zug_zug

I've noticed this for big companies, and I've noticed it for large startups that hired people who came from big companies.

At a place like that - results mean nothing, the only result is what your boss's boss's boss is getting yelled at for, and it trickles down from there. The company is likely slowly killing itself yahoo-style if it doesn't have a corner on some prestigious market, or just flailing but number go up if it does (meta), meanwhile all the products that come out of it are absolutely garbage (messenger, yahoo mail) than even a single startup engineer could improve in 1 month yet somehow the politics that be prevent it from happening at big co.

</rant>

IMO it's the death-knell for quality products (though the company may linger on for decades [microsoft]) if it's hard enough to switch to a viable competitor.

This research is one of the important studies in my own understanding of the world. I think it's the type of thing people are cautious to talk about too much because it might drive a certain type of person crazy and lead them to overcompensate in weird/destructive ways.

I also remember there's a study on how hormonal birth control (which causes the body to perceive itself as pregnant) affects these preferences too. In some ways we really are "experimenting on production." I also think there's some hesitation to talk about that a lot and come-across as anti-choice.

But beliefs must come from the research, not vice-versa.

Not as bad as "considered harmful" imo but still mildly toxic. I think the point is taking one rando's personal preferences (I'd prefer we swap the order of A and B) and trying to make it sound like something more than it is.

Do you work out?

If so creatine is supposed to help people push themselves harder and thus build more muscle. As a side-effect of intense exercises you'll create more testosterone. Increased testosterone leads to balding.

I can second this, do NOT start at 25g of creatine. If you're too lazy to read the literature a friendly AI tool will summarize it.

>> Recently, a pilot study (single-arm) by Smith et al., recruited 20 patients (73 years of age) with AD and provided them with 20 grams/day of CrM for 8 weeks [20]. Serum creatine levels were increased at weeks 4 and 8 (p < 0.001), and total brain creatine levels (as measured by H-MRS) increased by 11% (p < 0.001). Clinically, there were demonstrated improvements in cognition on global (p = 0.02) and fluid composites (p = 0.004), as well as List Sorting (p = 0.001), Oral Reading (p < 0.001) and Flanker tests (p = 0.05).

Yeah 20 patients is not a lot. I'm inferring this is a pre-post test. However some of those p-values are pretty good (.001 on reading and and sorting). Very promising pilot study but not conclusive imo.

A few thoughts

1) It annoys me whenever anybody mentions literally anything (whatever baking soda, potassium, any vitamin) you get a million unhinged comments about how this was a personal panacea.

2) Creatine definitely does stuff, that's scientifically been established by numerous studies for decades. It's been recommended as a supplement for vegetarians for mental reasons and for people trying to build muscle-mass (sort of niche). I'm actually a bit surprised how few people talk about it when it's a standard blood test thing (possibly because it can't be patented).

3) It's dirt cheap and made by tons of difference places. I don't think there's a "big creatine." It's probably like < 25 cents a serving.

To be clear you're not alleging the journal article published in Journal and Brain Psychiatry is ai-generated right.

I mean that's true but I don't think that's realistically what's going on when one model gives an unqualified "Yes" and the other gives an unqualified "no."

You can argue the study isn't as case-closed-decisive as we'd ideally like, but it's certainly evidence. It's probably hard to design a better study.

I mean I get it hits you in the feels... but at the same time... DO talk to your friends, but then use AI too?

Like I don't want to say it's a strawman exactly, because some people probably do use AI too much. But it's a really emotional (and not exactly logical) play to emotions that sort of implies don't use AI at all, which I don't agree with.

Like if you're writing a speech for my wedding, please do a sanity check against AI before saying a really crass or risky joke. Because some of us have those maybe-on-the-spectrum acquaintances and AI actually can be a great sanity check for those people.

I definitely got this sense with Zuckerberg/meta (and probably Musk too) -- it should be ironic disturbing to have people who aren't really social people building our social networks....

Some of the least-mentally-healthy people I know see human dynamics as fundamentally 0-sum competitions, and I feel like some of these platforms are modeled on that, but not all of them (youtube is a mixed bag, reddit used to be pretty harmless).

Well then it shows that these models are using widely disparate training sets and have high confidence even when they shouldn't.

Questions like "is mouthwash effective" presumably has one solid data source -- medical journals.

Though perhaps a bit long-winded and emotional, it's charming to see something so sincere still in this era.

It's not clear that this individual was fired for being too helpful, but it's been my experience that escalation 2 or more levels to report a problem is always a threat to your career, because it means you're exposing a failure within your management chain.

In this case it went all the way up to the CEO, so it's entirely possible he was mentally marked for "eventual downsizing after enough time to not raise red flags"

(To be clear this is a failure by organizations to protect their own bottom line. By not protecting/rewarding people for calling out systemic they incentivize all sorts of dishonesty by managers and directors which are the rule and not the exception in my experience. Famously there was the amazon case about how long customer support took to answer)

Title makes it sound like wired is agreeing with this label, but the article shows that wired is actually quite critical of this type of labeling.

