harrall

I started doing it months ago and, to be honest, what the agent chooses to do isn’t unpredictable.

The problem is that different people prompt so differently.

For example, I may ask like “test different variations of this annotation on k8s pods of this service on this X cluster because it proves Y theory.”

But you know what my coworker asks? “Test Y theory.” If you were to ask two different junior engineers that, one might try random things on production and the other one might run local tests! It’s such an unguided “do anything you want as long you figure it out” request and the agent reads it like a junior who has not been told any boundaries but has been strongly told “figure it out.”

I believe the Escape Hybrid actually sold really well and was in high demand, but they actually ran into supply chain issues.

The F-150 Lightning I think was too early for its time... an electric truck doesn't work unless it's mostly for leisure (e.g. Rivian). If you are towing or moving a lot of weight, your range drops a lot.

The Ford F-150 Lightning was just an experiment... not a real effort by Ford. If you look at how much money they spent on marketing aluminum bodies or turbocharged engines, it's a lot more because that's something they believed in.

The issue with high repair cost is that you actually end up paying for it via higher ownership costs... via insurance rates. So you might pay upfront very little but every time someone has their car repair or totaled, the insurance companies have to pay for the full cost of the car and this ends up being subsidized via insurance rates.

Ford is probably going to do it.

They’re never the first but they consistently bring new major shifts in cars to the working class, without making some major compromises to the car (BYD) or being expensive (Tesla).

They:

- Brought affordable V8 engines to the working class

- Got rid of the V8 and brought much more fuel efficient turbocharged vehicles to the working class

- Made the first and a popular hybrid SUV, which is what Americans buy

- Brought the first affordable passenger aerodynamic cars to the working class

- Brought military grade aluminum bodies to a working class truck, massively increasing fuel economy

- They obviously invented the moving car assembly line and were the first to make cars affordable

Currently they’re working on an inexpensive electric car platform that borrows some of Tesla’s manufacturing ideas (but is way less complex because Tesla is actually unable to use it on their cars), switching to 48V, and trialing a new tree-based assembly line.

And it will be a fully repairable car unlike BYD’s which transfers all impacts to the battery frame, which is safe and saves a lot of money but makes the cars impossible to repair. (BYD started as a tech company so they tend to view things to be disposable, like smartphones.)

Ford watches all the other carmakers add new features and then figures out how to make it affordable and then they spend massive marketing campaigns to normalize it with regular people.

I think evil is an an artificial and subjective construct and therefore intelligence will somehow do something “evil” by someone’s or something’s standard.

But at the same time, I think it is an important construct because it prevents groups from descending into absolute chaos, which encourages the survival of the species.

As a construct, I see the concept of evil as the way that humans classify activities that cause psychological harm and those triggers are somewhat biologically and culturally shared.

And there seem to be people that don’t seem to “see” evil (e.g. serial killers), but once again I think it’s just they don’t share some biological trait with the rest of us (which doesn’t justify their actions either).

So despite having the opinion that evil may just be a construct, I still find it important because (1) I am selfish and don’t want to be psychologically harmed and (2) I am not selfish and am vaguely interested in the survival of the species.

Very few commercial and industrial products use a Pi though.

Pi - 73 million sold

ESP32 - 1 billion sold

STM32 - 13 billion sold

For every 1 Pi sold, there’s almost 200 STM32s sold.

No there are topics that are not important enough to bring up (yet) so they don’t warrant their own meeting, so you need a soft place to bring them up with low expectations.

A 1:1 is like asking to get lunch with someone — you don’t have anything specific to talk about but it puts you two together to talk about random things.

Unless you meet new people by exchanging printed lists of your interests and activities and marking which ones you are interested in, but the rest of us don’t tick like that.

I just don’t think your opinion is shared by most people.

Gmail is the most popular email service in the world, people are always telling me how they prefer Google Docs over everything else and their only competition is Microsoft.

Yes it’s free but there is no other service that I rather switch to, and I actually pay for additional storage.

I have standup every day so my manager knows what I am doing so my 1:1s are:

- General sentiment about problems with the team and company that bother me but that I don’t have a solution to yet or decided how to bring it up with the team.

- Fun / interesting projects I unilaterally decided to dedicate my working hours towards that I never asked permission to work on. Sometimes it ends up being something cool that my manager wants to join in on or promote to a bigger effort.

- About our lives and what's going on.

Agree with this too. OpenCV is functionality great but its constituent parts are written by many different people who all kind of do things a little differently and it shows.

But I can’t really complain because it’s open source and added to by contributors.

But supposedly they’re the cheapest for certain workloads, especially ones that have high tokens and can make use of caching.

So they’re cutting edge in that way.

Right, but the limiting factor is not actually that it’s expensive.

The limiting factor is historical: Brazilians just don’t think of playing baseball already.

Which leads back to the point: Americans just don’t really think about playing soccer.

It’s not about cost, or about leagues, or any technical thing. There’s nothing stopping me, as an American, from trying cricket with my friends, except that the thought has never ever entered my mind.

Cuz the actual nuanced reality is that it’s structural. (Most) corporations don’t want to control the world but they do have their own self-interests, but because there are so many corporations there’s always some corporation controlling some facet.

For another example of a structural problem, California has been trying to add housing for the past few years but it has been one piecemeal solution after another. People who own homes don’t want their lives to change, cities like how they are laid out already, parking requirements exist to prevent developers from skimping at the time, environmental reviews are meant to protect the environment… at no point was anyone thinking “I want a housing problem that leads to job flight and homelessness” — everyone is just solving their own problem at the time but together it creates a major structural obstacle.

