aparsons

Is making more money legally inherently evil? Tax avoidance is ugly, but I’m strongly of the opinion that one must “hate the game, not the player”. Yes, tax avoidance is evil in the sense of “someone else is paying for it”, but I don’t see how that’s inherently different from profit-maximization which is a central tenet in capitalism. Different avenues, but the end result is indistinguishable. Additionally, I’d also like to highlight that Ireland has prospered through its meticulously designed tax laws.

Chamath is one of the most self-serving-pretending-to-be-altruistic salesmen to ever set foot in SV. If you were still a “follower” after doing even the slightest bit of due diligence into the man, you deserve to lose money.

I could never quite put my finger on it - but some of the best programmers I’ve worked with illustrated this. They seemed equally open to simplifying systems as towards extending them. Not “time for this week’s rewrite” kind, but they weren’t afraid of “losing” all or part of what had already been built.

Funny you mention meshes. I’ve always thought that self-organizing maps are a good model for neurons, more so than deep neural networks.

Do you think something like fMRI would have enough resolution? Can’t pick up activity directly of course, but perhaps by picking up fluid flow differentials?

Imagine the wonders it would do for interrogation /s

Why boomer? Are millennials or any other generation looking forward to paying more to avoid Chinese-made products?

Looks like whoever made the logo thought it would be funny

Thanks for the insight. I strongly suspect the COBOL compiler buyers are really just buying ongoing support and updates. Open sourcing should result in minimal revenue impact, but shared code might make it quite problematic license wise. Wouldn’t blame them for turning down that headache.

You’re not alone - I worked with COBOL a decade or five ago.

COBOL will always have a soft spot in my heart as the first programming language I learned. I did not use it much - 2 years max - but when reading COBOL it was really clear that there were some programmers who just saw code differently - in an abstract, artistic sense. It was the ultimate litmus test.

COBOL is really easy to write spaghetti code with - perhaps even the default. But some of these programmers (not including myself back then admittedly) just wrote code that came together beautifully like a jigsaw puzzle. I’m sure if given a C++ or other language with modern features, they could do amazing things. This was before a time when Clean Code (capitalized on purpose) and such were in the zeitgeist. I didn’t appreciate the full beauty of these modular, generalized, programs until a decade or more later.

I also didn’t realize that Z systems natively ran Linux. Must have missed that news. I suspect they’ll open source this soon - makes a lot of sense, if only for keeping consistency with their C/C++ work on Z systems. They are a big contributor to L.L.V.M in that area.

The anxiety is really noticeable in some people. My cousin - early 50s in age - recovered from Covid in late 2020. One of the most “happy go lucky” men you will meet, but now sounds constantly anxious. One year of quarantining may be a confounding factor. I hope we can get to the bottom of this.

From a lot of bittersweet experiences, I tend to be very wary of “drastically simple” API products. We often say APIs are forever - so it is so critical to build the right abstraction. When I saw the demo on their page, yes it’s magically (their words) simple, but it also smells strongly of an API that can start leaking as complexity rises.

Dave Cutler of NT fame used to say leaky abstractions are often worse than no abstractions, and early on, it’s often better to go with a lower-level API (for example, what Tensorflow did) because you can add a higher level one later (eg Keras) based on usage and reasonable defaults.

Heavy reliance on strings with logical meaning? Another strong smell.

Streamlit looks very accessible - which is amazing in this space, and I hope they do well - but my prediction is people will be importing “streamlit.v2” within two years.

Title should be edited to disambiguate

Author touches a number of things but two messages resonate loudly:

- accessible != easy

- having the hard work done for you != easy

The “easy” myth was largely started by bootcamps trying to make an easy buck (NPI). More power to them, because clearly a lot of graduates were happy with their program and the career it unlocked.

But working on hard problems- often the foundational pieces that make the “easy” stuff easy - is a different ball game.

I spent the last 15 years of my career as an engineering manager type role, and the people who shone the most were the physics PhDs, electrical engineers, mathematicians that had changed careers, and the people who had for example worked on early home computing (where your computer crashed multiple times a day).

