c4wrd

I think it's a balance. In some cases, the act of giving means much more to the giver than to the receiver, especially when they want to be a part of something larger than themselves.

Perhaps you are miserable because you are reinforcing your brain to only look for the flaws in others?

> Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?

I think the author’s point is that by exposing oneself to feedback, you are on the receiving end of the growth in the case of error. If you hand off all of your tasks to ChatGPT to solve, your brain will not grow and you will not learn.

I’m in this position now. The longer I’ve been in it, I’ve come to realize can be summarized as:

You experience some the benefits of being a manager but bear all the responsibilities of managing others. It becomes challenging to make sound judgments when you must consider two different perspectives of a problem. Essentially, you’re taking on the duties of two jobs. I’ve found it incredibly difficult to step back and allow the team to make decisions without my input. My technical bias compels me to intervene when I perceive a decision as clearly incorrect. However, this approach hinders growth and may be perceived as micromanagement. While it’s a challenging position, it’s an excellent opportunity to explore management and determine if it’s a long-term career path you’re interested in.

Obsidian's plug-in ecosystem is fantastic. I've used Obsidian for three years as a replacement for Notion, and I have never used the Graph mode. My Obsidian plugins enable automatic task synchronization with TickTick (where I manage my tasks) and allow me to set up features like templates. I strongly recommend giving it a spin.

The only downside for me is the inability to use it from a web browser. This isn't a major issue for my workflows.

You're missing the bigger picture. It isn't free to put content on the Internet. At a bare minimum, you have infrastructure and bandwidth costs. In many cases, a goal someone may have is that if they publish content on the internet, they will attract people to return for more of the content they produce. Google acted as a broker, helping facilitate interactions between producers and consumers. Consumers would supply a query they want an answer to, and a producer would provide an answer or facilitate a space for the answers to be found (in the recent era, replace answer with product or store-front).

There was a mostly healthy interaction between the producers and consumers (I won't die on this hill; I understand the challenges of SEO optimization and an advertisement-laden internet). With AI, Google is taking on the roles of both broker and provider. It aims to collect everyone's data and use it as its own authoritative answer without any attribution to the source (or traffic back to the original source at all!).

In this new model, I am not incentivized to produce content on the internet, I am incentivized to simply sell my data to Google (or other centralized AI company) and that's it.

A clearer picture to help you understand what's going on: the internet of the past few decades was a bazaar marketplace. Every corner featured different shops with distinct artistic styles, showcasing a great deal of diversity. It was teeming with life. If you managed your storefront well, people would come back and you could grow. In this new era, we are moving to a centralized, top-down enterprise. Diversity of content and so many other important attributes (ethos, innovation, aestheticism) go out of the window.

For those who aren't in the video game development field and like technical content, I cannot recommend watching GDC's content enough (even better, attending!). Although this blog post isn't as detailed as I've seen them do in the past, I appreciate that game developers have the opportunity to share their wins like this externally.

If you enjoy watching technical content and video games, the following videos are greatly entertaining deep dives into ludicrously technically complicated bugs or performance optimizations done to deliver the gaming experience that I myself take for granted.

- I Shot You First: Networking the Gameplay of Halo: Reach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h47zZrqjgLc - 8 Frames in 16ms: Rollback Networking in Mortal Kombat and Injustice 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jb0FOcImdg - It IS Rocket Science! The Physics of Rocket League Detailed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueEmiDM94IE - https://gdcvault.com/play/1023220/Fighting-Latency-on-Call-o...

> When attached to an EBS–optimized instance, General Purpose SSD (gp2 and gp3) volumes are designed to deliver at least 90 percent of their provisioned IOPS performance 99 percent of the time in a given year. This means a volume is expected to experience under 90% of its provisioned performance 1% of the time. That’s 14 minutes of every day or 86 hours out of the year of potential impact. This rate of degradation far exceeds that of a single disk drive or SSD. > This is not a secret, it's from the documentation. AWS doesn’t describe how failure is distributed for gp3 volumes, but in our experience it tends to last 1-10 minutes at a time. This is likely the time needed for a failover in a network or compute component. Let's assume the following: Each degradation event is random, meaning the level of reduced performance is somewhere between 1% and 89% of provisioned, and your application is designed to withstand losing 50% of its expected throughput before erroring. If each individual failure event lasts 10 minutes, every volume would experience about 43 events per month, with at least 21 of them causing downtime!

