ford

6 ms·

1.
by ford 14d ago
I've had Gemini model API use degrade the most out of OAI/Anthropic/Google (often "over capacity" vs true failures) Not sure on consumer/product use though
2.
by ford 21d ago
It'd be nice if we could change the bureaucratic process, not the interface
3.
by ford 21d ago
I'm interested how to mitigate risk without over-regulating & stifling innovation from exactly the people who are most thoughtful about the risk (which is who we should want innovating & leading). Even though this article is ne
4.
by ford 22d ago
IMO opinions of this variety often come from being misinformed or under-exposed to exactly how oppressive the CCP is. The US government isn't perfect, but it values various freedoms much more extensively than the CCP https:/&#x2F
5.
by ford 23d ago
Do you still believe this considering those companies live and die by the CCP? Would you feel differently if scale was reversed and Meta was the upstart trying to compete with Xiaomi/etc? I'm right there with you questioning Meta&
6.
by ford 1mo ago
I've been showing people chatjimmy for months - it's incredible. Both reasoning and tool use generation scale with TPS. Imagine 100x more reasoning on a model, or 100x parallel tool uses.
7.
by ford 1mo ago
I'll hijack this point to talk about robotics - I think we agree 1) It's not ideal for China to control production for _all_ of the things we use here. 2) What they already are good at they'll continue to improve at, because
8.
by ford 2mo ago
Without the singularity, I think Frontier labs will offer intelligent model blends. They'll have their own versions of "cheap" models and be expert at using the appropriate amount of compute for a task.
9.
by ford 2mo ago
Frontier models need to do everything for everyone. It's expected (though not often done) that smaller models fine-tuned on specific tasks can approach frontier performance on a specific area. [0] Post-training/fine-tuning is not
10.
by ford 2mo ago
In my experience everything that affects engineers affects an agent. Good abstractions, reasonably sized methods, good names, principled (intra & inter) service architecture, unit tests, etc. All of these things have historically been t
11.
by ford 3mo ago
Related - "The Electric Slide" [0] from NotBoring (a techno-optimist news letter) talks about production of batteries and other parts of the "Electric Stack", and explains where the US/China are relative to each oth
12.
by ford 4mo ago
Basically MCP is little more than a brand name for "APIs LLM's can use". This means more services are creating APIs, because xyz company who's never been super tech forward doesn't want their tools to be obsolete wh
13.
by ford 4mo ago
> If you’re going to use an LLM to write me an email, I’d much rather you just send me the prompt; at least then I’d have an idea of what you actually meant to say.” I'm excited for when Github starts letting me check in the chain-o
14.
by ford 5mo ago
In a post Claude Code world that's the job of engineers - the engineering is designing good abstractions, scalable systems, and things that are easy to contribute to. This is what the highest leverage senior engineers have always done,
15.
by ford 5mo ago
I think a more realistic model is not fully open source, but apps with extremely open/flexible APIs and data models that allow arbitrary front-ends (likely with a default one provided by whoever provides the API). Kind of like Stripe&#
16.
by ford 5mo ago
I'm really interested in how LLMs will enable more customizable, personal software. Our PMs & Designers are writing a lot of code now, and our engineers are spending time figuring out how to make a system that's easy for PMs &
17.
by ford 5mo ago
The "open source" part is the wrapper on top (up to you if you believe that's meaningful here)
18.
by ford 7mo ago
Good engineering has always been about minimizing the amount of effort it takes for someone to understand and modify your code. This is the motivation for good abstractions & interfaces, consistent design principles, single-responsibili
19.
by ford 7mo ago
I've found it really valuable to pair with people, sit at a computer together while they're driving and using AI. It's really interesting to see how other people prompt & use AI to explore the problem.
20.
by ford 8mo ago
Interesting thought (I think recently more than ever it's a good idea to question assumptions) - but IMO abstractions are important as ever. Maybe the smallest/most convenient packages (looking at you is-even) are obsolete, but me
21.
by ford 9mo ago
I hear this often, but I think this discounts the fact that this was mostly true for the US/Western Europe at a time where they enjoyed unilateral super-powerism as a result of winning WWII. I'm not sure that kind of prosperity is
22.
Show HN: Open-source Spotify Wrapped for arbitrary data(yirgachefe.lol)
2 points by ford 9mo ago|0 comments
23.
by ford 10mo ago
Has it been many people's experience that big companies intentionally remove experienced engineers from your team to something unrelated, in the name of fungibility? I've surely seen efforts within a team to make sure that there&#
24.
by ford 10mo ago
At the end of the day writing good code is rarely the "end" someone is shooting for. It's more research, more features, more experimentation, etc. Maybe hobby projects and library maintainers are the exceptions. In my experie
25.
by ford 10mo ago
"Why are we trying to make Yahoo Search faster? I already am fine with my 2-3s wait time"
26.
by ford 10mo ago
I think we take git for granted as software engineers Software engineering has decades of experience with proposing changes, merging them, staging them, deploying them, and rolling them back, and collaborating with other code-writers (engin
27.
by ford 11mo ago
IMO the only concentration OpenAI has is brand. Anthropic & Gemini both have roughly equivalent models. This could change quickly since success compounds, but for now I am actually somewhat surprised at how competitive LLM labs are with
28.
by ford 11mo ago
The argument sounds like he believes AI (+ robotics) will take jobs, and breaking up OpenAI could slow it down Historically the most productive countries are the most prosperous - I think there is a big landscape of local maxima/minima
29.
by ford 11mo ago
Interestingly I've often seen this in Claude outputs, especially on long prompts. I've assumed this is because of Claude's XML-based instruction format, but this does make me wonder how related the two are. And if Claude may
30.
by ford 1y ago
I've never understood the risk trade-off for early stage employees (Employees ~4 through ~10-20). At this stage equity packages are often <0.5% over 4 years. Founders on the other hand may have more like 30% equity at this stage. Bu

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