dmartinez's comments

This is a great point.

In-person work has higher bandwidth and lower latency than remote work, so for certain roles it makes sense you wouldn't want to farm it out to remote workers. The quality of the work can degrade in subtle ways that some people find hard to work with.

Similarly, handing a task to a human versus an LLM probably comes with a context penalty that's hard to reason about upfront. You basically make your best guess at what kind of system prompt an LLM needs to do a task, as well as the ongoing context stream. But these are still relatively static unless you have some complex evaluation pipeline that can improve the context in production very quickly.

So I think human workers will probably be able to find new context much faster when tasks change, at least for the time being. Customer service seems to be the frontline example. Many customer service tasks can be handled by an LLM, but there are probably lots of edge cases at the margins where a human simply outperforms because they can gather context faster. This is my best guess as to why Klarna reversed their decision to go all-in on LLMs earlier this year.

Every time I see this argument made, there seems to be a level of complexity and/or operational cost above which people throw up their hands and say "well of course we can't do that".

I feel like we will see that again here as well. It really is similar to the self-driving problem.

Thanks for the updated link. I'm not able to update the post anymore, but maybe one of the mods can.

I enjoy riding e-bikes, for the record. Going fast on an e-bike is like having happiness on tap. I think more people should own them so that we can collectively start to realize a different way of organizing transportation and commute.

Regarding safety, when it is a bike vs a car, I agree that having more speed is better and safer for the cyclist.

But the issue is when we have a bike vs a pedestrian. I've been a pedestrian next to groups of fast moving e-bikes. It can be pretty scary. Some cyclists can feel entitled to riding on the sidewalk, which at high speeds can really injure someone if they were to crash. E-bikes also weigh a lot more than a non-ebike (up to 120lb in some cases) so getting hit at top speed is a bigger deal than a normal bike.

My overall point is that I think cyclists need to start behaving more like vehicles, rather than fast-moving pedestrians. Obviously we need more investment in biking infrastructure for that to happen, but with how fun and useful e-bikes are, I am optimistic that will eventually happen. As e-bikes become more common, I expect this to become a bigger part of the conversation.

I tend to agree with you about e-bikes. A class 3 can go up to 28 MPH from the manufacturer, and getting them to go faster is an easy modification.

For anyone that isn’t aware, a Sur Ron X is essentially an electric dirt bike that can get up to 50 MPH when modified.

This project in Tempe, AZ markets itself as the first planned car-free community in the US:

https://culdesac.com/

I’m hoping that if it is successful, developers will build similar projects elsewhere.

A mental analogy that I personally use for this is cabinets. A section of an app is kind of like a cabinet in a kitchen. Some people like opaque cabinet doors while others prefer glass. Other people go even further, and eschew cabinets for open shelves.

These differences in object and system visibility sometimes reflect specific use cases (e.g., a professional kitchen can operate faster with open shelving than with opaque cabinet doors). Other times, they simply reflect the personal preferences of the designer.

Something I've been thinking about is what happens once the market for software developers becomes saturated. I think the answer is something along the lines of blending traditionally off-line skills (illustration, etc), domain knowledge, and software together. The ability to leverage the scale of the internet is still a form of tech-thinking, even if the software engineering part is not the main focus.

I think software alone has relatively fewer problems left to solve compared to solutions that require multi-domain thinking. So for the situation you've outlined, I think there is tremendous value in blending healthcare and software, or art and software. There are people who have found a niche in blending these ideas together [0], and I think the trend will continue.

So you shouldn't despair that your kids are not interested in "tech" now. It could be that once they are comfortable with their first domain choice, they will recognize the value in tech-enabled growth. You can then be there to help them realize that value by introducing system and algorithmic thinking, as well as tooling like vi or emacs.

[0] https://maggieappleton.com/

My take is that it implements the benefits you describe for simple sites that might have less infrastructure at their disposal. It seems like you still need a node runtime to rebuild the files when the cache needs to be regenerated, however.

Serious question: how long does it take for humans to permanently adjust their sense of normalcy? There is a concept of `creeping normality`[0] that gets at this, but there isn't a lot of discussion about how to speed it up and make it permanent.

We know from South Korea that public mask-wearing is probably the most effective form of dropping the R0 quickly. If somehow 100% of Americans could get access to face shields (via 3d printing, for example), then the engineering and logistic problem is solved.

But the bigger problem is the social one. How do you socialize the acceptable use of masks or face shields in everyday public life? If enough people feel enough distress, I could see every person wearing masks, forever. If that happened, the talking points about this dragging on or immediately rebounding start to change.

Given enough technical choices in lifestyle design, there has to be some optimal solution that minimizes droplet emission while maximizing freedom of movement.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normality

I would argue that an even more insightful view of money is to go one level up to “wealth”. Paul Graham covers it nicely: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Skip down to the “Money is not wealth” section.

Perhaps Amazon knows something about planned obsolescence that the consumer does not.

Interesting thoughts. It could be that PayPal has over extended certain models for far longer than they should have. Some forms of tech debt should be resolved sooner, rather than later. It would be fascinating to know the real reasons behind the fall from grace.

Is it really the employees, or the managers? There could be dilapidated business processes still in place that even prevent the company from healing itself. An interesting take on this is the book How The Mighty Fall.

Some relevant things to know might be if they have restructured a lot, and what their churn has looked like both in the executive suite and in engineering.

I don’t have hard evidence, and certainly not every VC would act this way. There is a great episode of Startup where they seek additional funding and eventually settle on an investor with a long time horizon. YC itself is known for having a longer horizon than most.

But for VCs with an aggressive stance towards working longer, there are many subtle ways to stop supporting a founder that goes against their working culture assumptions.

Increased combatitiveness in board meetings, reduced support in tapping their network for key hires, and increased attention paid toward advising competitors in their portfolio are a few that come to mind.

The sentiment here is a response to a minority opinion that has deeper pockets than the majority opinion.

It is interesting because VC math forces a level of intensity that Basecamp doesn’t have to contend with. So in one sense, the message can be interpreted as “don’t take VC funding”.

The more obvious interpretation is that, regardless of financing, work should never dominate your life. But this is can be argued against, since some forms of financing like venture take away your control of work intensity.

The act of ceding voting power in your company is a step closer towards the work style that Jason and DHH are protesting.

There is a chance that Facebook is trying to change public opinion for the better with a move like this. Unlikely, but possible.

I agree. The superscript example is a good one. In most contexts it refers to the exponent, but in the context of a cost function that minimizes a linear regression (for example), it indicates the index of the set.

Computer languages benefit from the fact that poorly designed syntax can be deprecated (not in all cases, e.g. C++) by introducing new features to the language.

Notation in math never advances in the same way for some reason.

They were probably looking for references to 'MEAN' stack.

`tldr`[0] can be helpful for quick references like this. I never worry about commands like `ssh` anymore because of this. This is the output for `dd`:

$ tldr dd

dd

Convert and copy a file.

- Make a bootable usb drive from an isohybrid file (such like archlinux-xxx .iso):

    dd if=file.iso of=/dev/usb_drive

- Clone a drive to another drive with 4MB block and ignore error:

    dd if=/dev/source_drive of=/dev/dest_drive bs=4m conv=noerror

- Generate a file of 100 random bytes by using kernel random driver:

    dd if=/dev/urandom of=random_file bs=100 count=1

- Benchmark the write performance of a disk:

    dd if=/dev/zero of=file_1GB bs=1024 count=1000000

[0]: https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr

> Seduction is a gift, and most people in technology vastly overestimate how much of customer happiness is solvable by data-driven algorithms while underestimating the ROI of seduction.

This is a bit unfair, but keen.