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alephnerd

14,442 karma · joined January 8, 2019

Recovering Policy Wonk. Former SWE, SE, PM. Now VC.
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alephnerd··on Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive
Most of these jobs are the same jobs that arose thanks to the CHIPS and IRA. Much of the AI boom and trade is building on top of the capex that arose from the semiconductor/hardware portfolio during that era.

Many of the current DCs being built out are also being powered or tied with renewable energy projects that were funded by the IRA, as many DC builders with deep pockets do know the political dimension. If this is what keeps the CHIPS, IRA, and the IIJA alive I'm happy.

Every industry and career type goes through ebbs and flows. The 2010s was a white collar boom, and the 2020s is now a white collar bust. Meanwhile the 2010s was a skilled trades bust and the 2020s is now a skilled trades boom.

alephnerd··on Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)
Huh. Like Pomodoro. That makes sense.
alephnerd··on Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)
Appreciate the clarification!
alephnerd··on I'm teaching an introductory 12 week course on Quantum Oracle Engineering
Disagreement does not mean dislike.
alephnerd··on Recreating Minecraft Is Not a Benchmark
This, and depending on the workflow and usecase, you don't necessarily need the latest and greatest with the right kind of harness engineering.

Like everything in engineering, it's about tradeoffs and what works best for your specific problem.

alephnerd··on Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)
The recipe is also similar to Hamedh [0], a delicacy in Iraqi and Baghdadi Jewish households. The only major difference is the addition of tomatoes thanks to the Columbian Exchange, and rice - which would have not been cultivated or traded in West Asia yet.

On that note, in Arabic, Farsi, and Hindustani the word for Tomato is essentially shared (tumatar/tamatimu) with the English word "tomato".

But anyhow, a lot of home cooking and traditional meals actually have a pretty long history.

[0] - https://www.splendidtable.org/story/2000/12/12/hamad-iraqi-b...

alephnerd··on Recreating Minecraft Is Not a Benchmark
Most of my and my peers PortCos run their own eval and benchmark sets, simply because they know what they need best.

The reality is, capabilities have largely converged across foundation models over the last 18 months, and much of the value add is coming from the harness layer itself now.

This has been the operating assumption for me and my peers, and has largely played out that way.

That said, this has always been an issue with benchmarking since the very beginning. DB Benchmarks, compute benchmarks, and others that were external facing were always inherently a content and product marketing tool. The actual internal benchmarking used to model, understand, and enhance your product was always a closely held secret.

Most of these conversations are happening, but largely in person and not on HN.

alephnerd··on I'm teaching an introductory 12 week course on Quantum Oracle Engineering
This isn't Reddit.
alephnerd··on I'm teaching an introductory 12 week course on Quantum Oracle Engineering
I know both you guys haven't been on HN for that long, but the downvote is not meant to be a dislike button. That is the antithesis of HN's norms around discourse:
alephnerd··on I'm teaching an introductory 12 week course on Quantum Oracle Engineering
Appreciate it! Are you recording the lectures as well?

Would also love some additions resources and recommendations from practitioners only.

alephnerd··on Vietnam Ho Chi Minh City proposes curbs on gasoline, diesel vehicles from 2027
It's not as dramatic as the title makes it out to be. It's a steady transition to EV buses and Grab drivers within D1 (the current CBD and Japanese red light district) and the new CBD called Thu Thiem. The majority of Saigon is exempt.

It's still a good start, but forcing most Saigonese to shift to EV vehicles in such a small amount of time with no subsidy would turn into a Tiannamen style event - not becuase they're anti-EV, but because a new bike costs around $1-3K in a city where your average take-home is around $3-5K/yr, rents are around $1-3K/yr, everyone is sending back $1-2K/yr to family, and the majority are working actual 996 hours.

alephnerd··on Non-alcoholic beer may actually contain alcohol
All NA beers I've seen prominently point out that they are 0.5% or less in ABV.

That said, AB InBev owns the IP for actual 0.0% beer and all of it's products are fairly good.

Their NA Stella and Budweiser tastes exactly like the original.

alephnerd··on Renowned NYC Washington Square Park Chess Hustler 'Chichi' Detained by ICE
It also makes it harder for so many immigrants who are following the straight path.

