Brystephor

Sorry, why would the baseline be their rideshare drivers instead of the average population? That seems like an arbitrary segment given that when talking about safety baselines, the average driver is what someone would reference. And why would waymo want to publish their own ride share driver safety data, especially if it is presumably not supporting their point, and what would anyone gain from them doing that? If they did do that, the counter argument would quickly be "they published ride share driver data because they know it makes them look better, why not compare to the average driver?" (Its equivalent because we do not have stats on waymo drivers vs the average driver and both statements are built off assumptions)

That sounds like an excellent thing based on that last sentence. Anecdotally, I hear people talk about trade school as being much more practical compared to the majority of traditional 4 year degrees. So I am interpreting a "move towards trade school" as an increase in practicality and therefore utility to the student.

1,2,and 4 all have owners and non-owners. Are you suggesting that the parents of the adult children and the adult child should also be marked as owners?

How does the multi generational preference living theory work given the correlation to rent to income ratio? Is multi generational living preference a cause or a symptom?

A few tech specs for those who don't want to read through the announcement:

* 51 degree field of view. Stated as being like you're working at a 24" monitor.

* 4 hours of mixed-use battery life with the case holding another 20 hours

* 132/136 grams depending on size

* Supports prescription lenses, easily interchangeable/swappable

Priced at $2195 w/ $200 deposit, arrival expected in Fall.

Did the security researcher point the LLM at the blob of information and say "Find vulnerabilities" or was the LLM told to "determine if vulnerability X is present in this blob"? Confirmation of suspected vulnerabilities is a different problem from finding vulnerabilities.

Same. I've used it for debugging failed canary tests which required scripts and very specific knowledge on the canary platform that I wouldnt of ever spent time on.

I also have scripts to fetch specific database assets and forward them to slack channels so I can easily share them with a group rather than manually running a query and generating them.

I had a theory about improving a product. I asked it to build an offline simulation setup to try various implementations. The results were a bit fishy but i decided to give it a try and A/B testing is showing similar results.

And now im vibecoding a locally hosted dashboard. This one is less useful for anything specific, and more of a minor quality of life improvement, but its fun to just vibe code and see changes happen occasionally. Its not a critical thing.

I work at a company that mainly makes money off ads. Theres no doubt in my mind that the end goal is to make their ads blend into organic content and make them indistinguishable. Typically that results in positive A/B metrics. Its also a reason why influencer driven ads perform well, they seem more organic.

I have recently began driving projects with multiple contributors that are following a plan I laid out and got buy-in on.

I attempted to run the project entirely asynchronous, where we had a slack channel, ICs had their section of goals and milestones, and I was there for them to consult with, provide feedback, unblock obstacles, and proactively come up with interfaces across the objectives. I thought this would be a nice high trust method of doing things that gave people ownership over their respective parts.

What happened was one person made an AI copy of the doc I had and began vending that out to everyone else, progress was quite slow and really complex in original proposed PRs (unsure if thats AI or author doing that), people did not really follow through with their implementations and it all ended up taking longer than I expected for no good reason. In the end, I lost trust in these ICs as I now feel the need to chase them and have low desire to work with them.

For the next XFN project, I will be driving a brief weekly meeting. Unfortunately the pressure seems to be important. I think there are things I could've done better communication wise at the beginning and throughout as well, but overall I felt disappointed that I had to check in to see progress.

Meta had grown headcount by 50% in the last 7 years. In the same time frame, they tripled their revenue up to mid $200B range.

Even if every employee fired saved $500k a year, that'd be roughly $4B in a year. Not a small amount but relative to their income, not huge either

Im at a public, well known tech company.

We got broad and wide access to AI tools maybe a month ago now. AI tools meaning claude code, codex, cursor and a set of other random AI tools.

I use them very often. They've taken a lot of the fun and relaxing parts of my job away and have overall increased my stress. I am on the product side of the business and it feels necessary for me to have 10 new ideas and now the ones with the most ideas will be rewarded, which I am not as good at. Ive tried having the agents identify opportunities for infra improvements and had no good luck there. I haven't tried it for product suggestions but I think it would be poor at that too.

I get sent huge PRs and huge docs now that I wasnt sent before with pressure to accept them as is.

I write code much faster but commit it at the same pace due to reviews taking so long. I still generate single task PRs to keep them reviewable and do my own thorough review before hand. I always have an idea in ny head about how it should work before getting started, and I push the agent to use my approach. The AI tools are good at catching small bugs, like mutating things across threads. I like to use it to generate plans for implementation (that only I and the bots read, I still handwrite docs that are broadly shared and referenced).

Overall, AI has me nervous. Primarily because it does the parts that I like very well and has me spending a higher portion of my job on the things I dont like or find more tiresome.

As someone who has worked in an ad domain, 100% agree. Ads are like a dangling carrot. There's always a way to get ad gains by blending them with organic content. What starts off as cleanly separated incrementally evolves into being indistinguishable from the original product offering.

It also skews towards power users, as it allows for more ad inventory. If they're going to do an ad auction marketplace with bidding snd such then they're likely to rollout slowly to keep auction pressure and bids high enough. Expand to too much inventory and CPMs will drop like crazy.

I work on ads as a SWE at a company youve heard of. Albeit, its been less than a few years for me.

Maybe OpenAI does things different, but as soon as an OKR around ad performance gets committed to, the experience will degrade. Sure they're not selling data, however they'll almost certainly have a direct response communication where advertisers tell Open AI what and when youve interacted with their products. Ads will be placed and displayed in increasingly more aggressive positions, although it'll start out non intrusive.

