blueyes

Old news, damaging and speculative. MSFT will never let them go down.

Two other relevant links for aspiring business side founders:

https://sive.rs/prog

https://sive.rs/how2hire

The irony here is that business co-founders actually have at their disposal more and better tools to test a business idea without need of a technical co-founder than ever before in history. The smart ones always sold before they built, maybe with a landing page. Now they can also test simple apps while having essentially no coding skills themselves. Obv this does not work in hardware and multiple other domains where complexity grows. But the business co-founders asking for technical co-founders for an app are actually signalling that they are either poorly informed or simply don't want to build with the skills they already have.

Another Luddite take from someone who clearly doesn't engage the technology directly either as a builder or a seller.

It takes years to decades for new technologies to achieve their full effect. Factories based on steam had to be rebuilt around eletricity. That took decades. It will take time to rebuild large operations around AI.

The real trick would be for LLMs, which currently do math very poorly, to simply send "math to be done" into a spreadsheet, and retrieve the results... (If anyone is aware of an LLM that's great at math and physics, pls lmk!!)

This take is incredibly cynical and naive. It takes tremendous effort to change the basic technologies of society, and the arrival of those technologies can be accelerated or delayed by decades. To encourage a sense of complacence in the technical community here on HN reads like fatalism to me. For someone whose life is measured in decades, it matters to me when a technology arrives, and I believe it also matters which nations are the first to develop them.

A Pyrrhic tradeoff.

Notable example now destroyed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamiyan

I speak native English, fluent German and beginning Dutch. A few years ago I picked up a Yiddish primer. In my layman's eyes, Yiddish is indisputably a Germanic language. Learning it was like learning to read German backwards in Hebrew letters. I understand why Yiddish speakers would not want to believe Yiddish is Germanic. And yet...

See Quilter: https://www.quilter.ai

You might even call this moment in AI the Twingularity.

One of problems with trying to discuss a word like anger, which has lots of meanings, is that people talk past each other, as many are doing in this discussion.

There are different kinds of anger. I have not doubt that some are useful, some are damaging, and some are both at the same time.

I think one kind of anger that can be particularly damaging is cited in the parent comment here. It's a chronic anger that was formed in childhood and accompanies a person through life looking for new threats, targets, and sources of outrage. I've known people holding that kind of anger, I've also been that person at least sometimes, and yes it's damaging to oneself and others. Profoundly maladaptive. A way to sabotage yourself, your relationships and your livelihood. That's a chronic anger.

But there are other forms of anger that might be momentary, and come up when something is going wrong that should be stopped. Maybe anger is the wrong term, but I'm talking about a sense of "this is wrong, and I'm going to intervene now." Sure, that can misfire, but it can also be useful and prevent a lot of harm.

For people who like sloths, I highly recommend the Pygmy Slow Loris:

https://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/pygmy-slow-loris

In America, you can find them at the DC zoo in a shadowed alcove under red light to simulate night time during visiting hours.

You don't understand.

A lot of the time, founder CEOs decide their own salary, as well as that of their employees. Why would a founding CEO want to shorten their runway by paying MAANG salaries to themselves an others? It decreases their likelihood of success by shortening runway and burn. As soon as the funding that VCs give founders is wired to the bank, the founders are playing a zero-sum game with every dollar. Their job is to decide the best allocation of capital.

A startup, by definition, is a team in search of a business model. They're not profitable or self-sustaining. If you're Google or Meta, you have at least a chance of saying "for every dollar I pay this engineer working on ads, I get this many dollars back." And sometimes that return/salary ratio is very large, so it makes sense to pay them a ton. That reasoning does not apply to startups. That is, you earn your high salary by contributing to a profit-making product.

When your product or profit do not exist, you get compensated in options so that your incentives align with those of the business as a whole.

VCs invest progressively larger sums as an idea is proved out and risk is eliminated. I don't see any other world that makes sense. Most overfunded startups die before they ever find product market fit because they hire too many people, have a hard time pivoting, and lose their hunger.

