Viewing profile — dbuxton

There's no such thing as a "timeless" translation - if you read something written by Victorians you'll get all sorts of overlaid assumptions and biases, just ones that are unfamili…

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a673180-0a78-83ed-abd0-d797c4d95a... tldr the initial effort didn't seem to read the linked article so I copied and pasted the full text in

I can’t read something like this without thinking of the late great Richard Scarry Luckily ChatGPt does a pretty good impression https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6a6662e9af6c81918523fb06d13…

At the moment a lot of companies thinking of it like speculative capex - we can just stop doing it if we don’t get results, or we can easily optimize. My concern is that with all t…

It is just extremely difficult in most companies to draw a line between a specific feature and an amount of revenue. A lot of engineering has a stochastic type of impact. (It’s oft…

As well as cost-per-task I think it's worth thinking about speed, especially in non-coding contexts that benchmark less cleanly We've started trying to do some comparison videos to…

It's genuinely depressing.

The problem with this is that you have a consistency problem if you want to take action. The only way of making your agents read-write rather than read-only in practice is to use t…

I would encourage anyone who hasn’t to try and see a glassblowing demonstration. It’s about as different from programming as any creative process could be - real time, intuitive, w…

We’re (harriethq.com) trying to do this by reframing it as a “provisioning” challenge - how do you get your connectors installed on non-technical desktops, how do you give some eas…

I had the same experience with chatbots, but we shipped a chatbot module a year ago that helps with complex config questions by reading and answering based on a Salesforce Experien…

From the comments looks like lots of people looking at this problem from different angles. We (harriethq.com) also have a somewhat similar insight, which is that setting up connect…

Hi! Everyone I've shown this to has been confused that it didn't exist already, so thought I'd share with the wider community. All the Google Docs MCPs out there seem to be broken …

I think the corrective to this is that many of these incumbents will fail to re-conceive their product stack from a user-centric perspective, and as a result they will be reduce to…

I played this in my head a few times and don’t get it. I assume we are talking - China - maybe South Korea? - US (or is US not one of the 4?) - Russia (ok this is explicit) I think…

The flip side of this is that if model capabilities are extremely strong such that they are able to saturate the benchmarks, the differentiation and defensibility of a wrapper solu…

Of all the challenges you face as a startup, the legal entity you choose is possibly the least consequential. Just choose a jurisdiction where investors understand how the legals w…

> I believe that the near-term de-dollarization isn't as much trust erosion as it is a tool to provide monetary penalty for behaving in unpredictable ways. How is that different fr…

Loved “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance” by Herman Wouk - middlebrow from the 70s but no less good for that. Re-read “The Art of Not Being Governed” by James C Scott whic…

I have played with this but been underwhelmed. However I do think probably on the right track. I know the ecosystem not-at-all (sum total knowledge of the CAD ecosystem is that my …

I used to love Heroku review apps!

> The unification and seamless workflow at that scale is painfully hard to achieve It does make you wonder, why not just be a lot smaller? It's not like most of these teams actuall…

One thing I find interesting about discussions of typography in Cyrillic is how poor the overall readability of text is in most fonts compared to Latin because of the relative scar…

It’s hard to bet against the foundation models winning consumer use cases where you can reimagine the whole product as a single tool or small number that can be dynamically plugged…

I think this is a relative succinct summary of the downside case for LLM code generation. I hear a lot of this and as someone who enjoys a well-structured codebase, I have a lot of…