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jackblemming

1,623 karma · joined January 14, 2020

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jackblemming··on Don't become an engineering manager
It’s how good you are at politics, that’s it. Big modifier if you’re tall and attractive.
jackblemming··on Microgpt
Case study to whenever a new copy of Programming Pearls is released.
jackblemming··on Qwen3.5 122B and 35B models offer Sonnet 4.5 performance on local computers
Death by KPIs. Management makes it too risky to do anything but benchmaxx. It will be the death of American AI companies too. Eventually, people will notice models aren’t actually getting better and the money will stop flowing. However, this might be a golden age of research as cheap GPUs flood the market and universities have their own clusters.
jackblemming··on We Will Not Be Divided
So big tech wants to court Trump with millions in donations and now that the big bully they supported is bullying them.. we’re supposed to feel some kind of sympathy? Am I missing something here? Why did Anthropic get involved with the military in the first place?
jackblemming··on Layoffs at Block
> What's the last 10,000+ employee org you founded and scaled?

A lot of smart and talented people could do this if given the opportunity. Jack was at the right place at the right time and had enough talent. Same with Elon and others. That’s kind of what happens when you have a population of hundreds of millions, a few get lucky and have enough talent to not screw it up.

It’s best to avoid being delusional and acting like billionaires are 5000 IQ geniuses. They’re regular people too, albeit, yes they are smarter than the average person you pull out of Walmart.

There are also plenty of smart people who simply do not care to run or start businesses.

jackblemming··on Amazon accused of widespread scheme to inflate prices across the economy
Enough is enough. Executives need to do jail time, no bullshit slap on the wrist nonsense.
jackblemming··on Show HN: Wildex – Pokémon Go for real wildlife
So what you’re saying is technology can be abused by bad actors and the solution is.. stop developing technology?

Good luck with that.

jackblemming··on I’m joining OpenAI
I appreciate the author’s work and he seems like a good guy.

In spite of that, it’s incredibly obvious OpenClaw was pushed by bots across pretty much every social media platform and that’s weird and unsettling.

jackblemming··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)
Godspeed you legend.
jackblemming··on Systems Thinking
People misinterpret this and think they can incrementally build a skyscraper out of a shed.
jackblemming··on Why more companies are recognizing the benefits of keeping older employees
With technological improvements, we could work far less than we do and enjoy a nice quality of life. Those excess gains were slurped up by the ruling class instead. And the 2nd question looks like American propaganda where if you don’t spend trillions and trillions on defense, the Chinese, Russian, whatever boogeyman will get you.
jackblemming··on AI is killing B2B SaaS
You’re doing God’s work. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Keep building.
jackblemming··on Sometimes your job is to stay the hell out of the way
A feel good article where you can choose to self insert as the wolf or the wise manager who knew to be “hands off”.

To someone actually running a company this looks like absolute corporate nonsense. Don’t categorize people like this, it’s demeaning and weird. Why can’t we just treat people like adults.

Instead of “Oh yea he’s a total 10xer wolf,” try “Yea Mark, has some good ideas for a test framework we should consider”.

jackblemming··on The $100B megadeal between OpenAI and Nvidia is on ice
You have to give credit to Sam, he’s charismatic enough to the right people to climb man made corporate structures. He was also smart enough to be at the right place at the right time to enrich himself (Silicon Valley). He seems to be pretty good at cutting deals. Unfortunately all of the above seems to be at odds with having any sort of moral core.
jackblemming··on Retiring GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini in ChatGPT
They should open source GPT-4o.
jackblemming··on Prism
There is zero chance this is worth billions of dollars, let alone the trillion$ OpenAI desparately needs. Why are they wasting time with this kind of stuff? Each of their employees needs to generate insane amounts of money to justify their salaries and equity and I doubt this is it.
jackblemming··on Microsoft suspects some PCs might not boot after Windows 11 January 2026 Update
How is this not considered destruction of property? How about big tech plays by the same rules as everyone else?
jackblemming··on Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant
So no different than management up to the CEO who simply “delegate” to the underlyings?
jackblemming··on Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
Where I come from, nerd is a term of endearment buddy.

> And even with this comment you literally do not understand that you have some skewed view of the world.

I’m well aware I don’t have a perfect view of reality and the map isn’t the territory. Do you?

jackblemming··on Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
The person replying was trying to turn the conversation into some sort of IQ pissing contest. Not sure why, that seems like their own problem. I was reminding them that there is always someone smarter.
jackblemming··on Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
And they’re all dumber than John von Neumann, who cares?
jackblemming··on Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
Seems like they’re trying to hire nerds who know a lot about hardware or compiler optimizations. That will only get you so far. I guess hiring for creativity is a lot harder.

And before some smart aleck says you can be creative on these types of optimization problems: not in two hours, it’s far too risky vs regurgitating some standard set of tried and true algos.

jackblemming··on Provide agents with automated feedback
I think the standard terminology for these are harnesses. No reason to invent some new term.
jackblemming··on The Dilbert Afterlife
You can absolutely criticize your hero’s and know they’re flawed humans like everyone else. I thought the author was pretty generous to be honest.
jackblemming··on Beating the Tutorial
The greatest trick management ever pulled was creating arbitrary ranks for software devs to chase while they make the real money.
jackblemming··on The Jeff Dean Facts
TensorFlow lost because it’s an inferior API and dev UX. Hate to break it to you.

I’m sure it got Jeff a lot of high-fives because it’s very complicated though!

jackblemming··on The Jeff Dean Facts
Jeff Dean is a lot smarter than me, more accomplished, and more talented. But let’s be honest. He was a big part of TensorFlow and TensorFlow sucks. And I imagine it reflects a lot about Jeff Dean internally. Smart, clever, but maybe over complicated or over engineered. And that itself reflects hugely at what Google tends to like, and why he’s so successful (at Google).

And if we’re being brutally honest, I wonder how he would have faired at somewhere like Bell Labs ;)

jackblemming··on Lessons from 14 years at Google
This sounds like an accumulation and reiteration of other peoples ideas and blogs, barely changing or adding anything. Fair, but I was interested in the author’s own ideas or how those ideas they’re reiterating matter within the context of Google.
jackblemming··on How to complain (2024)
Perhaps some would prefer to “fail” than everyone talk like a politician or corporate PR robot. Perhaps talking authentically and genuinely curates an audience worth having.
jackblemming··on How to complain (2024)
Anyone else tired of others policing how to speak? I think society as a whole is pretty burnt out on this and it leads to some pretty bad second order effects.
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