justsocrateasin

haven't thought about this book for a while. Dang, it was a fun read. I generally love books that take a simple premise and then explore where it would actually go

Over the last five years I've been in and out of therapy and 2/3 of my therapists have "graduated me" at some point in time, stating that their practice didn't see permanent therapy as a good solution. I don't think all therapists view it this way.

But it's not fully self driving. SF Waymo can't bring you to the airport. You missed OPs point, which was that the last few percentage points are the hardest.

Okay how about this situation that one of my junior devs hit recently:

Coding in an obj oriented language in an enormous code base (big tech). Junior dev is making a new class and they start it off with LLM generation. LLM adds in three separate abstract classes to the inheritance structure, for a total of seven inherited classes. Each of these inherited classes ultimately comes with several required classes that are trivial to add but end up requiring another hundred lines of code, mostly boilerplate.

Tell me how you, without knowing the code base, get the LLM to not add these classes? Our language model is already trained on our code base, and it just so happens that these are the most common classes a new class tends to inherit. Junior dev doesn't know that the classes should only be used in specific instances.

Sure, you could go line by line and say "what does this inherited class do, do I need it?" and actually, the dev did that. It cut down the inherited classes from three to two, but missed two of them because it didn't understand on a product side why they weren't needed.

Fast forward a year, these abstract classes are still inherited, no one knows why or how because there's no comprehension but we want to refactor the model.

did you even read the article? He talks about how he has/will continue to invest significant resources into alzheimers research.

Private industries are not incentivized to pursue the same kind of research as the public sector. An excellent example of this is antibiotics (or antifungal drugs). Pharma companies do not put forth a large budget for research like this, because it isn't profitable. But, if we were to see a super bug crop up in the next 10 years (unfortunately this is not a crazy "if" due to trends in antibiotic resistance), then you would quickly see the public sector's research paying enormous dividends in terms of missed economic hardship. These economic benefits would not affect the private sector in the same way, because a pharma company would not see, let's say, $50b in profits from helping ease an equivalent $50b in economic hardship caused by hospital bills/suffering/lost productivity.

On top of this, let's just look at the current private sector and what they spend R&D dollars in: can you really say that $1b spent by Google, Meta, Amazon etc. actually ends up being better worthwhile than $1b spent by NASA? see this list of inventions NASA has inadvertently created: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/20-inventions-we-would...

In general, public sector research is already so strapped for cash. Their budgets are not large. Their salaries are lower than the private sector. I agree that public R&D spending is likely not at a "theoretical optimal level", but would you argue that private sector R&D spending is?

I also had relatives that didn't make it out of Auschwitz. I could not care less.

Second this, I know several close friends who have done the Recurse center and they say it's a phenomenal experience, one of the best things they've ever done. Generally speaking the job placement afterwards is also not all that bad if you decide to go back into the workforce.

This article feels a little bit pointless to me. ryandvm said it perfectly - a staff engineer is just what happens when you have a senior engineer who deserves a promotion, but wants to be a technical leader not a people leader. How that actually fits into the company varies heavily company to company, specifically size and maturity.

I feel like this article wants to talk about the performance matrix through the lens of four pillars, and just arbitrarily chose "staff" as the role to talk about since it's a very senior engineer.

An engineer that makes less impact than a staff engineer but more impact than a junior engineer.

I don't think any dem is saying that. I think they're saying that inflation is the result of a global pandemic, not Dems printing another 1.5T. I think by all accounts the economic landing after a global pandemic was really good, certainly better than 2008. We aren't in a recession. Prices are high, but so is employment and job growth. The government failed at something, whatever that something was: was it a failure in signaling that yeah, these times are hard but guess what, it's because of COVID and buckle up because we did the best we could? Or was it that they let inflation rise too high? I'm not sure.

Yeah I agree, could be confusing to non native speakers though. It's a weird idiom.

People going to flat earth and believing in flat earth are two separate things. As OP said -

> People lose the ability to separate fact from fiction, lack the ability for critical thinking.

Distrusting governments is not the cause of people believing flat earth, people believe flat earth because they are unable to separate fact from fiction, which, I believe is a consequence of poor education.

