CapeTheory

Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

I attended an Intel "AI day" in London back in about 2018, before they bought Habana and had all of their focus on Nervana (mentioned in the article) and Saffron - which I've basically never heard mention of again since that day. seems a shame; while the AI accelerators have obvious utility, it was Saffron which sounded like it might be a game-changer.

A competing research team in France almost cracked the same problem - but their funding agency said Un Oeuf is Un Oeuf.

"Buncha fuckin' nerds, don't they know I got an MBA from Hahvad?"

From the inside, RTO feels more like a way to reclaim leverage from highly paid technical employees who have become too uppity. Summoning us back to the office is about putting us in our place - but in the social hierarchy, not physically.

Most of my consulting clients do barely any work on Fridays anyway and so wouldn't mind me reducing to 4 days at all.

When it comes time to write Python 4, please just let these guys handle it.

The bad weather places you mention have largely uniform bad weather, which is not true of England - the south east is noticeably warmer and drier than the north west.

Weather is of course only a contributing factor, just like the historical influences.

Any article which seeks to explore the problems of northern England and doesn't mention the weather is fundamentally incomplete.

I've lived in every part of England, but being in the north west for the last decade has highlighted how much our mental health can be damaged by constant grey skies and rain. A population predisposed to feeling hopeless naturally leads to a less vibrant economy.

I have observed a strange/alarming behaviour when I carry a notebook - because friends and family don't typically have one, they find it intriguing and so will sometimes absentmindedly snoop through what I've written if I leave it unattended. The same thing just doesn't happen with a ReMarkable (and even if it did, you can set a PIN code).

I have a solid sheet of grey clouds over my head for what feels like 300 days of the year - would happily take some of that variability!

Education comes in many forms. School taught me about long division and the battle of Hastings, but weekends away with my family taught me about societal norms.

We hear lots of complaints these days about how mal-adjusted so many children are, but is there any wonder? They are whisked from after school clubs to private sports activities, then off to bed (or homework) once their mandatory activities are done. Some of this is because parents are terrified of being considered neglectful by under-stimulating their child - but then children never learn to just exist in the presence of events which are more important than themselves.

> Suddenly, the economy looks more like an infinite series of tiny frauds than a harmonious ecosystem.

This hits hard.

I enjoyed reading that far more than I expected, even if I did keep glancing at the scroll bar and wondering if the juice would be worth the squeeze. The meta-commentary at the end (maybe this Slate article will finally seal a book deal) felt faintly reminiscent of the end of the Stephen King "Dark Tower" novels.

Always has been

> That means your manager has to be switched on and fully on board.

Your manager also needs enough political capital to drive the promotion. This is something I have an acute awareness of, having been told for the last 3 years that I was operating at the principal level (no staff title here) but not getting promoted. Eventually my manager was forced out of the company by bullying from my skip-level, so now I'm left to look for a new role elsewhere or spend some unknown amount of time building the relationship with my new manager.

Calling it now - a leetcode-based kindergarten programme is the next big a16z investment.

Fujitsu seems to be weirdly stubborn about global commercialisation of their CPUs. I know of at least a couple of HPC customers who wanted to build systems based on A64FX and the answer was basically "...nah we're good".

> I woudn't work on it though.

That's fair enough, but would you at least contribute to the development?

Cal Newport beat you to #3

The problem is that so many people being paid for 5x8 are actually working 5x9 or 5x10.

At least for myself, I was raised with the notion that working harder would be recognised and eventually rewarded. That has not turned out to be the case, so I am seeking a rebalance.

If you aim for the stars and fail, others can remember your folly by the smoking crater you leave behind.

Amazon culture was on a downward trajectory for a while before this, but the decay really accelerated in 2022 and has only gotten worse. No amount of face-to-face contact will fix it, as there are now too few people (outside an elite group in Seattle) who really know what "Amazon's peculiar culture" really means.

Someone paid a Cornish builder to work on their patio, this is how far he got. I'm sure he'll finish it dreckly.

With the greatest of compassion and respect: America - get a fucking hold of yourselves, would you please?

> Maybe it is naive but I think search would probably work again if they could roll back code to 10 or 15 years ago and just make search engines look for text in webpages.

Even more naive, but my personal preference: just ban all advertising. The fact that people will pay for ChatGPT implies people will also pay for good search if the free alternative goes away.

Don't worry, UK Met Office are currently shitting the bed on a migration from on-prem HPC to Azure (3+ years late at this point I believe?) so the competition isn't exactly hot.

OK, to be more accurate when I say "documentation" I really mean "widespread online messaging about Nix". At least everywhere I've looked, existing Nix users advocate for starting with flakes now on the basis that it will be the new normal soon.

I like the idea of it, but the Nix people seem to have really screwed the pooch. On the social front we have tedious community discussions about whether it is OK to be funded by a defence contractor, and on the technical front the switch to new Nix commands and flakes has left the documentation in a horrible mess. I think if things had gone differently over the last 18 months we could've seen some really significant adoption, but I have no hope of that any more.

Also, the demo site is running on Vercel and the docs are written in LaTeX.

Amazon used to pride itself on behaving like a (very big) startup, trying to be scrappy and focused - but now it has very definitely joined the league of ordinary corporations.