0xWTF

For the uninitiated: https://www.reddit.com/r/restofthefuckingowl/

Children do the same thing intuitively: parents continually complain that their children don't listen to them. But as soon as someone else tells them to "cover their nose", "chew with their mouth closed", "don't run with scissors", whatever, they listen and integrate that guidance into their behavior. What's harder to observe is all the external guidance they get that they don't integrate until their parents tell them. It's internal vs external validation.

Ok, this seems like a good post. At the end of the day, what do I, as a single investor, do? I'm 50 years old, 2 kids in college, I have a $300,000 mortgage on a house presently worth $1M. I have $300,000 cash and an open eTrade account.

What do I do with the cash?

A) keep it as cash

B) Pay off the mortgage

C) Buy some QQQ

D) Buy some T-notes

E) there is no E. I am a simple man. Let's start with a simple solution.

Sonova (Phonak's parent company) bought Sennheiser and you can now buy their Sonite R at Costco for $1600. If you have recent Phonaks, you'll recognize the design immediately. They also have an array of peripherals: https://www.costco.com/f/-/sennheiser-brand-showcase

Trusting a random vendor, even on your home network, seems crazy. But how do you secure a home network? Are we all supposed to be running Nagios, Grafana, Splunk, and have a personal CISO?

I don't understand why this has 29 points and no comments. What's so amazing about this?

I usually look at garage sales as displays of things you shouldn't buy. I feel like this is even more ... that. It would be helpful if Amazon posted to the return rates of this stuff.

Random samples being even more valuable than biased samples, it would be even more helpful if salvage services scanned all the barcodes and posted everything that's returned from everywhere.

But how do you make money on that? How does society recognize the value of that downward pressure on waste?

Yeah, I love folks who worry about China having access to models and GPUs. I mean, friend, they have 1.3B people. They could put a crack AI team in every country in the world, tomorrow. But yes, instead, it's far cheaper to let each of those AI teams VPN to any country, all the time.

> "world leading" AI lab (now run by a teenage data labeller)

Aarush Sah?

Depends on the market. Everyone dies eventually. Every near-fatal illness you suffer is a windfall for the medical system and ensures another windfall later.

For all other businesses, it's a little more complicated. If the patient/employee's knowledge, connections, etc, are valuable enough, then keeping them alive and mentating appropriately is inherently good for the business. The question then is "How do you measure 'enough'?"

USB2-A ... what? Why? It's <checks watch> almost 2026. Apple hasn't shipped USB-A since 2017. But ok, apparently there's a bunch of PC folks still rocking USB-A. Cool, love that for them. But why not make them all USB3-A?

My wife tried using Gusto and hated it. She then happily went a different direction, picked up Guideline for her 401K provider, and now she's super unhappy she's getting pulled back into Gusto. /sigh

My L7 and L8 colleagues at Google seem to be signaling next 2 years. Errors of -1 and +20 years. But the mood sorta seems like nobody wants to quit when they're building the test stand for the Trinity device.

> "Reflections on trusting trust"

Obligatory link to the unspecified-at-the-time Air Force critique of Multics with the introduction of a Trojan horse:

https://csrc.nist.gov/files/pubs/conference/1998/10/08/proce...

Meanwhile Ubuntu is still snappy on my original 2012 rMBP. It got a new screen, two new batteries, still has the last supported version of macOS installed if I want it. Still sparks joy. If only my fingers could keep the Ubuntu cmd and ctrl key functions properly mapped.

What line of laptops is in the same league as the MacBook Pro?

What tools do you use for this? PlantUML?

I just signed a credit card payment at a restaurant using a Toast device and it asked if they wanted to run in offline mode. So this is already solved at scale to some degree.

I love the idea of high quality code. I do, however, dismiss the energy efficiency issue.

> Data centers already consume 200 TWh annually.