I'm just learning about this tool now and had a brief question if you have the time:

The paper mentions support for zero-copy intranode object sharing which links to serialization in the Ray docs - https://docs.ray.io/en/latest/ray-core/objects/serialization...

I'm really curious how this is performant - I recently tried building a pipeline that leveraged substantial multiprocessing in Python, and found that my process was bottlenecked by the serialization/deserialization that occurs during Python multiprocessing. Would love any reading or explanation you can provide as to how this doesn't also bottleneck a process in Ray, since it seems that data transferred between workers and nodes will need to serialized and deserialized.

Thanks in advance! Really cool tool, hopefully I'll be able to use it sooner rather than later.

Why so much distrust for our civil servants? Have you met any of these people? I grew up in the DC area and both liberal and conservative civil servants are dedicated to truth, science, and the well being of the American people. Sure, there are exceptions, corruption is everywhere, etc. but by and large, the people who work in government agencies have our interests in mind. I say this as a liberal who briefly consulted for U.S. Customs and Border Protection - the people working at that agency understand immigration far better than I ever could. If you left it up to radical politicians to decide immigration, you'd be left with policies that swung too far in either direction every four years.

In theory, I entirely agree - regulation should not be decided by agencies, but by lawmakers. In practice, this is so painfully far from reality. Do you really think congress has the ability to pass meaningful legislation on complex issues? Do you think that lifelong politicians can do a better job than civil servants who have spent their entire lives studying this particular issue?

"My kind didn't really slither out of a tidal pool, did we? God, I need to believe you created me: we are so small down here." Lillie Emery

What a beautiful image

I thought for a long time that I was trash at leetcode. I would regularly fail the coding portions of interviews. Then a recruiter reached out with a tempting JD and I became good at leetcode, it just took a lot of hard work of tricking my brain into thinking it was a good use of my time.

I got a 20% increase the other year. But only because I threatened to quit aggressively and got promoted in the same year and was valuable to my small team of ~4 engineers.

I believe it's just stock portfolios as net worth, but I could be wrong

Not true anymore. I went to a shitty state school with no FAANg on my resume, and had a Jane Street recruiter slide into my DMs last year.

I believe that most of the time patients are enrolled in these trials, they've already exhausted all other options. It isn't quite "life-or-death" but rather "death-or-death-or-maybe-another-chance-at-life"

I think OP's statement was cutting corners. Protein and fat both help you stay full for longer. Carbs/sugar do not. Even this statement cuts corners, but overall science supports the general sentiment.

I'm definitely interested in hearing more! I've submitted an application for Research Engineer.

This is incorrect. The article explicitly mentions PFAS as a potential cause.

> So-called forever chemicals like per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, better known as PFAS, have been linked to other cancers and could also be driving some of the increase in early-onset colorectal cancer.

I think he answers the second point of "not every company can be a Google" though. He says this will get you to the point where your company could be a Google, but makes no promises that it will be one.

I agree with the first point. I do think that the experience would nonetheless be valuable, though, to pilot a failed company.

I think there is a very strong argument that the effects on the local ecosystems and habitat from putting down solar energy is significantly less than the effects that will occur from climate change. This is a straw man argument and I'm pretty tired of seeing it (similar vein - "wind turbines kill birds", yeah but not as much as climate change will!)

Hey Nicolas! best of luck on the product, you gave me a demo a while back and it's excellent - excited to see what comes of it.

I do believe that 1.5GB is tarred and gzipped though, so it is a fair bit bigger. That's also supposedly half a million emails, so 45gb is quite a bit.

This comment is dangerous and incorrect. Many people have exceptional responses on SSRIs - myself included. I went from having regular panic attacks to living a very normal life with absolutely zero side effects, just from taking the lowest dose of Zoloft (25mg generic sertraline). I don't live in a gray fog, my relationships do not suffer, and I have not had any suicidal ideation. You're cherry picking very rare/extreme instances and noting them to be commonplace.

It took me MONTHS to even consider SSRIs because of rhetoric like this that is online and pervasive in our culture.