throwaway_08932

I want to replicate the ROM personality of McCoy Pauley that Case steals in Neuromancer by tuning an LLM to speak like him, and dumping a llamafile of him onto a USB stick.

This risk multiplies when you have the audacity to make a joke on HN.

Got it, thank you for the explanation.

> ...a belief in psi powers implicitly supports an ideology of racial supremacy, and indeed, that's about the only explanation I can see for Campbell's publication of the weirder stories of A. E. Van Vogt.

Could somebody help me with this? I'd like to understand it.

> Sometimes you don't know the whole story. I have seen some cases where a person just can't do their job properly. They are burdened with tons of tasks and doing work for 2 people.

Never mind people who are just starting out -- I think many people on HN could really benefit from this perspective.

Also, many of them have experienced abuse masquerading as "free speech." Or, generously, they've been influenced by those who experienced it, and are holding the same stance even if they potentially suffered less from it.

Edited to say "universally work."

The "solution" doesn't even universally work in companies < 10 people.

Pinning this on product is IMO a mistake. Most companies don't understand the discipline of performance management; they don't care to learn beyond asking people "hey how did you do OKRs?"; and they substitute organizational design for performance management. This can show up in many ways, including substantially delegating the entire fate of the business to product management.

Also, I've found it a lot easier to reason about organizational issues if you don't fixate so much on "great people." More and more people enter the workforce with the idea of competence as a "ladder" being firmly ingrained in their heads. It doesn't work that way; people succeed as a function of who they are and the environment they're in. Your "smart person" is often totally useless somewhere else (see, for example: the huge numbers of FAANG-ish employees that struggle to do anything in smaller companies, and vice-versa.)

I found this entire article to read like it comes from the heyday of "only associate with people as _great_ as you want to be", which I think (a) was terribly reasoned and (b) hasn't really worked out that great, especially for the people who followed this advice.

Time for a "spywave" genre.

Threadripper is such a good cyberpunky name.

The iframers must be upset at being made the butt of this joke.

I'd be surprised if the mass-market apple hardware consumer was too worried about a potential incoming chipset change.

Nim does basically this.

Definitely. It can help a lot to get to know the details of what's going on and try to make things happen that improve the situation, rather than taking sides. There's a lot of knee-jerk fear reactions that people have to things that have never even happened to them, and they miss the details because of it.

And sometimes, the people around the problems just refuse to collaborate. In those situations, I try my best for a bit, and then go look for something else. We only have so much time and energy, and we already inherit enough intractable problems that "must" be solved to go looking for more.

I can check off the boxes in the "Is building prestige worthwhile for you?" list for the segment of companies that I care about. (Not huge ones.)

I've done a lot of "public prestige building." But the things that actually got me to this point, quickly, were:

1. Being close to the money within the companies I worked at

2. Keeping up a habit of meeting and talking to people 1-1

I realized about five years ago that I enjoy meeting people 1-1 much more than publicly writing and speaking. You can say things a lot more honestly 1-1 without worrying about who might see it one day, and it makes me feel better than trying to turn myself into a public spectacle.

With folks getting much more comfortable meeting remotely, this has become even easier. I've met some great folks who I now have outside-of-work relationships with as well. Usually all it takes is asking someone if they'd like to meet again in three months or so; and, after a couple of these, asking them if there's someone they wouldn't mind introducing on a no-agenda basis.

I also genuinely don't have an agenda for this, other than that I like meeting people.

However, I also find this opening statement telling:

> Most months I get at least one email from an engineering leader who believes they’d be a candidate for significantly more desirable roles if their personal brand were just better known.

Most of us are bad at self-introspecting about our careers. I suspect a lot of the folks thinking this way need more than brand recognition, because this perspective (to me) would be a potential sign of lack of maturity that I would want in a senior leader. (This is a complex topic, and one that I think needs to be handled on case-by-case basis rather than recommending general approaches.)