nathan_douglas

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2 months agodiscuss

Same. I'm also a big fan of the wild poster [1], too.

[1] https://eblong.com/infocom/maps/zork-1-poster.jpg (big)

2 months agodiscuss

As a side note for anyone who sees this, I received an unsolicited email from "Harold Anderson" ([email protected]) but signed "Chris", trying to get me to buy an AI service (nspire.ai).

nspire.ai 's company page [1] lists as their head of sales "Chris Kinnard". Perhaps this is coincidental. Perhaps nspire.ai, and their head of sales, has nothing better to do than to spam people. Doesn't say much for the quality of their product.

Anyway, I wanted to share this scummy, shitty, spammy behavior, just in case anyone now or in the future happens to Google™ Theo, nspire.ai, AI career coaches, etc.

[1] https://nspire.ai/company/

2 months agodiscuss

    Location: Ohio
    Remote: Yes
    Willing to relocate: No (but see below)
    Technologies: Kubernetes / Terraform / Ansible / Serverless / AWS / Rust / Bash / PHP / Python / JS / TS / C / Clojure / etc, happy to learn more
    Résumé/CV: https://ndouglas.github.io/resume/resume.pdf
    Email: See résumé
    Site: https://darkdell.net/

I'm a generalist software engineer with most of my experience (14YOE professional) in backend, platform, infra, and DevOps stuff. I'm currently employed and love where I am and what I do, but I intend to relocate to the EU in 2028 and my job (federal contracting) is incompatible with that goal.

I'm very interested in deep learning, formal verification, and compliance automation, but also artificial life, complexity science, robotics, cybernetics (as in Beer), computational social sciences, network science, transit, city planning, etc.

I use Claude Code happily at work, as directed, and seen significant (though not unqualified) productivity gains. I've used it to varying degrees on different personal projects. I'm avoiding it now on personal projects (to retain and build skill). I can work anywhere along that spectrum.

I enjoy learning about what other people are working on, so even if you're not hiring or not interested in hiring _me_, I'd love to connect. I've had some genuinely transformative conversations with people I've met on HN, and I'd love to have more.

*EDIT*: I mean "I'd love to connect" IF you're not just trying to sell me something - especially your shitty AI résumé- or interview-prep services, you hacks.

2 months agodiscuss

Good idea!

On another note, I dig your box of cards. I've recently re-encountered the Commonplace book [1] idea in multiple places (and when two events pertaining to the same object of inquiry occur simultaneously, I always pay strict attention), and this is kind of a similar idea.

I've had wikis before but they always became more about the engine / storage / infrastructure / etc, and I like your lightweight vision.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book

3 months agodiscuss

Are you finding the French decks helpful? I'm also trying to learn French (not using spaced repetition _per se_ but Pimsleur [which does use spaced repetition, really], InnerFrench, and reading [currently reading _Le Trône de fer_]).

3 months agodiscuss

FSRS is really cool. I'm trying to use it and a modified flashcard system to learn more abstract computer science and higher math. I hadn't considered it as a way of learning Chess - that's really interesting. I'm thinking about expanding my system to cover ear-training, birdsong recognition, a few other things like that.

3 months agodiscuss

I ended up giving up on it because my right shoulder is damaged from rheumatoid arthritis. Go where I could not, anon291. May your reeds be clean and your bellows free of mildew.

3 months agodiscuss

Really dig the sound of the first one, though all of these are really cool.

3 months agodiscuss

You're probably good if:

    - you're actually listing a job
    - the job pays money
    - the job pays a sane amount of money for the region in which you're hiring
    - you're actually trying to hire someone for the job
    - you don't demand they jump through stupid hoops like write an essay about Stendhal's views of modernity or your favorite unrolled loop from the GNU standard library
    - you don't come back every month for the next three years advertising the same job without hiring anyone for it
    - the business model isn't obviously delusional ("we're going to feed the global poor with AI, we just need to, uh, figure out some niggling little details")
    - you reply to inquiries and applications

3 months agodiscuss

Every day we stray further from the light of our lord and savior, Dr. Nicole Forsgren...

3 months agodiscuss

If you run it in a cluster, does it become a Lemon Party?

3 months agodiscuss

There are no incentive structures (besides possibly "posterity") to encourage anyone to see past their noses. In fact, hardly anyone at any level of any organization, public or private, is able to operate with a real longterm, sustainable outlook. They'd get shitcanned for trying to plan ahead, even if they were intellectually equipped for that.

3 months agodiscuss

That's actually blowing my mind. Thank you so much for making this comment.

3 months agodiscuss

@#$% that's impressive. A little above my budget. I appreciate your response. I read some of your other comments and will follow your career with interest.

3 months agodiscuss

lol, yeah, that's an excellent example.

I wish I had a stronger background in behavioral economics/psychology or some good connections in academia. The "instantly stop playing" thing seems really extreme and thus _really_ interesting. I'd expect people to think "nah, screw you buddy" but not leave entirely.

Unfortunately, while I follow a number of people on LinkedIn who work in the computational social sciences area, I'm not aware of any of them that actually follow me. I'd love to get their opinions on it but most of them are I think more in the area of economics than psychology or social psychology.

3 months agodiscuss

What's your GPU setup like?

I'm doing a vaguely similar thing - I have a 10" rack minilab [1] and I've vibe-coded an MCP server that runs in the cluster to introspect, etc, but the main longterm goal is to set up some ML pipelines and maybe work toward formal verification via TLA+ or smth. (_not_ vibecoding that... I'm thinking of moving into AI formal verification or compliance automation as a career move.)

I have a separate amd64 server with an RTX 2070 Super - which is obviously old and low-powered. Useful for some general ML stuff, but I don't think it's sufficient to run any non-trivial modern LLM.

I'm thinking about upgrading that GPU, but haven't committed to it or even really thought that hard about it.

[1] https://clog.goldentooth.net/

3 months agodiscuss

Ah, I think there was a German word for that idea, right? Lebensraum?

3 months agodiscuss

My guess would be that they're in a profit vs. loss mindset and thus less inclined to be charitable, community-minded, etc. You're basically forcing them to reason purely selfishly and then wondering why they don't donate.

For instance, I wonder if (all other things aside) Nicky Case would have the same problem with Parable of the Polygons ( https://ncase.me/polygons/ ).

I think this is distinct from the cognitive vs. emotional empathy issue you raise.

3 months agodiscuss

Oh man, that's super cool. I wonder if techniques like this will be used to investigate other games, possibly contributing to a sort of "family tree" of games kind of like the ones we have for linguistics with conjectured languages like proto-indo-european, etc.

3 months agodiscuss

Superpowers + worktrees works really well for me. Superpowers works well at building comprehensive plans for implementing large features or refactors, and asks the questions up front, and then worktrees provide a safe place to actually perform that work.

It's not perfect; I've had some issues with Claude Code forgetting where it did things ("oh... it's not working because I'm not in the right directory"). I think it needs some architectural tweaks to function more reliably.