grepLeigh

Supply chain attack? Does anyone have more info?

It still is! I think getting your foot in the door is much more difficult now compared to 5-6 years ago, similar to difficulty finding entry level work in 2008-2009 financial crisis.

Market conditions aside, the points the OP blog post makes about asymmetrical value are evergreen.

I adored this post right up until:

> I have an internal KPI: if in the last three days I haven’t spent at least 30 minutes playing with my kid, there’s something seriously wrong

I think I'm interpreting this ungenerously, because my knee-jerk reaction was to wonder about who is handling the other 12+ waking hours a day.

"Give yourself permission" here means acknowledging you're doing a "good enough" job (for now) instead of a "perfect" job, and not beating yourself up about it in the short term. The Wiki article on self-compassion [1] has more context on the therapeutic value of practicing self-compassion and the impact on measurements of life satisfaction/happiness, curiosity, resilience, etc.

Depending on the task/behavior, you may carry the same attitude into the medium/long term, OR figure out how to course-correct medium/long term to align with your values. E.g., if one of your core values is militant conservation of water, either because it's expensive or one of the disappearing resources on Earth, you might strategize ways to conserve your energy to do the best possible dishwasher-loading job every day. That's what I was getting at when I said these type of tasks are "microcosms" because sometimes they reveal misalignment of values.

Why do you say "therapist" here (with the air quotes)?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-compassion

On the other side of this argument, I've seen "just run the dishwasher twice" used as shorthand for giving yourself permission to do whatever is needed to get the job done and not letting perfectionism paralyze you from making progress.

This blog excerpt explains the idea [1]:

> Knowing this week was going to be a lot, I’ve been living by “run the dishwasher twice”. What the hell does that even mean?! Essentially it means to do whatever is the path of least resistance to get shit done. The advice came from a therapist to a woman who was feeling very low & was struggling with everyday tasks such as doing the dishes. She didn’t have the mental capacity to scrub dishes before putting them in her crappy dishwasher so she wasn’t doing them & they were building up & causing her more anxiety. Her therapist said not to rinse the dishes & just run the dishwasher twice, even three times if that’s what it took to get them clean. It was a game-changer for her, one that enabled her to do a small task in an imperfect way just to get it done.

I wish the OP article had dug a little bit deeper into the psychology behind daily task conflict in relationships. The dishwasher is one of many microcosms (laundry, car, pets, etc) that I wish I'd paid more attention to in my relationships, because these conversations really do reveal relationship dynamics around HUGE issues like compromise, empathy, perfectionism, and judgmental behavior.

[1] https://thebackfenceblog.wordpress.com/2021/08/27/run-the-di...

Eh, if you hadn't found Stumbleupon then you would have experienced the same effect from one of the zillion other competitors in the attention economy.

You're right that this kind of novelty-seeking content has a profound impact on the brain. It's really interesting to see finally see longitudinal research, plus research on screens/novelty on child development (search for $thing + "psychosocial development").

One of the most encouraging thing I've taken away is that neutral pathways are still quite plastic well into adulthood.

For example, here's an experiment to try if you wake up and scroll in bed. After you do your morning routine, jot down a mood score (-1 feeling crummy, 0 meh neutral, +1 feeling good). You can do this for a week or two if you want to collect control data. Then, force yourself to get out of bed without looking at your phone (buy an alarm if you have too). You should see changes in your mood log within a week. Sleep regulates/replenishes dopamine levels, and scrolling through a dopamine wonderland first thing in the AM can result in dopamine dysregulation for the rest of the day. Try it!

I found this years ago, during the "Stumbleupon" era of the Internet (does anyone remember this time sink?). I'm so glad it's still alive!

I do this a lot; it's just nice to have some quiet companionship while working on something.

The difference between body doubling and "working in an office setting" is mutual agreement to avoid distracting each other. I usually combine body doubling with a pomodoro timer, so 25-30 minutes and then a break. This isn't conducive to deep flow work, but it's great for getting your taxes done, booking a trip, researching a dreaded thing, reviewing a PR, etc.

