endymi0n

In other words: "Objects with less surface area and lower albedo are less reliably picked up by visual deep neural nets. We haven't benchmarked this against human drivers."

It took me some time to realize that Cloud Solution Architects are also just slightly more technical sales people in disguise whose only mission is upselling you onto more dependency. Same thing about their PR, every CxO these days says they need "multi-cloud", whatever that means and the costs are usually enormous, while complexity rises — with questionable benefit.

I did the math for our own stack and after a setback month in client revenue, and decided to put all our servers into a single AZ in a single region. The only multi-AZ, multi-region services are our backups. Surviving bad machines happens often enough that it's priced in via using Kubernetes, but losing a whole AZ is a freak accident that's just SO rare that calculating real business risk, it seemed apt to pretend it just doesn't happen (sorry, Google Cloud Paris customers).

Call me reckless, but I haven't looked back ever since and it saves us thousands of dollars in intra-AZ fees per month alone.

Looking at recent supreme court rulings in the US, I can‘t even see a lid on the can anymore, and I‘m honestly not even sure there‘s any piece of can left.

If the political right does not give a damn about neutral and impartial courts, I guess it‘s fair game to the left as well.

Granted, I'm just massively struggling with the idea of excluding a whole radically diverse community (with some of the most civilized and self-moderating discourse on the internet) in the name of inclusiveness. To me, it's as ironic as it gets.

On that end, I can't find any fault on HN's end enabling their 99.99% of their interested readers who didn't do any wrong to be included in the discourse around these ideas, on the free and open web.

My experience has been that it still has paid off to stay consistent. My youngest one is also extremely stubborn with a rage issue (I wouldn‘t dare to say 1% but at least 5%), and I can‘t count the time outs I‘ve had to distribute. All of them as a consequence with advance warning. Partially it was borderline violent, but I‘ve always did my very best to only use as much force to not hurt her, but just keep her from hurting herself and others as well as escaping the isolation from stimuli (I‘ve always stayed with her the entire time). One time I carried her screaming and shouting through a whole restaurant of people and stayed a whopping 20 minutes in front of the door until she was calm and my food was cold.

At the time, it looked like no progress at all, but fast forward 4 years and she‘s 7 now, well behaved, thoughtful, but still confident and strong willed: the upside of stubbornness. I feel like we did a decent job there.

Playing devil‘s advocate, all kinds of linting, vetting or security scanning with any degree of smartness beyond a regex would probably fall into my definition of non-human eyes too.

Slippery slope, yes, but in reality there is a legal framework and a ToS in place as well.

Here‘s my hack: Surround yourself with equally capable finishers. Once I figured out that there were lots of people out there who had great finishing, endurance and project management skills, but lacking the knowledge and the creativity in how to build them, I just started to put both of them together.

Granted, it often doesn‘t feel good being pushed into finishing your own things, but the joy of having delivered something tangible makes up for it. And as a bonus, even in something as big as building a company, I got to start hundreds of sub-projects and seeing most of them grow to fruitition!

People need to be carbon literate about as little as they need to be nicotine literate when buying cigarettes. Just like with cigarettes, the only thing we need as a society is to finally freaking price in the negative externalities of releasing carbon into consumer prices, aka carbon tax — just like we managed to do that with cigarettes.

If you still want to eat that $40 steak and can pay up for it, go for it. There's no need to curtail individual freedom when there's a simple and easy solution out there: Just make everyone pay for not just their consumption, but also for the damage it is causing on top. Problem solved.

Sounds exactly like my own feeling of superiority after my first hacks as a teenager. Dragon, as a greybeard who used to do equally dumb and great stuff like you… don’t let how people judge you ever stop you from hacking. Rock on!

Let‘s do the napkin math:

- Biggest EV batteries are about a ton

- Let‘s even assume they’re all lithium

- Lithium from seawater can be produced everywhere worldwide at about 5$ per kilo [1]

- That‘s 5k for a powerful battery lasting a decade.

- Seawater is as abundand as it gets.

-> Okay, this is really pure BS, and the only question remaining is which agenda is behind it

[1] https://electrek.co/2021/06/04/scientists-have-cost-effectiv...

Interestingly, that's my main gripe about scientists. Rarely does any of them actually dare to find anything out and settle a case. You can bet your aunt that the conclusion ends with "further research is warranted"... how better to secure your job!

