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jedberg

80,152 karma · joined March 24, 2007

Former CEO of DBOS. We make Transact, an open source library to build reliable and durable by default applications. https://github.com/dbos-inc/

I used to run reddit.com's servers, then I ran Site Reliability at Netflix (and invented Chaos Engineering), then I worked on making Alexa faster and smarter, and then I helped build a GPU cloud.

I enjoy technology, hanging out with my daughter and son, advising and investing in startups, and some other stuff.

You can reach me at {anything}@jedberg.net, and also send me any great investment leads there!

Or you can book at meeting with me (but please tell me why in meeting request!): https://calendly.com/dbos-ceo/30min

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/jedberg; my proof: https://keybase.io/jedberg/sigs/f2MDMfeLg---Sa3dsAQASZXctDSSz4GutwD8oOnuUzE ]

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jedberg··on Ask HN: What Cryptography book do you recommend for reading with 10 year olds?
Don't forget about the NSAs CryptoKids!

https://web.archive.org/web/20100128072801/http://www.nsa.go...

(They went offline a few administrations ago, hence the archive link)

You can also jump around the timeline in the archive to see different versions.

jedberg··on Study estimates 75% of NFL players who died over 15-year span had CTE
They've been doing flag football for the Pro Bowl for a few years now to avoid injury, and the overwhelming feedback is that it is boring.

They either need to make it safer or stop the sport altogether. Or at least stop letting kids play tackle. If an adult wants to make that choice, maybe we let them, but don't let adults make that choice for kids.

> but at the same time, there were lots of fatalities in the early, leather-helmet days of the sport.

This is a good point. We'd need to know if that was because medical science was worse or if it was actually less safe.

jedberg··on Study estimates 75% of NFL players who died over 15-year span had CTE
The number one change they could make to the game to make it safer is going back to leather helmets. Players would be far more cautious.

Or with technology we have today, not allow any helmet contact to any part of the body. You could outfit the helmets with a sensor and a light so the refs know it happened.

Yes, this would drastically change the game and how it is played. But it would probably still be entertaining enough to draw in the crowds they hope to draw in.

jedberg··on Study estimates 75% of NFL players who died over 15-year span had CTE
Basically zero. It only happens if you keep getting hit in the head.
jedberg··on Show HN: Subvocal – Talk to your computer without making noise
The whole paragraph above explains it. Radio through your head.
jedberg··on AI isn't replacing SREs, it's deskilling them
Terraform deskilled us too. No one is saying, "SREs should configure their infra by hand sometimes to not lose that skill".

If AI can handle it, great! We have a new tool -- let's make the tool better.

Let's figure out how to use AI to make us detect and resolve issues faster, and even better, prevent issues. I've always said we can't consistently hit 5 9's without automatic detection and remediation. We are there now.

Let's get everyone to 5 9s with AI!

jedberg··on Google Search is now less than half of Alphabet’s revenue
No one in Google is lying. If what the person in the Twitter post says is true, then everyone at Google is telling the truth, and so is OP.

And given all the replies to that post on Twitter, it sounds like it's true.

jedberg··on Google Search is now less than half of Alphabet’s revenue
You should submit this as its own story. This is big if true, so they say (and based on the replies, it is true).
jedberg··on DoorDash to acquire Instacart
Sure, you could operate without DD. You can also operate without advertising, but it makes it a lot harder to reach customers.

Elsewhere in this post a store owner talks about how DD is a necessary evil. How they have convinced a big chunk of customers to only use DD to order food, and you will lose out if you aren't on the platform.

jedberg··on DoorDash to acquire Instacart
> What I don't understand is why DD gets any cut of the store's profit. T

In theory it's because that customer wouldn't be purchasing without DD. In practice it's a shakedown.

jedberg··on MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch
No but at the current price you can just carry two phones. :)
jedberg··on GPT-6.1 Terra
That's why "They have orthogonal capabilities" matters. You need to find the one that's best suited to your particular task.

But the model names are linear by price.

jedberg··on GPT-6.1 Terra
Part of the confusion is that it's not linear capabilities. One model is not strictly "better" than the other. They have orthogonal capabilities.

I think the names are more of a reference to price. Luna is always cheaper than terra which is cheaper than Sol which is cheaper than Astra (for the same model number).

jedberg··on Anthropic S-1
So you don't have to do the math, at a midline valuation of $1.7T, the Amodei's each will have about $25B. It mentions that they have pledged 80% of their stock to charity in a non-binding agreement.
jedberg··on Ask HN: How to deal with shipping AI-written code you don't understand?
This is interesting advice. When I was coming up as a sysadmin, the advice was always "run a home lab it's the best way to learn all the details". So I did and it was helpful.

But you never heard someone say "you should still code in assembly so you can understand what your compiler is doing".

Is this more like case one or case two? Will it matter if you understand in a few years?

jedberg··on Token-maxxing is dead, OpenRouter's token usage plateaus
Or maybe Codex/Claude Code got better and more people are just using those?

Or more people are using harnesses that do what openrouter does so they don't need it anymore?

Or they are using other GPU providers directly to run their open source models?

I don't think this data is conclusive. It's a very unique subset who are using openrouter.

jedberg··on Show HN: I built a task system to handle the drudgery so I could focus on tasks
Thought it was great, didn't want to pay. We made it free for the basic todo, paid for groups and templates.

