Dan Luu

Dan Luu

@danluu.com

danluu.com / www.patreon.com/danluu/

4.2K followers14 following68 posts

Dan Luu
@danluu.com

At the time, I was doing automated bug finding with human review. Human review found zero known false positives in the bugs I filed. Anthropic was using a better model and had more tokens to spend, which gave them the advantage on the two most difficult factors w.r.t. false positive rejection.

Dan Luu
@danluu.com

Did Ralph loops ever work? They were popular for a while, but when I did a comparison, they underperformed. There were all these theories about why Ralph loops were effective ("invert the latent space of the model"), but AFAICT people just didn't run the comparison? danluu.com/pl-tokens/#r...

Dan Luu
@danluu.com

People keep replying to tell me that Ralph loops worked better than nothing, which seems to illustrate my point? When Ralph loops were popular, I used a loop with context, which outperformed. That's not counting clearing context when it helps instead of always keeping, which you'd do in practice.

Dan Luu
@danluu.com

Amazon exec: "you wouldn't notice [if someone blew up a datacenter]. I mean, we might be a bit upset, but you wouldn't notice! [laughs]" Amazon after DCs blown up: "After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted ...."

Dan Luu
@danluu.com

Yes, more than one DC was blown up, but of course DCs being blown up aren't uncorrelated events. We already know that hardware failures like disk failures, CPU failures, etc., are highly correlated events, and those aren't even adversarial failures!

Dan Luu
@danluu.com

Interesting to see Steve Yegge say he never successfully built anything with Gas Town. I mentioned not finding these super vibed orchestrators useful because the reliability was too low (w.r.t. completing non-trivial tasks). Turns out the author of the most famous one had the exact same issue.

Dan Luu@danluu.com

Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding from Galapagos Island: danluu.com/ai-coding/

Dan Luu
@danluu.com

Earlier this year, the FTC Chair said "you're going to have a hard time keeping up with the number of cases we're gonna be bringing" on privacy. It seems like this is starting; the FTC has filed a case against a company for promising privacy while running ad trackers on their site, which share info

Dan Luu
@danluu.com

The bulk of www.ftc.gov/system/files... is about standard dark patterns, but there's a fairly good-sized section on the use of 3rd party trackers. It would be really interesting if those end up carrying a real cost the company. Less interesting if this results in another GDPR/EU-banner-like thing.

ftc.govftc.gov
Dan Luu
@danluu.com

A version of Missile Command for the Commodore 64 where the bottom of your screen is the game state in memory and missiles cause memory corruption: csdb.dk/release/?id=.... In the video below, a missile broke my controls and caused my cursor to get stuck moving down and to the left.

Dan Luu
@danluu.com

The commentary I've seen says Teslas are safe so it must be the drivers but, per danluu.com/car-safety/, maybe it's the cars. The most fatal rated manufacturers (Kia/Hyundai, Dodge, Tesla) all did poorly — Kia/Hyundai, Dodge got the lowest rating and there's a strong case Tesla should have as well.

Dan Luu
@danluu.com

A funny side effect of the crackdown on "AI" scraping is that I keep getting banned from sites for browsing too quickly. I barely use reddit anymore and I still managed to get IP banned for scraping (the error message indicated that I should get in touch with them if I want to do bulk accesses).

Dan Luu
@danluu.com

A former Apple engineer discusses Google product culture: > My director wore an Apple Watch and had an iPhone ... my VP too. Nobody was expected to eat the dog food and so few did. This was crazy to me coming from Apple ....

Dan Luu reposted

👻👃🎃
@waxrepli.ca

Replying to @samuel.fm

i can speak with a little authority on this, i work in this field DCs expend water by evaporation, either in cooling towers or evaporative coolers (water becomes vapor, taking latent heat energy with it into the air and leaving cooler liquid water behind) so we expend liquid water resources 1/

Dan Luu
@danluu.com

Interesting comment about SGI leadership knowing about the problems they were facing and still being unable to come up with a way to handle them.

Dan Luu reposted

Martin Kleppmann
@martin.kleppmann.com

A thoughtful retrospective by @adamwiggins.bsky.social on the business behind Muse, a tool-for-thought/iPad idea-sketching app. I’m sad that the business didn’t work out as planned, but the software still exists and the underlying goals and values remain good. adamwiggins.com/muse-retrosp...

adamwiggins.comMuse retrospective · Adam WigginsThe inside story of four years building Muse, a canvas-based thinking tool for iPad and Mac.
Dan Luu
@danluu.com

"The algorithm" 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 to make things look clean.

Dan Luu
@danluu.com

automotive engineers had to fight designers to get headlights that illuminated the road. They were losing until Consumer Reports started testing headlights for function, which created enough bad PR that engineers were able to push for headlights that actually work: danluu.com/why-benchmark/