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mparis
Joined 80 karma
Entrepreneur, software engineer, mountain person, husband, occasional chef, wannabe historian. Likes to build things on the internet (and in his garage).
- I've been playing with the Gemini CLI w/ the gemini-pro-3 preview. First impressions are that its still not really ready for prime time within existing complex code bases. It does not follow instructions.
The pattern I keep seeing is that I ask it to iterate on a design document. It will, but then it will immediately jump into changing source files despite explicit asks to only update the plan. It may be a gemini CLI problem more than a model problem.
Also, whoever at these labs is deciding to put ASCII boxes around their inputs needs to try using their own tool for a day.
People copy and paste text in terminals. Someone at Gemini clearly thought about this as they have an annoying `ctrl-s` hotkey that you need to use for some unnecessary reason.. But they then also provide the stellar experience of copying "a line of text where you then get | random pipes | in the middle of your content".
Codex figured this out. Claude took a while but eventually figured it out. Google, you should also figure it out.
Despite model supremacy, the products still matter.
- We've been running structured outputs via Claude on Bedrock in production for a year now and it works great. Give it a JSON schema, inject a '{', and sometimes do a bit of custom parsing on the response. GG
Nice to see them support it officially; however, OpenAI has officially supported this for a while but, at least historically, I have been unable to use it because it adds deterministic validation that errors on certain standard JSON Schema elements that we used. The lack of "official" support is the feature that pushed us to use Claude in the first place.
It's unclear to me that we will need "modes" for these features.
Another example: I used to think that I couldn't live without Claude Code "plan mode". Then I used Codex and asked it to write a markdown file with a todo list. A bit more typing but it works well and it's nice to be able to edit the plan directly in editor.
Agree or Disagree?
- AI x Healthcare Startup | Boston, MA Onsite | Full-time | Early Engineer
We're looking for a backend-leaning fullstack dev. You will be one of the first engineers outside of the founding team. Here is a bit more about us:
We're a seed stage AI startup backed by several top tier VCs. We're on a mission to ensure patients get the coverage they deserve from their health insurance.
We’re building deep, vertically integrated technology systems to solve fundamental problems in US healthcare - the biggest market in the world ($5T). We use AWS, K8s, React, and Rust but there is no requirement to have prior experience with them specifically.
We are a founding team made up of ex-YC, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Harvard Business School with previous successful exits. We have a 6+ month customer waitlist and growing insanely fast.
We're hiring our first engineer outside the founders. You'll work directly with customers to understand their needs, design the right solution, and build from zero to one. You'll own entire parts of the roadmap and tech stack while wearing multiple hats. Most important characteristics are resilience, work ethic, and curiosity. We care about slope, not where you are today.
This is an opportunity to work in an insanely fast paced, high ownership environment while solving real problems in healthcare. We're happy to share more details on the role in person/on zoom. Please fill out this form if interested!
- AI x Healthcare Startup | Boston, MA Onsite | Full-time | Early Engineer
We're looking for a backend-leaning fullstack dev. You will be one of the first engineers outside of the founding team. Here is a bit more about us: We're a seed stage AI startup backed by several top tier VCs. We're on a mission to ensure patients get the coverage they deserve from their health insurance.
We’re building deep, vertically integrated technology systems to solve fundamental problems in US healthcare - the biggest market in the world ($5T). We use AWS, K8s, React, and Rust but there is no requirement to have prior experience with them specifically. We'll teach you!
We are a founding team made up of ex-YC, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Harvard Business School with previous successful exits. We have a 6+ month customer waitlist and growing insanely fast.
We're hiring our first engineer outside the founders. You'll work directly with customers to understand their needs, design the right solution, and build from zero to one. You'll own entire parts of the roadmap and tech stack while wearing multiple hats. Most important characteristics are resilience, work ethic, and curiosity. We care about slope, not where you are today.
This is an opportunity to work in an insanely fast paced, high ownership environment while solving real problems in healthcare.
We're happy to share more details on the role in person/on zoom. Please fill out this form if interested!
- I'm a recent snafu (https://docs.rs/snafu/latest/snafu/) convert over thiserror (https://docs.rs/thiserror/latest/thiserror/). You pay the cost of adding `context` calls at error sites but it leads to great error propagation and enables multiple error variants that reference the same source error type which I always had issues with in `thiserror`.
