Principal software engineer by day, cabaret stage manager by night. Pro hackathonner, wearable computing fan, previously Techstars startup founder and creator of (now defunct) AllThePeople.net, an automated people directory that was free and surprisingly comprehensive.
Looking for my next big thing. Feel free to reach out, let's build something together.
- OkGoDoIt parentThat doberman site feels kind of sketchy. It doesn’t say anything about the hardware required or how someone would integrate this. Also it says it’s free but then one of the five top level pages is the SLA which says it doesn’t apply to free plans. I really don’t understand if this is just a random landing page that someone created to gauge interest or what.
- I’ve never seen Waymo be cheaper than Uber/Lyft, but then again the audacity of them charging more even when they are driverless made me stop bothering to check pretty quickly.
One of the selling points of Uber over taxis has always been that you don’t have to tip. I get that some people are excessively generous but it’s absolutely not required.
If you’re the kind of person who is willing to pay more for a fancier car, good for you. I take the bus if it could just get me from point A to point B in a reasonable time, Uber is a last resort that costs 10 times as much as public transit, at least in San Francisco. It’s disgustingly, offensively expensive. And somehow Waymo charges more? Absolutely ridiculous.
- I feel like that’s the path San Francisco has been on. Over the last decade they’ve made it more and more painful to drive anywhere in the general downtown area. Market street and a few others are closed to cars, more and more streets don’t let you turn, many of the traffic lights have been replaced by insanely inefficient pedestrian-favoring traffic lights that seem hell-bent on making the traffic worse.
That being said, it takes me nearly an hour to take public transit between my home near Forest Hill and my office in the dogpatch whereas it takes 20-25 minutes to drive (plus an extra five minutes to park and walk from the parking lot to the office). This is not a long distance, on a map it looks like it should take me 10 minutes but San Francisco is so incredibly inefficient.
I would love to not own a car but it’s just not realistic. Also when going to Costco or when the weather is bad, public transit becomes a lot less of a fit as well. I got a bike, only to find out that you’re not allowed to bring bikes on the Muni train which is frustrating, and in the end means my commute isn’t any faster than not involving biking at all. I tried a scooter, and I got in an accident because apparently the brakes don’t work well in the rain, especially when there’s an intersection at the bottom of a hill, so I’m not doing that anymore. I guess they’re trying to make driving as bad as all of the other bad options. I wish instead we could make some good options.
- Adult content and things like making biological/chemical/nuclear weapons are the other main topics that usually get censored. I don’t think the Chinese models tend to be less censored than western models in these dimensions. You can sometimes find “uncensored“ models on HuggingFace where people basically finetune sensitive topics back in. There is a finetuned version of R1 called 1776 that will correctly answer Chinese-censored questions, for example.
- Thank you for making this happen! My family and friends are sick of my decade-long attachment to my pebble steel by now, haha.
Any chance the particular extra color for the metal one could be an actual metal color? My pebble steel with the metal link band was a great combination of stylish and functional. I never really liked the look of any of the later models so even when I bought them I always went back to my pebble steel. I went ahead and pre-ordered the new metal one and I suppose I’ll go for black if I have to but I really hope you come out with a stainless steel or silver color.
Also what’s the watchband compatibility? Will this work with the original pebble bands or with standard watch bands or something new and proprietary?
- I’ve been a .Net developer since it launched, but recently I find myself using it less and less. I’m so much more productive with LLM assistance and they aren’t very good at C#. (Seriously, I thought AI coding was all exaggeration until I switched to Python and realized what the hype was all about, these language models are just so much more optimized for python)
Plus now Microsoft is being a bully when it comes to Cursor and the other VS Code forks, and won’t let the .net extensions work. I jumped through a lot of hoops but they keep finding ways to break it. I don’t want an adversarial relationship with my development stack.
I miss C# and I really don’t like Python as a language, but I don’t see myself doing a lot more C# in the future if these trends continue.
- This was so cool to read. I often think in English names are black boxes that doesn’t have deeper meaning (unlike Chinese where names often have literal meaning), so the insight here was great. And in hindsight mostly obvious, but I had never thought of them that way before. Nice find!
- I wish. I own my own modem and router, but Comcast won’t let me use them unless I pay a whole bunch of extra fees or accept a stupidly low monthly data cap. I’ve got my router downstream of theirs which is a bit annoying, especially considering their modem-router combo overheats and needs to be rebooted via unplugging power at least once a month.
Sadly I have no other options here in San Francisco. My house is not wired for phone service so I cannot get DSL. The various fiber services that are becoming more available in San Francisco are generally only available downtown or large apartment buildings. My freestanding house can’t get any of that. AT&T‘s new fiber doesn’t connect to me either. And webpass doesn’t have a good line of sight from my location to any of their microwave towers so I can’t get that. It is Comcast or nothing. It always amazes me that San Francisco is supposedly the tech capital of the world but internet connectivity here is worse than rural China. (And that’s not an exaggeration, I’ve spent plenty of time in rural China and in the mountains there, both the cellular and hardline service is infinitely better than San Francisco, aside from the firewall issues of course)
…I guess that turned into a bit of a personal rant but holy crap how is it 2025 and this is still a problem in a major tech city?
- I also have been less impressed by o1 in cursor compared to sonnet 3.5. Usually what I will do for a very complicated change is ask o1 to architect it, specifically asking it to give me a detailed plan for how it would be implemented, but not to actually implement anything. I then change the model to Sonnet 3.5 to have it actually do the implementation.
