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random_i

25 karma · joined April 19, 2024

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random_i··on Bridge to Sicily: a strategic project for Italy or a waste of resources?
Supposedly the mafia blocked this for years.
random_i··on Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs
I previously assembled & managed a team of engineers at Microsoft.

Out of 10 employees on my team, I had:

- male and female (80/20 split)

- black, white, asian, latino

- engineers in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s

- east coast, west coast

- ivy league, college and high-school graduates

That level of diversity was very rare at Microsoft, and even rarer at other tech companies.

It took a *lot* of work; with less effort I would have had a more uniform distribution (male, white/asian, younger, west coast)

random_i··on Show HN: Tetris in a PDF
Playable where?

It doesn't work in the Adobe Chrome PDF viewer, or in Preview.

random_i··on Mermaid Gantt diagrams for displaying distributed traces in Markdown (2023)
I was a big Mermaid fan, but no longer.

It is very difficult to save the images as bitmap (.jpeg, .mpng) or vector (.svg).

You basically have to use a headless browser rendering toolkit, and guess what? The images aren't consistent (different rendering styles).

I'm switching to Graphviz (DOT-based) which can look just as nice and has tons of file save features.

random_i··on Why Does Every AI Cycle Start with Chat?
A better answer: natural language is the programming language everyone knows.
random_i··on Llama 3 70B tied with GPT-4 for first place on LMSYS chatbot arena leaderboard
I asked the console

"How can I visualize a decision tree trained using PySpark?"

and it very confidently gave me 4 detailed, step-by-step answers (including code!) that are utterly false and useless. :)