Dan Luu

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npub1pm93exm0eyfep2635k3epqh5f39tuzse44nuvwmsn5t4a0erureqnl88nl

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danluu_at_mastodon.social@mostr.pub

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Last Notes

2024-06-12 18:44:38

This is such a classic big company story: someone finds a critical problem (in this case, the team manually labelling training data is mislabelling it), but the team that owns the issue doesn't care about it and no consumer of the team's product has the bandwidth/patience to go through the many months long process of getting the issue fixed, so the issue never gets fixed:
https://www.mihaileric.com/posts/how-alexa-dropped-the-ball-conversational-ai/
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/605/124/333/883/557/original/492b7db042ffd79d.png

2024-03-16 19:57:17

How web bloat impacts users with slow devices:
https://danluu.com/slow-device/
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/107/122/144/005/594/original/63cdb917d9efb4a2.png

2024-02-24 21:09:21

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On a related note, I found Jonathan Shapiro's retrospective on BitC (which aimed to fill the niche Rust now occupies) interesting:
https://danluu.com/bitc-retrospective/
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/988/499/244/780/784/original/fa582506a72b4eda.png

2024-02-23 18:44:52

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@npub1pu3…8r76 There's a huge amount of pressure to not test enough since tester time is money and pushing parts into higher yield bins is also money.
I guess a related thing is that it used to be the case that almost all parts sold had a huge amount of margin and could be pushed significantly harder without many issues, but trying to squeeze the last bit of nominal performance out of chips has led to more chips being sold at or beyond their actual capability?

2024-02-02 17:28:03

In other https://danluu.com/discontinuities/ news, I'm surprised to see that people "round" to nice, even, ages in (some?) age surveys, e.g., see this poll on the age of WordPress users, which has spikes at 25, 30, 40, 45, 50, and 55:
https://wordpress.org/news/files/2023/05/2022-Annual-Survey-Final.pdf
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/863/037/867/079/831/original/3be771a4c85d655f.png

2024-01-24 22:08:35

This discussion on the GitHub bug that let you make a "GitHub.com signed" commit as anybody (which is tagged as "Verified") makes me wonder if I'm missing something about parsers vs. regexes.
I'm not an expert (I've written maybe ~10 parsers on my life) but, in my mind, parsers seem easier to test and verify.
Many people seem to think that a parser would've had the exact same bug, but I would expect that a parser with the exact same bug would error out when it encountered an unexpected field.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/813/202/490/803/188/original/9ed3723a78799c48.png

2024-01-22 23:19:30

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Long-time Microsoft employees explain changes in Windows:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307
Designers were handed full control over UX. Engineers who fought for usability over a slick-looking interface burned out and left after repeatedly being overruled.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/802/153/606/784/287/original/d18eefeb81da16b5.png

2024-01-17 07:37:40

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If you want to compare antibiotics as a class to the internet (which I'm guessing is the intent, since the original statement is meaningless as written), I don't think it's obvious at all, let alone by many orders of magnitude.
If you just look at personally, and ask someone if they could have the internet, but multiple relatives and/or good friends of theirs die because antibiotics don't exist, or they could have antibiotics but no internet, I suspect most would choose antibiotics.

2024-01-17 07:34:37

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If you think about how the modern internet has enabled conspiracy theories to flourish, and then add to that all of these mysterious deaths, we'd have conspiracy theories on a level that's hard to imagine.
On the original statement, that "the internet is obviously more important than penicillin by many orders of magnitude", I'd agree if taken perfectly literally, but that's like saying antibiotics are more important than ethernet, only obviously true because you'd use substitutes.

2024-01-17 07:28:19

It's sort of a funny thought experiment, but what would the world look like with the modern internet but without medicine? Infant mortality rate is roughly 50%, life expectancy is something like 20-30 years, with people randomly and mysteriously dying from infections after getting a small cut, etc.
Inequality due to wealth would be reduced because rich people would suffer from all of the same causes of death since this presupposes that no one knows how to treat or prevent any illness.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/770/100/415/320/940/original/0ce7b45f12e8e6d7.png

2023-12-30 00:44:20

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There's too much data for a Mastodon thread, but you can see this in reliability surveys of cars, not just in the data itself, but in what questions people even bother asking on reliability surveys.
In my lifetime, Consumer Reports tracked data on and reviewed how well cars started. Because, you know, it used to be common for new cars to not start. Now, a photo of a new car not starting is so silly that a friend of mine saw me trending on the front page of reddit, twice, for posting a photo.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/666/594/841/778/745/original/69285d4dc64ff896.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/666/595/480/953/639/original/60792e8f94df57a3.png

2023-12-30 00:38:36

I find it interesting that one of the most common replies to https://mastodon.social/@danluu/111643026109666672 is something like "this is why I'd never buy a car with a computer in it" / "that's less than 15 years old", etc., and that a lot of people generally think that cars are now less reliable.
I haven't pulled it up again, but from having skimmed it in the past, I feel like the data for cars getting more reliable is very strong and that cars have been getting more reliable basically since the creation of the car.

2023-12-25 20:49:45

"Unfortunately, a recent software update was not successful. Your vehicle cannot be driven.
Please call customer support"
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/643/022/744/786/331/original/44093c9550d675c4.jpeg

2023-12-16 23:27:16

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@npub1qnn…w7ad Oh, yeah, a related one that I find hilariously silly is when a writer gets the idea that a smart person can predict people's behavior and the future with perfect accuracy, so they'll do something like leave a screwdriver on a table and then in the big reveal, it's ah-ha, the genius character knew that the person would pick up the screwdriver with their right hand, causing them to shift their weight, etc., etc., and therefore, 10 minutes later, slip and fall and hit their head.

