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padolsey

4,365 karmajoined 15 ปีที่แล้ว
padolsey.at.hn

I'm James. Living between Beijing and London. I like coding. Also plants. Stroke survivor & disability advocate. My dog's a whippet/iggy cross and is called Ducky. He's a beautiful lunatic.

* website: [j11y.io](https://j11y.io) * building: [nope](https://nope.net) * bsky: [@j11y.io](https://bsky.app/profile/j11y.io) * contact: https://tally.so/r/waYPvE * twitter: [@padolsey](https://x.com/padolsey) * book recommendations: [ablf.io](https://ablf.io) * me = founding eng @ [collective intelligence project](https://cip.org)

My work email is my first name at cip dot org.

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![me](https://j11y.io/ducky.jpg)

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My meet.hn token: meet.hn-10d164d4-bf7f-4431-898f-e02b34b836dc

Submissions

Blob Opera, Community Edition

opera.addy.ie
29 points·by padolsey·7 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·4 comments

Tips for stroke-surviving software engineers

blog.j11y.io
505 points·by padolsey·8 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·189 comments

Sorry, We Deprecated Your Friend

blog.j11y.io
3 points·by padolsey·10 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·2 comments

comments

padolsey
·6 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
That's good. I wonder if it should be opt-in instead of opt-out. Disabled people are arguably less able to find random configuration options than non-disabled counterparts. I get a bit bothered with how undiscoverable these options are. But power-users by their nature don't mind going to the extra mile to get perf out of their experiences.
padolsey
·8 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Rendered div soup with pictures of data isn't a web standard and shouldn't be professing to be built for a11y.
padolsey
·12 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
This is just the 'LLM judge', very badly implemented without any scientific prudence. What a joke. To be terse: you cannot rely on LLMs to provide standardized scores against arbitrary criteria. To get close to 'reliable' you would need highly tested rubrics, grounded in human decision-making, and you'd need to avoid all the measurement biases these things are riddled with... positional/order effects, anchoring on whatever numbers you stuffed into your own prompt, scale-format sensitivity (a 1–5 and an A–E scale give different answers for the same input), holistic-vs-isolated context effects, and lovely examples like where adding a "be unbiased" instruction makes it more biased. I've studied this at length. You cannot even _begin_ to approach this problem seriously without held-out validation, inter-rater agreement, and ground truth. This repo is just quagmire of wishful vibes with random numbers littered throughout.
padolsey
·18 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
[flagged]
padolsey
·20 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
These vast multi-agentic systems with roles like 'Researcher', 'Writer' (with a review loop), 'Reflection agent', seem to ~feel~ mostly right but lack evals as to the merit of agent decomposition. So it forms a satisfying enough flowchart but I see no evidence these authors actually tried other approaches or agent roles. And let's be honest: an agent is just a system prompt and output contracts, and these rich architectures seem to be pontificating beyond their worth. It all feels a bit vibe-y.
padolsey
·21 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Chalkboard, pencil and paper are also technology. Ban them. Instead rely purely on the vocal chords to tell stories of old.
padolsey
·เดือนที่แล้ว·discuss
Tbf this is what 'defence in depth' is and it kinda works.. until it doesn't.
padolsey
·เดือนที่แล้ว·discuss
The most extreme virtue-signal is to go completely browser-default and have no styling whatsoever. Like lowercasing because your pinky can't be arsed to reach for the shift-key even though you've a billion dollars in series A.
padolsey
·เดือนที่แล้ว·discuss
>Where cash is stigmatized? I haven't seen such a place except PRC.

I don't know about stigma, per se, but there are a few places where businesses have a pretty explicit legal right to refuse cash, UK, Netherlands, Sweden, US. Oddly in PRC refusing cash is illegal.
padolsey
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
>covering such lovely topics as the hardest day of my life, my biggest life challenges, and other similar “trauma-baiting” questions.

And this was for a mental health startup!? Please name-and-shame them. Awful.
padolsey
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Does anyone know how this even happens inside the walls of google? Is it an automated process? How is such a (presumably) high revenue account just magically blocked without human intervention? I'm quite perplexed.
padolsey
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Nah the bounce is gorgeous
padolsey
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
My understanding was that strokes caused brain cell death, and that there was no coming back from that, but my neurologists would speak of 'bruised' brain cells, and that after weeks or months or even years you can see recovered function. UCLA's work here is targeting this disconnection and the lost rhythm in the surviving, distant networks. However there is, as yet, NO concievable intervention that could recover function from cell death at that center of the infarct.
padolsey
·3 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
For a 'happy map' there is a bizarrely puritanical deficit of orgasms. EDIT: oh wait I found one about backrubbing. That's nice I guess.
padolsey
·3 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
This is fun. I'd like to see the same idea but oriented for richer tokens instead of simpler tokens. If you want to spend less tokens, then spend the 'good' ones. So, instead of saying 'make good' you could say 'improve idiomatically' or something. Depends on one's needs. I try to imagine every single token as an opportunity to bend/expand/limit the geometries I have access to. Language is a beautiful modulator to apply to reality, so I'll wager applying it with pedantic finesse will bring finer outputs than brutish humphs of cavemen. But let's see the benchmarks!
padolsey
·4 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Knowing the nature of a test ahead of time, building out your capabilities and tooling before entering the exam hall when your peers don't have that advantage, makes you a cheater.
padolsey
·4 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
If true, this is essentially what Dspy does https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy (it was made back in 2023)
padolsey
·4 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Precisely. I dare say software developers bemoaning this new world don't realise that they - too - are supplanters of a prior world. A sweet irony.
padolsey
·4 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Does it have to be mutually exclusive? On-the-fly software does not destroy software. Gatekeeping software creation does not mean shoving the existing creators out, it just means creating a larger space that others can occupy, like when 'real' programmers had to slowly permit 'script kiddies' into their spaces. All feels a bit 'old guard' vs 'new guard'.
padolsey
·4 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
There is indeed a painful dissonance here. I like this new world, but feel sorrow for the loss of something. I try to remember how empowering AI is. It is already allowing millions of people to finally use the devices they've been sitting in front of all these years. No longer do they have to feel constrained by software creators who have made choices for them. Now it is their tool through-and-through, and they can construct software on-the-fly to match their needs precisely. They have been buying computers with both hands tied behind their backs. Now they are in control.