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há 3 anosdiscuss

I have a 100% remote job, but I had them set me up with a desk in a coworking space. I just felt that being alone all day was just a lonely way to live my life. It was great at the start to have so few interruptions, but y'know we're not building the pyramids. Everything we make in tech becomes legacy pretty quickly and eventually forgotten about and lost. I think a lot of life is what happens in the interruptions. That's where you find out about the guy that goes ice fishing and get invited along, or about someone who plays in a band and introduces you to a weird new music scene or something like that. I think everyone should get to work however they feel they need to within reason (I like the coworking space vibe myself), but I just hope people aren't giving up more than they realised.

há 3 anosdiscuss

Every technical thing you know is informed by your practice in an area. There's a lot of roles where you don't even have to think about which algorithm is implemented behind your favorite sort method. If you work in a role like that for 10 years, bubble sort becomes "which one was that again"?

Engineering is about solving valuable problems. Solving some of those problems requires obsessive control over (and selection of) specific sorting algorithms, many do not.

Edit: it's also worth bearing in mind that many of the people who discovered these algorithms are famous in part for having thought them up. If data structures and algorithms were so obvious, nobody would know who many of these people were.

há 3 anosdiscuss

Google does seem to have an issue with maintaining promising apps. Maybe those would actually would do a bit better if the teams those engineers were on actually had to make money. It wouldn't be so much of an issue if they weren't smothering similar apps before deciding they didn't like the ideas so much after all.

há 3 anosdiscuss

Neither does exactly what alt-tab does! Now command-tab does what I want.

há 3 anosdiscuss

I got a mac for the first time this year. Honestly, it feels like taking a shower after getting home from the beach on a sunny day when you've been wearing sunscreen. Everything just works with no extra garbage, no constant intrusive updates, no hassle. The only issue I had was the lack of alt-tab, and that was solved by an app called alt-tab.

há 3 anosdiscuss

Or comedians..

há 3 anosdiscuss

For this kind of thing, you can use LDA to draw out topics, then use clever prompting using the results of that with RAG to create summaries.

há 3 anosdiscuss

Yikes. So they're aiming for the chafing experience of working remote, but like, also when you're not remote.

há 3 anosdiscuss

I'd say it's basically standard everywhere outside the US. I lived in Canada and Europe, and eneryone is on it. All my fellow immigrants in the US are all on WhatsApp groups.

há 3 anosdiscuss

With WhatsApp, your phone number allowed you to see everyone in your contacts that you could message on there, so you could see everyone straight away. Without that, you'd have to bring your friends along and have them sign up as well, then give you their username so you can connect.

há 3 anosdiscuss

What's your source for this? European countries are quite different from each other, and I'm wondering if your experience was only in restaurants while travelling (which is a very different experience to what most people eat every day at home).

há 3 anosdiscuss

I wouldn't, but the mindset in traditional engineering is very different to tech. After a project, they might be required to conduct a post mortem per IEEE or something like that.

há 3 anosdiscuss

I mean you can argue all kinds of possibilities and in an abstract enough way anything can be true.

However, people who think these things have a soul and feelings in any way similar to us obviously have never built them. A transformer model is a few matrix multiplications that pattern match text, there's no entity in the system to even be subject to thoughts or feelings. They're capable of the same level of being, thought, or perception as a linear regression is. Data goes in, it's operated on, and data comes out.

há 3 anosdiscuss

When I saw this I thought it was a "water is wet" type story, because this telescope is supposed to see further than all the other ones we've made. The gravitational lensing aspect of it makes it cool though.

há 3 anosdiscuss

I don't think that's quite where we're at. I think we're converging somewhere more "like the robotic tasks that a human does". What I want from ChatGPT is bullet point facts, or short summaries. With multi-agents, I want it to do calculations or pull on detailed data that I don't want to have to search for myself. With robotics, we want warehouse workers and fruit-pickers.

Humans speak to each other in allegory, with using tales that have twists and turns to generate emotions etc. It's as much an art to generate and maintain bonds as it is a method to convey facts. When I speak to my friends, often they start with something like "you'll never guess what happened this morning", and then tell me a 20 minute long story about how they spilled their coffee in the coffee shop. I would stop using ChatGPT if the responses were like that.

há 3 anosdiscuss

You're making 2 assumptions there!

há 3 anosdiscuss

Like, without that inert gas there would have to be something else. Being in a pure oxygen environment for a prolonged period has health impacts to many animals including us. Anything even remotely flammable, like paper, wood, sugar, would burn uncontrollably with the slightest spark.

If you didn't have nitrogen you would need another inert gas to make up 80% (or whatever) of the atmosphere you were going to make.

há 3 anosdiscuss

For each token, the model is run again from scratch on the sentence too, so any memory lasts just long enough to generate (a little less than) a word. The next word is generated by a model with a slightly different state because the last word is now in the past.

há 3 anosdiscuss

I mean, my world view is that you should listen to people's ideas when they've had some good ones in the past. I'm not saying we have to believe they're always right.

I don't believe in great men, but I don't believe innovation just stochastically appears either. Behind all those little steps upwards is someone who's stumbled on some kind of insight and did something about it. Sometimes an idiot can get lucky and have it work out once, but Musk has done it several times.

há 3 anosdiscuss

I'm not Musk's biggest fan by any means, but after decades in existance he made electric cars "a thing", and he drove the costs of getting to space down by so much that it makes the existing players look like idiots. He's clearly not the dummy your portraying him as. I'd definitely listen to his ideas, even if some of them aren't good.