Viewing profile — moregrist

Nice analogy. I loved graphing calculators until I learned tools like Mathematica and Matlab. Still waiting for the Mathematica version of LLMs. Agents / loop engineering / whateve…

> The line has to be drawn somewhere to prevent garbage from making its way into open standards. Given that the term is explicitly mentioned in the Chicago Manual of Style, I suspe…

> Personally I don’t see any point to typing that sort of thing out As other people have commented, it's partly a relic of an era where things were typeset by hand. Some journals m…

Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid. You’ve clearly never had to deal with a lot of references. Author lists can cluster. If you’re reading,…

Preferring badly handled-drawn art to AI slop does not mean “use better AI slop.”

You wouldn’t need five tables. Each trit takes up two bits when unpacked into 0,1,2 values. You can do a full unpacking-via-lookup with a uint16[256] and then do bit shifting and m…

I think it’s pretty wishful thinking to believe that the Iran war was some complex N-dimensional chess to make Chinese oil costs higher. Even if the current President was known for…

Pretty much. For all the current US administration has complained about the opposition being “socialist,” they’ve certainly gone all-in on the state partially owning private compan…

> My point is not that hard to understand. Have you done any serious graphics programming? Even at the OpenGL 1.x level? What you’re saying just doesn’t make sense. Just because yo…

PCA is an orthogonal transformation of the covariance matrix, so like all orthogonal transformations, it’s _literally a rotation_ in N-dimensional space. SVD is more complex but ul…

> It has always been overpriced and had huge margins. This is the engineer’s take on things. I am entirely sympathetic to it. I also think it missed a lot of what management values…

> They hire juniors because they have junior level tasks that need completed. I have never worked at a place where this was true. Either senior devs would pound through the tasks, …

Claiming “50-100 years” is a misleading and hand-waving way of saying “futuristic.” It tries to get you to imagine that advances in the last 50-100 years will project linearly into…

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olson, Founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, in 1977

> I don't suppose you have experience with how badly small non-profits are fucked by every tech consultancy they ever work with? Definitely with you here. > Getting nonprofits into…

Regardless of how you think about LLMs (I do find them useful), there’s something really odd to think that you can select for “proven experience” in a young technology where curren…

I love that we’re already talking about “proven experience” for a technology that’s essentially 15 months old, arguably only broke into the mainstream 3-6 months ago, has an unclea…

> For any practical application, you are only interested in finite set of concrete identities I do a lot of numerical work in settings where computational efficiency is useful. In …

The tcl syntax is fine. And modern tcl is fine. But tcl 7.x and before was a pure string-based language. Everything was essentially a eval(). People would hit syntax errors on prod…

Why the negativity? If someone wants to have fun in COBOL, let them have fun in COBOL. If it’s agentic fun, that’s cool. If it’s an interest in the language, that’s cool. It’s not …

You bring in contractors. Ideally contractors that benefit you personally (eg: your buddy who now owes you one), but definitely contractors that let you outsource the responsibilit…

Sometimes you get lucky and it both looks up the documentation and then ignores it and makes stuff up.

This more or less agrees with my assessment of recent changes in Claude Code where a lot of new features are either: - A lot of half-baked features or half-done features. - Or have…

Marc Andreessen has a strong financial incentive to feel this way and to convince others to feel this way. I also think it’s easy to think that AI gives good answers if you don’t k…

Seems like there should be a market for a no-Elon/OpenAI/Anthropic ETF out there. Or one that just imposes a reasonable waiting period on adding newly-IPO’d listings.