alexpotato

7 ms·

91.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
> Even though the overall FRE regex engine has worse performance than the Rust regex crate, the gains you can get for specializing to your workload or use case mean that, in some cases, it could be reasonable to insert your own specializ
92.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
During COVID lockdown with: - my wife - au pair - 3 kids (all under 5) - dog I thought that was plenty of human interaction (I'm somewhat extroverted) until we had a friend come over and chat with us outside on the porch. I couldn&#x27
93.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
Fun story: - I signed my offer letter to work at Knight Capital on July 27th, 2012 - I resigned July 30th - Knight Capital had their $400 million outage August 1st - I went to work there anyway - Pager Duty app was not really a thing back t
94.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
Was recently chatting with co-workers about WFH vs in office and one person mentioned: "My dad would leave the house at 6am everyday to catch the train to New York and we wouldn't see him till 7-7:30pm. He did this 5 days a week f
95.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
> I wish I was joking. I worked for a company that had a gui that ran on customers' desktops aka not our hardware. We were discussing a new feature but we weren't sure how many people used the particular module in the GUI that
96.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
I would highly recommend the "Everything is a Remix" series on YouTube to show how a lot of "creative" work is really just combining different items. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc
97.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
> This is roughly the same as putting a group of random people In the book Range by David Epstein [0], he mentions that research has shown that groups of people with very mixed backgrounds leads to much faster rates of problem solving an
98.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
> I suspect that a lot about what we call being very intelligent is ultimately out-remembering people around us There is a great episode of Inside the Actor's Studio where there is a Q&A with Mike Myers. He was asked if going to
99.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
Can't the LLMs build scripts/tools etc that help generate creative ideas? e.g. have the LLM generate multiple lists of characters, themes etc and then have a script hooked up to a RNG pick from the lists to create more "creat
100.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
I learned recently that France IPv6 adoption is also very high.
101.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
I've worked at many firms as a SRE/DevOps and have seen lots of human written code that fell into at least one or generally of the below patterns: - 30+ committers on <5K LOC - software is robust/rock solid but the code is
102.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
> A 2025 Veracode report found that approximately 45% of AI-generated code samples failed security tests and contained critical vulnerabilities Co-worker of mine who was excellent at both system design AND coding and I were chatting abou
103.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
Reminds me of the early days of the CANSPAM act. One of the best indicators that something was not spam was the unsubscribe button.
104.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
Quality products are amazing but I do get the downside of building very durable products. For example, we have a Vornado fan in my house that is probably from the early 2000s. It still works perfectly even though we've left it running
105.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
There was an article a few years back about how homeowners in Hawaii were buying solar panels to try to get cheaper power. Then the local power company realized that as well and started shifting to solar with the net result that it became c
106.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
I worked on spam classification for litigation targeting in the early days of CANSPAM [0] enforcement. We had a similar problem where you can literally millions of email that we were pretty sure came from only a limited set of bad actors. W
107.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
> Another place I experience this phenomenon is bike shop This is my personal favorite story about bike shops (from circa 2008). At the time, I both lived and worked in Manhattan. I was lucky that biking was an option for commuting but t
108.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
I'm no expert in pricing economics but once peak/off-peak pricing arrives, it seems like tokens are going to be like electricity or long distance phone minutes where it just becomes a commodity/race to the bottom.
109.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
Back in during the dotcom boom, there were multiple examples of companies being bought for ridiculous amounts. Often as the result of a bidding war. Even back then, some economists used the "hidden wallet auction" as an example of
110.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
Having worked at some giant firms that heavily depend on SAP, I would think their position as "system of record for procurement/production" would get stronger with AI. e.g. AI + a good database of what your company does seems
111.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
I suspect that the author and many of the commenters have experienced the "bad project manager" effect. MANY people have dealt with terrible project managers and therefore assume all project managers are bad. This is because great
112.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
One of my favorite examples of this kind of thing is requiring a ticket for every change. There is a class of changes that take very little time but have a positive impact. If the cost of making a ticket for that change exceeds the cost of
113.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
I've been using Linux as my daily driver on my main personal computers for years. You could say that I love Linux and it has treated me very well. That being said, I consciously chose an iPhone b/c I want my phone to "just wo
114.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
"The rule of thumb was: - buy when home prices are 10x rent - sell when home prices are 20x rent" - The Big Short by Micheal Lewis [0] I remember reading this quote and then checking NYC prices and it was a 33x multiple. 0 - http
115.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
Came here to say the same thing. I think the Alien one is even better: https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/
116.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
In Patriot Games by Tom Clancy, there is a scene early in the book where Jack Ryan is talking about the laptop he is using to write his book. I don't remember the exact specs but am 100% sure he mentions that it has bubble memory.
117.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
My elderly father uses a financial planner/wealth management firm. Their returns are not spectacular and they charge fees but overall they are net positive on returns. My sister and I were discussing if this was a great idea for him an
118.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
I found the below line to get particularly "hard": > When I visited DC in February to start researching the brewing AI backlash, I found that the top two uniting issues were kids’ safety and data centers.1 These were very diffe
119.
by alexpotato 2mo ago
I know that "Great Man" theory is considered debunked. That being said, it seems a LOT of drops in quality trace back to some very senior person who cared about quality and put resources behind delivering quality and then either:
120.
by alexpotato 3mo ago
There is a great article called "Manual Work is a Bug: Always be Automating" [0] that was written in the pre LLM era for technical operations teams. I would argue that it is just as relevant today as it was then. To summarize: - s

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