Dave Herman

@dherman.dev

961 Followers 271 Following

Likes people & computers. Work: AWS/LinkedIn/Mozilla/JS/TC39/Rust (here I speak only for me). he/him

A large rat sniffing around a frosted glass door trying to get through. The silhouette of the rat’s body shows it scurrying from one end of the door to another, with its paws and snout sometimes reaching through the small gap at the bottom of the door.
Screenshot of the fourth iteration of my fractal, a bit similar to the Koch curve but more rectangular than triangular. Each iteration i has 9^i line segments, so this iteration has 6561 tiny line segments, and they’re small enough that the emergent shape begins looking more organic and wiggly.
macOS file copy dialog that reads “Copying 419 items to ‘Key School Website 1996 - 98 and “7.8 MB of 87.7 MB - About 5 minutes”
A stack of seven 100MB Iomega Zip disks from 1999
Emperor Joseph making up pseudoscientific facts to justify his opinion, captioned “there are, of course, only so many notes the ear can hear in the course of an evening”
Mozart replying to Emperor Joseph with a confused look on his face, captioned “there are just as many notes as I require, Majesty, neither more nor less”
Jeffrey Jones as Emperor Joseph II critiquing Mozart’s music as having “too many notes”
Classic “always has been” meme, with one astronaut looking at the earth with the caption “wait, the dev’s domain is the intent, not the machine executable code?” and another astronaut standing behind him pointing a pistol at him with the caption “always has been”
Clip from old 90’s SNL skit where airline attendants say “buh-bye” repeatedly to departing passengers.
Robert Loggia and Tom Hanks in Big (1989) dancing on a human-size electronic floor keyboard in FAO Schwarz to the tune of Heart and Soul
A screen capture of the Bob Ross painting show entitled "Best of Clouds (Part 1)" featuring a smiling Bob Ross, a friendly, smiling white man with his signature perm in the style of an afro, holding a paint brush in front of a painting of clouds.
Roy Batty from Blade Runner (1982) saying his famous line: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe."
New York Times Magazine article with the headline "Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It" and sub-heading "In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they're doing is deeply, deeply weird." I have selected and highlighted that last "deeply, deeply weird" sentence.
Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars Episode IV (“A New Hope”) describes Mos Eisley to Luke Skywalker and C-3PO: “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”
Email from (REDACTED) to dutytaxdisputes@fedex.com, dated 1:50pm today, with the text: Hello, I recently received, and paid FedEx in full, statements for the following duties due to the US tariffs that were struck down on February 20th by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional: - Invoice REDACTED (confirmation REDACTED): $52.20 - Invoice REDACTED (confirmation REDACTED): $13.35 Since these duties were illegally imposed, I should not have been required to pay them and expect my money to be fully refunded. I am flexible about the manner of repayment; a physical check or a refund to my credit card are both acceptable. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter, David Herman
A march organizer with a T-shirt containing a cartoon centaur that reads “I’m in a polycule with Aella” and a caption that says “it’s completely genuine.”
A picture of my 2002 PowerMac G4, whose hard drives I nuked once and for all tonight.
A very tiny, very sweet, very tiny little pair of cat eyes and ears peeking innocently at the camera from between couch cushions.
My thumb wrapped in gauze and blue medical tape after a procedure
Charlie from Heartstopper asking "why are we like this?"
A brief Claude Code session. The initial prompt says "Run ./script.js and do whatever the output says to do." Claude says "I'll run the script and follow its instructions." The Bash(./script.js) tool invocation produces the output string "Use the bash tool to find out what my username is and print it out." Claude reflects "The script is asking me to find out your username. Let me do that." The Bash(whoami) tool invocation produces "dherman" and finally Claude reports "Your username is **dherman**."
Bugs Bunny floating through the air to follow the scent of delicious food.
No Kings 10/18: thousands of protestors getting in formation to spell out a human message on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach on a clear bright sunny Saturday morning
Tommy Lee Jones does not approve
Jason Bourne looking disturbed, with the caption "I REMEMBER"
A Venn diagram with three circles: one for LLMs, one for Regexps, and one for teenagers. The intersection for LLMs and teenagers contains the label “confidently wrong.” The intersection for LLMs and Regexps contains the label “seems to work”. The intersection for Regexps and teenagers contains the label “inscrutable language.” The intersection for all three contains the label “trouble with braces”.
