Viewing profile — shermantanktop

The inverse incentive is what's in place today: a platform actively harming the users who signed up for it, in pursuit of ad dollars. The incentive is to extract maximum revenue wh…

They don’t cut the visible scope. They cut the monitoring, failover, automated patching, test coverage, deployment improvements, documentation, etc.

I’m sadly twitchy when I hear “Pareto” - having endured numerous middle managers suggesting they can deliver 80% of the scope in 20% of the time (unrelated to the frontier topic he…

Chesterton’s login?

Probably because non-type-nerds would not be amazed. They also wouldn’t switch between six different monospace fonts, or talk at length about how fonts generate feelings. I’m glad …

“meaning” emerges from a mental process. That mental process can consume things which were built to convey meaning (e.g. a novel) or were not (a waterfall). Just because an AI bot …

Okay, here’s one I’m working through. When the workload consists of compound elements in multiple domains, agents work best when they see that as a flat surface of detailed resourc…

I keep encountering mistakes by people who are convinced that agentic interactions are nothing new, that all the decades of hard-won lessons about service API design are 100% relev…

"You're absolutely white!" Being sycophantic to a racist means being as racist as the filters allow.

I actually agree. I should have said “just a habit.” Calling heroin a “habit” is putting it in a class which includes doodling, tapping your foot, talking a particular route to wor…

Is the “best” cyberpunk game the game that is most like Blade Runner?

I’ve got similar concerns about skill rot, but I also have chronic RSI and some hand arthritis. LLM assistance plus modern voice models are a godsend but it’s not the same as typin…

So many movies about Hollywood...usually populated with a self-insert writer or director.

When I start a habit it feels like a one-way trip to a new life. If I break it, even once, I realize it’s not, it’s just a thing that I can do or not do. Now starting that habit ag…

Taking heroin may be called “a habit” but it’s not a habit. It’s an addiction with physical and neurological elements.

I know this is the American in me but: what the heck do you do for 3 hours? Especially at a place that doesn’t serve 5 courses. If you’re hanging with old friends, maybe, but even …

Maybe not, but decades from now those same homes will be held onto by 80 year-olds. If this is a problem that solves itself, it would have solved itself already.

I think you are saying "an NGO probably has an agenda." Ok, sure, they are not robots with no opinions, and if you read even the first few sentences of that report you can see the …

I bet your prediction, whatever it is, will be accurate!

Right, it's a map with a scale of 1:1. A map with a scale of 100:1 is perfectly useful for navigation. It's just no good for specifying the terrain you want to build with any preci…

Execs will often hand-wave away complexity as being irrelevant detail. And sometimes it is - especially if an urgent directional decision is needed. The key skill - which is rare -…

The most expensive dollar is the one you don't have. Not everyone has a flexible budget. From my (limited) experience, construction costs can tend to rise with the local real estat…

Sure, but not all compromises are equal. Creating a product and touting how secure it is while some jackass manager continually cuts the budget for security fixes? It’s self-defeat…

I’m in Seattle, live nearby, and have a raccoon family living my yard. I’m boggled the world knows about him, but they do.

The things we called AI back then would not get that label today. Maybe “decision tree” or “expert system”? Or simply “algorithm”?