Viewing profile — msteffen

I’m just saying, to the extent that there’s a moral question here, “how unreasonable was it for the author to ignore the sign?” I think it’s a lot more reasonable if there are no a…

I think the keys here are 1. It’s not clear who wrote the note, and they didn’t leave contact info or any opening to a negotiation. If the note had said “this AC must stay on at al…

> I think this is somewhere in the middle east - Dubai likely What led you to this conclusion?

Well, I wrote my comment after an exchange similar to this, with the linked example chatbot (chatjimmy): https://pastebin.com/uEV7Pm8q I asked it a slightly tricky math problem (I …

This is neat but IMO a little crazy. Something I personally haven’t seen much of, in all the discussions of model benchmarks and AI breakthroughs, is a distinction between “peak pe…

I'd say that by the time you're considering jail, it's too late—these situations are better avoided than rectified. Per the article, one of the officers was evidently particularly …

Interesting to read this right after reading about the pseudpocalypse ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48908886 ) That article proposes that, soon, it will be possible to con…

One use-case for curating commits other than git history is carefully structuring code reviews to be easy to review. Eg "commit 1 just rearranges existing code, no business logic c…

> But this is also a factional concern; for reasons I don't understand, the Democratic left polarized hard against "abundance" (and thus YIMBYism). So these kinds of arguments now …

I read somewhere that almost every very successful person’s results can be attributed to 2-3 tricks that they consistently apply to great effect. With Elon, I think one of his is “…

> learn to turn off the over-thinking part of the brain that blocks creativity This is all pretty vibe-y but I think that might be what the post’s author found the ability to do an…

I wonder if some of these CEOs are anticipating a big crash and trying to lay people off now, so that (1) they can raise/hoard cash while the money-go-round is spinning and (2) the…

> I'm not sure how you get from "LLMs work in mysterious ways" to "So we need more discipline" to "everything is fine." Are you referring to this part: > I am not worried, at least…

> The Enigma of Reason (Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, 2017): their argumentative theory holds that reasoning evolved for social rather than individual epistemic purposes, to produc…

I liked this article, and I see a lot of other commenters didn't, so I'll give my take: When starting on a new codebase, how do you make yourself into a helpful contributor as quic…

> The beginning of the end: The day I bought an Adderall from a classmate. When that amphetamine feeling kicked-in, it was as if life was perfect for the first time. I was happy, c…

IIUC, the most basic version is when you have a log where every entry has both “date added” and “effective date,” so you can add stuff to the log retroactively. For example, “the u…

Yeahhhh…this is not really how Linux works, though. Most of LLM world is kind of anti-linux right now because the most popular LLMs are walled off by these huge companies and hella…

I've never heard this before, but it seems very insightful to me.

I mean the headline is great! I can't tell you how many arguments I've had about "you can't execute your way out of a bad strategy" (which I claim the original "you can't exercise …

> One of the current trends in modern software is for developers to slap an API call to OpenAI or Anthropic for features within their app. Well there’s your problem, control needs …

I wrote a series of blog posts about this a few years ago: https://creating.software/essays/theory_of_a_program/ , some of the few I ever actually finished, lol. Most of my posts h…

For that matter, here's a thread from a few days ago recommending the practice of scheduling status meetings for the purpose of pressuring the attendees to work on your project in …