Writing about SWE, ML, and AI

Joined March 2024
Dark UI pattern 🤦🏽‍♂️ Returning a product and almost thought there was no option to refund to my card because of how they styled the last option
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Here is the Apple HomeView launch video
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Learned that Tailscale has a serve command 🤯 Insanely useful for accessing personal projects without having to fully deploy them
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Most ppl are shocked by how knowledgable Ben is about tech But I haven't watched a lot of his movies so when I see this I just see a normal tech guy talking about AI
Ben Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models “I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that. “With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do, which is much more computation simultaneously, you would do things like look at what’s called a tensor. That’s the numerical translation of a visual image in numbers, like the batch number, the frame number and the red, green and blue values of each pixel in each frame. It’s just that simple. That numeric is called a tensor. “You’d use a convolutional neural network to identify patterns that reveal what’s called edge detection or feature extraction, which is identifying patterns well enough to know, this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green-screen image out and replace it with something. “That was familiar to me early on because, prior to Artists Equity, I had a small visual-effects company. I’ve worked with GPUs a lot too. The visual-effects guys said, ‘Hey, you should see. There are a couple: Google and this other company, OpenAI, are doing really interesting stuff with transformers in video.’ “I’ve learned that I can actually just call up and go, ‘Hey, it’s Ben Affleck. Can I come see what you’re doing?’ Sometimes people say yes, to my astonishment.”
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Also kinda silly that they don't auto activate on the expiration time
Can't complain about banked resets but having them both expire on the same day feels wrong 😕
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One of the things I find helpful when making games is let the agent build the core mechanics The have it abstract all values and levels into config so you can tweak to what feels right I can tweak everything and add new levels just by modifying easy to read json
Crazy that someone vibecoded a beyblade game and made it into a roguelike
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Finally read this all the way through and the more I learn about proper agentic development the more optimistic I get about the future
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Can't complain about banked resets but having them both expire on the same day feels wrong 😕
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Crazy that someone vibecoded a beyblade game and made it into a roguelike
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Also I'm that someone, play it here: rayblade.nadimify-cloudflare…
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TIL LinkedIn limits how much you can search a month Can't think of anyone who needs a serious competitor more than LinkedIn
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I still wouldn't use VR but this is by far the best looking headset that you can actually wear in public
$META just unveiled $1,299 VR glasses weighing only 100g by moving the battery and compute into an external pack. Bigger shift is that Muse becomes the interface because Zuck says you can “just talk to it” while any flat surface can become a keyboard.
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Jev is basically the Not Hotdog app from Silicon Valley except it works on everything
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Pretty wild that I was on Astra High and asking it to commit and push took up 7% of my 5 hour limit 😭 Not gonna be lazy and just do it by hand next time
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This is what AI should be the majority of the time All of the long verbose responses in most LLMs is usually just fluff to try and make it seem more human like
After co-inventing ChatGPT, I kept asking myself: why have superhuman chat models not led to AGI? I’ve spent the last 2 years in stealth building a new way to train models (RLCD), and a new type of frontier AI model that we are releasing today: Jev • 20-200x faster • 40-400x cheaper (w/ output tokens free) • Frontier composable intelligence optimized for decisions AFAICT the shortest path to AI-based economic revolution
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Its insane cause Elon co-created the original non-profit OpenAI to prevent something like this
I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We'll have more to share soon.
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We're really entering the era of robots and I couldn't be more excited
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Great job by Burak on this ad for WinRAR One of the few videos where I didn't even suspect it was AI until I read the post
Here's my 30-second spec ad for WinRAR (that nobody asked for). Okay, perhaps Rourke Heath did. He shared this fun brief with his GenHQ community last week, and I took it on. In this experimental project, I wanted to turn one of the internet's longest-running jokes into a subtle family drama about WinRAR's 40-day trial that somehow lasted almost three decades. Here's how I made it: After writing the script (the old school way), I worked with ChatGPT 5.6 Sol Max to turn it into a 14,000-character prompt for Seedance 2.5 (yes, Dreamina allows prompts that long). I used GPT Image 2 to create the reference image for WinRAR's trial screen, while Seed Audio 1.0 generated the audio reference for the full voiceover and dialogue. After 20+ Seedance 2.5 tests at 480p, with the prompt evolving throughout, I generated the final versions at 720p. I then lightly edited the video and upscaled it to 1080p with Topaz Labs Astra Starlight Precision 2.6. However, the screenshot text didn't survive the upscale (I should have used Astra's scene detection feature and selected a different model for that particular shot), so I recreated it using Seedance 2.0 at 1080p. (I also tried Hailuo H3 and Kling 3.0, but in this particular case, Seedance 2.0 gave me the best overall result in one go.) For the sound, I selected a solo-instrument soundtrack from Epidemic Sound and added extra sound effects to improve the overall sound design. And here's the result. I'm curious to hear what you think. Did this bring back memories, or is this genuinely your first time hearing about WinRAR? I’d love to know.
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This is a pretty cool concept, using pseudocode to generate code rather than a free form prompt To me the biggest inefficiency in agentic development is that humans have to write good prompts Pseudocode provides more structure and I think is a step in the right direction
I'm building a novel way to code with AI because I’m tired of chatting in longform prose. I just want to write pseudocode while AI handles the rest. Introducing Huzzah - an experimental editor. More in thread.
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Just read through GitHub's explanation of their Aug 17 incident and there are some obvious fixes like the client-side retry loop But I do think its insane how much traffic Github works with and the fact they still allow unlimited private repos for free tier is pretty impressive
On August 17, GitHub experienced a significant outage that disrupted developers and organizations around the world. If you were trying to ship software that day, we let you down. I posted in March and April about the steps we’re taking to make GitHub more reliable. The work is still underway. Here is an update: github.blog/news-insights/co…
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