Im curious how their targeting will work and how much control they'll give advertisers to start. Will they allow businesses of all sizes? Will they allow advertisers to control how their ads work? I bet Amazon is foaming at the mouth to get their products fed into chat gpt results.

And no change in exercise or other levels of physical activity, home life, work life, or other diets attempted, right?

Its awesome that youre feeling better. Its possible, but hard to believe, that its due to nothing but diet changes and if it is, then its hard to imagine that such an extremely specific diet is needed to get the same results.

How does this compare to Trainer Road?

What other resources would you recommend for learning about optimizations?

I use multi armed bandits a lot at work, and I wonder what other algorithms I should look into. Its hard to read the name of an algorithm or category and get a sense of whether or not its applicable. It seems like the general process of "which path out of N options is the best?" can be reframed in many ways depending on contextual details such as how large is N, what's the feedback latency, what are the constraints around evaluation and exploration, etc

No public write ups. What information would you want to see? I think there's two categories: infra ops info, and then product insights and "gotchas"/unintuitive but valid results.

Hey, an area I actually work on and use in production! MAB in our case has shown improvements in our A/B metrics. My general takeaways for my experience with MAB:

* we have a single optimization goal (e.g the metric to minimize or maximize). The hard part isnt defining a optimization goal. The hard part is identifying what stakeholders actually want the tradeoff between different metrics. If you have goal A and goal B, where B is more aggressive than A, then getting agreement on which is better is hard. This is a people problem.

* MAB seems to be a good proof of concept that something that can be optimized but isnt an "end game" optimization path.

* MAB for A/B testing is going to mess up your AB data and make everything more difficult. You should have a treatment that uses the MAB algorithm and a treatment that doesnt.

All of the above is for non contextual MAB. I am currently learning about different MAB algorithms although each of them are pretty similar. The ones ive read about are all effectively linear/logistic regression and tbe differences come from exploration mechanism and how uncertainty is represented. Epsilon greedy has no uncertainty, exploration just happens a fixed percentage of time. UCB is optimistic about uncertainty, and the amount of optimism controls exploration. Thompson sampling uses statistical (beta) distributions about uncertainty, exploration happens less as confidence about a particular set of options increases.

Overall its a fun area to work in that is quite different from your typical CRUD development which is a nice change of pace.

How big was the 2011 tsunami? Is 3m bigger or smaller?

Forcing reasoning is analogous to requiring a student to show their work when solving a problem if im understanding the paper correctly.

> you’d have to either memorize the entire answer before speaking or come up with a simple pattern you could do while reciting that takes significantly less brainpower

This part i dont understand. Why would coming up with an algorithm (e.g. a simple pattern) and reciting it be impossible? The paper doesnt mention the models coming up with the algorithm at all AFAIK. If the model was able to come up with the pattern required to solve the puzzles and then also execute (e.g. recite) the pattern, then that'd show understanding. However the models didn't. So if the model can answer the same question for small inputs, but not for big inputs, then doesnt that imply the model is not finding a pattern for solving the answer but is more likely pulling from memory? Like, if the model could tell you fibbonaci numbers when n=5 but not when n=10, that'd imply the numbers are memorized and the pattern for generation of numbers is not understood.

some core GCP cloud services are down. might be a good time for GCP dependent people to go for a walk, do some stretches, and check back in a couple hours.

> I've found great success with LLMs in the research phase of coding.

This is what I've found it most helpful for. Typically I want an example specific to my scenario and use an LLM to generate the scenario that I ask questions about. It helps me go from understanding a process at a high level, to learning more about what components are involved at a lower level which let's me then go do more research on those components elsewhere.

Reinforcement learning system. Currently trying to understand how to implement contextual thompson sampling and its details after doing non contextual thompson sampling. My YouTube history is a lot of logistic regression related videos at the moment.

This is incredible work. Its jaw dropping to learn that something like this is possible at all. Sometimes I wish I could work for a company whose products make a meaningful positive contribution to the work.

Do companies like this have a need for SWEs? Are there opportunities for a backend SWE without any background in hardware or biology?

Maybe a silly question, but has anyone used these in production? Or used libraries in production which are built on these structures?

Im imagining a meeting about some project design, and thinking about how it'd go if someone suggested using parentheses to represent nodes of a tree. I imagine it'd get written off quickly. Not because it wouldn't work, but because of the complexity and learning curve involved.

Do you know the name of the problem or strategy used for solving the problem? I'd be interested in looking it up!

I own DDIA but after a few chapters of how database work behind the scenes, I begin to fall asleep. I have trouble understanding how to apply the knowledge to my work but this seems like a useful thing with a more clear application.

Software engineer here with an android phone. I've never bothered to look into Apple TV because I assumed it'd only be available on Apple devices. Similarly, I saw this post and thought there may be a reason for me to get an iPhone now as I assumed this would be available on apple devices only.

No. It's a big political statement to include political messaging and plead to political figures when you shut down. Then to praise those political figures afterwards is additional political messaging.

What's the difference between the perception of a problem being present and the existence of a problem?

If you create an issue, and solve an issue, indifferent of the issue being real, you'll be credited with solving the issue. It's ridiculous at this scale

Did they shut down at the last moment necessary or did they shut down during what is likely a peak browsing time in the U.S.? Did they need to include messaging about political figures to notify the user of the reason of the ban?

I understand that there was this law. It's a political statement because of the political message being sent out to the user base. The act of shutting down on its own is not a political statement.