1,039 karma · joined October 5, 2010
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2023/01/20/risk-of-major-landsl...
https://manualzz.com/doc/o/9paan/amos-system-commands-refere...
1) An intern was paid 25% more than me. The disparity was even greater, since he was paid on a hourly basis, and I was salaried, working 60 hr+ weeks. It was baffling, the intern wasn't a family relation, and had no special skills. In fact, I had to onboard him. But, for whatever reason, he got an absurdly high wage. I suppose the hiring manager (who later went on to be an early Microsoft VP) wanted to be magnanimous and help a college student, but why not also be magnanimous with your regular employees who are busting their butts?
2) Starting salaries for new grads were increasing faster than salaries for existing employees, and salaries for existing employees weren't adjusted accordingly. Existing employees got stock options on more favorable terms though (having started earlier).
https://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Knowing-Science-Skeptic...
There are comments on Smalltalk at various places in the talk, but after the quote, all he says is, ..."There is one really important thing about Smalltalk, and some of languages like it, that we should pay really really close attention to, but it has almost nothing to do with the syntax and accumulated superclass library," ....
Quote is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY&t=634s
"Actually I made up the term "object-oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."
What strikes me here is the phrase, "exceptionally high levels." I imagine children need a "normal" level of care; it's only "exceptionally high" in comparison to the deprived state of family systems in these degenerate times.
I often reflect on the understanding in Attachment Theory, wherein a child a needs to have a caregiver who is sufficiently attuned to the child's needs. And it turns out, "sufficiently attuned" means that the caregiver responds in an attuned manner to 30%-50% the child's entreaties. As one of my meditation teachers says, 'That's not a high bar. What grade did you get the last time you scored 50% on a test?'
https://twitter.com/elizlaraki/status/1719379064564166772
EDIT: The following link is among the replies in that Twitter thread.
Anatomy of an Indian Address [50th Edition] [AUG 7, 2023] https://newsletter.theindianotes.com/p/anatomy-of-an-indian-...
https://chat.openai.com/share/ddd2800e-630c-4ff7-9992-14b265...
I find it much more pleasant to ask GPT4's advice and have it write sample code than it is to use web search, Stack Overflow, etc. Even when I know exactly what code to write, it's often faster to ask GPT4 to write it a certain way and then make minimal edits myself.
The paid version of GPT4 used to be the best, but lately the VSCode Insider GitHub Copilot produces comparable or identical results, since it uses GPT4. I have only one custom instruction, "If writing Python code, always use context managers where appropriate."
EDIT: If you don't want to hassle with maintaining a development environment, try Replit[0]. Their AI is not nearly as good as GPT4 though.
Among many, many applications, this would be helpful in allowing LLMs to converse about the current version of a website or application. I'd want a sense of time to be maintained, so that the LLM would know, if asked, about various versions. "Before the April 5, 2023 update, this feature was limited to ..., but now ... is supported."
I asked GPT4 about incremental updates, and it seemed to validate by my basic understanding. Here's the conversation so far:
https://chat.openai.com/share/00fe148a-13aa-4e92-8b77-f0de48...
I asked Bard if I could use it to access gmail, and it said, "As a language model, I am not able to access your Gmail directly." I then asked Bard for a list of extensions, and it listed a Gmail extension as one of the "Google Workspace extensions." How do I activate the Gmail extension? "The Bard for Gmail extension is not currently available for activation."
But, if you click on the puzzle icon in Bard, you can enable the Google Workspace Extensions, which includes gmail.
I asked, "What's the date of the first gmail message I sent?" Reply: "I couldn't find any email threads in your Gmail that indicate the date of the first email you sent," and some recent email messages were listed.
Holy cow! LLMs have been compared to workplace interns, but this particular intern is especially obtuse.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Determined-Science-Life-without-Free/... [1] https://www.listennotes.com/search/?q=robert%20sapolsky&sort... [2] https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-origins/robert-sapo...
YC isn't designed for small bets! That's not their thing. It would be interesting to see stats on non-huge exits though, some kind of distribution showing the following with a time element, indicating, say, the number of months for various outcomes.
Huge exits 1.25% (define huge), Exit exceeding YC's investment, YC investment repaid, YC investment partially repaid, YC investment entirely lost
The problem for me is that hosting costs are now variable, and the mere fact that I have to monitor or worry about an unexpectedly high bill is a drop-dead. Moreover, I have to take time even to understand the billing system.