That's 7.2 x 10^16 joules

Some estimates suggest that's low. Let's multiply by 5. Annually, that's

3.6 x 10^17 joules

The total radiant power of the sun that hits the Earth's atmosphere is about 174 PW, and about 47% of that lands on the surface. Even with the most drastic global warming models, approximately 100% of that is radiated away at the same time. Evidence: we're not charred embers. So the Earth's power budget, at the surface, is about 81 PW. Annually, that's

2.6 × 10^24 joules

Global annual oil production is about 3 x 10^10 barrels, that's

1.8 x 10^20 joules

So, the data centers consume 0.2% of the global petroleum budget and 1.4 × 10^-7 of the planet's power budget.

The digital economy is about 15% of global GDP, so I submit tech is thoroughly on the right side of their energy conservation balance sheet normalized against other industries and there are other verticals to focus your energy concerns on (e.g. internal combustion engines, including Otto, Brayton, Rankin, and Diesel cycle engines). Among serious people trying to solve serious problems, you would do your credibility a favor by not expending so many words and thus so much reader time on such a miniscule argument.

If you want to talk about energy related to code, take the total power consumption of the software engineer's life, and find a way to big-O that. I'm willing to bet they contribute more to global warming driving than all their compute jobs combined.

Is this measureable? Like code readability scores on the GitHub corpus over time?

> parallelism at both the core and instruction level

Which most programs don't take advantage of.

Am I reading this right? Statistical LLM outputs pushed through a formal logic model? Wouldn't that be a case of "crap in, crap out"?

That works with a network. But as the period of disconnection grows, the uncertainty grows.

There's a term I saw all over someone's Google calendar schedule, pre-pandemic "DNS without asking". Now I realize it means "Do not schedule without asking" but my mind thought "Domain Name Service without asking" ... how in the hell would you do that?

I guess this is similar: how do you make trustworthy decisions that seem to inherently depend on the network, in the absence of a network? Before the internet, we had phonebooks instead of DNS, and we had cash instead of cards. Did the phonebook have every number? No. Was every piece of cash not counterfeit? No. But it's "good enough". Portable reference sources and tokens. The references are issued periodically and the tokens have evidence of exhaustion, their decay over time. A dog-eared dollar with a bunch of phone numbers on it, half-torn ... the merchant doesn't have to accept it.

How do you do these things digitally? Periodic issue seems pretty straightforward ... if you have a network. Token issuance, similarly, needs at least occasional communication with other nodes in the network.

So there's a local dwell capability.

Is this part of the same reaction we saw with Denmark starting to have emergency stores within 50 km of every Dane? Is this motivated by a need to prepare for war?

Can we get a reset on the state actors while we're at it? Because I'm sure there are a number of countries who can't infiltrate 2025 FAANG, but could infiltrate 2015 FAANG, and any start-up is going to be dealing with scaling and will have vulnerabilities that rhyme with 2015 FAANG.

I was about to ridicule this, but then I thought about it. My wife is in a skilled trade in SV, and that actually sounds about right. She has nothing to do with software, but probably earns, dollar/hour, about the same as a mid-tier L6 SWE at Google. I do R&D program management, government though, so the conversion to quality of life is kinda weird. Most people would see our house and assume I'm a director.

Anyone who has downloaded raw data from an unencrypted weather satellite can appreciate how crazy familiar territory can look when a bit of rotation and skew is applied. Imagine a satellite over the Southern Ocean looking southeast across Madagascar where North is in the lower right corner of the image and the satellite is only 5 degrees above the horizon.

My general experience with things like this from Google is to assume that this is at least one big step behind what they're doing now internally. Taking a position on how useful one finds this today effectively insulates from thinking more seriously about what could be done. If taken from a perspective of "what hints are laying around in this blog post or scientific articles about what's possible?" it's probably more effective use of time if you're going to invest time in reading it.

As an example, as you're reading it, try posing a few relevant counterfactuals.

> consultation

consolation

Tangent inbound: your comment is a great example of my rule that whenever you read or hear the word "just", you should think hard about what that means. My wife told me to "just build a retaining wall." That word, "just" does a lot of work in our society.