That was after the IBM acquisition.

Hah, this is exactly what I was hoping to find. Thank you!

As an outsider looking at Microsoft, I've always been impressed by the attention to maintaining legacy APIs and backward compatibility in the Windows ecosystem. In my mind, Microsoft is at the opposite end of the killedbygoogle.com spectrum. However, none of this is grounded in real evidence (just perception). Red Hat is another company I'd put forth as an example of a long-term support culture, although I don't know if that's still true under IBM.

I'd love to know if my superficial impression of Microsoft's culture is wrong. I'm sure there's wild variance between organizational units, of course. I'm excluding the Xbox/games orgs from my mental picture.

If money weren't an object, which labs or lines of research would be the most interesting to you? Do you have strong personal preferences between university/academic research, national labs, and private/startup research roles?

Back to the reality where money is a real factor, what was the difference in compensation like? Was it like a 10x difference or closer to 2x?

I'm asking because I'm a software engineer/founder, but I stepped back from my career due to burnout. I went back to college to study physics and geek out on quantum computing, but I know it'll take grad school (likely a PhD plus postdoc) to grok the full stack. Trying to get a sense of what might be ahead of me.

I'd recommend starting with Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Isaac Chuang and Michael Nielsen ("Mike and Ike"). It's the text used in most intro courses.

There's an "Intro to Quantum Mechanics" section that covers what's strictly necessary to understand quantum algorithms.

For lectures, John Preskill's lectures from the Quantum Computation course at CalTech: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0ojjrEqIyPy-1RRD8cTD_lF1...

> Internal company documents from 2019 and 2020 show thousands of reports of “serious physical assault”

> By this point, Matthews had already been reported for rape at least once to Hinge. Court documents show that he had already allegedly sexually assaulted nine women and drugged 10. Not only did the apps allow him back on, they featured Matthews’s profile.

> Match Group didn’t make it easy for the Denver prosecutors to convict Matthews. A search warrant was issued for Hinge in July 2023. Two months later, prosecutors were still empty-handed – with the judge in the case asking at a hearing whether he needed to start “dragging people in to get stuff done”. It wasn’t until February 2024 that the Denver district attorney’s office said they had finally received documents returned by Match Group.

Disgusting. I didn't see any reference to "Duty of Care" in the article, but I hope this case is used to establish precedent of holding tech companies accountable for the same "Duty of Care" standards you'd expect from a brick/mortar business.

TTS runs Cloud.gov (government cloud provider similar to AWS) and FedRAMP certification. These aren't small programs.

TTS also runs data.gov, which hosts tens of thousands of local/regional datasets. I don't think there's anything close (please correct me if I'm wrong) to providing this level of access to this kind of data. Off the top of my head, data.gov has historical tap water data, lead/toxic substance tests in public spaces (schools), EV vehicle/charging infrastructure, crime data, air quality, etc. A lot of this data is collected at the regional/state level, but data.gov warehouses it all.

LLMs that use Chain of Thought sequences have been demonstrated to misrepresent their own reasoning [1]. The CoT sequence is another dimension for hallucination.

So, I would say that an LLM capable of explaining its reasoning doesn't guarantee that the reasoning is grounded in logic or some absolute ground truth.

I do think it's interesting that LLMs demonstrate the same fallibility of low quality human experts (i.e. confident bullshitting), which is the whole point of the OP course.

I love the goal of the course: get the audience thinking more critically, both about the output of LLMs and the content of the course. It's a humanities course, not a technical one.

(Good) Humanities courses invite the students to question/argue the value and validity of course content itself. The point isn't to impart some absolute truth on the student - it's to set the student up to practice defining truth and communicating/arguing their definition to other people.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04388

As a learning exercise, I enjoyed Neural Networks From Scratch: https://nnfs.io/

There's also a world of statistics and machine learning outside of deep learning. I think the best way to get started on that end is an undergrad survey course like CS189: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jrs/189/

Maybe I'm the outlier here, but 15 minutes to chat with a human about my use case and pricing is way more efficient than donking around in docs/trial product.