These are some seriously heavy-handed assumptions being made, completely disregarding the data they collect. First, the author assumes that these failure events are distributed randomly and expected to happen on a daily basis, ignoring Amazon's failure rate statement throughout a year ("99% of the time annually"). Second, they argue that in practice, they see failures lasting between 1 and 10 minutes. However, they assert that we should assume each failure will last 10 minutes, completely ignoring the severity range they introduced.

Imagine your favorite pizza company claiming to deliver on time "99% of the time throughout a year." The author's logic is like saying, "The delivery driver knocks precisely 14 minutes late every day -- and each delay is 10 minutes exactly, no exceptions!". It completely ignores reality: sometimes your pizza is delivered a minute late, sometimes 10 minutes late, sometimes exactly on time for four months.

As a company with useful real-world data, I expect them not to make arguments based on exaggerations but rather show cold, hard data to back up their claims. For transparency, my organization has seen 51 degraded EBS volume events in the past 3 years across ~10,000 EBS volumes. Of those events, 41 had a duration of less than one minute, nine had a duration of two minutes, and one had a duration of three minutes.

Imagine you're studying for a test where you are given an image and need to answer the correct class. To prepare, you're given a deck of flashcards with an image on the front and the class on the back.

(Random) You shuffle the deck every time you go through it. You're forced to learn the images and their classifications without relying on any specific sequence, as the data has no signal from sequence order.

(Fixed order) Every time you go through the deck, the images appear in the exact same order. Over time you may start to unconsciously memorize the sequence of flashcards, rather than the actual classification of each image.

When it comes to actually training a model, if the batches are sampled sequentially from a dataset, it risks learning from correlations caused by the sequencing of the data, resulting in poor generalization. In contrast, when you sample the batches randomly, the model is biased and encouraged to learn features from the data itself rather than from any signals that arise from artifacts of the ordering.

> “We once again need to raise more capital than we’d imagined. Investors want to back us but, at this scale of capital, need conventional equity and less structural bespokeness.”

Translation: They’re ditching the complex “capped-profit” approach so they can raise billions more and still talk about “benefiting humanity.” The nonprofit side remains as PR cover, but the real play is becoming a for-profit PBC that investors recognize. Essentially: “We started out philanthropic, but to fund monstrous GPU clusters and beat rivals, we need standard venture cash. Don’t worry, we’ll keep trumpeting our do-gooder angle so nobody panics about our profit motives.”

Literally a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Sam, you can’t serve two masters.

The point you are missing is that many of us do not have big tech careers. I am very fortunate to have a big tech career, but before I was hit by a stroke of luck, I was doing gig work paycheck to paycheck barely making ends meet. When you can’t see more than two weeks ahead in time, which you cannot do living paycheck to paycheck, you don’t think about the long term consequences because you are not capable of it. The incentive structure is too strong to sell zero days to any external party for those who have nothing to do all day but try to find exploits.

You have a fair point in that a native experience will more than likely keep privacy in mind and have more resources to produce a potentially better experience. The concern is that these are unethical practices. Now, they don’t own a monopoly over the smartphone market, but they do have a monopoly on the actual app purchase market, so the monopoly question is debatable. Apple has both created the game (marketplace), owns the game and has private information on how the game is being played. They are then using that information to increase the value of their offering. They have a statistically unfair advantage against any offering on their marketplace and can use that to build up their own product. I’m not a lawyer and I can’t speak to the legality, although this is something that would be classified as at least suspicious, although it’d be hard to build a case on, if at all possible.

Ethically, their practice of appearing to target successful offerings and undermining them is debatable. There’s no right answer here, it’s a matter of opinion. But this repeated behavior would signal to anyone looking to build a commercial success on their marketplace: don’t be too successful. You have to remember that you have a multi-trillion dollar international corporation suppressing the success of small (internationally <$1B business is considered small) businesses, who have employees that believe in their mission. And you can see I keep referring to “their marketplace” that they legitimately own, and I understand they may not be doing anything “illegal” as defined by current law, but when you look at a multi-decade view of this practice, I think we’re going to start to see new laws being drafted and regulations put on place. I’m not sure how you even begin to fight a “virtual monopoly” which has little physical monopoly dominance.

I will caveat that I do thoroughly enjoy Apple products and the seamless Apple native applications and integrations with each other. I do appreciate their craftsmanship and attention to detail. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth when we see a similar headline every year each of the last few years, where a closed environment controlled by one entity is swallowing more and more of the world’s resources and preventing others from growing.

I have taken a thorough look at the source and I very much enjoyed it.

The project highlights the utility of Bazel more than I have seen before. How long did it take you (and others) to become as fluent as you are in Bazel and working with it?

