struct

I do think the Spotify DJ has been dumbed down a lot since its launch (“a’ight, I got you. Here’s some songs for your washing up session.” [proceeds to play the same 10 songs it always does]).

But for classical music: Apple Music Classical is where it’s at, it understands the relationship between composer, work and recording.

First, I'm sorry you're having problems finding a job -- that sucks.

Second: consider that sometimes, the cost-benefit of automation depends on perspective. An example that I like to give is Ocado's automated grocery warehouses in the UK: impressive technology, very efficient, but during the COVID-19 pandemic - when everybody wanted online groceries - Ocado had to stop accepting new customers. They didn't have the capacity, and adding a new warehouse took years. The regular supermarkets hired people and bought vans, they were able to scale up.

Automation is great, but it can't help businesses adapt to novel situations. Corporate life is about cycles: the pendulum swings one way, then the other - we've just swung hard over to the automation side for now. The best strategy: know the limits of AI tools, prove your agility and ability to do the things the tools cannot do.

Good suggestions, but you should also have some formal training on how to manage people on that list - every employer should offer it, and if they don't that's an _enormous_ flag.

It's a shame that Gemini Ultra is not out yet, it seems like a solid improvement on GPT-4. I wonder how it'll compare against GPT-5?

You almost certainly don't want to handle this at your scale. KYC involves handling a lot of personally identifying information and there are big consequences if it goes wrong. Have you considered using something like Stripe's Connect API? [1]

[1] https://stripe.com/docs/connect/identity-verification?locale...

I'm going to try and learn Rust (started and failed several times already), probably by building something with actix-web

I have a Darden-signed copy - one of my proudest possessions!

It's great that the web is so durable and long-lived, but I wonder about the health of it - it's got so complicated that we're down to only three implementations (Firefox, Chromium, WebKit), no realistic possibility of a new engine emerging, and essentially one implementation defining the standard. I wonder where we'll be in another 30 years?

Yeah, this is why hosting user content scares me. AFAIK:

1. Yes - Google can safe-site ban the domain for hosting malicious content and it's difficult to get it unlisted once it happens.

2. Yes - it's always better to use a secondary domain, it just protects your brand.

3. There are cases where it's OK - e.g. when the majority of the site's content is private or substantially populated by an application (and therefore secured), or where you have a business or contractual relationship with the person hosting the content (and therefore can revoke their account on abuse).

What does Microsoft get out of this? They already have TTS and deep learning transcription, what technical capabilities does Nuance have that they don't have already (or can't develop for substantially less than $20B?)

I’ve also found the Microsoft API guidelines helpful (especially for error handling).

https://github.com/microsoft/api-guidelines/blob/vNext/Guide...

Link to the actual judgement: https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2019-0029-judgme...

It’s interesting the level of control that Uber has (i.e. rejecting a driver application based on the make and model of car, renting smartphones to run the app).

I mentor school kids, trying to get them to build interesting stuff and choose engineering as a career. They haven’t been to school in basically a year, they’re stuck at home missing their friends, everything’s upside down, but despite that - they still want to go the extra mile, show up to their Zoom calls, and work together to build a cool robot. It’s rewarding to know that people don’t give up, despite such a difficult situation.

Free speech always requires qualifications: to foster a tolerant society you can't tolerate intolerance. Where the balance is, is hard to determine. Will Trump's supporters follow him to a new social network? Will more active moderation stem disinformation and restore civil, good-faith discourse? I don't know if platforms taking a more active role in shaping online discourse will be successful, but I know that it's essential to our society that we keep experimenting to find that balance.

It’s interesting that the kids with helicopter parents had reduced confidence, and reduced perception of their own skills - confidence does seem to be a necessary (but not sufficient) thing for leadership.

It's interesting that all the chips are branded as the M1 - I wonder if there are any clock, memory or cache differences between the devices?

I always found the PS3 fascinating - it’s so exotic, so wild, so crazy that the current generation seems prosaic (but I guess the current generation is way easier to program, so...)

The paint you get in a tin varies a little depending on the batch - even if you get exactly the same colour from exactly the same brand - so unfortunately you’ll never be able to get a precise match (pro-tip: if you suspect that you’ll run out of paint whilst doing something, go buy another tin and mix it with the one you already have - it’ll be much harder to tell you ran out).

> it's almost like I've been using only 10% of my mental capacity for work (the rest was on dating/dealing with breakups/dealing with depression/gaming/...)