2023-12-16 22:16:05

What thriller and/or mystery TV series / movies / books have people engaging in reasoning that actually makes sense?
Almost every example I can think of reminds me a bit of how little kids reason, e.g., in Jack Reacher, they're constantly trying to show how smart Reacher is with little kid reasoning, like when he "smartly" concludes that the bad guys didn't find what they were looking for because some place was trashed. Sure, or maybe they did and were checking if there was more, were mad, etc.

2023-12-12 00:59:42

There's something I find hilarious about all these fancy audio features being not only negated but actually becoming negative value (unless you disable them) due to "last mile" apathy.
There's something similar with some fancy Wi-Fi stuff which, when tested, is negative value when enabled for many (but not all) consumer Wi-Fi routers.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/564/719/563/284/425/original/65dff18fd00d48b5.png

2023-12-08 06:27:50

One thing I find interesting about modern board game culture is how many people consider it wrong to learn how to play a game well, e.g., in response to a question about how often people read about strategy, every response (so far) is "basically never", with multiple people considering reading about strategy to be cheating and/or at ruining the game for other people.
I don't think I've ever played a sport where this was the dominant attitude, and of course it's also not for chess/go/bridge/etc.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/543/374/966/957/129/original/5843b4bf95d3cf24.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/543/375/336/627/558/original/ad812c53bc1edcde.png

2023-11-27 19:24:03

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Reminds me of this story where automotive engineers had to fight designers to get headlights that illuminated the road. They were actually losing the fight until Consumer Reports started testing headlights for function, which created enough of a stink that engineers were able to push for headlights that actually work over headlights that follow modern design principles: https://danluu.com/why-benchmark/
And sure, #notalldesigners, but this is a problem that goes back decades across multiple industries.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/484/143/265/484/901/original/bf7077177703c6ad.png

2023-11-27 19:21:55

A site with ranked feed has somehow decided that I want to see viral UX/designer content.
In every viral UX comparison I've seen so far, the "good" version looks more "modern" but is also less legible / usable. E.g., below, the contrast is lower and legibility is sacrificed for cleanness.
When designers have free reign to do things how they want, the result is often quite unusable: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1211782987664113664, https://twitter.com/danluu/status/919423128895442944, etc.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/484/132/479/450/884/original/a87c422c6e91dbd5.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/484/133/082/039/876/original/a124b5e27f88f3bb.png

2023-11-16 10:37:42

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@npub17qe…v7la More generally, if you want to own a new-ish car, there's basically always a model you can pick up that's a good bet to not depreciate for a few years. The previous time I was shopping for a car, I almost bought a mazdaspeed 3 or a Saab 9-2X for that reason, but decided against it because I figured I'd just keep the car for decades, which makes the depreciation curve irrelevant, but I was right on which models you could sell for the same price years later.

2023-11-16 10:28:42

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@npub17qe…v7la Also, I think car prices were predictable and I bought a nice car when I did for that exact reason.
Used car prices dropped a ton and new car production stopped, which makes no sense whatsoever. Making money off this trade isn't exactly rocket science. I wasn't excited to start a car buying business, but CarMax made this exact same bet at around the same time and made a ton of money off of it, buying cars when dealerships were panic selling cars at nonsensical prices.

2023-11-16 10:20:25

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@npub17qe…v7la I could've also gotten zero depreciation by just keeping my old car, which couldn't depreciate significantly because it was worthless (I sold it for $800 and there are lots of nicer cars on the market for $1000). It was reliable and I never had to major maintenance on it, so it seemed like it was good indefinitely.

2023-06-05 08:57:16

Nice post by Gradon Hoare (original creator of Rust) about his preferences in language design vs. the Rust team and the resultant differences that fall out of the differences in preferences: https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/307291.html.
It's rare to see someone who has a deep understanding of the trade-offs involved in major technical decisions write up their thoughts, so I thought this was a really great read even though I'm not really a "language person".
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/490/754/340/547/665/original/b603ff76c5a67432.png

2023-06-01 18:10:40

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Some people asked what the point of this kind of spam is. I think a lot of people will have idiosyncratic purposes, but I'd guess that, by volume, most spam will be from accounts associated with spam services, e.g., services that let you buy GitHub stars (stars from semi-plausible accounts cost ~$1/star, > 10x the rate of stars from newly created spam accounts).
BTW, one of the two accounts mentioned above got wiped out 3-4 days after the "toot" hit #1 on HN and the other is still spamming.

2023-05-09 00:51:38

Interesting to see the rise of ChatGPT-enabled Github spam.
The screenshots below are from one account, but if you search a bit it's very easy to find other examples.
Github doesn't appear to be on top of this at all, e.g., the account mentioned in https://github.com/swarna1101/VeChain-Thor/issues/1 has been spamming repos since last year and hasn't been banned (I reported a bad account once and got no response and nothing happened and haven't bothered since).
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/335/938/894/188/302/original/3680d352a86d604a.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/335/940/108/811/487/original/4870917134a02ad4.png
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https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/335/941/131/005/333/original/8db6c900617f973e.png

2023-03-31 19:11:54

The new stuff in the Twitter algorithm is wild.
"author is elon", "author_is_republican", "author_is_democrat", etc., are explicit terms that are special cased.
https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b928b479b512ec51ac2c3821f5922/home-mixer/server/src/main/scala/com/twitter/home_mixer/functional_component/decorator/HomeTweetTypePredicates.scala
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/119/470/561/076/911/original/afddca3e2cf864f3.png