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AdamN commented on GPT-5.2   openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/atgctg
jacquesm · 3 days ago
That's a far more dangerous territory. A machine that is obviously broken will not get used. A machine that is subtly broken will propagate errors because it will have achieved a high enough trust level that it will actually get used.

Think 'Therac-25', it worked in 99.5% of the time. In fact it worked so well that reports of malfunctions were routinely discarded.

AdamN · 2 days ago
There was a low-level Google internal service that worked so well that other teams took a hard dependency on it (against advice). So the internal team added a cron job to drop it every once in a while to get people to trust it less :-)
AdamN commented on Oliver Sacks Put Himself into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?   newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/barry-cotter
cryzinger · 5 days ago
Also worth noting that the New Yorker published a lot of essays from Sacks when he was alive. So there's a sort of meta thing happening here with a biography of one of their famous contributors.
AdamN · 4 days ago
Yeah he was the consummate neurotic New Yorker writing for the New Yorker and now in death he has been woven directly into the New Yorker.
AdamN commented on Italy's longest-serving barista reflects on six decades behind the counter   reuters.com/lifestyle/cul... · Posted by u/NaOH
darkwater · 4 days ago
The same thing happened with TV in the 80s/90s. It will eventually fix itself, Gen Alfa will grow tired of smartphones when they will be in their thirties, I'm pretty sure. (that doesn't mean that there should not be active campaigning to point out the risks of smartphone addiction)
AdamN · 4 days ago
A friend of mine's kid (maybe 10 years ago) started crying when he watched regular TV for the first time. He literally thought the TV was broken when the commercials came on with the volume cranked up.

It's the same now with fb and these other old format social media sites. People just stop doing it. With that said I literally think fb will be with us for another 50 years as the people who are still on there are great marks and they won't be leaving until they 'age out'.

AdamN commented on Oliver Sacks Put Himself into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?   newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/barry-cotter
rendaw · 5 days ago
Subtitle

> The scientist was famous for linking healing with storytelling. Sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality.

TLDR

> after her grandmother’s death...she becomes decisive, joining a theatre group.... in the transcripts... [she] never joins a theatre group or emerges from her despair.

AFAICT the quote above is the only thing directly relevant to the title.

From what I read, skimming through the article, it paints Sacks as being a delusion driven emotional romantic and was practicing some sort of cult medicine, but I can't tell how much of that is reality and how much is NYT's ridiculously flowery embellishing of everything.

AdamN · 5 days ago
Just a nit but it's the New Yorker, not the NYT.
AdamN commented on Show HN: I built a dashboard to compare mortgage rates across 120 credit unions   finfam.app/blog/credit-un... · Posted by u/mhashemi
sokoloff · 11 days ago
What’s the alternative that’s better? Having a 5/1 or 1/1 ARM just means that your current house’s mortgage would also be more expensive because your 3% mortgage would have adjusted upward by now.

If you’re willing to have your current mortgage be more expensive to avoid the “downside of being locked into a low payment, you could just pretend your mortgage had adjusted and go buy a house that suits your needs better.

AdamN · 11 days ago
Home prices are probably higher now than they would be due to the limited supply due to people being locked into house.
AdamN commented on Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service   theregister.com/2025/12/0... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
shevy-java · 11 days ago
The reason is a bit strange. To me it seems as if Zig is just very opinionated. Personally I think the decision to move to Codeberg was made independently of Microsoft being a problem. I don't dispute that Microsoft is a problem; I just don't see many great alternatives to github either. Gitlab consistently is worse for me as a user.

I think the bigger problem is that these big megacorporations control so much. I find Google even more problematic than Microsoft these days in that regard. AI worsens this problem, but even without AI it already was a problem.

AdamN · 11 days ago
How is Bitbucket these days in comparison? Is it no longer even a player?
AdamN commented on Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive   old.reddit.com/r/google_a... · Posted by u/tamnd
lazide · 13 days ago
It’s just a computer outputting the next series of plausible text from it’s training corpus based on the input and context at the time.

What you’re saying is so far from what is happening, it isn’t even wrong.

AdamN · 13 days ago
Not so much different from how people work sometimes though - and in the case of certain types of pscychopathy it's not far at all from the fact that the words being emitted are associated with the correct training behavior and nothing more.
AdamN commented on Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive   old.reddit.com/r/google_a... · Posted by u/tamnd
liendolucas · 14 days ago
I love how a number crunching program can be deeply humanly "horrorized" and "sorry" for wiping out a drive. Those are still feelings reserved only for real human beings, and not computer programs emitting garbage. This is vibe insulting to anyone that don't understand how "AI" works.

I'm sorry for the person who lost their stuff but this is a reminder that in 2025 you STILL need to know what you are doing and if you don't then put your hands away from the keyboard if you think you can lose valuable data.

You simply don't vibe command a computer.

AdamN · 13 days ago
> Those are still feelings reserved only for real human beings

Those aren't feelings, they are words associated with a negative outcome that resulted from the actions of the subject.

AdamN commented on We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs   lalitm.com/fixits-are-goo... · Posted by u/lalitmaganti
Wololooo · 20 days ago
The problem is even if you make a note to fix it later, one you never get back to it and two this drives decisions for things around it, until it breaks...
AdamN · 18 days ago
It's compounded with multiple teams and ownership. So one team's bugs necessitate another team's workarounds.
AdamN commented on The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop   arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/cyclecount
dijit · 18 days ago
just don’t apply too much pressure or the center segment can bend over time, becoming weak and prone to potentially snapping off.

It happened to me at least.

AdamN · 18 days ago
Yeah you want to focus on the outside corners of the port and be gentle with the inside contacts.

u/AdamN

KarmaCake day3438August 27, 2009
About
AWS/Amazon Q - Berlin

Formerly Seattle, Nairobi, NYC:

* AWS Reliability Services (Fault Injection Service) - Region Isolation, AZ Power Outage and other tools for Chaos Engineering * AWS Developer Tools - building software teams to build software for other developers to build software * CTO at Factr - a geo/temporal research aggregation tool for international organizations and media * Founder of Kili.io - a public OpenStack for African markets based in Nairobi. * CTO at Yipit - Built the team and was initial dev (Python, Django, Ubuntu, AWS) * Way back when, I was the CTO of Forsalebyowner.com (acquired by Tribune Interactive).

Get in touch (adam@varud.com) if you have any interest in African technology, governance, Amazon, or anything in between.

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