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purplethinking

263 karma · joined February 5, 2017

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purplethinking··on You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project
And the only better experience than that is that all software is pain
purplethinking··on Tesla sales plummet in the UK, France, and Germany
I mean, you label ADL as a Nazi party. Then you label Musk as Nazi by association. But if you actually look at ADL they are not Nazis. Here's an interesting things I saw just today: https://x.com/derJamesJackson/status/1887425955494268997

So gays are supporting a Nazi party?

purplethinking··on Tesla sales plummet in the UK, France, and Germany
No, are doing whataboutism and ignoring how horrible China is?
purplethinking··on Tesla sales plummet in the UK, France, and Germany
Ah yes, buy cars from an actual brutal dictatorship.
purplethinking··on Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall (2022)
Fine, time AND energy. HN is entertainment. SR feels like work. When I have an hour at night on average to yourself, I don't want to spend it studying. I've tried taking breaks at work to do it, but you need those mini breaks at work to be a bit unproductive as well. I can't be "ON" 100% of the time, I need rest.
purplethinking··on Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall (2022)
I used it for language learning and CS among other things. The thing is, life gets busy. Suddenly you have a kid or two. Spaced Repetition falls into the same category of things that people in their 20s do because they have too much time, like using intricate note taking systems, journaling, training for triathlons and being really into artisanal coffee.
purplethinking··on Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall (2022)
I've done the whole spaced repetition and Anki thing, realized that if it's boring, you won't learn as well, and you won't stick with it in the long term, once you miss a week and suddenly you have 863 reps to get through to catch up. Instead, read stuff you're interested, apply it in your work, learn mostly Just In Time for when you need it. Learn by doing.
purplethinking··on Tesla Reported Zero Federal Income Tax on $2B of U.S. Income in 2024
An interesting thought experiment what would happen if we treated people as corporations. I guess we'd have to raise income taxes quite a bit to make ends meet, as most people spend everything they make.
purplethinking··on More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
Too much competition is bad for innovation since it leaves no room for exploration.
purplethinking··on Ask HN: Can we just admit we want to replace jobs with AI?
Yes, of course. But it's also inevitable and overall good. If we stagnate then we are headed towards certain doom via climate change, nuclear war, an asteroid, a vulcano eruption leading to cooling and crop failure or a pandemic. If we are to survive and thrive long term we need to become true masters of our environment, and that means we need to be smarter, stronger and more productive.

I think this is my main disconnect with the pessimists, I don't see "stop AI progress" as a valid option anyway.

purplethinking··on Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
Teachers in most countries are, at best, mid-wits with no practical or real world experience. I know teachers who barely passed math in high school who are now match teachers. It's like a basketball teacher who went to "Basketball Teaching School", who's never played basketball in his life, teaching kids how to play basketball.
purplethinking··on Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
The fact that you believe the ultra rich conspire to control and abuse the uneducated shows that you are part of that group of average people parents want their kids to stay away from.
purplethinking··on Training AI models might not need enormous data centres
> they ingest far less data

True in terms of text, but not if you include video, audio, touch etc. Sure, one could argue that there is much less information content in video than their raw bytes, but even so, we spend many years building a world model as we play with tools, exist in the world and go to school. I don't deny humans are more efficient learners but people tend to forget this. Also, children are taught things in ascending order of difficulty, while with LLMs we just throw random pieces of text at it. There is sure to be a lot of progress in curriculum learning for AI models.

