benogorek's comments

Not saying it's AGI but I haven't seen agents running in parallel before. Still can't figure out how to make one subagent call another. Code: https://github.com/baogorek/Miscellaneous/tree/master/ai/cla...

Funny I was worried that Thinkpads might be "made for Windows" and not as compatible with Linux, but you're saying it's really the other way around. Well, I'm glad Windows is off my new machine.

Maybe more intersting than the Thinkpad is how bad GPT-5 was at giving advice in this situation. Gemini was incredibly helpful.

I think you're right and that two Christmases and two Easters and almost 700 days is enough time, but there is the perspective out there that the 2-year mark is when you've finally learned enough to be productive and the 3rd year is when you're actually running on all cylinders.

The LinkedIn badge was satire, but I did some consulting in 2019-2021 and my employement history got a little fragmented. I thought it would be a good signal to a future employer that could play nice for a couple of years in a standard corporate environment.

But that signal came with a cost.

I don't have much advice for you but I can tell you the statement, "I would feel sick at my stomach just looking at code in the morning" resonates quite strongly.

I just got laid off last week and was looking forward to taking some time, but someone last night strongly advised me not to wait as Spring is hiring season. I should probably start looking.

I'll tell you what I really hate, is when you get short on vacation during a burn out period. Then you really see how trapped you are.

I think a mistake I've made is sticking things out because I wanted to get my 3 years in. That's a long time for a LinkedIn badge.

I built a free Chrome extension for Desktop users of X / Twitter who enjoy the platform but want to control how much time they spend on it. It's called XCoach, and it allows users to create timed sessions and see their minutes spent on X that day and through history.

If you'd rather read about it than watch the video demo, I wrote a Medium article: https://medium.com/@baogorek/xcoach-a-chrome-extension-for-a...

Though it's completely free, I'm having trouble getting users. I'd really appreciate any ideas.

I'm also wondering whether it would make sense to create a "Coach" for other platforms on desktop as well. I learned that some people primarily use TikTok on desktop, which surprised me (well, one person, who is a creator).

A competitor to TI - which has been able to sell 1992 technology for the same price for three decades - is definitely a good thing.

So is it fair to say that with tea relative to coffee, you get all the cognitive benefits and none of the arousal downsides (e.g, anxiety)?

I just released Version 1.1.0 of the datascroller package for Python, the first version that automatically fits the portion of the data set to the terminal window. See it in action here [on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mewJAcurJPg). Even if you're not a Python user, you can still benefit from the `scroll` binary to quickly skim CSV files while in the terminal. Hope you like it.

Yeah if you were to discretize it, then you'd get random walks with the only difference being the variance of movement from the last point. Wish I could find this one source that talked about continuous time noise processes - it was pretty interesting. If you assign a random variable to every point t on a continuum, it's not a real process (in terms of the definitions set forth in Measure Theory), so you have to use other methods to define them, like limits of discrete processes.

For 1-d time series analysis, the Autoregressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average is the apparent analog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoregressive_fractionally_in.... "In a fractional model, the [differencing] power is allowed to be fractional, with the meaning of the term identified using the ... formal binomial series expansion"

There's a lot of math for a Wired article. I'm interested in challenges to the assumptions.

Well said. I feel that documentaries, etc. hand-wave away abiogenesis as it's just obvious that it happened, but there's this elephant in the room regarding the question of "why?" Great, you're a puddle of RNA compounds, all 4 in fact. Just sitting there. A puddle.

Looks like a good overview but I'm surprised it didn't cover process control charts, since they are easy to make and specifically for detecting the situation where the world has changed in a meaningful way (e.g., a machine is malfunctioning). The book "Understanding Variation: The key to managing chaos" by Donald Wheeler has a cult following and exalts control charts in the business and manufacturing world. Parts of it are a little goofy but I do think it does a good job making a simple tool useful for practitioners.

I knew someone who loved that book and taught corporate workers to throw literally all data into control charts. For instance, instead of doing a t-test, just string out the data in order of the classes and see if the points go outside the lines. I thought it was lazy, but if you're going to have one tool then I guess you could do worse than the control chart.

Good description of this particular lifecycle. I'm new to Hacker News and I remember reading (when I joined) about how the platform is taking steps not to become too hip for its own good.

It's mentioned below but boy did Agile fall into that trap. I now cringe when I hear the word.

It sounds like Six Sigma is also in a self-destructive part of the cycle.

"Stimulation to the the posterior parietal cortex facilitated numerical learning, whereas automaticity for the learned material was impaired." Fascinating.

Apparently this works on healthy people as well (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5592297/). "it was proposed that use of emerging brain stimulation techniques might also enhance physical and mental performance in sports." Anybody...want to try it?

In 2011 I was buying a Ford Mustang and I had to make the decision whether to upgrade to the V8 engine. It was $10K more (+ extra fuel) and the V6 already had 300+ horsepower. I just couldn't justify it.

Eight years later, the car runs great, and it still even gets some complements. I never once needed any extra power! But when someone asks me, "Does it have the V8?" I have to tell them, "Naw, it's just the V6."

At the Ford dealership, you're paying $10K for nothing else than to be able to tell people, for the next 8 years, that you bought the V8. And it might just be worth it.

That's advice on whether to get your PhD, by the way, but it's a few more than 8 years.

As someone who once got stuck in an intersection after flooding a '79 Monte Carlo's carburetor while deciding to go on red, I'm with you on fuel injection. But I could see the counter-argument that something that makes an experience nicer is not radical innovation. That old junker got me where I need to go for a while.