Co-founder / CTO of Helply (formerly Groove) • girl dad • software dev • synthesizers • photography • gaming • christian above all

Joined May 2008
500 Photos and videos
Landed in Lima, Peru last night. Woke up to my plans getting cancelled because of protests. Any suggestions on what to explore today?
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Absolutely wild move
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…
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Planning the sunsetting of some systems I built a few years ago. Embarrassed by the excessive level of complexity I added in them. It all made so much sense at the time 🤦‍♂️ Happens to all of us… if you stay long enough to face the consequences of your decisions.
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I’ve had a lingering, illness-triggered cough for almost a month now. On my second round of prednisone, an inhaler, several bags of cough drops, and amoxicillin. Still can’t kick it. Headed to Peru in a few days. If the rainforest doesn’t do me in, hiking around 16,000 ft will.
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Searching for a usb-c hub with a uhs-ii sd card reader on Amazon. Out of the first 30 results returned to me, 20 were ads, 1 was a complete crock with false info, and 0 actually had uhs-ii readers in them. It’s like I’m shopping at Five Below.
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Just got a $1k bill from an orchestration platform we use for running ~20k jobs on OUR OWN infrastructure. Guess how long we are gonna keep that subscription going...
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Actually, followup to this. It was @dagster. They changed their pricing model, 10x-ing our bill. Not cool folks, not cool at all.
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Why is claude giving me options in greek?
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Hey @AWSSupport, I have filed a business critical issue and your support system is consistently failing. Every time the call comes through, your system says it experienced a technical issue connecting us and you are now outside your SLA for responding.
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Oh dang, the memory cards I use in my camera have tripled in price, if you can even find them in stock anywhere. Haven’t really payed too much attention to the memory shortage lately, guess I should have. Yikes.
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Another card I sometimes use is up almost 4.5x
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Feel like models prefer that you use "main" instead of "master" in git. Constantly having to wait a few turns before coding agents figure it out. Easy fix in agents.md, but wonder if this gives insight into prioritization of data freshness.
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If you have an agent that takes screenshots for UI regression testing and work proof, you better make sure it isn't just hallucinating those screenshots. Just caught one of ours making screenshots up out of thin air. Not even sure how that happened yet.
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are you even a real engineer if you don't post a picture of your laptop running a local model on a flight?
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Follow-up, I did indeed end up relying on a local model a bit on my last flight…
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Had a great time at @saastr this past week! If you’re a b2b SaaS and are tired of paying seat-based pricing for your customer support platform, we should talk. Helply is our new AI-native helpdesk with outcome-based pricing… you pay nothing for the seats, just the results.
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A lot of this hinges on how you define IC work, but my gut tells me that expecting leaders to have 15 direct reports and also be strong ICs sounds more like you assume one of those responsibilities will suffer at some unspecified but acceptable rate. Even with ✨AI✨
This is an email I sent earlier today to all employees at Coinbase: Team, Today I’ve made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%. I want to walk you through why we're doing this now, what it means for those affected, and how this positions us for the future. Why now Two forces are converging at the same time. We need to be front footed to respond to both. First, the market. Coinbase is well-capitalized, has diversified revenue streams, and is well-positioned to weather any storm. Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption, with stablecoins, prediction markets, tokenization, and more taking off. However, our business is still volatile from quarter to quarter. While we've managed through that cyclicality many times before and come out stronger on the other side, we’re currently in a down market and need to adjust our cost structure now so that we emerge from this period leaner, faster, and more efficient for our next phase of growth. Second, AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically, and it's accelerating every day. All of this has led us to an inflection point, not just for Coinbase, but for every company. The biggest risk now is not taking action. We are adjusting early and deliberately to rebuild Coinbase to be lean, fast, and AI-native. We need to return to the speed and focus of our startup founding, with AI at our core. What this means To get there, we are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we’re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it. What does this mean in practice? - Fewer layers, faster decisions: We are flattening our org structure to 5 layers max below CEO/COO. Layers slow things down and create coordination tax. The future is small, high context teams that can move quickly. Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15 direct reports. Fewer layers also means a leaner cost structure that is built to perform through all market cycles. - No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams. - AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role. In short: AI is bringing a profound shift in how companies operate, and we’re reshaping Coinbase to lead in this new era. This is a new way of working, and we need to leverage AI across every facet of our jobs. To those who are affected I know there are real people behind these decisions — talented colleagues who have poured themselves into this company and our mission. To those of you who will be leaving: thank you. You’ve helped build Coinbase into what it is today, and I am sincerely grateful for everything you've done. All impacted team members will receive an email to their personal account in the next hour with more information, and an invitation to meet with an HRBP and a senior leader in your organization. Coinbase system access has been removed today. I know this feels sudden and harsh, but it is the only responsible choice given our duty to protect customer information. To those affected, we will be providing a comprehensive package to support you through this transition. US employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks base pay (plus 2 weeks per year worked), their next equity vest, and 6 months of COBRA. Employees on a work visa will get extra transition support. Those outside of the US will receive similar support, based on local factors and subject to any consultation requirements. Coinbase prides itself on talent density. Our employees are among the most talented people in the world, and I have no doubt that your skills and experience will be highly sought after as you pursue your next chapters. How we move forward To the team that is staying, I know this is a difficult day. We’re saying goodbye to colleagues and friends you've been in the trenches with. But here’s what I want you to know as we move forward together: Over the past 13 years, we have weathered four crypto winters, gone public, and built the most trusted platform in our industry. We’ve made it this far by making hard decisions and by always staying focused on our mission. This time will be no different – nothing has changed about the long term outlook of our company or industry. And most importantly, our mission has never been more important for the world. Increasing economic freedom requires a new financial system, and we’re building it. The Coinbase that emerges from this will be more capable than ever to achieve our mission. Brian
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Anyone else getting immediately rate-limited by @FireworksAI_HQ's firepass today? Never had problem before in OpenCode, but now it fails after a couple of tool calls.
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Good to know that Zillow has my back
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