Additionally, you (Will) seem to have a very intuitive grasp of build processes in general, notably many of the scripts are fun to dive into and have a very clean design. How did you familiarize yourself so well with those sorts of concepts? Do you have any recommended readings or side-projects you’d recommend tackling to get experience with?

Disregarding all of the negative sentiment and claims of this repeating old work, I must say the source code is very fun to go through. The code is well-structured, integrates many awesome technologies and provides a foundation to build on. The project is the clearly the result of a high caliber level of craftsmanship and labor of love, great work Will Chen (wwwillchen) and others!

This simplification misses key nuances. Strategies like Tit-for-Tat (TFT) are context-sensitive and not universally "optimal." Effectiveness varies with game structure, communication clarity, and the presence of noise. Moreover, the "optimal" strategy adjusts in finite games (which you didn't clarify which type of game) due to the endgame effect.

Simple hole in your simplification: one simple misunderstanding could lead to an endless cycle of defection where everyone will defect on each other: game over.

Having self-control can give a false sense of self-righteousness, and if you're not careful, this will lead to you eventually caring about how you look and you will do whatever it takes to maintain the image of self-control/responsibility. If you carefully analyze this, you are now basing your self-worth on external appearances, therefore you are giving your control away to anyone who can see this projection. Anyone experienced with controlling others can sniff out this projection and then use it against you in this way: "We need to think about the importance of handling this (X) responsibly. What do you think we should do?". Now they are telling you they think you can make responsible decisions on an important decision, stroking your projected ego, and they've activated your want to act responsibly to do something for them.

Now, it doesn't always mean that this is a way someone is manipulating you. Self-control is realizing that this ego-stroke feeling of making you feel important does not mean to need to involve yourself or act. You need to separate the emotion from the decision-making process and realize that others can use your emotions to manipulate you. It's up to you to decide whether you can trust this person or not, you just need to be aware that the emotion could have been intentional or unintentional.

Here's an analogy that I think about from time to time. Imagine your life as a garden. You have a finite amount of days, with a finite amount of resources per day to plant new things or caretake existing things. Your soul represents the breadth and depth of your reach on any given day, but it is a fixed size and you must choose how much breadth and depth it has through your choices. Consider each day as an opportunity for change in this ratio of breadth vs depth, and over time this will play out as a spectrum between the two following situations:

(1) You can spend each day traveling to a new area, planting a new seed wherever you go, but never watering the same area twice. You get to learn about many different seeds, but you never get to stick around somewhere long enough to watch them grow into fruit-bearing plants. Your soul will be full of different experiences, but you will not be able to relish in the details of any particular area (i.e. pluck the fruit from your garden when you are ready to relax and are thinking back on your life)

(2) You can choose to focus on one or a few areas to add depth, learn the fundamentals of how things grow in those areas, and learn to care for and nourish them over time. In the end, you will be left with a beautiful garden that you have perfected and know every detail about that is full of fruit-bearing plants. You can wander this garden and eat the fruit from any of your plants.

Your soul has a finite reach. By focusing on one thing, you are neglecting to focus on another, and there is nothing you can do to change that. It's up to you to choose how you want to live, and not making a choice is also a choice. If you don't make a choice (i.e. a sacrifice of not visiting some areas or not nourishing the area around you), you will be left with the worst of both worlds: a decaying garden and no knowledge of how to grow anything.

You're right. I never said it was an unbiased perspective, so let me make it clear. The post was intended to help those who were like me. When I wrote the post, I wrote it as if I was speaking to my past self in a style that would have motivated my younger self; nothing more, nothing less.

I have no affiliation with the author of the book and stand to gain nothing from helping others. I still stand by my choice of The Daily Stoic. I resented the thought of reading self help books because my pride led me to believe that if I read a self help book, I was admitting I was weak. That said, the reason for the book is simple: the book is intended to take a year to read, one page at a time. I wake up each day and the first thing I do is open the Books app on my iPhone, load up The Daily Stoic and read the days entry. It takes me 2-3 minutes and reminds me why I am chasing self-discipline. I have done this every day faithfully for three years. I hate to admit, but a page was as much as I was personally able to commit myself to, a full book was too much for my pride to handle at first. So if you’re like me and can’t make time for a full book, I ask you to make time for a single page per day.

In fact I will double down on this book so much, that I will personally buy a copy for anyone who sends me an email cory@linux.com. No one will know you asked for a copy and I ask for nothing in return.