We also didn't have the advantage of good whisper models so voice input wasn't a thing. I feel like that hurt adoption as well.

jedberg··on Ask HN: How to deal with shipping AI-written code you don't understand?
I've been a Principal Engineer for a while, so this is how I've worked for a while. Sometimes when you're a PE, you either design something and then junior engineers implement the details, or you're dropped into a project that was already designed and built by more junior engineers, and you have to quickly understand the design an as many details as you can.

With AI, everyone now gets to act like a PE. Your job is to design, the AI builds like the junior engineers. Then you review their work. You may never understand the details, and that's ok, as long as you know the main ideas and where to ask for the details (in this case the LLM instead of a human).

jedberg··on Show HN: I built a task system to handle the drudgery so I could focus on tasks
I tried to build a todo app a few years ago with a similar thesis -- that the problem with todo apps was triaging the list.

So we built an app that did it for you, just like yours, using machine learning and AI (and some simple rules based on due date and expected time to do the task).

Turns out people don't want to pay for that, even at $2/mo. We even had group features, so that a parent could put tasks on their kid's list, or a group of students could use it for a group project, or a team at work could use it to coordinate team tasks.

We also had templates -- tell us you're a single person who lives alone, and we would auto-add tasks like washing the sheets and cleaning the toilets. Or we could add a daily exercise routine or even a daily bible study if you told us you were a religious Christian.

Feel free to take these features. I hope you have better luck than I did.

jedberg··on Waymo in Toronto
I've been using it for a long while in SF. I love it. Never had a problem.
jedberg··on Why We're Banning AI
I know of one CEO who said "If you copy/paste an AI response and send it to someone else, they didn't need you in the loop and you don't need to work here anymore".
jedberg··on Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome
1. I didn't know it exists. Now that I do and I looked into it...

2. I have an M1 chip and I'm not sure it's supported.

3. ChatGPT can open both browers, not sure if Safari plugin builder can

But if it does all those things, great. My point was more that plugins won't be a problem anymore because AI can build them.

jedberg··on Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome
I use all three browsers on a daily basis. Chrome for accessing google owned properties and things I click on from Google search, Safari for reddit and hacker news, and Firefox for everything else.

Safari is always the best on my Mac, but my complaint has always been the lack of plugins.

But just now I ported one of my favorite plugins from Chrome to Safari using ChatGPT. I told it I already have it installed in Chrome so it can get the source code there, and then told it to port it and install it.

After 20 minutes and few bucks in tokens (estimated, I actually used my 6% of my $20/mo plan), I have Session Buddy in Safari.

So maybe the plugins aren't a problem anymore...

jedberg··on GLM-Legal
> Wonder if the law firms are saying the same thing about software

If they're not, they should be.

> Will you still say it's great when it is the society as a whole?

Yes. A world in which menial tasks are taken care of by computers is a wonderful idea.

The important part is that our society needs to transform around that. If all capital accrues to the owners of the AI, then we'll have a problem. If we remake society so that everyone shares in the success, that's a very different idea.

jedberg··on Secret of Orange Cats Revealed After 60-Year Search
> Impossible to follow any topic without it devolving into political flame wars.

But have you considered how that is Donald Trump/Joe Biden's fault?

/s in case it isn't obvious.

jedberg··on GLM-Legal
Not good for the law firms, but great for the rest of us!
jedberg··on GLM-Legal
> but we really need to think about how the next group of people are going to learn the skills and nuance to applying them

That's what school is for. For the last 150 years we've automated a bunch of things, and then we send people to school to learn how those automations work, so they can make better automations.

Maybe law school will have to be a year longer. Or maybe some forward thinking firms will have new associates check the work of the LLM to gain that experience.

jedberg··on AI coding agents generate more code, but not more software
Way back in the day, everyone wrote assembly. Then things like C came around, which had to be compiled to assembly, and most people objected: "I don't want to be that far from what the CPU is doing!".

Each time we move up an abstraction layer, people object, saying that nothing will work right if we move up that high in the stack. Give it time. I'll bet in 5-10 years, almost no one will look at code anymore, except in special cases.

We still have people who write in assembly, we still have people who write in C, mostly for performance reasons. Because you still need to be close to the CPU to get that last bit of performance. But in most cases, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if the LLM makes bad code if it works and passes all the tests.

Granted, this is the first time we're going from deterministic to non-deterministic, but is it really? Large scale distributed systems are already non-deterministic. They create inputs and situations that programs aren't designed to handle all the time. What's a little more chaos? :)

jedberg··on GLM-Legal
I would love to see these benchmarks split up across "generic" tasks and novel tasks.

For example, redlining an OEM agreement with my vendor. They pretty much all use the same template, and the objections are always the same. I tried using Claude first, and even my lawyer was impressed that it found things they missed. Then I used Claude to redline that type of contract and the other side said "your lawyer was surprisingly thorough". I had my lawyer do the final check, but saved a bunch of money doing the first three rounds with Claude instead. And my lawyer basically just said "looks good to me" by the time they reviewed it.

Or even writing a simple will or estate document.

It seems like LLMs are great for the kind of generic work you'd usually pawn off to a new associate or paralegal, but not for the important things that partners usually do.

jedberg··on Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?
Yes, my spouse has access to my password storage, which has all the decryption keys. Whether she remembers how to do it is a different question. :). Maybe I should write it down, or show one of my kids...
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