Viewing profile — jp57

There are so many strange things about the original Dunning-Kruger plot. Why use quartiles for one axis and percentile for the other? Why use higher precision for the subject's est…

I don't think this is the death of creativity. It is just a new kind of non-creativity. He is comparing to a baseline of zero (or perhaps negative) creativity before AI. Without AI…

I think one of the saddest thing is that the kind of person who would recognize, "we can solve this seemingly complicated problem by just applying this formula", would often have t…

What does it mean for an OS to be ported to another OS? Do they mean "ported to devices that support Android"?

I think this brings out the cognitive dissonance around "safety" regarding cyber security: a) In order to make us safe, the LLM should help us find (and fix) the vulnerabilities in…

Not specifically about drinking water or jackets, but I've often wondered why air-conditioning condensate is plumbed into the sewer instead of someplace useful. An A/C is a water-f…

I think he could have gotten away with naming his daughter Photophone, but he would have to pronounce it as if she were a character from an ancient greek epic: phoTOphoNEE.

It wasn’t wrong, though, in my case.

Actually seems absurdly simple now, but sometime last year I was trying to figure out what I'd need to tow my daughter's car cross country with my truck: what are the trailer/dolly…

Just recently it occurred to me that the sage parenting advice, "Don't try to make a happy baby happier," applies to so many other things. Once I had this idea, it seemed like ever…

That’s far more believable than 10,000 elevator attendants. I was an adult in 1990 and used travel agents. But I can’t remember ever encountering an elevator attendant.

I really think a majority of NYTimes and ABCnews consumers don't know the difference between a 2/3 chance (super close) of winning and 2/3 of the vote (a landslide).

Wait. There were 10000 elevator attendants in the USA in 1990?

Well, he is standing still, the camera is stationary. For just that last segment, it is easy to answer "how did he do it?" Write out his remarks, rehearse with a timer, then figure…

They mention Meta's layoffs, which probably have more impact on employee morale than the AI stuff. My current theory of tech layoffs is that over the last decade or so, churn-induc…

But are they actually serious people? I had corporate astroturf accounts arguing with me on my otherwise-ignored blog as early as 2004. All this time later, I just assume that ever…

Claude is a mediocre programmer that can do great things with great supervision, but it can't make mediocre human programmers into good ones, because they can't provide great super…

IDK. I was just reporting what Boris said. In any case the litany of reports of slop inside Claude Code speaks for itself.

There’s all kinds of stuff there that’s not the Claude Code app.

I saw a talk by Boris where he said, basically that Claude codes itself now. They have it automatically writing features and reviewing PRs, apparently. I suspect that much of the c…

Ha. Yes. "Speedrunning enshittification" is the phrase that's been in my head. The flat-rate plans were the top of the slippery slope to enshittification, really. If everyone were …

I have my doubts about the value of a two-alternative forced choice task for this. I was pretty much answering randomly both of the time because I wouldn't ncessarily have called e…

Tokens have replaced LOC as the dumb productivity metric of choice.

Not everything sells out right away, though. I've bought concert tickets on the day of the show more than once. Somehow they still managed to have all the concessions staffed. But …

Our basic findings suggest that the auctions “worked”: price discovery substantially improved; artist revenues roughly doubled versus the ­ fixed-price counterfactual; and, perhaps…