We made it a point not to hire from bootcamps and rarely new grads - not because of gatekeeping, but we had much more success paying 50-100% more for a hard science candidate.

I think some of this has Python to blame. It’s very difficult to write idiomatically maintainable code in dynamic, scripting languages.

Now also consider that data wrangling is almost always highly coupled to one or more input formats, lots of index-via-literals, string manipulation, type conversions, field copying etc... I think I’d have trouble writing what others would consider Clean code in such a setting - and I’ve programmed for 40 years.

For most programming (ie - web services), no. For anything that makes system calls within 1-2 layers of abstraction (graphics programming, shell utilities, etc) it is a godsend

Can also attest to this. One of the companies I advise looked into them recently before realizing the “open source” is marketing folly. Quite disappointed in YC not doing their due diligence with them.

Slightly edited title to fit char limit. Mods, feel free to change to fit.

If you flip some NUMA switches so tasks on the other core don’t add overhead, I’m inclined to say yes. But then modern schedulers are also so low-overhead that this case really only applies if you have a hard real-time requirement - in which case dedicated hardware is the norm

Great book (as with all of Bob’s work) but would hardly suggest it as a starting point. Perhaps good to visit after a few months of programming games.

Other way around, no?

The cost to win the arms race may be prohibitive for the generators. Of course, that isn’t a problem for large/state actors

Presumably, fund A places a limit buy at price - $n and fund B places a limit sell at price - $n - $0.1

OneDrive?

Generation X has the benefit of learning from X-1. The “better” part is a given. Zero signal.

What’s more impressive is pushing the boundaries of a sport - ie, being good while others suck.

That part is not clear. From the buyer perspective though, unless I intend to use it, or the seller gives me a pretty steep discount, this is equivalent to buying “cash”... so it’s generally a bad investment?

I think the numbers may work for the seller because the incremental cost of an additional SaaS subscriber is about $0. But a company needing funding doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence to buy a low upside asset from.

It’s a payday loan for businesses from what I can tell.

I see about 10 ads a day from these guys, so some more things I observed:

- They’re trying to build a capital market aspect on payday loans - essentially, turn “SaaS subscription stock” into “SaaS subscription future” and let people trade it... except, that is a terrible investment with little to no upside. The company can go under, reduce prices, and in general a subscription worth $k is equivalent, at best, to holding $k in cash with no interest.

- So to make investors “buy”, you give them a discount. Which means, for all intents and purposes, there is interest. There is debt (where does accounts payable go on a balance sheet?) contrary to their marketing material.

Debt + interest, with your future earnings as collateral = payday loan. Plus some lipstick to distract you from this fact.

Having watched four generations of American professional sports, it’s really obvious to me that athletes should be judged by “dominance” which is implicitly based on the other athletes of the same era as a reference.

There might he a better hockey player one day than Wayne Gretzky, but I’m fairly confident in saying there will never be anyone as dominant

There is some sport-specific subtlety there too, which I’m too tired to map out right now, but it roughly goes like this: Michael Jordan was not as good at basketball as Gretzky was at hockey from a statistical perspective, but anyone who watched them knows he was just as, if not more dominant. This may be explainable through some sort of modal analysis of the sports’ talent pools - Gretzky was a ridiculous outlier.

In a weird way, MJ can be greater than WG in relation to his peers, but Gretzky was better at his sport - relative to peers - than Jordan!

There’s this weird aspect of sports that you can’t quantify, and is a large part of the allure.

Lovely article indeed . I loved the attached photographs.

I probably predate you and the author by a decade, but growing up in the 70s in rural Michigan, I did not even know what a computer was until my late teens (and by a stroke of luck at that). When our town got a second TV, it was a huge deal and I still remember that day! I started documenting my journey at [0] but have not written follow ups in the last 2 months as I’ve had to deal with some health issues.

[0] https://romlane.substack.com/p/from-sawnwood-to-software