, right?

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety

ibejoeb··on LastPass notifies users of yet another data breach
Well, these types of companies typically carry cyber incident insurance. If there was, say, a ransomware attack, the carrier is going to bring in a forensic team to investigate. If it is determined that there was negligence, like not patching a system, that will be used to deny a claim. This might be a little different from the lastpass situation in that it's an untrustworthy vendor, but there's still significant exposure.

If this bank were my client, I would make sure that the decision-makers were aware.

ibejoeb··on NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute
They're great at building datacenters and running massive archival operations.
ibejoeb··on There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
Wow. Can anyone recommend a good write-up on that history?

41%... I suppose these were non-voting shares. Imagine owning nearly half the company and being denied access to company documents.

ibejoeb··on FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model
I've been using the new swipe for a few days and it's truly excellent.
ibejoeb··on What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance
In most of the developed world, you need to register with a government to operate a communications device, whether it's radio, land line, mobile phone, whatever. If you're theorizing some kind of peer-to-peer system, where you let someone use your service to bypass mandatory registration, you're going to be liable. There will be very limited takers.
ibejoeb··on What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance
> Ostensibly, the goal is to prevent children from accessing content their parents don't want them to see

This is not even ostensibly the goal. Ostensibly, the goal is that the government controls what a child can do.

ibejoeb··on What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance
It will go fine, because everything you want to do will require it. Even if you don't strictly have to, you will be effectively ostracized. Transit, entertainment, productivity tools. Haven't you noticed that things that have previously been easy to do are much harder now, even before this has rolled out? Like providing a government ID to visit a museum, for example. Or getting an email address. Using claude.
ibejoeb··on White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report
> that's what Clinton is referring to

We agree. The statement was that no major figure on the left claims fraud. Hillary Clinton, a specifically named major figure on the left, claims fraud.

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