This is something I've noticed in myself and I'm glad there's research to back this, although this is an open secret to those who do master self-control. I've spent the last three to four years working on self-control and discipline after I hit rock bottom in my life and realized I had no self-agency. For me, having greater self-control led me to ensure I can focus on providing value where it matters in my life, and not getting caught up by the shiny object syndrome I was distracted by a lot when I was younger. Not every thought needs to be acted on, especially if the thoughts come from external sources. In regards to why it leads to power, as you make your way up the managerial chain, when you have greater self-control you are less prone to get "bullied" by other managers into doing work for them and you can stand up more for your team and you will be able to provide more value. For perspective, I would personally trust others who have self-control more than those who don't for time-sensitive and critical tasks because I can rely on them to regulate their emotions and give honest answers, as well as hold themselves accountable.

For someone, like me a few years ago, who is undisciplined and has not spent time cultivating self-control this is hard to hear. If you find yourself making excuses when you read this article for why the power hierarchy is against you, or that there is bias in the results of this study (as some of the comments here allude to), then you should consider reevaluating why you are making excuses. It's a sign that this post triggered you and your response was to make an excuse rather than accept a correlation that speaks to an underlying hard truth. Once you start digging into "why did I make an excuse" and chase that feeling over and over whenever you find yourself making excuses, you will start to realize that you can't think of a reason why you made an excuse, it's just what you've done and reinforced in the past. If you've read this comment this far and you have a spark of curiosity and relate to not knowing why you are making excuses, I suggest you take this moment to chase it down and gain agency over your own life. Some would say this is your red pill moment. 'The Daily Stoic' woke me up, I highly recommend it. Discipline equals freedom, my friend, and we sorely need you.

This is laughable. People are focusing on the aspects of where Sam Altman and team are going, and less on the fact that it is even more clear that this was a move to remove the non-profit cap on the OpenAI business and re-align their strategy with market capitalization. They've been slowly chewing away at it the last few years (a notable example being them not opening up GPT-4, which was against their stated mission statement of opening AI). The board simply serves as a conduit for ensuring that there is ethical direction towards where the profit arm is moving, and ensuring that it stays within realms of the originally stated mission statement. By having the entire board resign, you can install people with different motivations and mission statements, and on-paper look like they're acting ethically. We should all be collectively sad for the ruse that was given to us as OpenAI, as they used our (the software engineering community collectively) will and direction and pulled the carpet underneath of us. I'm not surprised that this occurred, more surprised that people are focusing on the literal movement of figures on the chess board, and not focusing on what the chess board now looks like: closed-source monopoly on AI.

Microsoft gave Sam and the for-profit arm of OpenAI a paved road towards a much larger GPU supply and access to other resources, much quicker than OpenAI could procure naturally. This allows the for-profit arm of OpenAI to grow much faster, albeit with more directional influence from an external entity that does not have a position on the board. Microsoft's investment, significantly motivated by business interests, rather than philanthropy, creates tension in OpenAI. The for-profit arm is being tugged in two directions, one that wants to capitalize and recoup investments at the cost of less risk assessment of the impact of AI, and the other direction that wants a slower, more guided approach towards building an approach to AI more focused on ethics, sustainability and improving the human condition.

The fact that Microsoft might not have directly recruited Sam and his team is less significant in light of their promise of substantial growth, which ultimately swayed Sam's decision, whether he consciously realizes this or not. This now leads to him misrepresenting information to the board, leading to his removal. This scenario humorously mirrors a common personal dilemma: choosing between financial gain and leading a meaningful, sustainable life. Sam's choice is hyperbolically likened to 'selling one's soul to the devil', reflecting this paradox.

As a recommendation from someone who suffered this way too long, your way of thinking is why you only store the bad memories. I often thought “I’m just a negative person” and accepted it, but not until I decided to focus on my mental health did I realize I had to let this go. I’ve been happier each and every day since. It took almost a year or two of “fake it until you make it”, but once you’re on the other side of this coin, you will never look back.

Eaton, I was a big admirer of yours back in the Xbox 360 modding scene, and envied your genius and dedication to things like FATXplorer and DevTool. We had common acquaintances (cas, teh1337) and I believe we may have worked together very briefly on a project at one point (I developed XPRC, which brought RPC and a whole host of new modding abilities to JTAG'd consoles). I'd love to get in touch and hear what you're working on now-a-days and see if there's anything we can collaborate on (perhaps a blog article?)!

> Why do all the CEOs come from the same handful of schools and have the same backgrounds? Is that the only way to acquire the skills?

I don’t think this is the case. Sure, for most of the largest companies that is true, but that’s not a representative sample size.

> Does mere access to knowledge directly increase intelligence? Very exciting implications if so.

Yes, at the population level over generational time periods. I wasn’t able to find the sources here, but I’ll keep looking and edit my comment when I do.