No dogma. If you want an error per module that seems like a good way to start, but for complex cases where you want to break an error down more, we'll often have an error type per function/struct/trait.
- Congrats on the launch. Seems like a natural domain for an AI tool. One nice aspect about pen testing is it only needs to work once to be useful. In other words, it can fail most of the time and no one but your CFO cares. Nice!
A few questions:
On your site it says, "MindFort can asses 1 or 100,000 page web apps seamlessly. It can also scale dynamically as your applications grow."
Can you provide more color as to what that really means? If I were actually to ask you to asses 100,000 pages what would actually happen? Is it possible for my usage to block/brown-out another customer's usage?
I'm also curious what happens if the system does detect a vulnerability. Is there any chance the bot does something dangerous with e.g. it's newly discovered escalated privileges?
Thanks and good luck!
- That's fair. I don't know what the generative AI industry will end up being worth. Maybe you're right it's only worth 25bn or 75bn. But.. also.. maybe you're missing something. I certainly don't know, but I try to hold a spectrum of possible futures in mind.
I acknowledge your bear case and hear the possibility that it's all hype and the aggregate value of all generative AI (measured in dollars) will be worth less than e.g. the market capitalization of a single company like Uber.
BUT, hear me out. Forgive me, as I fallback to healthcare... The US spent ~$4.9 trillion on healthcare in 2023 alone (according to CMS). That cost is spread out across a lot of things, some of which is work that things like AI can help make more productive, some of which is not applicable to AI. When we are spending nearly ~$5 trillion dollars a year, it does not take a lot on a percentage basis to start seeing really significant dollar values in savings.
It's a story of death by 1000 cuts. I suspect it won't be a big magical fix all at once where AI magically solves healthcare. But we will optimize 1% here and 1% there using focused solutions that actually solve pain points. If someone improves productivity in healthcare by even just 1%, one-time, then we are talking about savings of ~50bn per year.
- There will of course be high-flyers whose wings will melt and that will fall back to earth, but don't be so quick to dismiss the teams that are bringing real value to industries that have historically been tricky to make more productive. For every red-hot AI demo that drops promising to change the world, there is some other team using AI to do something that may sound boring, yet is important..
For example, I work in healthcare and its difficult to over-exaggerate how much time it can take to do the most basic things. The people that are tasked with doing those basic things are often highly-educated, highly-skilled, and highly-paid; and it still takes a long time.
I suspect there is an unreasonable amount of cost to shed from doing simple things. Things like:
1. Reading, reasoning over, and copying structured data from lightly-structured, highly variable documents like PDFs.
2. Reducing the amount of time a human sits on hold on the phone. I'm of the opinion the AI doesn't even need to do the talking to deliver huge amounts of value. Just help me help my highly-skilled employees move from high-value task to high-value task without the tedium in the middle.
3. Login and copy basic details from any of the 1000s of healthcare specific websites, each of which does more or less the same thing, slightly differently. RPA has always been so costly to build and maintain. The high variation fan-out just got a lot easier.
In the short term, I'm most bullish on AI to solve these low-value, highly-variable, highly-annoying tasks. I'm also reasonably confident that the AI we have today is already good enough to do it.
Give it time and we'll start to see companies operate at margins that were previously impossible in industries that we thought were near-impossible to make more productive.
- This project resonates with me a lot. Call me old-fashioned, but I still appreciate a nice ole' deterministic program that I can fully understand and operate reliably.
With that said, there is undoubtedly still room to innovate on the long-tail of RPA. In the healthcare domain, for example, there are 1000s of sites that might need to be scraped occasionally, somewhat transactionally as e.g. a new patient comes in. However, there are other sites that need regular attention and even the smallest of errors can be catastrophic.
The combination of browser-use & workflow-use seems like a really natural fit for such use cases. Nice work!
We've also experimented with the self-healing ideas you are playing with here. In our case, we wrote a chrome extension that connects to an LLM of your choice as well as a process running locally on your machine. You write a description of the job to be done, click around the browser, and then click "go". The extension grabs all the context, asks the LLM to write a typescript program, sends that typescript program to the local process where it is compiled & type-checked against our internal workflow harness, and then immediately allows you to execute the program against your existing, open browser context.
