benstein

I rebuilt isitchristmas.com using 484 subagents and 16 million tokens to learn how Claude's dynamic workflows work. Oh, and today is not Christmas.

I really appreciate how much thought you gave this. Interesting to me that biggest tells came out of the attempts at humor and metaphor.

The title was intentionally ironic :-)

LOL fork

+1000. "Human coders are still better than LLMs" is a hot take. "Antirez is still better than LLMs" is axiomatic ;-)

I made my own webmail client in 2001. The killer feature was a Heart button that one-click opened a new mail addressed to my then-girlfriend-now-wife. I've never seen that feature replicated then or now. And since it was hard-coded to my girlfriend, it was clearly (hopefully!) not broadly applicable.

"Special Olympics T-Ball Stand Pitches Perfect Game" is the greatest headline ever written

The different prompting strategies needed to improve results for different models is fascinating. I usually tell ChatGPT the role it should play to get better results e.g. "You are an expert in distributed systems". The same approach with Gemini returned "as a large language model constantly learning, I wouldn't call myself an expert."

I wrote the article and I think it's funny

Why hate on that game? It had both great puzzles (challenging yet approachable) AND was pushing the envelope of CD-ROM as a new technology, specifically the use of video + celebrities.

It's a good point, but the challenge is we sometimes just get street1 from a utility without city/state/postal. We tried USPS and geocoding libraries, but they fail because they often pick a random-ish city which likely will not match.

Using an LLM to solve day-to-day programming problems, replacing more traditional algorithms, data structures, and heuristics

Cliche, but I've found this to be an amazing interview question for nontechnical positions. You learn quickly how much someone can hand wave and bullshit. If they are too cocky and can't say "I don't know", that's great to suss out up front. If it's for a sales role, maybe that's a good thing.

TL;DR buy all your vanity domains early. Just a prank. Move along.

Bank of America has had 2-part login screens forever. IIRC they are going in the opposite direction and will be putting them together in a single page very shortly.

in a bar

My favorite BBG anecdote was when I was on the hiring side. I rated a candidate "hire at top priority" but he was rejected by another manager.

When I asked why, the manager told me it was because the candidate wrote "xml" on his resume and not "XML" and that any knowledgable programmer would know to capitalize it correctly so he clearly didn't know his stuff.

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