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marshmallowmad's comments

marshmallowmad | 2 years ago | on: From deep to long learning?

I don’t quite understand why context length needs to keep growing. It seems to me like many tasks (e.g. customizing your LLM on your own data) would benefit from the model doing some sort of sped up fine-tuning on any prompt that gets added. That way we don’t have to find all these hacks to find the most relevant context and repeat the same info in prompts. Curious if anyone has insight here as this has caused me some confusion lately!

marshmallowmad | 3 years ago | on: Turn your best programmers into managers

How does a non technical manager know who is doing bad or good work? I wouldn’t want to work on a team where the person in charge of my compensation can’t understand if I’m doing decent vs. great work. Leads to the best folks getting frustrated and leaving over time. Mediocrity is all that will remain if manager’s can’t understand the work their team is doing and the obstacles they face.

marshmallowmad | 3 years ago | on: “Laws” of software estimation for complex work (2021)

I don’t agree that trying to estimate things is bad as the author suggests. If you are perceptive and want to get better at it, then there’s a decent chance you will. Estimates also help us timebox work. They can help us give an objective view of when we should start exploring functionality tradeoffs. This article sounds like a lot of whining about not wanting to do something because it’s difficult.

I will say I think that holding people to estimates is not fair because it doesn’t necessarily correlate with productivity/value added. When asked for estimates my general rule is: take a conservative estimate and double it.

marshmallowmad | 3 years ago | on: Advent of Code 2022 is nigh

First day was a pretty fun start. Just heard about this for the first time this year and going to give it a go.

Tangential question - why does the HN crowd hate these types of questions in interviews but apparently likes to do them on their own time? Different folks answering to different posts? Honestly curious.

marshmallowmad | 3 years ago | on: The fall of Sam Bankman-Fried is crypto’s Enron moment

It appears that he may have upped his dosage. And him acting like he can recover is from the drugs. To act like this after clearly committing crimes visible by tens of millions of people, and just getting torn apart for it online. I wish I was this confident!

marshmallowmad | 3 years ago | on: Body Doubling

And I respect your view that generally workers are more productive at home. We can agree to disagree there. Also, work commutes in traffic are indeed silly.

This post is about body doubling, which happens far more in offices. That is a fact. Your reply makes it seem like that’s not the case. But, I agree with your gripes about in office work, which is why I work from home :)

Edit: my point is that what’s best for you, me, and other individuals may not be best for organizations. Do I care about organizations more than myself? No, but it’s at least something to recognize because I still care for some of them.

marshmallowmad | 3 years ago | on: Body Doubling

I agree with you that productivity for managers versus programmers is different, but my view is that the majority of workers do more work in person and people actually really enjoy being productive! The “body doubling” that goes on in offices is IMHO an underestimated phenomenon, especially for new employees coming into the workforce. For remote work to be a permanent choice, I think we need to be a bit more honest about the benefits of being in-office. Giving employees the choice is very important to me, just trying to give my perspective.

marshmallowmad | 3 years ago | on: Body Doubling

I think this is the reason why in-person work environments will be more productive over the longer term for any larger organization. Not saying I’m against remote work, as I actually prefer it myself.
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