There are so many hustlers and that forces the American system to be so antagonistic for those who do follow the rules.

alephnerd··on Renowned NYC Washington Square Park Chess Hustler 'Chichi' Detained by ICE
It truly sucks for his kid who is a US citizen - just like how I became a US citizen even though my parents had to naturalize.

But millions of immigrants naturalize in the US without committing crimes.

It isn't that hard - don't commit fraud in a country you are not a citizen of.

alephnerd··on Renowned NYC Washington Square Park Chess Hustler 'Chichi' Detained by ICE
"In 2014, he and his sister Uchechi Onyekwere were charged in a $13 million medical fraud scheme. ... According to the FBI's report, the operation took place from approximately 2008 through at least the end of 2013."

"As alleged, the defendants used fictitious companies and fraudulent claims to steal very real health care dollars," said then-United States Attorney Loretta Lynch in 2014. "The Medicare and Medicaid systems serve our most vulnerable citizens, and those who seek to steal those tax dollars will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."

You cannot naturalize in the US if you are found to have conducted criminal conduct. There are millions of us immigrants and children of immigrants who followed the straight path.

alephnerd··on Product Backlog Problems: Why Your Hierarchy Is Broken
Yep! Totally agree with ya! We're all a team and no one is above or below each other, and I always made sure to manage out people who had a superiority complex - even if they were gifted (and they usually weren't) they would just make life hell for everyone else.

I also always fought for higher compensation - I'd rather have a couple really talented and well paid individuals rather than a mass of low paid and checked out ones.

I've mentored my PortCos this way as well.

alephnerd··on Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts (2016)
The absolutely are copy editing, writing, and translating with AI but keeping a human in the loop to steer, edit, interview sources, and do research.

These were entire divisons that made up the majority of a newsroom. Most members of a newsroom aren't reporters - they're editors, copywriters, translators, graphic designers, narrators, etc.

If the whole point of a good journalist is to provide and synthesize context from sources, validate with experts, and do research then most of those other roles are tangential and can be reduced with human gating.

This is how newsrooms and other similar organizations are approaching and leveraging AI now.

alephnerd··on Sony makes bold claim about game ownership
> sony is a giant corp with a reputation and a monopoly on playstations.

That's like saying Volkswagen has a monopoly on Volkswagen cars.

Sony clearly does not have a monopoly on the video game industry, and a plurality of video games are cross-platform across consoles, PCs (Windows/Linux), and even MacOS.

alephnerd··on Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond
This. Those of my friends with kids moved to neighborhoods and suburbs where other households of a similar age existed.

You see this in SF, with singles primarily living in the Marina, Russian Hill, or Rincon Hill and then upgrading to Mission Bay once they have kids.

alephnerd··on Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts (2014)
The Beeb [0], WSJ [1], Guardian [2], NPR [3], The Economist [4][5], and others are using generative AI as well.

The reality is that everyone is using it, and has been using forms of AI and ML for news writing and copywriting for decades. For example, I remember hearing how Reuters used to use statistical models to auto-generate articles from notes taken by journalists 20 years ago that would then be copy edited.

The reality is that Generative AI is here to stay just like the Internet, but there are ways to use it responsibly (also like the Internet).

[0] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/reports/policies/what-were...

[1] - https://www.wsj.com/news/author/wsj-artificialintelligenceto...

[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2023/jun/16/...

[3] - https://www.npr.org/about-npr/1205385162/special-section-gen...

[4] - https://myaccount.economist.com/s/article/How-we-handle-AI-g...

[5] - https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/05/the-economist-launches-a-d...

alephnerd··on Six curl CVEs after OpenAI and Anthropic came back with zero
> Wow, this announcement is good content marketing.

Why do you think companies hire PMMs?

alephnerd··on The shrinking landscape of linguistic diversity in the age of LLMs
LLMs are also a mixed bag. The core issue is limited Viet-English corpora aside from what can be found in local government documents in the US and Canada given the huge Viet Kieu community requiring local governments to create Vietnamese language collateral.
alephnerd··on The shrinking landscape of linguistic diversity in the age of LLMs
You got downvoted but I know what you are talking about, but there were other ways to write that sentence.

Basically what OP is saying is interpersonal relations can be confused when using the Vietnamese and English definitions of both words.

