paulhebert's comments

On: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

[paulhebert]

Thank you! It's the dumbest term and I hear it thrown around way too often

[reillyse → paulhebert]

I can't reply to the other comment because it's been flagged, but I just wanted to point out that I do not think employees should be treated like cattle. I was being sarcastic. I was using the language of tech bros to satirize the situation.

I'm actually shocked that people could take my comment at face value and not realize it was obviously sarcastic. That is eye opening.

On: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

[paulhebert]

What a sad way to think about other people

[claytonjy → paulhebert]

It is, but it’s the only way for a company to succeed and scale over time. A pet approach works well in the early days, but you can’t become a VC-backed success without drastically reducing bus factors throughout the company.

That could be an incentive to keep companies small, but high-scale companies do have unique benefits to society.

[paulhebert → claytonjy]

Employees are people. Not cattle or pets. It doesn't mean you don't ever fire or lay people off. But you treat them as humans.

[harimau777 → claytonjy]

Sounds like we need to prevent companies from scaling or being too successful.

[Arainach → claytonjy]

> It is, but it’s the only way for a company to succeed and scale over time

This is absolutely not true. It never has been at any point in history. Not even CEOs would claim such a thing until the 1980s, and they were wrong then as now.

Even today, Costco and other businesses are thriving.

Stop drinking the Koolaid.

On: Let's talk about LLMs

[paulhebert]

> Did you?

I would say I got better at both of those over the last 12-18 months. Are your skills static?

[CamperBob2 → paulhebert]

Compared to Claude or GPT 5.5? Yeah, my skills are static relative to the progress seen recently. So are yours, unless your grandpa was named von Neumann or Szilard.

[eiekeww → paulhebert]

My brain got better at thinking deeper when I stopped using llms.

Lmao why does it seem outlandish to other people? Perhaps they never thought too deeply in the first place to recognise it.

On: Tiled Words 6 Month Update

[paulhebert]

Hey, there’s a new feature that should help here!

On the past puzzles page you can now hide all puzzles you’ve completed to filter down to only uncompleted puzzles.

On: The smelly baby problem

[paulhebert]

If there is poop on them you need to scrape it off.

We bought a pack of thin disposable diaper liners. These go inside the diaper and catch most of the business. They then get thrown away (but it’s much less waste/garbage than an entire diaper)

They do get their own load. The ones we have tell you to run them in the wash twice.

[onionisafruit → paulhebert]

You throw away linen every time your kid wees?

[paulhebert → onionisafruit]

Yes. Most people throw out an entire diaper each time (as discussed in the article)

The liners I’m describing are very thin and very small. Probably smaller than a marble if scrunched into a ball.

It’s not perfect but it’s much less than an entire diaper. It’s the compromise we found that works for us.

[onionisafruit → paulhebert]

Sorry, I misread “liners” as “linens”, and it seemed just strange to have a disposable piece of linen paired with a cloth diaper. What you’re really describing seems like a great idea to make cloth diapers doable for weak-stomach people like me.

[paulhebert → onionisafruit]

No worries!

On: Your website is not for you

[paulhebert]

Just wanted to second that the design is lovely

On: Making AI chatbots friendly leads to mistakes and support of conspiracy theories

[paulhebert]

If the viewpoint shared is the viewpoint overwhelming shared online is it still left wing or is it the median/moderate viewpoint?

Could you share some examples of where you thought it was left wing?

On: Making AI chatbots friendly leads to mistakes and support of conspiracy theories

[paulhebert]

Here are a couple of articles with examples:

Grok says Musk is fitter than Lebron and funnier than Jerry Seinfeld:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk...

Grok didn't stop there. Elon is best in the world at drinking pee:

https://newrepublic.com/post/203519/elon-musk-ai-chatbot-gro...

Also randomly mentions white genocide out of nowhere (one of Elon's pet political issues)

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/05/elon-...

[bheadmaster → paulhebert]

> Elon is best in the world at drinking pee

What? How does this not show willingness to insult Musk?

[paulhebert → bheadmaster]

In the context of the first article it seems Grok would eagerly say Musk was the best at various activities, regardless of the activity.

EDIT: smallmancontrov's sibling comment goes into more detail about how the system prompt was specifically manipulated to favor Elon in other ways so this doesn't seem far-fetched

[HocusLocus → bheadmaster]

Now that 'tough guy' Chuck Norris has departed this world...

The AIs are looking for new defs for tough.

On: Tiled Words 6 Month Update

[paulhebert]

Thanks!

On: Tiled Words 6 Month Update

[paulhebert]

Good feedback. I’ll work on a fix soon!