There's a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion about the topic I've seen and it's a commonly expressed belief "in real life" a … | Continue reading
About eight years ago, I was playing a game of Codenames where the game state was such that our team would almost certainly lose if we didn't correctly guess all of our remaining words on our turn. From the given clue, we were unable to do this. Although the game is meant to be a … | Continue reading
There've been regular viral stories about ML/AI bias with LLMs and generative AI for the past couple years. One thing I find interesting about discussions of bias is how different the reaction is in the LLM and generative AI case when compared to "classical" bugs in cases where t … | Continue reading
This is an archive of some posts in a forum thread titled "Beware of Bioware" in a now defunct forum, with comments from that forum as well as blog comments from a now defunct blog that archived that made the first attempt to archive this content. The original posts were deleted … | Continue reading
This is a summary of the publicly available documents on the 2011-2012 FTC investigation of Google's allegedly antitcompetive actions in search and ads, followed by a tech-focused analysis of the decision from someone who's worked at the two companies that are discussed in the mo … | Continue reading
In 2017, we looked at how web bloat affects users with slow connections. Even in the U.S., many users didn't have broadband speeds, making much of the web difficult to use. It's still the case that many users don't have broadband speeds, both inside and outside of the U.S. and th … | Continue reading
This is an archive of the BitC retrospective by Jonathan Shapiro that seems to have disappeared from the internet Jonathan S. Shapiro shap at eros-os.org Fri Mar 23 15:06:41 PDT 2012 By now it will be obvious to everyone that I have stopped work on BitC. An explanation of why se … | Continue reading
If I ask myself a question like "I'd like to buy an SD card; who do I trust to sell me a real SD card and not some fake, Amazon or my local Best Buy?", of course the answer is that I trust my local Best Buy1 more than Amazon, which is notorious for selling counterfeit SD cards. A … | Continue reading
On large platforms, it's impossible to have policies on things like moderation, spam, fraud, and sexual content that people agree on. David Turner made a simple game to illustrate how difficult this is even in a trivial case, No Vehicles in the Park. If you haven't played it yet, … | Continue reading
This is a set of notes on the Quinn Emanuel report on Cruise's handling of the 2023-10-02 accident where a Cruise autonomous vehicle (AV) hit a pedestrian, stopped, and then started moving again with the pedestrian stuck under the bottom of the AV, dragging the pedestrian 20 ft. … | Continue reading
There's a class of comment you often see when someone makes a popular thread on Mastodon/Twitter/Threads/etc., that you also see on videos that's basically "Why would make a Twitter thread? This would be better as a blog post" or "Why make a video? This would be better as a blog … | Continue reading
In The birth & death of search engine optimization, Xe suggests Here's a fun experiment to try. Take an open source project such as yt-dlp and try to find it from a very generic term like "youtube downloader". You won't be able to find it because of all of the content farms that … | Continue reading
This is a transcription of videos Elon Musk's appearance on stage with Dave Chapelle using OpenAI's Whisper model with some manual error corrections and annotations for crowd noise. As with the Exhibit H Twitter text message release, there are a lot of articles that quote bits of … | Continue reading
This is a scan/OCR of Exhibits H and J from the Twitter v. Musk case, with some of the conversations de-interleaved and of course converted from a fuzzy scan to text to make for easier reading. I did this so that I could easily read this and, after reading it, I've found that mos … | Continue reading
I've been reading a lot of predictions from people who are looking to understand what problems humanity will face 10-50 years out (and sometimes longer) in order to work in areas that will be instrumental for the future and wondering how accurate these predictions of the future a … | Continue reading
Article URL: https://danluu.com/octopress-speedup/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31865238 Points: 70 # Comments: 21 | Continue reading
Wave is a $1.7B company with 70 engineers1 whose product is a CRUD app that adds and subtracts numbers. In keeping with this, our architecture is a standard CRUD app architecture, a Python monolith on top of Postgres. Starting with a simple architecture and solving problems in si … | Continue reading
You don't have to be at a party to see this phenomenon in action, but there's a curious thing I regularly see at parties in social circles where people value intelligence and cleverness without similarly valuing on-the-ground knowledge or intellectual rigor. People often discuss … | Continue reading