You give them the benefit of the doubt because they tell you exactly what you want to hear?
7,998 karma · joined October 2, 2018
Perhaps it’s possible you didn’t do enough to explain why you didn’t believe it was the right work to do, or if you did, perhaps there were other factors in play than “user experience.”
Also, uh, “I have to do what my boss says” doesn’t make you a blue collar worker.
SF has one of the largest city budgets in the country — >$15billion — and struggles to staff park workers making $70-90k.
If the park workers only make $60k, but the city budget is 1/10th, 1/20th, 1/100th of SF’s, how does the math here ever work?
Hiring people with intimate knowledge of Bad Thing to try to fix Bad Thing is not necessarily a bad strategy.
Just need them to have very legible incentives. That’s less clear to me in this case.
Minimum knowledge is one thing; minimum time to apply it is another.
We’re all different at good things, and it’s usually better to lean into your strengths than it is to paper over your weaknesses.
We can wish everyone were good at everything, or we can try to actually get things done.
Optima for “stable-relationship-forming app” are yet to be discovered — and also, I think, to really be sought at all
Netflix is absolutely easier to use than any form of pirating for the vast majority of their userbase.
Everyone in this thread talking about how people will “just get a VPN” to use TikTok have zero concept of the technical abilities of TikTok’s user base
You’re right that single vs. two parent household is the largest contributing factor. You’re wrong that it means that no other factors matter at all.
I genuinely don't mean this in a dickish way -- isn't this, like, tautologically untrue?
By definition, more nuanced, more descriptive language describes a narrower, more precise view of reality than broader language otherwise would.
When would plainer language allow less room for interpretation?
I do generally think writing laws and other documents in plainer language would be beneficial for society, but not for this reason. Sometimes you do have to describe a really, really precise concept. "Kill" is different than "murder" is different than "manslaughter" in ways that are meaningful and important to preserve.
Although even as I write that, I guess you could say "kill", "kill a person with intention", "kill a person without intention". That's kind of what you mean by word subroutines?
At a certain point this just seems like a similarly-complex vocabulary, just with more words, though.
Very much appreciate this being the second paragraph, made me immediately much less skeptical.
In general, I think these are excellent principles. I didn't really realize how important speed was, in particular, until I was in an organization that pathologically lacked it. It absolutely sucks the life out of anyone who wants to do more than the bare minimum.
I’ve read The Bitter Lesson, I understand the argument “the human eyes are just cameras, and we do just fine”; I’m not totally unsympathetic to the idea that Tesla is better-positioned than some people think.
But I still think it’s a big leap to suggest Tesla will definitely solve FSD by scaling / software, and Waymo is fundamentally screwed and has no way to innovate out of its own scale problems.
Companies lower material costs by an order of magnitude all the time! Look at battery/solar over the last 15 years — in many areas we see two OOMs of cost reduction. It’s a challenge; but one that seems on par with creating software to replicate the optical capabilities of the human brain.
If Tesla can solve FSD with only cameras, then yes, their ability to scale is much better than Waymo’s.
But that is a stupendously large “if”!
I’ve seen the Karpathy quote before, and I think it’s kind of hilarious to compare one company which does X0,000 robotaxi rides per day, to another company which has a robotaxi maybe entering production in two years, and say, “well look, they both have problems!”
Bit of a misleading simplification, no? Tesla boosters assume they will crack FSD, it’s just a matter of time. That seems like a big leap to me.
And Waymo has that whole time to bring down their costs of construction, learn how to solve problems of scale, and so on.
I agree that a CyberCab would have structural advantages if the service were at parity w/ Waymo, but that is a very big hypothetical!
- some minimal description for the problem you're trying to solve
- what you've tried already, and why it hasn't worked
----
Bad:
> "Hey! Does anyone know how to use X"?
...time passes...
> "Sure, I can help with that. What are you trying to do?"
...time passes...
> "I'm trying to do Y."
...time passes...
> "Okay, sure. You can set it up like this."
...time passes...
> "Oh, I already tried something like that actually, and it didn't work."
...etc., etc., etc.
----
Good:
> "Hey! I'm trying to use X to do Y as a part of feature Z. I already tried A and B, and they didn't work for <reasons>. Could someone help me out?"
> "Oh, yeah, that's a known problem with A and B. We can get around that by setting up X this way. Since you're working on feature Z, you might also want to consider..."
I’m imagining seeing the node! macro used, and seeing the macro definition, but still having a tough time knowing exactly what code is produced.
Do I just use the Example and see what type hints I get from it? Can I hover over it in my IDE and see an expanded version? Do I need to reference the compiled code to be sure?
(I do all my work in JS/TS so I don’t touch any macros; just curious about the workflow here!)
Knowing thyself is a superpower all its own; we need people to write scrappy code to validate a business idea, and we need people who look at code with disgust, throw it out, and write something 100x as efficient.
Recall's offering allows you to get "audio, video, transcripts, and metadata" from video calls -- again, total conjecture, but I imagine they do need to decode into raw format in order to split out all these end-products (and then re-encode for a video recording specifically.)
Not sure if it's a "premium feature" so to speak, but would be very cool to extend this to comments generally.
Waymo has started onto a very good trendline now, for sure, and a path to revenue-positive is becoming clearer. But they have a loooooooong way to go before they are offsetting even their operating costs, let alone beginning to pay down their (absolutely massive) fixed costs.
I think the bear case is actually pretty tough for Waymo. Their scaling is not cheap.
- The cars are, by all account, expensive as hell; I've seen $200k+
- The cars require ongoing cleaning, maintenance, mechanical work
- There's a massive customer support operation; not just people to call for support when your car gets stuck, but people who can step in and remote-instruct the vehicle.
- Expanding to a new city requires a massive data-gathering operation before any paid trips can begin.
None of this is taking into account the massive fixed costs that come with being a tech company - hundreds of $400k+TC employees, server bills in the tens of millions, thousands of top-of-the-line GPUs for training clusters.