throwawaythekey

The sales pitch should change from "probabilistically we will NEVER lose your data" to "you are most likely to lose your data due to wars, terrorists, software bugs, someone losing the master encryption key, the government forcing us to...".

Offsite backups are sadly rare these days, and aws sales is the main reason why.

My experience was I thought everyone was aphantasic and it was a misunderstanding of language.

Then one day when I was 18 I went to the pub and played pool with/chatted up some girls for one of the first times. When I got home I went to bed and closed my eyes and could see the whole scene vividly for the first time ever. I had been drunk plenty of times before so assumed I had been drugged, told my parents and just got a nonchalant 'wtf' reaction.

Since then I've mostly assumed it's a skill issue, and in the past 15 years have maybe visualized ~3 times under similar circumstances (usually sleepy, usually sexual).

I've spent a few meditative sessions trying to train, and gotten the sense that it might be close, but it seems like it would take a good chunk of dedication on my part to make it happen.

If you accept that drugs/trauma can cause altered states then can't you also accept that some people have the altered state as their default?

Modern politeness encourages us to think of all humans as more or less the same, which I think causes a default minimization of difference mindset.

One thing that really blew my mind in my 20's was learning that asians have a different type of earwax -> usually white and dry instead of yellow and waxy. It really shocked me that I was never taught that in school, and if people are unaware of common physical differences I am sure we are largely unaware of common mental difference.

The majority of people don't reason themselves into anything, whether it's the mainstream view or the conspiracy.

There's just a substantial bias where people assume all 'new knowledge' is wrong. Probably correct most the time, but still often wrong.

> I don't think that's ever saved money.

I spent about a year as a consultant in the AWS space, visited about ~15 clients of varying sizes.

More often than not there's a single pg aurora instance responsible for 50%+ of the bill. Even worse are the serverless aurora offenders.

All the indexes and guarantees of PG don't come cheaply and dynamodb pricing is not cheap but comparatively reasonable. It really is a good product if you know how to use it.

I think people overlook the natural experience of Dunning-Kruger we all have.

You think you are good at chess because you win against your neighbour, then eventually a class mate absolutely embarrasses you multiple times and you realize there is a whole world you don't know, and before now you didn't know that world existed. Then you eventually beat your classmate before getting whomped by the beginner in the chess club and the whole cycle happens again. After this happens a few times, you should begin to find each time less surprising than the last.

To me this is the essence of DK and not really something to be proven/disproven by maths. You don't know what you don't know, and it takes some learning before you are wise enough to realize there are unknown unknowns.

> instead showed that both experts and novices underestimate and overestimate their skills with the same frequency. “It’s just that experts do that over a narrower range,” he wrote to me.

I think this is trying too hard on the researcher's part... if the data were reinterpreted such that small estimation errors are considered correct then the effect would reappear.

> Simply: Anytime anyone overestimates their ability, they will perform worse than if they had approached it with humility (on average).

Do you have a basis for that?

It seems like in life some tasks reward overconfidence, e.g. starting a business, and some tasks reward underconfidence e.g. retirement savings.

I'm not sure there is a strong bias one way or the other.

> In your link the ABC is claiming the footage wasnt edited by them.

I'll admit I don't fully understand what they were claiming/how it changed over time but they later issued an apology for the incident [1].

From what I can work out the thrust of the abc claim is "don't blame our journalists, the editors on multiple occasions accidentally did this for no reason at all and we then failed to catch it".

Then midway through the apology they pivot to blaming twitter, or at least that is the flow of the guardian article.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/sep/17/abc-australion...

The ABC are sadly incredibly biased.

A recent, prominent example is [1] where they edited footage to make it look like a soldier was shooting at an innocent civilian. They then appointed a 40 year abc/sbs veteran to investigate the incident who unsurprisingly found no wrong doing.

All of this on a topic that isn't even super political...

Granted they are still probably the best journalists in the country, but when you can't trust them to not alter primary evidence, or admit real fault when something has gone wrong, you cant really trust them for much.

For day to day stuff I still find them an ok source, it just needs to be taken with a very heavy dose of salt.

[1] https://7news.com.au/spotlight/7news-spotlight-abc-launches-...

I hired a data engineer who was unable write a for loop in their primary language (python).