Given the choice between hunger and complacency, I'd say founders with hunger are probably more likely to succeed that complacent ones. Earning a MAANG salary makes you complacent, all other things being equal.

Cyc is one of those bad ideas that won't die, and which keeps getting rediscovered on HN. Lenat wasted decades of his life on it. Knowledge graphs like Cyc are labor intensive to build and difficult to maintain. They are brittle in the face of change, and useless if they cannot represent the underlying changes of reality.

I didn't find this piece particularly compelling. As opposed to a thought piece, this is more like a feels piece with the usual gestures at how "technology is changing us", without hard numbers or proof. Not impressed!

Can someone tell me how giving government officials the right to control how AI models are trained would produce less political LLMs? What wouldn't they skew toward supporting the current regime whatever it may be? And why would it not be protected by 1a?

I like the idea of finding micro-habits, activities and relationships that are fulfilling.

While Ikigai may have been repurposed by the West, its new incarnation and Venn diagram seems like a pretty valuable tool for young people to navigate life, even if it's a radical semantic shift from the original Japanese. It also has the merit of trying to awaken peoples' ambition, to raise the ceiling on what they think they might achieve, and how to get there, which Anne-Marie's originalism lacks.

People may, but I am not. Back then, we gave them equipment for free to beat the Nazis.

Today, Russia buys western equipment at a 10% markup after sanctions. As Lenin said: 'The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.'

The supplier relationship in both wars is simply a symptom of the West being more advanced in quality or capacity for the parts and services in question.

This is part of a trend. Sanctions are easy to get around. The Russian war machine runs on Western parts, much as it did in th WWII.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-got-components-w...

More recently, Starlinks started to be used by Russian troops in the occupied territories.

But the difference between a US chip being used in Russian devices, and a Starlink terminal or satellite image archive being bought by Russians, is that the latter are digital services where it is relatively easy to identify the user, and which can be turned off any time!

Too great resources on the value of hardship:

Michael Easter's The Comfort Crisis https://www.amazon.com/Comfort-Crisis-Embrace-Discomfort-Rec...

A Boy Named Sue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOHPuY88Ry4

Doesn't go far enough upstream, in my opinion.

There are so many things people can do to increase their neurological energy to affect things like motivation and focus. Much higher leverage than an assessment that will lead to the plablum interventions of wellness teams.

These are great. BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits book shows how to design behaviors using prompts like "when i enter the office, i do five pushups," or whatever makes you more productive...

typo in headline "windfallf" @dang

It's would be trivially easy to scan these streams of messages through some kind of ML classifier and identify cases of extortion before they result in suicide. Once the platforms identify the perps, they can block them from the platform. I hope this lawsuit makes the costs of platform inaction so high that they build out detection systems.

When large groups of assets and securities go to zero, it always has a a ripple effect on markets across many other assets. That was the story of Bear and Lehman in 2008-9.

I don't think it does. I think it simply poses an analogy between religious activity and the other belief-driven activities that people constantly engage in, even when they are not actively attaching themself to a metaphysics and an afterlife.

The things people worship now, they don't call God. That doesn't always make them irreligious. I can think of more than one popular modern movement that is deistic, in that it fashions a god-like power out of some idea, a soul-like essence out of another. The church of the subreddit.

GenAI means we can all consume media that basically never existed before. The long tail just got about a million times longer.

She talked about physical reads as an edge and gave two aspects of finding the edge.

a) she put herself in a room with her adversaries, the other poker players, and paid attention to how their behavior correlated with their hands

b) she brought up what she noticed and was discounted by other players.

These are two excellent components of an edge:

1) primary data and repeated experience

2) watching the consensus reject that data

Data scientists go through a stage called EDA, or exploratory data analysis, where they just play around and look at the shape of data. From that, they can begin to form conjectures and dig further to validate or refute their hypothesis. Cate was doing that IRL.