Jacob Eckel

Building software since the last century.
From first hire to unicorn - twice.
Dropping wisdom one aphorism at a time.

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

Still waiting for Claude Code to rediscover the Turbo Pascal UX.

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

Now that I have Claude Code, I know exactly how slave owners felt.

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

The word “biggest” is surprisingly the most interesting part of the post. The greater heating effect is not due to wavelength. Infrared is actually less energetic. Nor is it due to higher intensity: there is less energy in the infrared than in the visible spectrum per unit wavelength, both emitted by the Sun and reaching Earth. The reason infrared caused the “biggest” temperature rise is a peculiarity of the prism used in the experiment: it bends shorter wavelengths more, so the infrared part of the spectrum was projected onto a smaller patch of the table. That means the radiation density was higher there, hence the larger temperature increase. We think of infrared as the heating part of the spectrum because, when absorbed by water and organic matter, it dissipates most of its energy into molecular resonance, which we feel as heat. However, if he used a mercury thermometer, that part of the effect would not be significant, because mercury reflects infrared as well as visible light. This is why you need to blacken the tip of the thermometer if you want to reproduce the experiment.

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

@JeremyTate41 Outside

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

@michaelfreedman @martin_casado I’d argue the more important factor is the volume of available training data. That’s why LLMs tend to be far more fluent in JS or Python (and their ecosystems) than in C.

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

If ClaudeCode were a person, it would have been fired already. Otherwise, an excellent tool.

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

@_simonsmith Build vs buy has always been around, and most of the time building is a myopic mistake. AI or not, if the software isn’t core to your business and a solid buy option exists, building it will lose in the long run.

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

I would absolutely pay to read the email Anthropic’s trademark lawyers sent to GitHub the moment they spotted a project called ClawdBot.

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

@flappyairplanes Er, what?
https://t.co/3TobJtAV7D

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

Planes don't flap their wings, but we think of them as capable of Artificial General Flying. They, however, cannot do many things birds can. Similarly, AGI will not be able to do many things we can, but we won't need it to flap.

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

@thdxr https://t.co/yIdg5nnJ8m

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

AI won’t have to coerce us. It’s already apparent that we’ll willingly surrender our thinking to it. A few will pursue thought as a hobby, most will drift into mental vacancy. Just as we’re disconnected from our food’s origins, we’ll lose touch with the sources of ideas. In the end, we’ll live for emotions only. Aren’t we already, most days? We’ll sneer at the peasants of thought like we do at people who butcher their own chickens.

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

@martin_casado Please tell us how you arrived at the 20–30% figure. Measuring software dev productivity with 10% precision is a bigger story than AI.

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

@Math_files Assuming two genders and, at birth, P(boy) = 0.5.
There are 4 possible pairs, so:
P(same-gender pair) = P(different-gender pair) = 0.5.
Given one child is a boy:
P(the other child is a girl) = P(different-gender pair) = 0.5.
All the rest of the data is irrelevant.

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

Mosquitoes that eat me in silence, I can understand them. I hate the ones that buzz. The proud ones.

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

Mary Kay Ash once said, “Everyone has an invisible sign hanging from their neck saying ‘Make me feel important’”. The motto is quite banal except for the word “invisible”. Why is the need for appreciation so often hidden?

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

Patience is the most Machiavellian trait. Beware, beware of patient people.

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

Hear me out: Autonomous Teslas should have an Optimus arm for gesture communication with drivers and pedestrians.

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

The only thing harder than predicting a black swan is manufacturing a black swan.

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

@mitsuhiko Not even controversial. Grep, BM25, and whatever else people use for search is the R in RAG.

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

@paulg To protect free speech, it would be better to proportionally lower the community-note threshold based on how often someone has been noted before. Chronic bullshiters should trigger an instant note.

[Jacob Eckel @eckely]

@skirano I would be very cautious with the results, because it cannot count to three yet.