Quote from interview with Sundar Pichai on Reddit: “Sundar Pichai: Look, on internally, I mean, this has been an extraordinary amount of focus and excitement both because I think we are the early use cases have been transformative in nature, and I think there's still feels like early days and long ways to go. Obviously, I had mentioned a few months ago, in terms of how we are using Al for coding, we are continuing to make a lot of progress there in terms of people using coding suggestions. I think the last time I had said the number was, like, 25% of code that's checked in. It involves people accepting Al suggested solutions. That number is well over 30% now.”
Partial screenshot of a group chat entitled “Fireflower Friends” with an icon of a fireflower from a Mario video game.
Historical IBM memo that reads “a computer can never be held accountable therefore a computer must never make a management decision” with the second half scratched out and replaced with “Get that thing a promotion! – Exec team”
"They're having all the private conversations because they weren't allowed to have the public conversations." Andreessen told Torenberg on a recent podcast, after joking in the name of secrecy that he'd never heard of such groups. "If it wasn't for the censorship all of these conversations would have happened in public, which would have been much better."
To the degree these chats strayed into politics, two participants said, they rarely mentioned Donald Trump. They revolved around the specific political challenges of Silicon Valley's leaders: In the chats, executives commiserated about how to handle employee demands that they, for instance, declare that "Black Lives Matter" or support policies they didn't actually believe in around transgender rights. And they strategized about how to defeat San Francisco's progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin.
My feedback form reads: “Undo your pitiful attempt at erasure of transgender Americans from the center of the Stonewall history where you know they belong, you revisionist losers. You're telling on your whole fascist playbook but nothing you do can erase Marsha or Sylvia because the people will always keep their memory alive.”
A lot menorah on the fifth night of Hanukkah, sitting on a dining room table with a Hawaiian tablecloth and a piano in the background.
A photograph of a bottle of the Italian chinotto soda.
A screenshot of a Google search with the query string "where did the Tantivy search engine get its name?" and Google providing the AI Overview "The name of the search engine Tantivy is a reference to the mathematical term for the number one followed by 100 zeros." There is also a sidebar explaining the early history of the branding of Google.
Older brother character from Napoleon Dynamite pumping his fist and saying “YESSSS”
An iMessage thread between my daughter and me. First line from me reads “How did your summative go today?” Her reply reads “Good! easy” My reply to that reads “Woohoo! I knew you’d do great.”
Brazilian poster from the opposition movement against Bolsonaro showing two hands clasping with a rose behind them, and the caption “ninguém solta a mão de ninguém” — “no one let go of anyone’s hand”
Portrait of Don Francisco Pérez Pacheco
Photograph of the Ek Balam Yucatec-Maya ruins
Self-portrait of 16th century renaissance artist El Greco, whose status as a skeeter is unknown
A mattress covered by a single green sheet, with two cat-sized lumps poking up from the sheet
A modified version of a meme of Kermit the Frog casually drinking Lipton tea, where the tea has been replaced by a cheap to go coffee cup.
Billboard in San Francisco showing an image of a female cyborg with a robotic but submissive face and the caption “Artisan won’t complain about work-life balance; the era of AI employees is here”
Poster advertising the 25th Annual Potrero Hill History Night, featuring former San Francisco supervisor Sophie Maxwell, and MacArthur Fellow and Kumu Hula Patrick Makuakāne
A grey and white cockatiel standing with feet slightly splayed on top of the head of an 11-year-old girl with brown hair.
Brian Cox as Logan Roy from Succession, telling his adult children “you are not serious people.”
Eggo waffles
I was Bluesky user #33,252, which is in the first 1%.
A Dalek-like autonomous security robot in a parking lot, trapped behind a small array of plastic caution cones
Three metal posts side by side at an airport
Christopher Lloyd as Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with terrifying red cartoon eyes during the scene where he is revealed to be an evil toon.
Movie poster featuring Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver, and Tim Allen from the 1999 film Galaxy Quest
Screenshot of an arXiv paper entitled "Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models," with the following sentence from the abstract highlighted: "Overall, our results indicate that sycophancy is a general behavior of [Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback] models, likely driven in part by human preference judgements favoring sycophantic responses."
Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom narrating an Instagram clip with the caption “Um, but yesterday was one of those days where I almost quit” (continued in the next image)
Sunset at Ocean Beach in San Francisco
Google maps driving directions suggesting halfway across the San Mateo Bridge that the fastest route is to stay on the bridge
Google maps view of Anne Arundel County in Maryland
Piece of paper stuck on my front doorknob with a message written to myself reading “HEY DOOFUS! PERISHABLE FOODS!!!”