And, sure, the LLM generated code isn't great, but if I compare the LLM-generated game and "AI" in https://danluu.com/codenames/ to commercially successful online board game implementations that were created by human programmers, the LLM generated version is faster and less buggy.
Per the argument in https://danluu.com/customer-service/, AI doesn't have to be very good to replace humans in a lot of roles because, in practice, humans often aren't all that good (see also, https://danluu.com/p95-skill/).
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This exchange between some programmers and a non-programmer typifies what I was getting at in https://danluu.com/codenames/#appendix-writing-the-code-for-the-post
Programmer 1: GPT-4o and Claude Haiku are useless for programming
Programmer 2: Claude Sonnet is useless for programming
Non-programmer: What do you mean GPT-4o is useless? I don't know how to program and created an app that makes $10k/mo with GPT-4o
LLMs have allowed non-programmers to produce apps for years and programmers are calling these things useless for programming.
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Exercises in benchmarking and experimental design, part 3:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/118646029
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A version of Missile Command for the Commodore 64 where the bottom of your screen is the game state in memory and missiles cause memory corruption, which eventually causes you to lose: https://csdb.dk/release/?id=135463.
In the video below, a missile broke my controls and caused my cursor to move down and to the left so I couldn't stop other missiles.
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I find it really interesting/surprising that Tesla topped the fatalities per mile ranking from 2018-2022.
Fatality rate is strongly negatively correlated with price and weight and Teslas are much more expensive and heavier than average.
The commentary I've seen says that the cars are safe so it must be about Tesla drivers, but per https://danluu.com/car-safety/, maybe it's also about the cars. The most fatal manufacturers (Kia/Hyundai, Dodge, Tesla) that were rated all rank poorly there as well.
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Would the world be better or worse if car horns didn't exist?
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Some comments on moving to Canada:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/115578334
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A funny side effect of the crackdown on "AI" scraping is that I keep getting banned from sites for browsing too quickly.
I barely use reddit anymore and I still managed to get IP banned for scraping while I was clicking on posts with no automation (I got an error page basically suggesting I contact reddit if I want a license to their data instead of scraping).
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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
https://danluu.com/ballmer/
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There's been a lot of talk about how recent events mean that we'll see a serious WordPress fork soon.
To make it concrete, is there a > 50% chance we'll see a WordPress or WP plugin infra fork with significant market share (at least 3 out of the top 15 hosted WordPress providers are using the fork) within one year of today?
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Concussions and modern medicine:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/113518236
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What do people like about Telegram? I keep seeing people mention how it's nicer than Signal or WhatsApp. I recently tried it out to talk to someone who isn't on Signal or WhatsApp and the main "feature" I've noticed is that I get way more spam on Telegram than on other services (the redacted message below is the one recent non-spam message I've gotten).
I haven't tried replying to any of the spam, but from reading about it, it seems like the spam is generally from scammers.
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The utter dominance of U.S. tech:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/111706949
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Really nice startup postmortem that gets into specific reasons the founder thinks the product failed:
https://feelmuddy.notion.site
Most startup/product postmortems I read feel like some variant of "we were just too awesome and the world wasn't ready us", but this feels like a postmortem where the founder is really trying to understand what happened.
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Is there a document / post out there that describes engineering levels with archetypes like "Fixer", "Generalist", "Specialist", etc.
I thought, at one point, I saw one from Slack that seemed inspired by the Facebook levelling system, but I can't seem to find it. Am I misremembering where I saw this or mashing up two things or something?
I think it wasn't https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes/. Visually, I thought it had a darker background and more bullet points or something?
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Also, a few random comments about audio quality on calls:
BTW, some people I know A/B tested macbook vs. airpods and the macbook won handily.
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Ironically, I bought these speakers on the theory that it would make people easier to understand on calls. I don't think this was prima facie stupid since a $40 pair of speakers/headphones makes it much easier to understand people who have really bad audio setups (for video calls or w/e).
But it turns out that a more expensive pair of speakers, on average, makes speech harder to understand (though, on the rare occasion I listen to good audio, it sounds much better).
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there's a lot more low quality audio now. 15 years ago, I was mostly listening to was music on CDs.
Nowadays, it's YT, podcasts, etc., which tend to have bad audio, even when people have fancy setups.
E.g., I just listened to a podcast that has a full-time pro audio crew, with hosts and guests in the same room, in front of SM7Bs. 1 of 3 people had strong proximity effect; sounds terrible, and that person is way too loud. You're better off with 0 bass when listening.
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Another surprise was that getting a halfway decent pair of speakers that can emit bass (but aren't particularly bass heavy) made a lot of audio sound worse without EQ.
The problem is that a lot of audio sources contain a huge amount of low frequency garbage, which most speakers don't reproduce. If you get speakers that actually reproduce the garbage, that audio actually sounds much worse. I don't remember this being an issue the last time I had speakers with bass, but
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A former Apple engineer discusses their Google culture shock experience:
My director wore an Apple Watch and had an iPhone ... my VP too. Nobody was expected to eat the dog food and so few did. This was crazy to me coming from Apple ... several internal sites would ask you to file [a bug report] on why you switched to chrome [if you used chrome]. So many crazy issues I saw and reported didn’t actually matter to many high ranking members of the pixel team because they didn’t use the devices
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