trogdor's comments

On: My lobster lost $450k this weekend

[trogdor]

Because it makes for a more eye-catching headline.

On: iOS 27 'Rave' Update to Clean Up Code, Could Boost Battery Life

[trogdor]

I’m sure there are countless examples to the contrary, but I recently submitted feedback regarding an issue that I was experiencing in Final Cut Pro. Within a week, a member of the Final Cut Pro team contacted me and asked for a copy of my video editing files so they could replicate the issue. I sent them the files, they confirmed the issue, and the issue was fixed in the next release.

I was very pleasantly surprised.

On: Stanford Review: Is YC for Cowards?

[trogdor]

> 2 years ago, a much (much) smaller stunt got me nearly fired at $FAANG, and all I could think was "where has the culture gone?"

Okay, I’ll ask. Details?

On: A flawed paper in management science has been cited more than 6k times

[trogdor]

> it became clear that the journal's editor was too embarrassed

How sad. Admitting and correcting a mistake may feel difficult, but it makes you credible.

As a reader, I would have much greater trust in a journal that solicited criticism and readily published corrections and retractions when warranted.

[steveklabnik → trogdor]

Unfortunately, academia is subject to the same sorts of social things that anything else is. I regularly see people still bring up a hoax article sent to a journal in 1996 as a reason to dismiss the entire field that one journal publishes in.

Personally, I would agree with you. That's how these things are supposed to work. In practice, people are still people.

On: The realities of being a pop star

[trogdor]

> I think Charli crossed that line with the success of her album Brat last year.

In Hollywood, that line gets crossed at a surprisingly low level. I am friends with Josh Sussman, who played Jacob Ben Israel on Glee. I occasionally visit him in LA, and we can’t go anywhere in public without getting constantly stopped by people wanting photos. It’s exhausting.

[derangedHorse → trogdor]

I didn't watch it myself, but Glee was a very popular show. Since Josh Susman was a recurring character, it's unsurprising that he'd have a large fanbase (especially in LA).

On: USA gives South Korea green light to build nuclear submarines

[trogdor]

> European countries are notable for using commercial hulls standards for these ships

Is that a problem? Why would navy ships need a different hull construction?

On: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

[trogdor]

I just changed my ChatGPT personality setting to “Efficient.” It still starts every response with “Yeah, definitely! Let’s talk about that!” — or something similarly inefficient.

So annoying.

[BuyMyBitcoins → trogdor]

A pet peeve of mine is that a noticeable amount of LLM output sounds like I’m getting answers from a millennial reddit user. Which is ironic considering I belong to that demographic.

I am not a fan of the snark and “trying to be fun and funny” aspect of social media discourse. Thankfully, I haven’t run into checks notes, “ding ding ding” yet.

[400thecat → BuyMyBitcoins]

> a noticeable amount of LLM output sounds like I’m getting answers from a millennial reddit user

LLM was trained on data from the whole internet (of which reddit is a big part). The result is a composite of all the text on the internet.

[oceliker → trogdor]

Did you start a new chat? It doesn't apply to existing chats (probably because it works through the system prompt). I have been using the Robot (Efficient) setting for a while and never had a response like that.

[trogdor → oceliker]

Followup: there is a very noticeable change in my written conversations with ChatGPT. It seems that there is no change in voice mode.

On: I Am Mark Zuckerberg

[trogdor]

I used to be a full-time YouTuber, and I was very successful. For my channels, the revenue estimates on Socialblade were accurate. Reality for me tended toward their high estimate.

On: Why aren't smart people happier?

[trogdor]

Have you tried therapy? For many people, it works.

[cwmoore → trogdor]

Why not all?

[Hupriene → cwmoore]

There are a lot of mediocre therapists out there. And even if you do get a reasonably good one, they might not click with you in terms of personality/approach/cultural background.

On: The Mack Super Pumper was a locomotive engined fire fighter (2018)

[trogdor]

The Plaid can only output its maximum power at 100% state-of-charge (or close to it).

As state-of-charge decreases, so does the overall battery pack voltage. Since the motors can only pull some peak number of amps, doing so at lower pack voltage will always deliver less total power.

I own a Model S Plaid and I used to pay close attention to the OBD-II data, out of curiosity.