If I understand the new billing system correctly, and again, I don't want to have to spend time figuring it out, there is a monthly allowance, so that my typical small test deployments are unlikely to incur any charges beyond my prepaid annual subscription. Is that right?
Suppose I leave a site deployed, and there's a DDOS attack? Or by some fluke, the site goes viral because a Reddit user happened to like a test image on the home page. My allowance is exceeded, and I'm suck with a bill. Sure, it's unlikely, but it could happen. I see complaints about unexpected bills from various cloud providers often, nearly every week.
The whole appeal of Replit's earlier billing system is that there was a fixed cost. Is there a setting so a deployment will be taken offline if the prepaid allowance is exceeded? If not, I won't use the service as much as I'd like. Why pay for a service I use only for the occasional one-off?
That said, this makes me realize I'm not a satisfied customer, and I regret renewing my one year plan recently. The site is just too unreliable. A problem the replit has had for years (I haven't tried this recently), for example, is that if I accidentally select a large file in the editor (like a data file), the browser freezes while an attempt is made to render the file. Sometimes the only way to recover from this is to delete the repl. At least put up an alert if a large file is selected, "You have selected a 1 GB file....."
Also, the forum-based support is practically unusable, unless someone happens to have recently posted about the problem I'm having. Searching through posts and reading lot of unsolved, minimally categorized issues with non-authoritative replies is not a good use of my time. I get that Replit doesn't want to provide support, and there might not be a market for paid support in Replit's user base, but Replit can do better. EDIT: Is anyone working on ML-based support?
My use case is a few regular podcasts, and many (~100) podcasts where I listen to only one episode. I like to keep the infrequently accessed podcasts around so I can remember what I listened to, and in case there's another episode I want.
Also it doesn't sync with iCloud, but maybe that's been added?
I then used it to search for videos,
> There are several YouTube videos with a title that begins, "Gregory Blackstock, The Incomplete Historical World," List those videos with the YouTube URLs.
In this particular instance, the titles aren't unique, but the videos are different. The result appeared to be correct. The list was formatted to I can paste it into an email, something that doesn't happen when I search YouTube itself. Nice!
My next prompt was
> Make a list of the top 5 most viewed YouTube videos about moths.
Strangely, the result was 3 groups of 5 videos, with some duplicate results.
> Why did you list 15 videos in your reply when I asked for 5?
Reply: "I apologize for the confusion. I am still under development, and I am always learning.
I listed 15 videos because I found it difficult to narrow down the list to just 5. There are many beautiful and fascinating moth videos on YouTube, and I wanted to share as many as I could.
I will try to do better next time. If you have any feedback on how I can improve my responses, please let me know."
One revelation was more fascinating to me than all of the gossip combined.
It's what the book calls The Algorithm. Elon's simple 5 step recipe for success. Read on to learn all about the algorithm and what it implies for the future of Twitter.
The Algorithm
The five steps of the algorithm are:
1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Then make the requirements less dumb.
2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough.
3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. You should avoid doing this for parts and processes that should not exist.
4. Accelerate. Every process can be sped up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. Again, you should avoid doing this for parts and processes that should not exist.
5. Automate. This comes last. Wait until all requirements have been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and bugs removed.
...
https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Herbal-Healing-Beers-Fermentat...
"This book was so overwhelmingly good that I could only read a couple pages at a time. How on earth did Wroe manage to produce such a rich and fascinating, 432-page book about a guy for which the historical record is not more than a couple artifacts and inscriptions? I don’t know–but that’s what makes it a masterwork. What so captivated me about this book is that although it is of course about the most seminal moment of the Christian world, it is happening inside the Roman world–the world of Seneca, literally. Seneca’s brother is in this book (he adjudicates a case involving St. Paul). Luciliius, who Seneca is writing his famous letters to, has the same job in a different province as Pontius. And by the way, that’s the most radical thing about this book: That you get to look at Pontius Pilate, the man who sentenced Christ to death, as a guy with a job. Did he do it well? How did it go so sideways? He said several times that he did not think Christ was guilty…he tried several times to get out of sentencing him to be crucified…yet in the end, he relented and did what he knew was wrong. What can that teach us? This was one of the most interesting and creative books I’ve read in a very long time. Wow."
https://web.archive.org/pdf/search/vitamin%20c%20and%20the%2...
My own experience with vitamin C is that it is not clearly helpful for various illnesses when I tried it. However, I do take 1 g magnesium ascorbate every day just for fun.