Anh and Em essentially means masculine and feminine, but is also often used in romantic, non-romantic, casual, and sometimes formal usecases and this is heavily dependent on the verbs and adjectives that follow.

Viet-English NMT is very flawed at the moment.

alephnerd··on The shrinking landscape of linguistic diversity in the age of LLMs
> where "here" is

California

> It doesn't mean we can't get along or have a peaceful world full of diversity in language and culture. We just need to get better at nuance and understanding

Wasn't making a judgement about that. I was just pointing out a somewhat common mistake and pattern I've noticed Vietnamese ESLers make.

Your reaction seemed very intense and polarizing for what sounded like a funny anecdote of a date gone wrong.

My SO had a similar reaction when she confused "common law marriage" and "civil law marriage" years ago.

alephnerd··on The shrinking landscape of linguistic diversity in the age of LLMs
My SO is Vietnamese and a Bac Si trained in Japan and here, and even she has made similar ESL mistakes.

Some of the tools and dictionaries used for Viet-English are wonky, and depending on when they were educated the English teachers were either unqualified backpackers or some grifter who opened an English tutoring center (oftentimes one and the same).

And coming from a language with little overlap with Indo-European languages and roots makes it a very alien experience (and the same in reverse as well).

alephnerd··on Product Backlog Problems: Why Your Hierarchy Is Broken
When I was a PM, I was brutally honest about my heuristics, thinking, and product vision and made sure to give as much visibility as I could to ICs without overstepping executive leadership mandates.

And if an engineer thought I was talking shit, I'd give them the option to lead low risk customer calls with me shadowing and their manager's permission so they can see the tradeoffs a business deals with on a daily basis. Either they could prove their mettle (and I'd mentor them to climb up the engineering or PM ladder) or they'd shut up once faced with the kinds of day to day tradeoffs and responsibilities comes from being a PM for an 8-9 figure product line.

Of course, I always demanded full visibility into our hiring pipeline across functions because a bad hire is an expensive mistake that can kill an entire product line.

Also, this was how I became a Sales Engineer and later Product Manager as a SWE. I told a VP Sales and Director of Product that they were talking out of their ass but I had a great engineering reputation internally, so they brought me in on a similar gambit. My leadership were old school Silicon Valley (they lived first hand during the Halt and Catch Fire era), but this kind of culture is still common here in the Bay.

Edit: oh damn, we got Silicon Valley history makers here :0

alephnerd··on Uber shuts operations in Nigeria and Uganda with immediate effect
Bolt (the CEE ridesharing app) is the primary player in Nigeria. In Uganda it's primarily a bunch of local startups.
alephnerd··on Product Backlog Problems: Why Your Hierarchy Is Broken
Submarine article.

Also, back when I was still a PM I found most these kinds of tools to be a waste of time. Tools don't solve ownership.

I found just talking directly with my sellers and engineers in the same room would solve these backlog issues.

Every project, initiative, and task needed to be directly tied to enhancing customer satisfaction or tangibly driving revenue (1-2% of ARR).

If Eng could not justify why a refactor could help customer satisfaction or topline P/L, I'd deprioritize it. If sales could not justify why a checkbox feature would satisfy the majority of our customers or help our topline P/L, I'd deprioritize it and re-prioritize the refactor.

Just demand fucking ownership from everyone - PM, Sales, and Engineering - and complex projects can be easily executed.

Ownership also means trusting the people executing but also validating - I trusted my engineers, salespeople, and stakeholders and vice versa, but I always made sure to do my homework.

Backlogs will always expand - that's to be expected - but someone must groom them and own them. That's on the PM.

Who cares what tool you use - it could be JIRA or a Excel 95 spreadsheet. Just own shit and fucking execute.

alephnerd··on The Nerd Reich wants to 'destroy' democracy, and it's mask has slipped
They should, but much of Australian media (which is largely Murdoch owned media) never brings it up.

It's why so many Australian journalists ended up being poached by the The Guardian - especially after what happened at "The Australian"

alephnerd··on The Nerd Reich wants to 'destroy' democracy, and it's mask has slipped
I don't want to be that guy, but Murdoch also owns much of the Australian media and the "nerd" reich.
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