Dave Herman
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dherman.dev
Dave Herman
@dherman.dev
900 followers 260 following 360 posts
Likes people & computers. Work: AWS/LinkedIn/Mozilla/JS/TC39/Rust (here I speak only for me). he/him
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dherman.dev
Neat, LLMs have eval.
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**."
November 13, 2025 at 5:41 PM
dherman.dev
November 4, 2025 at 3:36 AM
dherman.dev
No Kings, Ocean Beach, San Francisco
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
October 18, 2025 at 7:20 PM
dherman.dev
Tommy Lee Jones does not approve
July 17, 2025 at 3:55 AM
dherman.dev
June 22, 2025 at 1:31 AM
dherman.dev
too cynical?
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”.
May 13, 2025 at 4:52 AM
dherman.dev
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.” Quote from Google research paper on the source of that number: “Our earlier blog describes the ways in which we improve user experience with code completion and how we measure impact. Since then, we have seen continued fast growth similar to other enterprise contexts, with an acceptance rate by software engineers of 37% assisting in the completion of 50% of code characters.”
May 13, 2025 at 12:42 AM
dherman.dev
I do :) One of my most active and longest running group chats is with a few dear friends from that era of my life 😍
Partial screenshot of a group chat entitled “Fireflower Friends” with an icon of a fireflower from a Mario video game.
May 1, 2025 at 6:39 PM
dherman.dev
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”
May 1, 2025 at 2:01 PM
dherman.dev
These guys. 🙄
"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."
April 28, 2025 at 3:36 AM
dherman.dev
It’s been painfully apparent for the last few years that reactionary centrists and tech bazillionaires were hyping each other up to create the backlash against the social change of 2020. Amazing to see so much of it revealed in a single article.
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.
April 28, 2025 at 3:28 AM
dherman.dev
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.”
February 14, 2025 at 4:19 PM
dherman.dev
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.
December 30, 2024 at 3:11 AM
dherman.dev
Chinotto would like a word…
A photograph of a bottle of the Italian chinotto soda.
December 20, 2024 at 9:57 PM
dherman.dev
You're so vain, I bet you think this search was about you
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.
December 8, 2024 at 8:03 AM
dherman.dev
<music nerd brag alert>

I’m beginning to be able to pick out the use of Lydian and Dorian modes by ear!
Older brother character from Napoleon Dynamite pumping his fist and saying “YESSSS”
November 25, 2024 at 5:44 AM
dherman.dev
The 6th grader nailed her math test today!
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.”
November 23, 2024 at 3:31 AM
dherman.dev
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”
November 17, 2024 at 7:42 PM
dherman.dev
I refuse to join Bluesky - I don’t want to become part of a Don Francisco Pérez Pacheco chamber.
Portrait of Don Francisco Pérez Pacheco
November 17, 2024 at 7:20 AM
dherman.dev
I refuse to join Bluesky. I don’t want to become part of a Yucateco chamber.
Photograph of the Ek Balam Yucatec-Maya ruins
November 17, 2024 at 7:11 AM
dherman.dev
I refuse to join Bluesky. I don’t want to become part of an El Greco chamber.
Self-portrait of 16th century renaissance artist El Greco, whose status as a skeeter is unknown
November 17, 2024 at 6:41 AM
dherman.dev
an exploit was found in the temporary laundry day mattress protection scheme
A mattress covered by a single green sheet, with two cat-sized lumps poking up from the sheet
November 16, 2024 at 10:19 PM
dherman.dev
So if I understand the rules of Bluesky, sadly I now have to block everyone on this list. Love you all!
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.
November 16, 2024 at 4:31 PM
dherman.dev
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”
November 15, 2024 at 4:10 PM
dherman.dev
Inspiring evening hearing from San Francisco legends en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_... and en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick... at the 25th Annual Potrero Hill History Night. So many voices in this city arguing what we can’t do; these two leaders showed us what can be created with community & love
Poster advertising the 25th Annual Potrero Hill History Night, featuring former San Francisco supervisor Sophie Maxwell, and MacArthur Fellow and Kumu Hula Patrick Makuakāne
November 3, 2024 at 5:40 AM