The people at YouTube don’t actually care about controlling the narrative. They just want to make money while removing problematic content, but they’re not exactly sure what problematic content is and Google tends to invest in algorithms more than support, but the end result is channels get randomly removed sometimes.

The world’s problems are hard because not because people are generally malicious, but because everyone is just doing their own thing. That’s why the only fixes are structural, but structural solutions are really hard.

But you’re only competing with other leagues in your own country.

Lol it’s the same with the sports in America. People love gambling on sports no matter what country they live in.

You just need a bat and ball? My friends use a plastic bat balls and find a grassy field. Soccer balls are actually more expensive.

Basketball is growing in Brazil a lot and that’s kind of expensive.

Skateboarding has become massive in Brazil and that’s even more expensive than soccer and every person needs their own skateboard, unlike soccer where you can pool your money to share 1 ball.

Idk what you are talking about, you don’t need fancy equipment to play most sports with your friends. Most of the time, it’s having the idea is the issue.

I mean you could say that baseball academies in Brazil aren’t good yet either, but I wouldn’t say that it’s because they “don’t know how to.”

It’s just that Brazil currently doesn’t care about baseball that much and baseball first has to become popular, except they already have soccer plus even basketball is growing quicker.

In America, soccer just isn’t that popular and there are so many other sports that people currently care about more.

The US has also strangely invented a lot of sports (Americans football, basketball, baseball, volleyball, lacrosse, skateboarding, snowboarding, and so on).

Soccer has major competition in the US.

Because these sports started in America too, America usually dominates them.

I don’t it’s the imperfections that are being chased. Most people don’t pay attention to technical details like that.

Instead it’s about chasing the era. For example, the 80s/90s seemed like a happier time, for both those who grew up in it and those who don’t, and imperfections like VHS artifacts put the viewer in that mindset.

Laws and rules don’t hold anyone accountable. Anyone can say anything and then break that trust the next second.

Instead you trust your best friend because you have known them for 15 years and seen them in enough situations. It’s long term observation and predictability they ultimately gives trust.

AWS has been around 20 years and has never once shown a sign that that they would sell customer data. Could they still try? Sure, in the same way they my friend who hates seafood his entire life could suddenly flip 180 and love it. Yeah I guess it’s possible.

The Soviet Union was an economic disaster for a long time. During the space race, which was ultimately a fight about economic systems, NASA’s budget was 0.7% of the US GDP but the Soviet Union was spending up to 15-20% of their GDP to “keep up with the Joneses” (the exact figure isn’t known because they lumped everything into military spending).

They were dirt poor and were throwing an extreme amount of money at looking rich for decades and eventually it caught up with them.

Like the people who take out giant loans to lease an expensive car above their means.

Remember when crypto was hot and everything had crypto.

Remember the Internet was first hot and everything was iThis or Active That. iPhone still has i.

Remember… well not, me, I wasn’t alive… when radiation was cool and Radioactive was in.

Everyone always wants to be cool.

That’s like saying the free pizza parties are draining the company’s resources and so we need to cut them.

The pizza parties ARE indeed draining the company, but it’s so minor and ultimately spending your big brain on cutting pizza parties is diverting attention from your real problems that led to this point.

I don’t support illegal immigration but it has little to do with our current major problems. It’s just a political tool to distract the voter.

The closest IKEA equivalent is the IVAR.

Between IVAR and now this 606, I actually don’t know any other non-garage-oriented “universal” shelving systems where you can like mix and match drawers, shelves, tables, etc.

I have IVAR in my office and it’s great.

Household names like Uber, Amazon, Blue Bottle Coffee and Fedex used the same playbook of burning investors’ cash for years and look where they’re now.

Everyone’s long term plan is hoping that they build out and survive long enough that, in the end, the market accepts them.

Even your local still-unprofitable restaurant is burning their grandparents’ inheritance money hoping that it works out.

But on the other hand, that’s what Theranos, WeWork, and Pets.com tried too.

Those problems are endemic to all web apps.

e.g. You can’t just provide software to people that obtains TLS certs on their behalf: you have no idea how their infra is setup.

Hosting any app on your own infra is a serious skill set.

Musk is like that person on Facebook you know that is really good at <welding / programming / performing surgeries / etc> then they post about their thoughts on some other topic and all you can respond with is “stay in your lane.”

Musk has been successful is pure engineering efforts led by engineers he hired achieving the next big-but-not-too-big step.

You ignore his thoughts on everything else.

I print documents and photos at home regularly but I still contract out to dedicated print shops.

The print shop can’t replicate the practicality of local printing and I can’t replicate their scale of investment. Both coexist perfectly.

Trying to figure out the best way to solve vague requirements is why I got into engineering.

If I got detailed specs, I’d just be a coding robot. I push that work off onto juniors.

You can now buy 128 GB unified memory computers from AMD as commodity.

They’re still pricey, the world is still scaling up memory production, and a lot of code isn’t yet built for AMD, but we went from the Wright’s brothers first airplane to jet engines in 27 years.

I’m not sure “it’s only a few years away” but we are sure moving there fast.

Uhh I don’t think you shop for clothes if you think there’s just a half dozen giant mail order clothing vendors.

Well obviously you shop for clothes, but nowhere like the way people who like clothes shop for clothes.

Finding clothes is about matching the vision in your head. If you’re the type that just buy clothes whatever, this is not a problem that exists in your world.