alexpotato

6 ms·

31.
by alexpotato 1mo ago
Two quotes I love about this: "I was in the top 100 in tennis. Then I asked myself: 'what if I started training like Andy (Roddick). So I did and next thing I know I'm in the top 8 in the world" - Mardy Fish [0] "Ko
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by alexpotato 1mo ago
A lot of this is also moving to SWIFT (as in banking system) messages. I guess in some ways this is better but SWIFT is famously a giant pain in the ass to install and support.
33.
by alexpotato 1mo ago
There is a great story about movies and VHS/Betamax. The movie studios were pretty sure that people would want to buy movies and watch them at home. What they weren't sure about was how to price the movies because this was a brand
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by alexpotato 1mo ago
> - Full refunds are paid within 7 business days for cards (20 calendar days for other payment methods) I remember on the show Airline (docuseries about Southwest Airways) one of the passengers didn't want to fly and asked for a re
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by alexpotato 1mo ago
I placed an ad on Facebook as an experiment just to see what the conversion rate would be. It's for real estate so you can't select age ranges. The view count grouped by age (highest views to lowest) was: - 65 to 75 - 55 to 65 - 4
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by alexpotato 1mo ago
I owned the "broker FTP" service at a hedge fund. There was a project in 2021 to talk to the banks and brokers that we connected and ask them to upgrade their keys and ciphers to modern versions. IIRC, the oldest key/cipher w
37.
by alexpotato 1mo ago
> What they are proposing, in most cases, is a dashboard or website that displays the status of a process that is not ready to be automated, built to track a workflow that does not yet warrant tracking. The tool has not solved a problem
38.
by alexpotato 1mo ago
They were usually small outages that we caught before they got out of hand. If you never have outages, then you need to start getting either creative with the "table top" exercises or you set up a test environment that is very pro
39.
by alexpotato 1mo ago
I was the head of a global SRE team at a top tier hedge fund. We started doing a weekly meeting where whoever was on call would do a table top exercise of an outage that happened the prior week. The idea was to have someone else be the simu
40.
by alexpotato 1mo ago
I get the theme of this post. I also get the theme of DHH and Hashimoto talking about how exciting LLMs are and how much they are getting done. I've also spent the last 10 years of my life feeding my family with my tech skills which ar
41.
by alexpotato 1mo ago
Been doing a lot of interviewing lately. Despite not having written code for about 6 months due to using Claude etc, I've surprised myself with how much the "muscle memory" of leetcode etc has come back to me. I say this b&#x
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by alexpotato 1mo ago
Past job had MCPs for the following: - Loki - Prometheus - Grafana - Incident.io - GitHub for our codebase - A custom MCP for our server inventory/nodes Having all of them made it trivial for the LLM to start with an alert, search the
43.
by alexpotato 1mo ago
There is a bit of a trap for smart people with high agency where they assume "well, someone else will just go do <thing>". They assume this b/c they probably have multiple examples in their own life of being the only pe
44.
by alexpotato 1mo ago
How would you know if it's there? I ask rhetorically but I also imagine that at some point there will be an app that tells you and then people will vote with their dollars to the places that don't have them.
45.
by alexpotato 1mo ago
> we had to retract because significance started dropping almost the day the paper was approved. It's stories like this that raise my p(we are in a simulation).
46.
by alexpotato 1mo ago
Speaking as a SRE/DevOps guy with almost 20 years of experience: There are no solutions, only tradeoffs. I'll give some examples: Firm 1 had a single server running tron [0] for ALL scheduling of processes. Pros: very easy to see
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by alexpotato 1mo ago
> Freshly harvested birch is flexible, allowing it to be woven into complex forms. Once woven and shaped, those fibers create a rigid structure that resists sagging beneath heavy loads while remaining lightweight. There are stories of Na
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by alexpotato 1mo ago
With regards to how skill is more important than technology in these other form of carrying: A couple years ago I read Survival of the Bark Canoe by John McPhee [0]. There are several discussions of a crooked knife and how it was the "
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by alexpotato 1mo ago
> The military can piss away millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of hours, and it is not an existential situation. Meta and it's pursuit of VR would like to have a word. > Crazy investment. No business would do that. M
50.
by alexpotato 1mo ago
> hooking up creative LLMs to reliable verifiers like Lean show that it’s possible to construct systems where the unreliability is suppressed. You can also have LLMs create these things called "programs" that are written in &qu
51.
by alexpotato 1mo ago
> no better than WAIS and GOPHER. I was using telnet on a Windows 3.1 PC I had a corporate internship in the late 1990s and they blocked external web access. They did, however, allow external Telnet access. This meant that whenever I had
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by alexpotato 2mo ago
The author uses the military as an example of top down and that is true in many cases. However, after reading the book Corps Business [0] about the United States Marine Corps, you realize that they are VERY big into having a top level missi
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by alexpotato 2mo ago
Derek has a great post about "having a database": https://sive.rs/dbt (it's a quick read but essentially he suggests having a sort of minimalist CRM for people you know. Or, as our parents might say: "ha
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by alexpotato 2mo ago
> Some others have had some success getting this stuff working, but it wasn’t something I spent much time on for this review. One of the unexpected benefits of LLMs is that they make figuring out random Linux issues a breeze. Personal st
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by alexpotato 2mo ago
> There was an episode of Cowboy Bebop, where a mechanic held a wrench against an engine cowling to see how much it vibrated (likely a real thing people do with real engines?) I was watching a documentary about dirt track racing and they
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by alexpotato 2mo ago
Also a reminder that a lot of life is basic physics and a simple state machine. e.g. even the development of eyeballs started with a slightly photoreceptive skin cell and then evolution hill climbing took care of the rest.
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by alexpotato 2mo ago
> It is absolutely not worth buying hardware to run models for purely (long term) cost reasons This is especially true when it's trivial to have the LLM itself write you a script/tool that can rent a GPU node for you (via API c
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by alexpotato 2mo ago
This has been true in the opposite case too. e.g. make as much money as possible while you have a favorable judge/Congress/President b/c you assume the ability to make money will go away once the next regime is in power.
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by alexpotato 2mo ago
> The LLM handles the fuzzy part: > And Lemmalog handles the deterministic part: There seems to be this view in some circles that the LLM should do EVERYTHING. The most extreme version of this was "just commit the prompt, bro&quo
60.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
Dave Beazley has a great talk about using Python built ins [0] for data analysis and other quick operations. As a meta note, I've used many of these builtins over the years but, due to LLMs, have been using them less and less. Re-watch

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