smoll

Not AI related, but I plan on having my agents use this heavily so I can review PRs in bite-sized chunks instead of all at once.

Here’s what’s crazy: by making this widely available to SMB, they will soon have enough training data to beat this benchmark —- in probably less than a year is my guess.

isn't Sago Palm (Cycas revoluta) highly toxic? i don't think it's edible...

sorry to hear that and i can absolutely relate to this feeling of losing something, of perhaps even being dragged into a game you never wanted to even play, where no one wins and everyone loses something.

the one silver lining is that it seems to have strengthened your resolve, to keep planting and keep building instead of just letting chaos and destruction stop you in your tracks. so in that way maybe you haven’t lost after all and maybe this isn’t even a bad thing, it helped clarify the things you find important in life and even inspire others (me included). thank you!

nifty tool!

> NOTE: It does not control any actual cloud resources nor does it generate cloud formation or terraform code.

would be kinda cool if it could, though

"After receiving some bad news about my wife’s family, I suddenly realized that my future life had just been predetermined indefinitely. Due to the situation we’re now in, combined with my values and ethics, my actions for the foreseeable future are already decided."

But you have no idea how your life will turn out. Something could happen that would cause you to lose your entire family. And if that happens you might even say "look, here's another thing preventing me from achieving my full potential". All the while you're dismissing the life you're leading because it fails to live up to some imagined expectation you have in your mind.

Instead of lamenting how reality does not match expectation, consider immersing yourself in your reality. Look, hear, and touch the rich detail that every single moment contains, feel what it feels like to be a person in your exact life circumstances. You will never experience this collection of thoughts and feelings in this precise moment in your life ever again.

"No such thing as a life that's better than yours (love yours); no such thing, no such thing" - J. Cole

When the operator was demonstrating "perturbations", they were reaching into the scene while the robot was very close to grabbing objects they had their fingers near - isn't this dangerous? What if the robot clamped down on their fingers?

Imagine you’re working at a startup and trying to solve a tough real-world problem by creating software that involves writing some CRUD APIs. You bring on someone to the team who says, “we gotta stop writing these pointless CRUD APIs and write compilers instead.”

I’m not trying to be dismissive, but I think this actually well illustrates the central tension between engineers who are more interested in the business problem and ones who are more interested in solving technology problems. I know that when you get to a later stage as a company you need both kinds of engineers, but at an earlier stage company you have to ensure all of your engineers are of the former kind and not the latter kind or you will probably not succeed.

There’s a character on For All Mankind (the tv show) who sounds like she could be based on her.

I wonder if that character was based on her or if there are others at NASA who came from a similar sort of background.

> I think people need to realize you’re getting a terrible deal when you give Lambda School x% of your earnings at your first job

To people who have other options, yes, it's a bad deal. But to those who have no way of navigating those options, like the people mentioned in the article, fundamentally changing your options landscape in exchange for a fixed percentage of an income bump you never would have realized otherwise is a fantastic deal.

I say this as a largely self-taught programmer who at one time considered giving away a huge chunk of 2 years of salary in exchange for a programming bootcamp + apprenticeship type of opportunity (this was a few years before bootcamps became a mainstream thing). It was extremely tempting and many times on my self-taught journey I second-guessed whether I could figure it out on my own and TBH, without an extremely high level of self-confidence in my intelligence and scrappiness, I probably wouldn't have figured it out on my own.

Yes, but this is where politics comes into play. If you're a Google/Amazon/Samsung/any big player, why would you stick to the open standard when you could just change to a proprietary standard for more lock-in and profit?

With a blockchain-based standard, you could make vendor buy-in permanent and enforceable. The only way that one of the big players could win in this new normal is if the products on their proprietary standard are better (in merit) than the entire marketplace that implements the blockchain standard.

Perhaps this is too simple of an explanation to be true, but maybe the lack of capitalization comes from people on the internet typing internet without capitalization, and then the “important publications” all followed suit eventually. Sort of like how no one really uses “LOL” instead of “lol” even though it’s an acronym and of course acronyms are supposed to be capitalized.

Based on the title of this thread, I was disappointed that the title of his memoir did not end in an exclamation mark, but then was happy to discover that it is indeed titled "Memoir!"

because you wrote Futurama and referred to it so many times in this reply, when I skimmed the thread I read the word in this post and the one above it as Futurama. it took me like 3 re-reads to realize the original did NOT say Futurama.

What made you keep trying running even though you failed multiple times at it? And had you failed even with excellent running shoes, would you have even kept trying? (Maybe you would have thought: "Well, I already have the best shoes. If I still can't get good, maybe I should give up forever.")

I initially read the title and thought this would be about why "[the origin of life, on earth, or in the universe] is the result of a series of unfair coin flips" and got almost too excited, but what the article was actually about is just as interesting! And, if true, it maybe even informs how we might go about answering the origin question too...

But necessity is the mother of invention, so we will probably invent a viable nuclear fission-based energy solution at the 11th hour, probably by someone who also helped cause the death of countless people through their earlier work[0]. I know this sounds absurdly far-fetched, but it’s pretty much par for the course for us humans.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber

Is it a pendulum then? When it’s less obvious is it still happening (and they just do a better job of hiding it from a more sensitive public) or is actual positive change happening?

There’s this saying that sunshine is the best disinfectant, but that somehow feels less true right now. It seems like you can be openly crooked in a democracy as long as you appeal to a sufficient majority for other reasons not related to your crookedness.