The task was to write a simple sum of a list, but they had to convert the list to a pandas dataframe and then call some series of arcane functions. I originally thought this was just a preference but when I asked them for the simpler version while standing over their shoulder they were unable to do it.

They had ~8 years of claimed experience at the time and were from a country notorious for faked credentials. Turned out to be an ok hire overall (friendly, hardworking) but definitely lacking 80%+ of their supposed competencies.

> A person's total luck is constant over a lifetime

Ah yes, the much revered cosmological fairness constraint.

More precisely -> the competitors heavily subsidize which causes cursor to feel expensive.

> Recently, we purchased one of each Anthropic/OpenAI subscription plan and randomly ran long horizon coding tasks until we exhausted the weekly limit. It's widely believed that a $200/month plan maxes out at ~$2000/month worth of tokens (assuming API pricing). However, we found that the subscriptions are actually far more generous. (2/4)

https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/2064815044085318040/

In my workplace AI has more credibility than humans, so dropping a block of claude with attribution can be:

- A way to convince others of your position.

- A way to demonstrate that you did research (because experience is worthless)

- A way to soften harsh feedback.

At first I found this very dysfunctional but now I don't mind too much. It beats being ignored and/or offending someone.

Battlemage had the best perf/% and most the driver issues from Alchemist had been ironed out. Another generation or two of steady progress and intel have a big winner on their hands.

Intel's foundry costs are probably competitive with nvidia too - nvidia has too much opportunity cost if nothing else.

> Part of the interview is explaining when and why these techniques are necessary as part of demonstrating your understanding.

The slightly altered "explain when and why these techniques are *not* necessary" is much less appreciated.

>I would've expected the candidate to at least be able to talk about indexing, tradeoffs of joining in the DB vs. in the application, schema migrations and upgrades, creating separation between data-at-rest vs. data-in-flight, etc.

The problem is that many of these trade-offs only applied to older databases. The more relevant axis is about how distributed the db is, the replication type etc.

Or at least counterbalance it with

"America arms Israel to attack Lebannon and Palestine"

- Trump murdered top a top Iranian general (Soleimani)

- Israel bombed an Iranian Embassy

- Iran counterstruck Israel but relatively restrained and with warning

- Israel bombed several high ranking Iranians, especially those involved with the nuclear program

- Iran counterstruck Israel.

None of it had that much to do with America.

> "To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.” President Trump

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/01/fact-sheet-pr...

The first time founders I had couldn't keep 100% of the equity out of the VCs pockets, so YMMV.

Isn't it obvious that (2) in practice entirely negates (1)?

In Australia we recently had a proposed law to prohibit information that "potentially undermines faith in the banking sector" regardless of truthfulness.

What's the better kafka/redis? Mongo I know you can just use your favorite relational tool with JSON support if needed (PG/MYSQL)

Not sure but molotov-ribbentrop provides an interesting precedent.

Yes and to me it is a fine tone for all of 'hacker' culture if you will. Perhaps not if you were giving a presentation to your boss, but as this is a message between peers it seems fine.

If it were on x it would seem fine.

Not trying to flame or anything but what is your age?

As someone in my early 30's who grew up on message boards/gaming the language he is using is fairly mild. I think we just have very different social norms.

I'm thinking about him every day lately due to a new set of AMD GPU drivers which has stopped my pc from being able to reliably wake from sleep.

You also have the crazies that initially advocated for the policy now reversing their positions.

It was a fair bit more than that. From the left-leaning guardian

> The most worrying issue the Twitter Files have exposed is the level of contact between the social media company and state security organisations. The FBI regularly holds meetings with Twitter executives, pressuring them to take action against “misinformation”, even when this amounted to little more than a satirical tweet, and demanding the personal data of users.

Take note of the "pressuring", in line with what was reported by Zuck.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/01/the-tw...

I agree with the thrust of your argument but the idea that you need to have a really really large pile of gold sitting in a warehouse to fix it seems silly to me.

Can't they just not print so much?

Is there a fundamental repudiation to Austrian economics?

All I know about them is that they don't like funny money, which to me as a systems thinker is perfectly reasonable. At worst you would expect it to be harmful, at best to obscure what is really going on.