I used to row and even the tiniest of waves could make it annoying. You'd slide to the front of your seat and try to insert your oar and catch air instead of water. Then if you overcompensated by trying to insert your oar farther in you'd catch a crab (having the oar ripped out of your control). This is on a lake with tiny waves.
Rowing across an entire ocean is absolutely amazing.
> but ultimately the only reliable way I've seen to close the gap is hire disciplined people who care about, and thoughtfully consider, what they build.
You were able to turn around a codebase that was growing its bug count exponentially by changing an entire company's hiring practices?
I really don't believe in the "just don't be stupid" or "don't hire stupid people" approach to things. If it works, it only works at a small scale and once things become urgent enough, things fall apart.
> The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it.
I was on a platform team and I had a constant backlog of bugs (introduced by others) that I was working on and the two most impactful things for preventing bugs were Typescript and Cypress (playwright-like testing before playwright).
I've dealt with many shitty code bases and the only way that worked for removing bugs was automation. It didn't matter how many bodies you threw at the problem.
> Then why are you saying you have so many annoying bugs in the Zig code? What happened to the test suite being sufficient to catch everything?
You can't use tests for trying to catch use after frees and other memory bugs for the same reason you can't use unit tests as a replacement for type checking, the combinatorial explosion of possible inputs into functions makes unit testing types across an entire project impossible.
Anyway, Jared donated $60k a year to this project and tried to resolve this in the most diplomatic way possible and still got personally attacked. The lesson from this article is don't donate to the Zig project because if you migrate away from it they will try to ruin your reputation.
This is just another example of the bitter lesson. In a year a model will come out that will make none of these model specific optimizations you made matter.
> I understand the arguments for a margin collapse, but I don't see any historical analogues. It seems that enterprises will pay top dollar for service guarantees, integration, and someone they can sue.
Intelligence has diminishing returns, the analogues are with humans. It's a waste to hire Albert Einstein for $X million to operate the cash register in a gas station.
Artificial super intelligence will not have many customers.
I'm a big fan of jolt because they have a more incremental way of snapshotting physics state which really reduces the amount of serialization and memory you have to do if you want to implement deterministic netcode.
You just need to build back up to high intensity training over time by consistently exercising and pushing yourself. Injury comes from pushing yourself too hard too soon. Unless you are approaching 50 (and even then) you can recover most of your fitness from your early 20s.
Microvms are better for the VM provider. They use less memory and have a smaller attack surface. Also starting in 100ms means you don't need to add a bunch of async machinery when launching the vms.
The CEO of Anthropic himself has said AI is like a nuclear bomb when justifying export controls on Nvidia chips. How many private companies control nuclear bombs?
Company performance doesnt follow a uniform distribution where each company is as likely to overperform as any other. Selling companies that are run well because their stock went up is a great way to miss out on a lot of money.
People are constantly talking past eachother when they discuss this. Is there even a concrete definition of consciousness?
When people talk about consciousness it's more than just self-awareness. It's self awareness + sensory stimulus + emotions + some level of intelligence.
Now onto AI: I don't even think it's self aware. Notice how if you ask an AI to estimate how long a certain task will take, it estimates arbitrarily long times. It has no understanding of its own capabilities until the prompt triggers them. A self aware LLM would understand it's an LLM, it would understand what LLM's can and cannot do and what they are good and bad at. It wouldn't tell you a refactor would take 1 week when an LLM can do it in an hour.
Did slowing down factory build-outs stop globalization from gutting the midwest? I think there are direct parallels here. We either automate ourselves or someone else will automate us and we will have no control.
Personal site: https://vmg.dev