purplethinking··on Pushing the whole company into the past on purpose
No no, the guy is definitely sending the company back 50 years, to a time when free speech actually meant something, and when a single party didn't control 90% of all media outlets, social media, institutions and controlling policy at most Fortune 500 companies.
purplethinking··on Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs
Wow
purplethinking··on Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs
Must be the worst in Universities where there is no reality check in the form of having to make a profit (well, maybe decades later when the reputation craters). I can't imagine trying to be a white man in the humanities today, you've got no chance.
purplethinking··on Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs
A few small holes will not sink the aircraft carrier, but eventually there will be enough holes. See Disney.
purplethinking··on Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs
I can tell you that my change in political leanings, from a pretty far left stance to a center-right is based on personal experience. What you see happen in reality far outweighs what people claim online.
purplethinking··on Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs
DEI has not been only for show, I know for a fact that being "diverse" has been a huge benefit in job search for the past 15 years. If you're a "woman of color" in tech you've been basically guaranteed a job, no matter how good or bad you actually are. I've been on several teams where the higher ups demanded we hire women because we were not diverse enough. Various grants and investments require a certain ratio etc. There's no point in denying this, this is what DEI has been pushing for, and this is what happened.
purplethinking··on I am rich and have no idea what to do
There's also a difference between saying you work at $FAMOUSCOMPANY and knowing it's true, it gives you a kind of confidence that you don't have if you say "I'm the CEO of my own startup" or something like that. I think actually "I retired early, working on some of my own projects" might work, but all sorts of problems creep up when money is involved like that, especially with family.
purplethinking··on I am rich and have no idea what to do
You mean, what will happen when we get to Episode 5: The Deep State Strikes Back?
purplethinking··on I am rich and have no idea what to do
I took 1.5 years off to work on an open source project (also because I was struggling with health issues), and the hardest thing was describing what you're doing to other people. I thought I was "above" social status, that it wouldn't affect me, but it did. I was essentially unemployed, that's how it felt at least. It's so much easier just saying "I do X for a living, I work at company Y". It means some company thinks you're good enough to pay good money for.
purplethinking··on I am rich and have no idea what to do
But why did you need to distance yourself from others? Or was that just a consequence from your other lifestyle choices?
purplethinking··on I am rich and have no idea what to do
Almost at that point myself. Thinking about doing another year or two to save up an additional buffer, and make sure we're not right before another 2008-like event before I pull the plug. Start my own company, maybe make some money, maybe not. I'm tired of the grind. I'm tired every single day, and there's no time or energy to try to fix it. At this point I just want to be left alone, in peace and quiet...
purplethinking··on GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
Well, you seem to have your head screwed on right, but here's my big disconnect: I get that you don't trust what Elon says, he's been wildly optimistic and sometimes misleading. But what does that have to do with objective reality? Would the moon landing had been less impressive if NASA had promised to land on Mars? I don't get why we have to anchor what we find impressive on what Elon promises or predicts. To me that's irrelevant.

As for the most advanced AI driving system, yes you could argue Waymo is more advanced, it's certainly more complex. By most advanced I mean that it's fully end to end, and this is a very new development in AI and robotics (which I work with). It's actually a much simpler architecture than other systems. But as we've seen repeatedly, what tends to win is simple models with a ton of compute and data.

As for V13.2, it won't be perfect, but it's also not the final version. It's approaching feature complete, and we've seen it handle snow covered roads at the very least. Rain hasn't really been a problem for recent versions. In my view, weather is mostly a matter of data collection at this point.

purplethinking··on GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
Have a look at V13.2 and tell me they "underdelivered". This is the most advanced AI driving system in the world. It's essentially DriveGPT, trained on absolutely massive amounts of training data on the largest GPU super cluster in the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeNKYRWGgBc

Just because Elon was optimistic in 2017 doesn't make this any less impressive.

purplethinking··on GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
Omar is a fanboy yes, but AIDRIVR and DirtyTesla have been openly criticizing FSD for years and show all the problems openly, now waxing lyric over the latest version. Omar, while sometimes cherrypicking videos, has reportedly had 1 safety critical intervention in over 1000 miles of driving in SF and LA.
purplethinking··on GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house
Tesla is a distant first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYlQjINzO_o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoZhER_-nhg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeNKYRWGgBc

purplethinking··on What we know about CEO shooting suspect
[flagged]
purplethinking··on My second year without a job
That escalated quickly! I think biology has probably shaped us to worry about different things. As you say, I think it's probably that women look for a mate that can provide a good environment for raising kids. There's also the status aspect. Men are also status sensitive but it seems like they are much more willing to sacrifice status short term in order to focus on work and earning money long term, while women want a nice house etc no matter what, and it's up to the man to provide.
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