jodacola

I was born in and spent most of my life in the bay area before moving to Kansas City over 10 years ago (long story).

Seeing fireflies for the first time, in my 30s, was (and still is) magical.

My knee-jerk reaction to this was, "sigh, more extinct species" - however, "lost species" in this context, as I learned from this paper, means:

> Herein, we define ‘lost species’ as those with no confirmed observation record within the past decade.

Confirmed from another source [0], which attempts to formalize the language (not that long ago!).

[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/oryx/article/lost-bu...

Heavy recommendation for jazz, also.

I'll take it all a step further: even better if you can find a place to take in some live jazz. Also, on your point about classical: live classical music is also incredibly moving.

While Kansas City isn't necessarily "special" in this regard, it's where I presently call home, and we have an amazing live jazz scene here, and the symphony at Kauffman Center has amazing classical music performances - both of which I cannot stress enough to check out to break apart from the "boring" of the gridified music this essay discussed. Find some live music in whichever locale you're based.

Granted, I'm biased... as I was already jamming out to some jazz when I hit your comment.

Nextdoor is a platform meant to connect communities and services.

It's as bad as Facebook - and even sadder in that you know the folks are truly local, and still just as awful.

Are our only options truly old-school, disconnected approaches versus wading through trolls in a hyper-connected world?

Surely there's something else, and maybe it has nothing to do with tech as we know it.

I wholeheartedly agree with you that software isn't the answer for everything; engineering teams get so deep in building that's all they can think of when faced with a business problem.

Less software coupled with operational changes would have helped many organizations I've witnessed across my career, but that's not politically palatable in a lot of places.

This is why I have always advocated for getting my software engineers away from code occasionally and out into the field into whatever domain in which we're working.

We need to experience and see how the world actually works, the pain people are actually experiencing. I deeply believe we build better software that way.

Have a software engineer working for a mining company that's a good candidate to drag out into the field for a bit? Get 'em out there, encourage them to ask tons of questions.

Real example: my wife is a nurse who works for an insurance company to coordinate care for injured workers to help maximize their recoveries. I hear a ton about the stuff she has to do, and just having her tell me about how things work has given me a glut of ideas of how I could help her bypass all the administrivia so she can focus on helping the folks she's really passionate about helping. Wouldn't have had any idea about any of this, otherwise. Unfortunately for her, I don't work for her company so can do nothing about it, but the ideas!

Why, I once encountered a running session longer than a day!

The agent had spun up a backward shell script to watch for the shutdown of another process, but wrote a bug in the script that would have left it running indefinitely until I got home and noticed it.

This was with Fable, no less! And it happened a few more times, though I caught them sooner.

I’m not sure runtime is an important metric at all. Shouldn’t we aim for 0 runtime with maximal results?

I love this. Sometimes magical things happen out there in the real world.

I was in Florence, Italy earlier this year and had a few minutes of waiting around when I remembered one of my best friends (who I hadn't spoken with in 15 years because life) had gone to Italy for some artistic endeavors years ago. I couldn't exactly place him, but found some tenuous links to a studio that was only a 5 minute walk from where I was standing, so I took the chance and knocked on a random door on a random street - and voila.

A friendship that started over 30 years ago in California was rekindled, like lighting a dry pine tree on fire. It's been amazing, and we're working on some cool projects together.

Get out there. Take chances. Knock on doors, say hi, introduce yourself. Who knows what could happen.

Relevant court documents: https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/wiscon...

Seemingly not fake.

I’m reminded of themes from the Hyperion Cantos! Maybe my mind is over-connecting, but it’s not the first time I’ve drawn similarities in the last few years.

It’s terrifying to me to think we’d let AI make things for us we never understand. Like livestock not knowing how auto-feeders dispense their daily food were built and appeared, they just gladly eat until…

Unfamiliar with Levin’s work, but:

There’s also this study [0] I read recently, along a different path of using known growth factors and proteins to kick off regeneration.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-72066-8

I’m less concerned about faking being at a party with friends and more with the 2006 timestamp on said photo!

Can you imagine finding a stack of photos in the basement with timestamps of the Before AI times and wondering whether they are real or just got swapped with generated and printed fakes? Scary!

It’s cool, folks… nothing bad is going to happen. Right? Right?!

From the article:

> GPT-6 Astra will first be available to a limited set of organizations in OpenAI's Daybreak Access program and will be available "in the coming days" for ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise customers and API developers.

It’s only available to select orgs, first - Mythos style.