Came to say that nothing really beats the bottom-up approach you mention, but there WERE some top-down tools over my career that really helped me too:

- Understanding the circle of fifths (and just doing the exercise of playing a simple melody completely through it)

- Understanding the natural tones scale and its mathematical properties (simpler intervals with low integer fractions -> „nicer“ sounding intervals)

- Understanding Euler‘s Tonnetz for the multidimensional relationship of intervals

These were the backings letting me understand a lot of the rationale behind what happens on the keyboard (by all means, a keyboard based instrument makes it SO much easier to grok theory). Though in the end, if you want to play and compose, 80% is building intuition by just trying to first copy styles and second disassembling the chords and melodies behind.

The future of AI isn‘t training data, it‘s logic and adversarial training on reasoning by first principles. You already see the first flowers of that in the InstructGPT paper and we‘re about to see much more. If you port the idea of GANs to the LLM world, you‘re about to get a hardened model that can introspect both facts and subtext, including agendas.

Having delivered projects with about a dozen different relational and "schemaless" databases over the course of 15 years, I'm proud to say I'm siding 100% with this article by now:

https://orangematter.solarwinds.com/2015/02/24/schemaless-da...

> There’s no such thing as a schemaless database. I know, lots of people want a schemaless database, and lots of companies are promoting their products as schemaless DBMSs. And schemaless DBMSs exist. But schemaless databases are mythical beasts because there is always a schema somewhere. Usually in multiple places, which I will later claim is what causes grief.

When I started my career, I thought thinking about schema was an unneccessary complication that got in the way of me delivering valuable software. These days, I don't write a single line of code without having a good schema first, because it means I have understood the domain well enough to properly model it.

Llama is neither instruction finetuned nor human reinforcement learning ranked. It‘s a base model like the original GPT3 that needs much more careful prompting and few-shot reasoning to produce similar results.

If you want a cautionary tale, here it is:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3134322

The coffeeshop fallacy (2011)

It‘s easy to get blinded by how incredibly privileged the tech bubble is and have had a better experience so far just trying to find a great non-toxic spot in there. YMMV, good luck!

Sounds a little bit like the standard recipe of any functional programming enthusiast: Just use pure functions!

Except that they‘re colliding all the time with that tiny problem that the world isn‘t pure... People expect the same page at the same URL, with different content, tomorrow, so good luck choosing a different one than the one they have bookmarked and that ranks on Google.

Caching doesn‘t get any less hard by trying to define the problem away.

I like it, will steal some. I followed the same strategy and always added relevant content to this doc, then forcing myself to read it every day. It‘s a non-attributed mashup of several sources. because it‘s from my personal notes:

—- Core Question: Is what I‘m currently doing helpful to my goals?

Get Bored. Get Calm. Enjoy boredness.

Whatever happens on the front page, I’m never involved. It seems like the whole thing would work just as well even if nobody ever read the Times or watched the cable chat shows. It’s a closed system.

Breaking News is most often wrong and later corrected by more breaking news.

But if that’s true on a scale of minutes, why longer? Instead of watching hourly updates, why not read a daily paper? Instead of reading the back and forth of a daily, why not read a weekly review? Instead of a weekly review, why not read a monthly magazine? Instead of a monthly magazine, why not read an annual book?

Following the news isn’t just a waste of time, it’s actively unhealthy. Edward Tufte notes that when he used to read the New York Times in the morning, it scrambled his brain with so many different topics that he couldn’t get any real intellectual work done the rest of the day.

Its obsession with the criminal and the deviant makes us less trusting people. Its obsession with the hurry of the day-to-day makes us less reflective thinkers. Its obsession with surfaces makes us shallow.

I have not followed the news for a long time. My life does not seem to be impoverished for it; indeed, I think it has been greatly enhanced. But I haven’t found many other people who are willing to take the plunge.

News makes our inner opinion volcano boil and that is toxic!

Uncontrolled input prevents rest, relaxation and output. All this massive time that is lost is ultimately YOURS! I am good to myself. I am worth it to myself not to stuff myself with poison!

Bad news is toxic for your body:

By consuming all of this news (which is nearly all bad news), you’re stressing your body out, weakening its ability to fight off infection, and potentially causing digestive and growth problems.

The really bad news is that news consumption is a vicious cycle that’s hard to get out of. Stress weakens your willpower. Without the willpower to put your phone down or turn off your computer, you’re likely to consume more and more news. And so the pattern continues.

“We are training our brains to pay attention to crap.”

The more a person consumes multiple types of media, the fewer brain cells there were in the anterior cingulate cortex. This is the part of the brain responsible for attention span and moral deliberation. You can no longer concentrate on books and longer articles. Your mind gives up after just a few paragraphs without absorbing any of the content. And you begin to suffer from anxiety.

After all, it is also part of freedom of opinion not to have an opinion.

Reading the news doesn’t help you change the world for the better. Ignore it or do something.