If most people are hard-wired to be duped, why does it feel like only recently people are getting even more conspicuously duped by their political leaders (a la Trump and Johnson)? Presumably this effect should have had a more uniformly distributed effect throughout history.

Is it solely due to the weaponization of technology for this means? Or are there other reasons for “why now”?

I had an interview question a few weeks ago (writing a JSON parser from scratch) that required me to remember that in python that a for loop allows you to iterate through not just a list but also each of the characters in a string. I forgot about that and spent several minutes wasting time trying to think of a regex-based solution before I remembered that was an option.

Why should an interview question reward you/require you to remember this? If I actually had to solve a real-world problem similar to this, I would google it, see a solution that iterated through the characters with a for loop and go “oh yeah, I forgot you could do that. Duh.” Why am I not allowed to google dumb things? On most days, my brain is focused on high-level abstractions that tie together two or more tools via disparate APIs, why the hell should I remember or think about for loops?

> This looks like an effort to bring to REST APIs some of the benefits GraphQL offers, mainly by adding extensive conventions on top of traditional HTTP endpoints.

This was my take-away as well. There are a couple of full-featured frameworks in GraphQL land -- Hasura[0] and Prisma[1] spring to mind, among others -- that enforce conventions and in exchange allow you to specify a sort_by array and operate on a standardized payload without exposing too much non-essential configuration.

---

[0] https://hasura.io/all-features

[1] https://www.prisma.io/with-graphql

If I was any more in tune with my sense of smell, I don’t think I could live in New York. Walking through most neighborhoods in Manhattan is an assault on most of my senses, smell especially.

I haven’t lived in any other large cities in the United States (only a handful in Australia), but is this a common experience for people living in other large, dirty cities or am I just being overly dramatic?

> The reduction in vaccine-preventable diseases (e.g., diphtheria, tetanus, measles, poliomyelitis, and Haemophilus influenzae type b meningitis) has reduced infant morbidity and has had a modest effect on infant mortality

It says infant mortality, which I assume is 0-1 years of age. What about the effect on child mortality altogether?

This is really great, and I wish this existed 6+ years ago while I was transitioning careers. I graduated from a "name brand" university with a Stats degree, but no relevant work experience, and no desire to pursue what most of my classmates were doing (actuarial exams, etc.)

I liked assembling computer hardware when I was younger so I ended up getting my A+ certification and started working in IT help desk, eventually doing more sysadmin work, but still felt pretty unfulfilled. I couldn't afford to take the time off a full-time job to do a bootcamp or something similar, and almost took a combined work/training gig (which would have been something like a 60% pay-cut for 2 years -- in retrospect, this was totally exploitative and a terrible offer, so I was right to be reluctant).

I told my then employer about the offer and leveraged it into a lateral move into their QA dept. After doing the job for a bit and learning the basics, I read online that people were automating the checks I was performing manually. I started spending as much time as I could (and several months of extremely late nights) learning how to code. Once I knew enough Ruby to be dangerous, it was a gateway to new and better offers until I found myself doing regular old Software Engineering. I was lucky to be given some great opportunities and tenacious enough to lateral my way into the career I wanted (at past jobs I would spend a chunk of my time unsanctioned working on various software problems that the company had, only to turn around and say "look what I built, could you give me a job doing this full-time?") but had I not already been in a field where I was working with developers and with computers every day, it would have been 10x harder to make the lateral moves that I did.

Anyway, that's my nontrad story. I think the best time for me to have joined a program like this would have been at the moment where I was doing lots of webdev side-projects but no "real life" problem to solve using the theoretical skills I had gained. It worked out for me in the end, but something like this could have definitely made my circuitous path a lot more straightforward.

Depends on if you think in purely capitalistic terms (most but not all Americans) or not (again, most Europeans). I mean one way to think about it is the sidewalk is exploitable by businesses as a potential source of revenue for people who want to ride electric scooters (and other businesses that directly grow the economy) and they can pay lobbyists who drive the engine of American economic growth (lol), whereas you as a pedestrian is hardly doing an activity on that sidewalk that directly contributes to economic growth, so yeah, in a way you are getting your walk down the “free” sidewalk subsidized.

> I wonder what exactly is meant there. Is he speculating that a larger brain directly provides better parenting ability? Or that perhaps generations ago a family with a useless gene that causes large brains also happened to have another unrelated gene that gave them better parenting abilities, and thus both genes ended up being reproduced a lot?

My guess is something closer to the former, that the two sets of genes are linked https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_linkage and there’s a direct causal relationship between the two. Therefore, it’s actually the “better parental ability” trait is the one that produces the positive result and not the “bigger brain” trait. So yes, adopted children could help falsify this hypothesis.

For ML practitioners, how much more/less difficult is this than predicting calorie content/macros from pictures/video of food? Because that seems like the holy grail of “calorie counting” apps, to seamlessly track (within a small margin of error) what your macros for the day are so far, thus helping you make intelligent choices about what to eat & portion size. Especially since those apps are great for sticking to diets, if it weren’t for all the mind-numbing data entry.

Wasn’t it just the sensible thing to do back when the definition of what people today think of as a “sin” was invented? Imagine if safe, reliable, widely-available contraception was around when they were first formulating it, I bet the rules would have been way different.

I guess we could extend the metaphor perpetually - if there was no biological clock or aging at all, the rules might be completely different again.

Maybe the page itself is the research experiment and they’re polling people/running sentiment analysis on whether or not people are buying it. So meta...

> Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left in my life to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?

Sorry for the author's loss, but crying alone in an H Mart out of bitter anguish and deep longing is probably the most Korean thing ever.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_(cultural)