> Meanwhile, the same intelligence center also circulated a report in March showing monitoring of constitutionally protected events and demonstrations related to critical views on technology. These events included multiple "Tesla Takedown" protests against Elon Musk’s ransacking of the US government and a “Break Up With Tech Rager" sponsored by Eject Elbit, an activist group organizing to halt investment in the Israeli weapon’s manufacturer Elbit.

Could you explain more or link a place that explains how this prevents the runaway wealth we are seeing?

Well the API is over 10x cheaper, so I find it’s much more efficient for personal projects

funny, I just changed to bitwarden from 1-password after they had a big price increase (I probably otherwise would have been a lifetime customer if it could have been a leave it and never think about it again for the next 40 years deal).

I'm not too worried, if bitwarden changes their price somebody is going to vibecode a decent enough solution for pennies on the dollar, or there's always apples built-in product.

Based on the number of upvotes I'm getting I think it's you who's really struggling to make a point.

I don't think your arguing in good faith and you are getting called out on it by a few people. So you answer first, then I'll answer -- Was the boston tea party justified? Is civil disobedience ever justified? Is breaking the law a good thing sometimes if it's a bad law (e.g. Rosa Parks)?

If you can't answer those then I think you'll have convinced me and the rest of us that you aren't even trying to make a good-faith effort to make a point.

For throwing the tea into the harbor.

By the way -- Where do you stand on throwing tea into the harbor? And where do you stand on the legitimacy of publicly discussing throwing tea into the harbor?

Kinda like saying "Throwing the British's tea into Boston harbor will only make us subject to harsher terms."

The reality is the vast majority of social progress in the last millenium was achieved with force and threat of force. I find this weird revisionist "violence is never the answer" trope recited as a fact that needs no justification to be incredibly weird and unreliable.

This guy knows exactly what he's talking about. However, it feels more like a "if you know, you know" rather than relaying the experience/data he's accumulated.

Let me just say: A lot of people think architecture is how do you build a very complex system with tons of moving components (databases, queues, scaling, reduandancy, failover, dozens of services). I think expert achitecture is being able to answer how do I correctly solve the problem using the fewest of those.

Genius-level engineering is inventing the zipper, usable anywhere, lightweight, cheap, sturdy, simple to make.

(I believe he's alluding to this by saying companies follow conways laws and essentially socially construct a lot of work to match up with the number of teams, hence creating a completely unnecessary nightmare of complexity just for the social incentives)

Yeah I'm glad somebody's talking about it. Wealth inequality seems like it will be THE defining issue of our lives (accelerated drastically by AI).

I think there are many practical ways to solve it, and would love to see more proposals out there. Instead I tend to see nihilism or division.

Uh France? It annoys me when people say this stuff is "inevitable." No, many countries have forcibly "reshaped" their government (French revolution, American revolution, etc etc) and nobody has any basis for saying it won't happen again, perhaps many more times.

I'd like to point out that all the graphs only go to 4,000 elements, which is basically non-data. Basically it'd be like measuring which car wins a 1cm race.

For small workloads binary search is slower than just checking every element.

To add to this, I think people can forget how small log(n) is... it can practically be seen as constant (as the log base 2 of ATOMS IN THE UNIVERSE is ~300).

My understanding is that nuclear should have built decades ago, and is probably worth maintaining at this point rather than decommissioning. People got emotional about nuclear.

But but solar had a 90% reduction in cost between 2010 and 2026, and is projected to decrease between 50% to 80% again by 2035. So once again, it's just numbers, and some people are being emotional again. Further evidence is that China added 70x as much solar as it did nuclear in 2025.

I don't think so... I think most of the sci-fi I grew up reading presented AGI that could reason better than humans could, like make a plan and carry it out.

Like do people not know what word "general" means? It means not limited to any subset of capabilities -- so that means it can teach itself to do anything that can be learned. Like start a business. AI today can't really learn from its experiences at all.

I feel like this is on to something. I remember earlier in my career whenever I hit a really, really hard problem I'd have an instinct to try to stare of into the far distance (especially if there's like a distant skyline) and sort of zone-out. It was like shower-thinking or almost sleeping, and then come back with a deeper understanding of the problem.

Psychology research backs this up -- I think there are studies that show students who have a break between two classes before better in both classes (it's called interference).

Anyways it felt weird to me that our work never accommodated this, I think peak performance requires tuning the environment to the human biology, not management optics.

> This post covers how we got to a place where over 60% of our pull requests (PRs) are agent-assisted

Well I mean you could (and should) turn on 100% agent code-reviews, and that's a type of assistance.

The hard part is that most orgs never made disposable environments nor any meaningful local testing, so the ability to validate code doesn't break something indirectly (e.g. memory leak, hammer the prod DB, cache values with the wrong key, etc) isn't there. In my experience AI code has several subtle bugs and is deceptively dangerous (because it can look so competent in other ways).

Or, maybe this is the cleaned-up interpretation

I recommend Wingspan for a wide range of gamers. If you don't have anyone to play with there is a very nice app you can play (steam, ios) with great music, AI, relaxing vibe.