And on the side of not being able to get models to understand something specific, there’s a place in a current project where I use a special Unicode apostrophe during some string parsing because a third-party API needs it. But any code modifications by the AI to that file always replace it with a standard ascii apostrophe. I even added a comment on that line to the effect of “never replaced this apostrophe, it’s important to leave it exactly as it is!” And also put that in my cursor rules, and sometimes directly in the prompt as well, but it always replaces it even for completely unrelated changes. I’ve had to manually fix it like 10 times in the last day, it’s infuriating.
- I’ve been using it a lot recently. Multiple times even today while I’ve been trying to find just the right photos of my theater for a brochure I’m putting together. I have over 100,000 photos in Apple photos so even if I vaguely remember when I took a photo it’s still difficult to find it manually.
As a concrete example, someone on my team today asked me “can you send me that photo from the comedy festival a couple years ago that had the nice projections on the proscenium?”. I searched apple photos (on my phone, while hiking through a park) for “sketchfest theater projection”. It used the OCR to find Sketchfest and presumably the vector embeddings of theater and projection. The one photo she was referring to was the top result. It’s pretty impressive.
It can’t always find the exact photo I’m thinking of the first time, but I can generally find any vaguely-remembered photo from years ago without too much effort. It is pretty magical. You should get in the habit of trying it out, you’ll probably be pleasantly surprised.
- Why do you assume sally@dankstartup.com doesn’t have a vanguard account? I’ve absolutely had similar retirement account logins that became difficult to access once I left that employer. Had to contact HR and get them to help me log into my account. If the company had folded during that timeframe I would’ve been screwed. Of course for financial institutions you can probably recover your account through some identity proving process, and generally money transfers require a second factor sms auth, but a domain takeover would probably have been sufficient to at least get someone logged in and able to see my account balance.
- I have catchall email accounts in every domain name I own (mostly so I can do differentiated emails for every service to track/combat leakage), and you would not believe the amount of emails I get that are intended for previous domain owners (and typos too). I haven’t actually done any reset password flows, but there are a bunch of social media and SaaS accounts I could easily take over if I wanted. I used to try to track down whoever the emails were intended to go to and forward it to them and let them know to change it, but that got to be too tedious so nowadays I just ignore them.
Still, I wouldn’t call this a vulnerability on the service provider’s part, it’s just user negligence.
- I think this comment and the parent comment are talking about two different things. One of you is talking about using nondeterministic ML to implement the actual core logic (an automated script or asking Dave to do it manually), and one of you is talking about using it to design the logic (the equivalent of which is writing that automated script).
LLM’s are not good at actually doing the processing, they are not good at math or even text processing at a character level. They often get logic wrong. But they are pretty good at looking at patterns and finding creative solutions to new inputs (or at least what can appear creative, even if philosophically it’s more pattern matching than creativity). So an LLM would potentially be good at writing a first draft of that script, which Dave could then proofread/edit, and which a standard deterministic computer could just run verbatim to actually do the processing. Eventually maybe even Dave’s proofreading would be superfluous.
Tying this back to the original article, I don’t think anyone is proposing having an LLM inside a chip that processes incoming data in a non-deterministic way. The article is about using AI to design the chips in the first place. But the chips would still be deterministic, the equivalent of the script in this analogy. There are plenty of arguments to make about LLM‘s not being good enough for that, not being able to follow the logic or optimize it, or come up with novel architectures. But the shape of chip design/Verilog feels like something that with enough effort, an AI could likely be built that would be pretty good at it. All of the knowledge that those smart knowledgeable engineers which are good at writing Verilog have built up can almost certainly be represented in some AI form, and I wouldn’t bet against AI getting to a point where it can be helpful similarly to how Copilot currently is with code completion. Maybe not perfect anytime soon, but good enough that we could eventually see a path to 100%. It doesn’t feel like there’s a fundamental reason this is impossible on a long enough time scale.
- The site is amusing, and sure it feels fairly obvious that it’s parody/satire in this context, but also I went through the FAQ and fine print and I don’t see any admission that it’s parody/satire. They seem to hold very true to the joke to the point that it does feel a bit worrying. At what point does parody/satire become misinformation and defamation? If my mom landed on this site after it was emailed to her from one of her Fox News-loving elderly friends, I’m not sure she would have enough context to realize it wasn’t real. It seems like it would be better if they at least had a disclaimer or notice or something on the bottom of the site.
On a related note, I hosted The Empire Strips Back parody Star Wars burlesque show at my theater, and they had to have disclaimers everywhere explicitly saying it was a parody production. They got sued and won in court but the disclaimers were an important part of that.
Of course if the main concern is the misuse of the DMCA to get this taken down by claiming copyright infringement, that’s clearly an abuse of the DMCA. But if the companies involved sued for defamation/slander/whatever, I think there’s at least a legitimate concern here.
- I’m assuming this refers to things analogous to dependabot on GitHub where maybe it automatically updates a library version reference and runs the tests and creates a PR if everything seems good, or similarly for fixing style issues or other stuff that is pretty trivial and has good test coverage.
When you maintain an open source project on GitHub you will occasionally get some open source automated bot that submits a PR to do things like this without you even asking, and I’m sure there’s plenty more you can sign up for or implement yourself.
I wouldn’t really call it AI, but it is automated. I agree with the parent comment that a journalist trying to push an angle would probably lump it in as AI in order to make the number seem larger.