We've found that even this basic loop is outrageously productive. If the script doesn't do what you expect, there is a big "FIX IT" button that lets you tweak and try again. For the record, we're not a competitor and have no intention of trying to sell/offer this extension externally.
I suspect one of the harder parts about this whole ordeal will be how to integrate with the rest of the workflow stack. For us, we've really appreciated the fact that our extension outputs typescript that seamlessly fits into our stack and that is more easily verifiable than JSON. The TS target also allows us to do nice things like tell the self-healing bot which libraries will be available so that e.g. it can use `date-fns` instead of `Date`. We've also thought about adopting more traditional workflow tools like Temporal to manage the core workflow logic, vending out the browser connectivity remotely. Curious how you guys are thinking about this?
Rooting for you guys, we will be sure to keep an eye on your progress and consider adopting the technology as it matures!
PS. If you like things like this, want to work at a growing health-tech startup, and live in Boston, we're hiring! Reach out here: https://wgwx7h7be0p.typeform.com/to/LV0t8OjI
- AI x Healthcare Startup | Boston, MA Onsite | Full-time | Founding Engineer
We're looking for a backend-leaning fullstack dev. You will be the first engineer outside of the founding team. Here is a bit more about us:
We're a seed stage AI startup backed by several top tier VCs.
We're on a mission to ensure patients get the coverage they deserve from their health insurance.
We’re building deep, vertically integrated technology systems to solve fundamental problems in US healthcare - the biggest market in the world ($5T). We use AWS, K8s, React, and Rust but there is no requirement to have prior experience with them specifically. We'll teach you!
We are a founding team made up of ex-YC, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Harvard Business School with previous successful exits. We have a 6+ month customer waitlist and growing.
We're hiring our first engineer outside the founders. You'll work directly with customers to understand their needs, design the right solution, and build from zero to one. You'll own entire parts of the roadmap and tech stack while wearing multiple hats. Most important characteristics are resilience, work ethic, and curiosity. We care about slope, not where you are today.
This is an opportunity to work in an insanely fast paced, high ownership environment while solving real problems in healthcare.
We're happy to share more details on the role in person/on zoom. Please fill out this form if interested!
- I also love rust and we use it heavily at our startup, but I agree with you and wish there were a mainstream alternative that kept much of the type system, pervasive expressions, and pattern matching while being smaller. I’d accept “very fast” even if it’s not as fast as rust.
One project I’ve seen that I don’t think is particularly active but that I really like the ideas behind is borgo. It compiles to go (thus GC) but is decidedly more rustacean.
Check it out. I hope someone makes something like this wide spread.
PS. I have no affiliation with borgo, just an online fan.
- Stealth AI Healthcare Startup | Boston, MA Onsite | Full-time | Founding Engineer
We're looking for a backend-leaning fullstack dev. You will be the first engineer outside of the founding team. Here is a bit more about us:
We're a seed stage AI startup backed by several top tier VCs.
We're on a mission to ensure patients get the coverage they deserve and providers get paid fairly! To do so, we're debugging core problems in the US healthcare system with a modern tech stack and AI. We use AWS, K8s, React, and Rust but there is no requirement to have prior experience with them specifically. We'll teach you!
We are a founding team made up of ex-YC, Amazon, Meta, and Harvard Business School with previous successful exits. We also have a 6+ month customer waitlist!
We're hiring our first engineer outside the founders. You'll work directly with customers to understand their needs, design the right solution, and build from zero to one. You'll own entire parts of the roadmap and tech stack while wearing multiple hats. Most important characteristics are resilience, work ethic, and curiosity. We care about slope, not where you are today. This is an opportunity to work in an insanely fast paced, high ownership environment while solving real problems in healthcare.
We're happy to share more details on the role in person/on zoom. Please fill out this form if interested!
- That’s fair. Another pro is the flexibility that comes from being able to store policies in a database and manage them as data instead of code. E.G. roll your own IAM.
A good problem to solve when you need to, but for many of my projects, which admittedly don’t grow into big organizations, I find myself valuing the simplicity of the reduced toolkit.
