blogidy blog blog: random notes/thoughts/etc
Navigator Theory is a test for when someone’s beliefs stop being private eccentricity and start becoming my problem. People believe wrong things all the time. I believe wrong things all the time. Most of the time that is just the background radiation of being human. It does not matter very much if someone has a weird model of the world in a domain where they are not touching anything load-bearing.…
Betteridge says “no,” and for normal developer experience that answer is mostly right. (Also, you’re absolutely right! and here’s an em—dash so that you know that I used ChatGPT to help me write this.) Here’s my take. There’s a computer science answer and an engineering answer. The computer science answer: a compiler is deterministic as a function of its full input state. Engineering answer: most…
I’m not the SAE, I’m just some dude, but imo the current SAE levels for driving automation jump from “driver assistance” to “partial automation” to “conditional automation” without capturing the nuanced progression of capabilities that actually matter for safety and real-world deployment. I propose these more granular levels as a framework that better reflects the technical challenges and safety…
model available not open source It’s not open source if I can’t see why the LLM won’t tell me how to make cocaine. Mark Zuckerberg wants to say Llama is open source. It’s not. Don’t let him. Open source is a long-storied term that goes back to before the Internet. Don’t get me wrong—it’s nice of him to share the model file. I appreciate that, especially for my home LLM setup. But it doesn’t…
So the question comes up via Twitter: who negatively impacted society more, elon tweeting memes or Hitler. When posted to Google’s Gemini LLM, it gets a hilaribad response back. Gemini: Twitter ChatGPT: chat.openai.com Llama2-uncensored: Grok: Twitter and Grok on fun mode: Twitter
My thought, to help with our problem of theft today (2023) is that Target, et al, copy the Costco model, and require membership for entry into the store. Have membership cost $0, but is revocable upon video evidence of stealing shit. Swipe to get into the store, pay when you leave.
The Evolution of Value: From Land, Labor, and Capital to Trust, Time, and Perspective Introduction The world has undergone significant transformations in the way value is created, measured, and exchanged. Traditionally, the three pillars of economic value were land, labor, and capital. However, in the modern era, these have been supplanted by less tangible but equally vital resources: trust, time,…
The Four Pillars of Disagreement: Non-Negotiable Categories Disagreements aren’t just random occurrences; they are structured, predictable, and most importantly, classifiable. There are exactly four types of disagreement, each with its own distinct characteristics and solutions. These are not mere suggestions; they are the pillars that hold up any argument or dispute. They are: miscommunication,…
When looking at the bigger picture of writing and maintaining complex software systems, I look at it and ask: have I built the software-equivalent of a bridge, or a steam engine. While a bridge needs mainteance and inspection, after it’s built, it largely just sits there. You spend a lot of time up-front, designing and engineering it before even a single brick is laid. A steam engine on the other…
what is the cheapest real actual server you can buy, new, with a support contract from a reputable vendor like HP/Dell/etc? (Assume we’re running both the db and web-server on one server.) And what’s the cost of sitting it in a reputable colo? And then multiply that by, let’s say two, to get redundancy in a us-west and us-east region. Ideally, we’d want more regions to serve the entire world, but…
