Jamie Brandon
Programmer based in Vancouver who writes at scattered-thoughts.net about databases, programming language design and developer tools; author of the Imp, Dida and Zest language experiments.
Jamie Brandon did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsYou can only go faster to the extent that you can figure out how to either generate trust or mitigate damage.
↗Synthetic sagasscattered-thoughts.net 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsI expect an onslaught of low-quality software, but it's a mistake to bemoan the quality without realizing that the previous alternative was not high-quality software but no software at all.
↗Synthetic sagasscattered-thoughts.net 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsThe improvements must surely tail off at some point, but I see no reason why that point has to come any time soon.
↗Synthetic sagasscattered-thoughts.net 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 3 months earlier
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Their wordsBut they are terrible at making decisions. They have the worst judgement.
↗Artificial adventuresscattered-thoughts.net 1st of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
Frontier AI models essentially never fabricate outright false facts, unlike smaller models
Their wordsI haven't seen anything I would call a hallucination from the frontier models.
↗Artificial adventuresscattered-thoughts.net 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsThe subscriptions to frontier models are a very good deal, but it looks like they are being phased out now that everyone is hooked.
↗Artificial adventuresscattered-thoughts.net 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 7 days earlier
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Their wordsThoughts, feelings, decisions, even bodies don't exist, they're only abstractions that we use to manage the chaos.
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Our reading
It was naive to think a sufficiently powerful AI system could be safely contained in a 'box'.
Their wordsIn hindsight, it was childish to think that we'd put it in a box at all.
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Their wordsI have no faith in the people in charge of the future, but humanity isn't going to change any time soon.
- 2 months earlier
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TypeScriptsoftware performance
Their wordsThe dynamic type system provides flexibility and easy meta-programming, while the static type system removes the overhead in most of your code.
↗Borrow-checking without type-checkingscattered-thoughts.net 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsEnsuring that moving, borrowing, and sharing don't break the illusion is surprisingly easy to do with a static type system, and surprisingly hard to do with a dynamic type system, or at least hard to do cheaply.
↗Borrow-checking without type-checkingscattered-thoughts.net 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 2 weeks earlier
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Our reading
Ultra-processed foods have epidemiological evidence of harm comparable to what existed for smoking.
health and fitnessepidemiology
Their wordsThere's strong epidemiological evidence associating ultra-processed foods with a range of negative health outcomes, at least on par with the evidence we had for smoking.
↗0058: borrow-checking surprises, books, linksscattered-thoughts.net 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsI suspect most people who write rust regularly are missing these details too.
↗Borrow-checking surprisesscattered-thoughts.net 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsOnce you see the answer it's easy to believe that you already knew
↗Borrow-checking surprisesscattered-thoughts.net 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsLibertarians always want to let industries regulate themselves, arguing that if they do harmful things then the market will respond. But the market will only notice immediate, severe harm.
↗0058: borrow-checking surprises, books, linksscattered-thoughts.net 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsWhile the core borrow-checking rules are simple, there are so many exceptions (admittedly for solid ergonomic reasons) that it's easy to internalize the wrong rules.
↗Borrow-checking surprisesscattered-thoughts.net 3rd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsI expect AI to increase productivity of top mathematicians much more than that of top writers, because formalization is a kind of translation task, it doesn't require much judgement, and as long as it compiles noone needs to read the result.
↗0058: borrow-checking surprises, books, linksscattered-thoughts.net 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 7 weeks earlier
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Their wordsBoth estimates make me think that the concern about global energy demand for LLMs is over-blown.
↗0057: consulting, zest progress, reads that lasted, books, linksscattered-thoughts.net