- Quarter:
- Net sales increased 14% to $170.0 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with $149.2 billion in fourth quarter 2022 - Operating income increased to $13.2 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with $2.7 billion in fourth quarter 2022 - Net income increased to $10.6 billion in the fourth quarter, or $1.00 per diluted share, compared with $0.3 billion, or $0.03 per diluted share, in fourth quarter 2022
Year:
- Net sales increased 12% to $574.8 billion in 2023, compared with $514.0 billion in 2022 - Operating income increased to $36.9 billion in 2023, compared with $12.2 billion in 2022 - Net income was $30.4 billion in 2023, or $2.90 per diluted share, compared with a net loss of $2.7 billion, or $0.27 per diluted share, in 2022
- Start a group chat with people you respect, provide the prompt, and start spit balling ideas. You probably already have a list in your head of “non-bullshit” people that you already know. Ask them what they care about and what they like to think about/work on. A few brainstorm starters:
- How can we address inequality and provide more opportunities to traditionally under-served communities?
- What does a “better” education system look like?
- How do we get people to eat less meat without being dogmatic or preachy? It’s really a win-win, people and the environment will be healthier.
- How does one combat counter-factualism (fake-news) without getting political?
- How do we bring new opportunities to those working in industries on the out? E.g. coal
- What are we going to do about a growing & aging population? Thinking about things like elderly care, retirement savings, family relationships in a fast moving and increasingly remote world.
I think most people want to think of themselves as “non-bullshit” but often it’s easier and safer to take a 6-figure job at something like a FAANG where they focus on monopolizing attention instead of working on really impactful problems like climate, education, health, etc. How might we change those incentives to get more people working on those types of problems?
- A freebie online using python: http://www.oreilly.com/programming/free/files/functional-pro...
A freebie online using Haskell: http://learnyouahaskell.com/chapters
I don’t write much Haskell any more but learning it will force FP into your brain. Good luck :)
- May I ask for a clearer definition of “better off”. From whose perspective? Also does this imply that since going public, google has not been following its mission?
It’s certainly seems true that companies are able to survive on private funding longer than they were a decade or two ago. The longer the company stays private, the larger the IPO leads to bigger payouts for investors and employees that stick around long enough to see the liquidity event and/or have enough cash to exercise their options should they choose to leave. With a strong team, perhaps the lack of public shareholders leads them to pursue more moonshots, shut down fewer products, and find more success but I also think there are downsides.
Chief among them, I think, is that employees generally assume the downside of additional private funding as VCs often get to maintain their pro-rata rights (get to maintain their ownership percentage) while employees get diluted with additional funding. As private valuations rise, option strike prices increase without any guarantee of liquidity in the future. That means employees either need to stick around longer or need to pay significantly higher strike prices for their options without a guarantee they will be worth anything in the future. RSUs (basically options with a $0 strike price) are very employee friendly and many engineers seek them out as they are as good as cash.
As with many things it’s probably a trade off. Perhaps they stay more “true” to the mission without going public, but I would guess many google employees would have missed the wealth brought about by the liquidity from the IPO.
Good question. What do you think?
- Fun: Rossignol black ops gamer 118 skis. They shred.
Coffee: Kalita 185 pour over coffee maker. Inexpensive, high quality coffee. Also the porlex mini burr grinder.
Software: IntelliJ Ultimate/Clion for rust dev. Historically a VS Code guy but jetbrains products are great when you have enough horse power to run them.
Speakers: UE mega boom 3. Waterproof & great sound.
Book: Victor Frankls man’s search for meaning.
Food: Eggplant for this parm https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/bas-best-eggplant-parmesan
Charity: Donating to Wikipedia. We need them.
- Congrats to the Apollo Team and contributors for all the awesome work that went into this release. The majority of our customers at Scaphold (https://scaphold.io) are using Apollo to power their applications with amazing results.
We're excited to keep working to push the limits of GraphQL by supporting awesome features like subscriptions, persisted queries, and much more!
If you're in SF come to meteor tonight for the GraphQL meetup and let's talk about what's coming next.
I have churned from CC in favor of codex until the scrolling bug is fixed. There is no set of features that will convince me to switch back until they fix their broken UI.
I haven’t dug into the JS code base but I imagine they will have a hard time matching the performance of the rust based codex.