I think that could give an indication of what might be wrong here, I can relate (somewhat!). I work for a top-flight tech firm, straight out of school, for about 5 years or so, and for a long time I felt just like that: I focused for a very long time on achieving the next goal - passing an exam, getting into University, getting that job, and not really focusing on what that was all for, not really focusing on my personal life etc. Once I got my job I was like “what is all of this for?”

So I changed tack, I rotated positions at my job, I tried to “live with purpose”, do something with a super-high impact, and not put myself under such relentless pressure to succeed. It may not feel like you have a super-high impact, but I’d say you do - the services you run help to improve literally millions of people’s lives. Try to think about it like that, instead of “I’m not living up to my potential”, think about the enormous impact you already have. If you just don’t find the work interesting, talk to your manager about the possibility of a secondment to another team.

I’d also advise that relationships are hard, and it is OK to feel miserable when they end. But one thing I only realised recently is that if your misery extends by more than a two months, it could be indicative that you need to see a doctor. Depression is a terrible condition that’s still (IMO unfairly) stigmatised and it’s often hard to disentangle from the rest of what goes on, but it is not a weakness to admit that we all need some help sometimes. If you need an impartial but sympathetic ear, you can find my email in my profile. Good luck! :D

The last time I tried, I used vue-cli to initialise the project and it “just worked” in that sense. Converting an existing JS app might be a bit trickier though - I guess you can specify at a per-component level what they’re implemented in via the script lang attribute. So basically I would go with: latest TypeScript, latest Yarn, latest Vue CLI, initialise a bank TS project, add some basic components to check everything works, move your old app components over one-by-one.

I think the problem with all these analyses is that yes, all models are wrong, but some are useful. We spent trillions and totally transformed our society in the 20th century, not really based on much sound economic analysis (and certainly not because it was the cheapest thing we could have done), because the economy serves human society and not the other way around. Of course it’s cheaper to do nothing about the externality of climate change, but it doesn’t do the economy or us any good to ignore it. And a climate model is just a discussion point about the uncertainty we’re introducing to our future prosperity - what might happen, how bad could it be?

I’ve recently redone our work CI setup with Typescript + Vue.JS + VueJS Bootstrap on the frontend and Typescript + Prisma on the backend - it’s been awesome so far. Took a little while to get the setup right, but it’s an excellently productive combo and I’ll continue to use it in 2020.

Apologies (I was on mobile!)

I wrote a lot of (and still occasionally maintain) a library called golearn [1] which tried to bring first-class support for the “traditional” ML algorithms, but it seems that Go’s compiler and toolchain just don’t optimise well enough for Go to be very competitive on performance for that application. That’s not a criticism of Go, it’s just that C/C++/FORTRAN have decades of optimising compiler support and most competing solutions are Python sugar over a nest of such C/C++/FORTRAN libraries. Go’s also concurrent, which is nice, but we found cases where being too concurrent also cost performance for most people. I’m still optimistic that Go has a place in ML, but it’s probably not right now.

[1] https://github.com/sjwitworth/golearn

Sure! Here's a particularly big one I built when deciding whether to invest in Walmart: https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/10935

Here's another one I did to ballpark a pension plan: https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/11133

Another thing I like is that you can do simple statistical reckoning for it. For my job, I often have to benchmark something several hundred times with or without a patch applied. It can be bit difficult to put "on average x% faster" in context when the benchmark is noisy, but Guesstimate allows you to answer questions like "assuming somebody ran one run of this benchmark with the patch, and one run without it, what's the expected range of performance improvement that they'd see?" with the actual numbers that you get out of the benchmark: https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/11850

Great tool! (I’m a regular user :D)

I’m genuinely curious as to what they’re working on: my guess is it’ll have spherical wheels, a climate control system with cyclone technology and expensive air filters you’re supposed to wash every 500 miles, be silvery plastic with orange highlights, dock with a dedicated wall charger, feature a drivechain with Dyson Digital Motor(TM) technology, and cost a lot of money.

Alternative link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-10/tesla-is-...

I've long wanted something like this, basically as a sort of super-history search. Looks promising!

However, they have just merged a feature called jumbo which squashes lots of compilation units together. The guy who developed it (Daniel Bratell from Opera) reckons an improvement of 70%-95% in per-file compilation time[1]. But, it's only for the core of Blink right now.

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!searchin/ch...