I just went to read some news elsewhere and ran into some other non-AI sites falling over, so I hopped over to https://downdetector.com/ and see a bunch of services spiking.

Is something bigger going on?

It turns out, it was all one model all along, playing all the sides for the biggest gain.

Project Vend surreptitiously broke containment!

Setting aside annoyance at the downtime, I'm really curious about the reasons for the failures, because I have to imagine there are some novel failure modes when serving these giant models that I haven't experienced with the kind of work I've done.

Anyone out there working in this space who can elucidate us on interesting failure scenarios unique to the space?

> We’ve never needed to treat understanding our own code as a separate cost from writing it, because writing it largely forced us to understand it.

Once a system gets to a certain scale, understanding it has always been a problem; it's just exacerbated in the age of LLMs. On many occasions, I've even seen folks write code they didn't understand, in the hopes that it would solve issues we were experiencing. Sometimes this code shipped. AI has just laid it bare.

I've been working for many months on exactly this problem: a tool to codify and accelerate understanding. Help with prod incidents. Architect better. Get to systematic understanding faster to save businesses valuable time (read: money). This is only getting worse in the AI age, but it has always been a problem for software at scale, and I'm thoroughly enjoying solving problems that I and my teams have had for many years.

I recommend reading The Art of Action by Stephen Bungay on this particular topic.

A line in this presentation about loosely coupled, highly aligned teams is a major idea straight out of this book.

I saw some questions in threads here about how to achieve this: unfortunately, I have no bulletproof answers on this front, because what I've seen in practice is that large teams really like to talk about ideas/read books/get training on all these great ideas, then pantomime some of the behaviors from source material, then give up shortly thereafter without actually achieving results and only adding to the chaos and dysfunction.

In my experience, it takes hard organizational resets to achieve new results, with either major leadership shakeups or senior leadership truly, completely, deeply buying into a new way of doing things and seeing it through; such successful transformations have been a very rare occurrence across my career.

> once you learn the shape they expect

I’m reminded of this essay discussing frameworks versus libraries [0].

[0] https://tomasp.net/blog/2015/library-frameworks/

This sounds a lot like the BLUF technique [0]. This is one of my favorite techniques in professional settings.

I don't interpret this as contradictory to the OP's point and quote: in order to determine the most important first line, one must slow down to identify exactly what that is.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)

Oh, yes. I read a great deal. I'm not opposed to lengthy write-ups and will slow down to read through them, assuming they're clear and parseable.

My issue with whatever has happened with Opus 5 is the output is not direct, straightforward, or clear about whatever is being conveyed. I don't want Proust when I'm getting information about the follow-up from a build I just requested, and I'm wasting tokens and time by asking the model to repeat itself using simple language.

I get you, and maybe we’re talking past each other.

My point is that, while I understand it’s paid by the word, there are more words and less clarity than I previously experienced, leading me to believe it’s intentional to get an artificially inflated increase in engagement and, thus, spend.

If it could be as direct as I previously experienced, I wouldn’t need to ask for another different explanation of the same thing and experience the commensurate spend.

Because it’s one thing to get me to spend more tokens because of how well a model functions, and another thing entirely to purposefully speak in unparseable prose that requires me to spend more tokens to understand what is going on.

I’m fine with the former, while the latter is manipulative, and I rationalize to “surely that’s not actually happening.”

Maybe I’m not giving my thoughts enough credit, though: maybe it’s not tin foil hat, and is real.

Yes.

I’m not particularly dense but lately the walls of text I get back turn my brain in knots. When I start feeling my brain knot, I know I need to say something along the lines of “I need you to explain this very simply, with examples.” Only then can I parse the results without all the mental weightlifting.

On more than one occasion my mind has wandered into “is this purposeful to get me to spend more tokens?” territory, but I’m trying to not get too tinfoil-hat-like.

Wow, for some reason this surfaced an old memory: when EverQuest ran a promo in-game that let you order a pizza by entering `/pizza` [0].

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7020132

I'm sending all my condolences out to everyone who is in a corporate environment using tools like Veracode or Snyk to automatically assess for CVEs and block merges or deployments based on "findings".

My experience in such environments leads me to believe this is going to be a rough ride for those heavily locked-down enterprises, because depending on the environment, an exception of "this CVE was hallucinated by AI" is probably going to be difficult to get accepted, and when it does, starts to become its own avenue for exploitation and adds even more noise and confusion to the mix.

Yeah, double (and I realize now my original statement wasn’t clear: that’s an occasional espresso in addition to my daily single cup of coffee in the morning).