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llmthrow103

101 karma · joined March 7, 2025

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llmthrow103··on Attention is your scarcest resource (2020)
I'm mid-30s, never did anything to accelerate my career, and have already reached a point in my career that I'd be happy at if I stopped climbing here. I also can eat 3 meals per day with my family because I work from home and I have multiple athletic and intellectual pursuits.

Speedrunning a career at the expense of living the rest of your life just seems psychotic to me.

llmthrow103··on Scientists may have found a way to eliminate chromosome linked to Down syndrome
People have an aversion to the word "eugenics" because it's often connected to atrocity propaganda from World War II.

I'm not suggesting that every country should have genetic purity tests and policies on the level of Israel, just that we should understand that policies affect what kinds of people are more likely to be produced.

llmthrow103··on Scientists may have found a way to eliminate chromosome linked to Down syndrome
I understand where they're coming from, but I believe it comes from a place of local and specific concern (the child with Down's syndrome) and not the wider impact.

The way I think about it; 10-20% of known pregnancies (and a larger number of all pregnancies) end in miscarriage, the majority of which are due to genetic errors and chromosomal abnormalities that, unfortunately, mean the fetus wasn't viable to begin with.

While some genetic defects don't kill the baby in the womb, the resulting baby is not healthy and will never be self-sufficient. Terminating these pregnancies lets the couple try again and gives the chance for another, healthy baby to come into the world, and possibly more because they won't have the burden of a many-orders-of-magnitude more difficult and perpetually child to raise.

llmthrow103··on Scientists may have found a way to eliminate chromosome linked to Down syndrome
Dating apps and services with a beauty/salary standard and long prison sentences for the worst criminals are also a form of eugenics. Many kinds of societal and political changes have a eugenic or dysgenic effect on the population, and I'd prefer to live in a society that has more eugenic policies.
llmthrow103··on Protecting my attention at the dopamine carnival
I agree that it's not a great study, but I also don't want to find out too late that it wasn't a good idea to outsource my thinking to ChatGPT.
llmthrow103··on Show HN: Ten years of running every day, visualized
Looks fantastic! I run somewhat regularly and enjoy it, but would never make it my primary form of exercise due to the high impact stress on the body and relatively high injury rate compared to other solo forms of exercise. What made you decide to make it your primary form of exercise, and to do it every day?
llmthrow103··on What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)
Yeah, great, but also completely irrelevant. Is every post on Hacker News related to AI in any way a place to post anecdotes about AI?
llmthrow103··on What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)
This post is about a specific, complex system that stretches from operating system to the physical world, as well as some philosophical problems.

What you're describing is a dead simple hobby project that could be completed by a complete novice in less than a week before the advent of LLMs.

It's like saying "I'm absolutely blown away by microwaves, I can have a meal hot and ready in just a few minutes with no effort or understanding. I think all culinary schools should have a curriculum that teaches people how to use microwaves effectively."

Maybe the goal of education should be giving people a foundation that they can build on, not make them an expert in something that a low skill ceiling and diminishing returns.

llmthrow103··on U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites
You think America can occupy a country as big land-wise as Iran with a population approaching 100 million and an actual military?

This is more likely to be the end of the American empire than an actual change in Iran.

llmthrow103··on I failed a take-home assignment from Kagi Search
Every step in the process is a filter. You can ask them not to use AI and trust, you can ask them what tools they used (including AI) and for what part, you can ask the candidate to screen record them programming their solution and forbid using AI, you can ask them about their solution in a followup interview, etc.

It's kind of up to what you're filtering for, and how much you trust the candidate at that part of the process, and how you follow up after hiring.

llmthrow103··on I failed a take-home assignment from Kagi Search
As a hirer, the kind of takehome assignment I like to give is one that:

* Can be completed in 30 minutes by a skilled programmer

* Has clear evaluation criteria, both objective and subjective

* Has multiple approaches that require making different tradeoffs

And of course, only give it to some candidates where the result will be make-or-break.

As someone who took one of these broad take-home assignments my last time looking for a job, I failed a the assignment for a job I was overqualified for because I was told I wasn't able to divine what parts of the extremely broad assignment I would be graded on.

I doubt I will be in a position where I get a job that isn't a referral for the rest of my career, but it really turned me off of these kinds of assignments, both taking and giving them.

llmthrow103··on Redis is open source again
We switched to Valkey on our Elasticache instances and immediately noticed a performance improvement in our usecase that allowed us to reduce number of instances. Not really interested in moving back to Redis at this point.
llmthrow103··on Why Even Try If You Have A.I.?
Technology shapes humanity. Cars preclude roads, roads shape cities, the shape of car-first cities has fundamentally changed how humans interact. The same is true for any technology to an extent.

Whether for better or worse that depends on one's own interpretation and the technology itself. On one extreme you have people who reject all technology after a certain point in time, with rare exceptions thoroughly considered (the Amish). On the other you have people who see technology as the goal, even if it comes at the expense of the genocide of the human race.

llmthrow103··on A single line of code cost $8000
In fact, assume the opposite unless you have a reason to assume otherwise (aka a close personal relationship). Giving strangers/businesses that you have no connection to the benefit of the doubt when they harm you is a good way to get taken advantage of.
llmthrow103··on America's cyber defenses are being dismantled from the inside
Since when has the American government acted based on what will or will not help the American people?
llmthrow103··on The order of files in your ext4 filesystem does not matter
I've been using no capitalization on short messages in chat for more than 20 years (and still do), but an entire article written in the style makes it harder to read. It's funny that the author believes in syntax highlighting for code readability but not capitalization for English readability.
llmthrow103··on Google to buy Wiz for $32B
American states wish they had as much influence on US politics as Israel.
llmthrow103··on “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
Yeah, it's really a poor quality post, but these terrible arguments and affirmed my bias toward believing 10x engineers exist and there are many great reasons to want to continue hiring them.
llmthrow103··on Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died
It's obviously not a problem of electing the wrong people. There are enough checks and balances in the system to ensure that there is no change forthcoming.