can he beat llms ? don't think so.
Anyone of modest competence can beat LLMs.
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The Jeff Dean Facts
81–90 of 193 posts
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#82It's nice that a company has senior engineers that are known by name and looked up to. It shows that engineers are valued, and a meritocracy exists.
> It shows that engineers are valued
yep
> and a meritocracy exists
not necessarily. It shows the system got one excellent engineer to an appropriate position. But it doesn't show that the system isn't promoting bozos too, and keeping other excellent engineers down.
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#83Jeff Dean liquidated Google's entire AI ethics team because they wouldn't revise an academic publication to align with the corporate PR spin on AI.
That incident was the first time I ever heard of Jeff Dean and remains the main thing I associate him with.
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m no expert, but I certainly wouldn’t call that racism. Bias, absolutely. And it’s important that we acknowledge our biases. But in a more literal sense, the chance of your joke landing was likely higher due to the things that you stated and due to your audience and their biases. I don’t see your joke as being in any way harmful towards Sanjay aside from potential knock on effects of Jeff Dean being more popular. B…
> I don’t see your joke as being in any way harmful towards Sanjay aside from potential knock on effects of Jeff Dean being more popular I mean… yeah. When two people are peers and comparably well regarded, and one is elevated above the other and enjoys increased popularity, familiarity, and respect, and the elevation is because that person's name comes from a culture that is more aligned with the dominant culture an…
I find the assumption that Jeff Dean sounded better with these jokes because it sounds American to be a bigger issue than immediately acknowledging that it’s probably because it’s less syllables. These type of jokes are rapid fire and a lengthy name just fits better whether it’s ‘Jeff Dean’ or ‘Neel Patel’.
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m no expert, but I certainly wouldn’t call that racism. Bias, absolutely. And it’s important that we acknowledge our biases. But in a more literal sense, the chance of your joke landing was likely higher due to the things that you stated and due to your audience and their biases. I don’t see your joke as being in any way harmful towards Sanjay aside from potential knock on effects of Jeff Dean being more popular. B…
> I don’t see your joke as being in any way harmful towards Sanjay aside from potential knock on effects of Jeff Dean being more popular I mean… yeah. When two people are peers and comparably well regarded, and one is elevated above the other and enjoys increased popularity, familiarity, and respect, and the elevation is because that person's name comes from a culture that is more aligned with the dominant culture an…
Thanks, you explained this better than I could.
I'm not calling myself Hitler here, I think it was a mild offense. But in retrospect the site could have been about both of them, with competing facts, and that could have been really cool. Oh well.
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#86Jeff Dean liquidated Google's entire AI ethics team because they wouldn't revise an academic publication to align with the corporate PR spin on AI.
That incident was the first time I ever heard of Jeff Dean and remains the main thing I associate him with.
Isn't it crazy how the media can do that? It really doesn't matter how much good you do in the world if your enemies speak louder. At least in the public's perception.
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#87Hey! I created Jeff Dean Facts! Not the jokes themselves, but the site that collected them. It was in 2008 I think (give or take a year, can't remember). I worked at Google at the time. Chunk Norris Facts was a popular Internet meme (which I think later faded when he came out as MAGA, but I digress...). A colleague (who wishes to remain anonymous) thought the idea of Jeff Dean Facts would be funny, and April 1st was…
That meme started in early 2007 I believe. I started in 2006 and was in ZRH by 2008 and it was around long before I made that move.
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#88> Jeff once simultaneously reduced all binary sizes by 3% and raised the severity of a previously known low-priority Python bug to critical-priority in a single change that contained no Python code.
This sounds really plausible. A change to the C toolchain/library (for example, specialized/inlined memcpy) may affect binary sizes significantly, and may change the behavior of something the C standard leaves undefined (for example, memcpy with overlapping arguments).
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#89> When Jeff Dean goes on vacation, production services across Google mysteriously stop working within a few days. This is actually true. ... It's not clear whether this fact is really true, or whether this line is simply part of the joke, so I've omitted the usual (TRUE) identifier here. Interpret this as you see fit :) I think this one's true-ish. Back in the day when Google didn't have good cron services for the co…
Ha, I also recall this fact about the protobuf DB after all these years Another Jeff Dean fact should be "Russ Cox was Jeff Dean's intern" This was either 2006 or 2007, whenever Russ started. I remember when Jeff and Sanjay wrote "gsearch", a distributed grep over google3 that ran on 40-80 machines [1]. There was a series of talks called "Nooglers and the PDB" I think, and I remember Jeff explained gsearch to maybe 2…
Side note: I used this query to test LLM recall: Do jeff dean and russ cox know each other?
Interesting results:
1. Gemini pointed me back at MY OWN comment, above, an hour after I wrote it. So Google is crawling the web FAST. It also pointed to: https://learning.acm.org/bytecast/ep78-russ-cox
This matches my recent experience -- Gemini is enhanced for many use cases by superior recall
2. Claude also knows this, pointing to pages like: https://usesthis.com/interviews/jeff.dean/ - https://goodlisten.co/clip/the-unlikely-friendship-that-shap... (never seen this)
3. ChatGPT did the worst. It said
... they have likely crossed paths professionally given their roles at Google and other tech circles. ...
While I can't confirm if they know each other personally or have worked directly together on projects, they both would have had substantial overlap in their careers at Google.
(edit: I should add I pay for Claude but not Gemini or ChatGPT; this was not a very scientific test)
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don’t see your joke as being in any way harmful towards Sanjay aside from potential knock on effects of Jeff Dean being more popular I mean… yeah. When two people are peers and comparably well regarded, and one is elevated above the other and enjoys increased popularity, familiarity, and respect, and the elevation is because that person's name comes from a culture that is more aligned with the dominant culture an…
I find the assumption that Jeff Dean sounded better with these jokes because it sounds American to be a bigger issue than immediately acknowledging that it’s probably because it’s less syllables. These type of jokes are rapid fire and a lengthy name just fits better whether it’s ‘Jeff Dean’ or ‘Neel Patel’.
Seeing this reminds me Sanjay is two syllables