The only product I really want to punch in credit card info and GO is commodity software (e.g. AWS EC2 or a domain registration service.

I think wires sometimes get crossed in pricing/sales models, where an enterprise product gets priced like commodity software ... but that's usually a sign the company is immature. There shouldn't be a sales team for software that costs 2-3 figures. Software costing 5-6+ figures absolutely requires people in the sales/onboarding process, because a big part of what I'm paying for is support.

What's the compensation scheme for reviewers?

Are there any mechanisms to balance out the "race to the bottom" observed in other types of academic compensation? e.g. increase of adjunct/gig work replacing full-time professorship.

Do universities require staff to perform a certain number of reviews in academic journals?

A less literal translation like "essentially" or "in essence" is deployed by master Latin translators like Robert Fagles. I've even seen "in a vacuum" which does a better job at communicating the original intent than a string of cryptic prepositions.

Ah that makes more sense, thank you! I wasn't looking at it as a proxy for surrounding development, but now I can see why that might be a more nuanced metric than just region size/population.

Is living near a sports stadium really that desirable? I lived a few blocks from the Giants stadium in SF, and I'll never make that mistake again.

Running a 15 minute errand on a game day could take hours. It was impossible to get my car out of the garage or get on/off the highway. The food/trash left on the streets was terrible too, which made walking my dog a PITA instead of a pleasure.

I think for every student thoughtfully using ChatGPT, there are a dozen who mindlessly dump homework in and copy the output verbatim.

I'm taking classes at a community college for fun, and it's frankly disturbing how reliant the 18-20 y/o crowd is on ChatGPT to do basic tasks. There's also so much unfounded trust in the output of LLMs. At least once per week, I've heard a student arguing with a tutor/professor because their ChatGPT generated homework was marked incorrect - they argue the answer key must be wrong.

I do think LLMs have a place in education, but right now I see them exacerbating existing problems in high school / college aged generations. There's a low tolerance for frustration and grappling with a new problem, or applying past learning to a new situation.

Nvidia is trying something similar: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/llm-semiconductors-chip-nemo/

I'd want to know about the results of these experiments before casting judgement either way. Generative modeling has actual applications in the 3D printing/mechanical industry.

I ditched technology and switched to paper planners, in particular Japanese planners with time columns and enough space to dot down daily notes/thoughts.

After years of being tethered to Slack and other productivity apps, the only ones I use now are Google calendar (coordinating meetings with other people) and email for communication/correspondence.

I think it's been helpful for coping with ADHD. Attention is a finite resource that you only get so much of in a day, and everything online is fighting for it.

Here's an example of what I mean: https://www.jetpens.com/blog/Kokuyo-Jibun-Techo-A-3-in-1-Pla...

I have a whole "chop wood, carry water" speech born from leading corporate software teams. A lot of work at a company of sufficient size boils down to keeping up with software entropy while also chipping away at some initiative that rolls up to an OKR. It can be such a demotivating experience for the type of smart, passionate people that FANNGs like to hire.

There's even a buzzword for it: KTLO (keep the lights on). You don't want to be spending 100% of your time on KTLO work, but it's unrealistic to expect to do done of it. Most software engineers would gladly outsource this type of scutwork.

Similar story, but for the mobile era: I knew an indie app developer who built a portfolio of early mobile apps. His top-earners were a coloring book app, bead animal patterns, and a no-essay college scholarship app. Those three allowed him to pay himself and a partner salary and drop contract/client work.

I'm researching and writing a paper on Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) computer architecture. I'm focused on comparing the advantages/limitations of three different qubit modalities: superconducting, trapped ion, and neutral atom.

Indie developers getting paid for their craftsmanship ruined the web?

If a solo dev builds a tool that helps even a handful of people manage 5-6-7 figure portfolios, that's worth more than a cup of coffee.