Viewing profile — jefffoster

I’ve been thinking about this too. There’s this notion of variety popularized by cybernetics folks a long time ago. Variety is like the state space of the system. Then there’s a la…

AI is an expert in everything you are not.

I did a PhD in the late 90s. What was the motivation? Honestly, I was too lazy to get a job and staying in academia for another 3+ years seemed amazing (probably not recommended, b…

I remember attending a tech event at MSR Cambridge, and a speaker made some disparaging comment about older developers not being able to keep up in this modern world of programming…

At a guess an Enterprise API account. Pay per token but no limits. It’s very easy to spend $100s per dev per day.

It’s not only the low obesity rates, the article states it suppresses impulsiveness.

Does anyone have any intuition about the how reasoning improves based on the strength of the underlying model? I’m wondering whether this seemingly underwhelming bump on 4o magnifi…

A great quote that’s stuck with me is that “LLMs are experts in subjects you are not”

Mostly functional programming does not work ( https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2611829 )

Interestingly they used to attach a sponge to the end. You might think that was because it doesn’t break the glass, but really it was to ensure the nearby houses don’t get woken up…

Not just cost reduction but allowing more investment. A good architecture can enable more people to work on your product.

This is an absolutely fantastic book! Read it to learn how to program, learn a bit about AI as an added benefit.

Gives me a chance to reference the best Harvard Business Review title ever: How Earlobes Can Signify Leadership Potential ( https://hbr.org/2011/11/how-earlobes-can-signify-leaders…

Once upon a time I found string interning useful in conjunction with IdentityHashMap for quick lookup of lots of strings.

There's also a positive framing for the sunk cost fallacy. Invest your money in something (e.g. exercise equipment) and you'll be more willing to spend time using it.

Reminds me of how hard it is to write a screensaver by jwz https://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/04/i-told-you-so-again/ (and follow the links)

I found Paradigms of AI Programming ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigms_of_AI_Programming ) an amazing book to work through. It takes you through implementing some classic AI…

I agree this is an important metric and a kind of technical debt that's hard to capture. How do you discriminate this from RenovateBot or Dependa-Bot? Both of those will not only t…

There's some research in the "Accelerate" book that talks about this. For example, having an automated CI/CD pipeline decreases stress measures (iirc).

I think there's a lot to learn from the aviation industry. I did a talk at my companies internal conference on this (turned into words at https://medium.com/ingeniouslysimple/why-d…

I haven't read the Stephen Pinker book, but it sounds similar to one of my favourite books "Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You…