> (Or would you rather treat everyone as equal, let talent go to waste, and become stagnant?) I don't think these things are connected at all. If you're going to draw a link between them then do so, but putting them together in a sentence doesn't establish that.

You’re right, it doesn’t, and I think this issue is too complex and nuanced to actually reach any objective argument. I’ll gladly retract my statement under the guise that there are too many definitions of stagnation, and there are also many different factors that can affect whether and how people are motivated to work hard and contribute to society. So it's difficult to make a definitive statement about whether treating everyone equally will always lead to stagnation and I was wrong in doing so.

I want to say I appreciate and agree with most of your insights. I do truly believe that the current social-economic structure does provide many unfair advantages to those at the top, that’s an unfortunate side-effect that we have great people working on. I also appreciate you calling out some of my points that I definitely articulated incorrectly (I wrote the comment in passing between meetings).

This is a mischaracterization of why CEO level pay for most companies is higher than the lower skilled workers. It’s supply and demand. The skills required to be an executive at a large company are very hard to find, so companies need to compete with each other for the small supply of candidates that are eligible for the job. Obviously there are exceptions to this, especially in tech and finance, but it’s not as simple as “they are paid more because of a title”. There’s a lot of responsibility and skill required for those positions, and most people do not have the ambition, drive or resiliency to survive the stress induced in those positions. I believe over time the problem will be less of an issue as general intelligence in the population rises due to more open access to knowledge. Unfortunately we live in a world where some people have significant advantages, either environmental or genetic, and not all people are equal. I’m not arguing this is the right answer, but rather would you as a nation like to capitalize on your talent and give incentive to those few advantaged to rise to their level of competence? Or would you rather treat everyone as equal, let talent go to waste, and become stagnant? The rising tide lifts all boats, and that can be shown by the fact we’ve nearly eliminated poverty in the last 100 years, which is not celebrated enough. Nearly all low-level workers in America have access to food, housing, water, and even cell phones, and we take that for granted.

I would argue the other way and praise them for the storage engine changes. Each iteration has had drawbacks, but based on the real-world reported usage they've made decisions to better support what customers are asking for and actually running into, as opposed to trying to iterate on the same engine over and over and making assumptions of real-world usage. Sure, there are drawbacks, but at the end of the day they're continuing to make good improvements for their customers.

In my opinion, we lose a lot, some things practical and others societal. Practically first, when I’m in the market for a new vehicle, I’m not sure which I honestly want. I like being able to go to a dealership and find something that convinced me otherwise from what I came to originally look at it. In the most recent case, I was really wanting a truck and being able to see them in person, how I fit, etc, was what sold me over one make versus another. Second, how does a future where there’s X car dealerships with different sites that I can’t easily compare across makes sound? Now it’s much harder for the average consumer to find a new vehicle. This will lead to aggregators, which will initially not be allowed up front because the manufacturer wants the full cut, but they’ll eventually concede.

Now societal. Sure, car dealerships may be “predatory” (I argue against that, some may be but most I’ve dealt with are opposite of that because they want your business), but at the end of the day it allows for more people to have jobs and participate in the economy. At some point we, technologists, are going to remove everyone’s job from them and we’ll act surprised societal uprisings happen because there’s no jobs available to the average Joe. Now I’m not arguing against automation, but car dealerships employ millions across the country, I don’t think removing those jobs from our fellow citizens who may or may not be able to do much more than sell cars, to no fault of their own, just to make a few more dollars for the manufacturer at “ease of the consumer”.

Once again these are my opinions, I’d love to hear from people who think this could be a good model for selling vehicles and will take them into full consideration.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this (i.e. taking a video and creating a 3D scene) and I don't think that it is feasible in most cases to have good accuracy. If you need to infer the angle, you need make a lot of biased assumptions about things like velocity, position, etc., of the camera and even if you were 99.9% accurate, that 0.1% inaccuracy is compounded over time. Now I'm not saying it's not possible, but I'd believe that if you want an accurate 3D scene, you'd rather be spending your computation budget on things other than determining those angles when it can be simply be provided by hardware.

“Booters” are a cat and mouse game. They come and go fast, what’s on the first page of Google today will be removed tomorrow (metaphorically) and be replaced by another (random tech word).(newest TLD). It’s probably not worth CloudFlare’s time having a dedicated team addressing those, I assume they primarily handle them via reports from federal agencies or individuals. They more than likely aren’t hosting the “traffic” that gets sent in a DDoS (probably delegated to a botnet of IoT devices) so I can’t imagine much can be done from the detection front as the traffic to the site is generic user traffic.