You need to make a complete break. The best way to do this is to push through 30 days of no news at all. By the end of those 30 days, you’ll hopefully reach the point where you don’t feel the urge to peek at the headlines.

What do you REALLY want in life?

To be really successful at something, you need to dedicate yourself to it fully. Albert Einstein, Frida Kahlo, and Beethoven didn’t become greats in their respective fields by scrolling through news feeds every few moments. They simply couldn’t have done, wasting all of that time. —-

I can relate a lot, since I have always been a sports hater myself. after lots of research, I came to the conclusion that the best bang for the buck would be found in strength training. it works best in a lot of dimensions: back pain, looking great, staying there, even if you make two weeks of vacation.

In the end, after giving this a serious shot, I really came to like it a lot. Especially after I realized how much of a difference it makes in terms of mental strength, willpower, and confidence as well. My love life is through the roof.

Even though it takes considerably more than 30 minutes, I now have a power rack in my room and I fill the minutes of waiting between sets by using them on starting the most dreaded tasks on my list. This works incredibly well, as I am so filled with adrenaline after a hard set that it works a bit like the blinking star in super Mario: It makes my mind almost invincible for a few minutes.

Just an experience of many here. YMMV.

Assuming you’re a cis-hetero male, as you talk about both love and a lasting relationship, I can vouch for https://www.amazon.com/Married-Man-Life-Primer-2011-ebook/dp... from years of happy marriage - even if you‘re not married yet. It takes you through all of the fundamentals.

Some key takeaways:

- Stability and centeredness of your own life is the key to a healthy love life

- Learn about both alpha and beta traits, master both

- It‘s impossible to make exactly one woman in your life desire you. It‘s either zero or many.

- Fitness is not optional. Don‘t assume any success if you don‘t lift

„If you’re unsure whether to quit your job or break up, you probably should“

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17840275

This wasn‘t the market crash. The real one is still to come.

* literally everybody else _per continent_ please, also CCS is an abomination of a charging port.

If you would let the CCS consortium design a megawatt charger like Tesla‘s V4, mere mortals would probably not even able to lift it.

Here‘s how I did it (pretty much accidentally), but found out it‘s a great platform to start from: I stumbled into an ill-defined semi-technical role in a growing company with a great boss. I was a technical ad creative support specialist, and the role was ripe for automation. Within a year I had automated my frustratingly boring job away completely and was promoted to engineering as the guy with the ability to „make stuff happen“. The road was very much uphill from there, just picked up the skills as needed on the way, showed up, took additional responsibility when nobody else did.

I‘m CTO of a Series C stage scale-up by now.

There are literally hundreds of such jobs out there you can‘t really train for with obscure names, just go browse some listings from companies with a good culture and a way up. Show up with a technical enough mindset and an attitude of making things happen and you‘ll get that job.

If you just go a bit above and beyond of what‘s expected and ask smart people smart questions, you’ll kill it in no time.

Good luck!

It was more of a philosophical than a political support of free speech, minted by the same forces of the early internet (in a time of true single-channel mainstream media) that a lot of us older hackers experienced.

It‘s just that over time I realized that in such a situation not the most accurate and consistent voice would win, just the most obnoxious, manipulating and brazenly lying.

There seems to be a tipping point lurking behind „pretty free speech“.

Counter-intuitively, I‘ve seen deeper, way more meaningful, effective and vulnerable conversation happening in places with very high amounts of moderation (EO Gestalt language protocol, Chatham House rules).

Count me in as a fan of well done moderation these days.

Getting one of my comments banned by dang in his calm and substantiated manner was a wakeup moment for me. I like my discussions hot, but this was the time where I realized that keeping a discussion valuable and on point is probably more important than winning it in the grand scheme of things.

Incidentally, it also gradually managed to cure me from free-speech absolutism. (By now, I think almost all Xisms and extremes are nonsense, but that‘s a different hot discussion to be had).

This forum wouldn‘t be the same without him.

Thanks dang.

You both have a point. For my own career I found the advice of Oliver Burkeman helpful, who put it in a very apt and actionable sentence:

> When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness.

The good part is that there‘s still a lot of jobs out there who both enlarge you and make good money. They‘re just harder to find.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/sep/04/oliver-...

„If being rich is outlawed, only outlaws will be rich.“

– roughly after Phil Zimmerman

Thanks, I don‘t like that future.

Don‘t get me wrong, I‘m all for progressive and _way_ higher taxes, but this extreme would do the opposite of what you want.

[citation needed]

> pro-labor

True that, mate. In no developed country you can do more unskilled labor for the same money.