There's no point at which turning your brain off will work
In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs1. They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked2. This...
View ArticleHow well do agents use test and verification techniques?
We previously noted that, while it's easier than ever to hit a particular quality bar by having coding agents use effective test techniques, software quality seems to be getting worse, indicating that...
View ArticleEd Zitron's AI prediction track record
I was curious how well the predictions of the most widely cited AI skeptic I've seen (Ed Zitron) have done, so I looked at how his predictions panned out. To disclose my own biases, I've never had a...
View ArticleBug blindness
I used to wonder why I see so many more bugs than most people. I easily observe hundreds to thousands of bugs per week and nothing seems to work, but most people I talk to don't see anything like this....
View ArticleKara Swisher interview of Jack Dorsey
This is a transcript of the Kara Swisher / Jack Dorsey interview from 2/12/2019, made by parsing the original Tweets because I wanted to be able to read this linearly. There's a "moment" that tries to...
View ArticleJonathan Shapiro's Retrospective Thoughts on BitC
This is an archive of the Jonathan Shapiro's "Retrospective Thoughts on BitC" that seems to have disappeared from the internet; at the time, BitC was aimed at the same niche as RustJonathan S. Shapiro...
View ArticleHow accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
I was curious how well the predictions of the most widely cited AI skeptic I've seen (Ed Zitron) have done, so I looked at how his predictions panned out. To disclose my own biases, I've never had a...
View ArticleBug blindness
I used to wonder why I see so many more bugs than most people. I easily observe hundreds to thousands of bugs per week and nothing seems to work, but most people I talk to don't see anything like this....
View ArticleThere's no reason for software to be slow anymore
The other day, I saw a viral tweet saying that people talking about how LLMs are causing slow, bloated, code are going to eat crow once they re-write everything in super-optimized assembly. We're not...
View ArticleThe benchmarkpocalypse
There's been a lot of talk about the vulnpocalypse, to which I don't have much to add because I'm not a security person, but I haven't seen much discussion on the closely related (and to be fair, less...
View ArticleHow does programming language affect token efficiency and correctness?
This somewhat widely cited post (I keep seeing it cited, anyway) suggests that dynamic languages and/or languages that represent things more concisely are more token efficient. It seems to be cited...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bad benchmarks and evals: Senior SWE-Bench, napkin math, and winter tires
We're going to look at three different kinds of benchmarks, one set of calculations for baseline numbers for performance "napkin math" estimates, one set of AI model evals, and one on car tires. To...
View ArticleAgentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding...
I've been using AI fairly heavily since last November and the whole thing is a funny experience. An agent will do something that, if a human did it, you'd immediately fire them. My reaction, of course,...
View ArticleSteve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
There's a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion...
View ArticleHow good can you be at Codenames without knowing any words?
About eight years ago, I was playing a game of Codenames where the game state was such that our team would almost certainly lose if we didn't correctly guess all of our remaining words on our turn....
View ArticleClik here to view.
A discussion of discussions on AI bias
There've been regular viral stories about ML/AI bias with LLMs and generative AI for the past couple years. One thing I find interesting about discussions of bias is how different the reaction is in...
View ArticleWork-life balance at Bioware
This is an archive of some posts in a forum thread titled "Beware of Bioware" in a now defunct forum, with comments from that forum as well as blog comments from a now defunct blog that archived that...
View ArticleComments on the FTC antitrust investigation of Google
html { max-width: 170ch; padding: 0.5em 0.5em; margin: auto; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 1.15em; } This is a summary of the publicly available documents on the 2011-2012 FTC investigation of Google's...
View ArticleHow web bloat impacts users with slow devices
In 2017, we looked at how web bloat affects users with slow connections. Even in the U.S., many users didn't have broadband speeds, making much of the web difficult to use. It's still the case that...
View ArticleRetrospective Thoughts on BitC
This is an archive of the BitC retrospective by Jonathan Shapiro that seems to have disappeared from the internetJonathan S. Shapiro shap at eros-os.org Fri Mar 23 15:06:41 PDT 2012 By now it will be...
View Article
