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jrowenon In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

Comparison is the thief of joy. I know plenty of people who live in SF on much lower salaries. Acting like you need AI bucks to survive is out of touch with the reality of the common man.

A household that earns nearly 400k talking about "I'm not completely hopeless" is shameful. Take some lessons from people who earn a lot less and are more happy.

jrowenon Daisugi, the Japanese technique of growing trees out of other trees (2020)

This is such an interesting subtext. I think the original comment was a bit unfair to call it "just pollarding," at the least it's a very specific subtype that has its own culture and clear uniqueness.

Your comment feels somewhat reductive as well, you could basically replace "Japan" with a lot of things that are appreciated by some sizable subset of HN readers.

But, for some reason Japan does seem to inspire a certain fervor in both the otakus and weeaboos and their inverses. I think it's because it's the closest thing to an alien civilization for Westerners.

jrowenon There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

I mean, that's a tale as old as time. That's humans, not AI.

Has the internet enabled more people to be more educated and informed, or has it enabled echo chambers of misinformation? I don't think it's demonstrable that it's not a wash. Technology is an extension, a mirror...we need to fix ourselves, AI is not the problem.

jrowenon There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

I feel like it could be a law that there is essentially no way to guarantee that AI is any more or less safe than humans. It kinda seems incompatible with what we understand to be "intelligence" which arguably requires a certain unpredictable freedom...Has a method of "baking in" such safety features even been conceptualized? Or is it just a matter of nurturing/raising/policing them after the fact and hoping for the best like with us?

Kind of taking this a step further, what is the worst thing that an AI run amok could do to existentially threaten the human race? I feel like almost anything could be short-circuited by some form of "pulling the plug" before it got too far. But, hypothetically, if it were possible to launch nukes without human intervention, or with maybe a small amount that could be socially engineered, that seems plausible (or releasing some kind of super-pathogen that is stored in a lab somewhere).

So, what if, along the lines of MAD doctrine and the plot of Battlestar Galactica, the best thing we could do for AI safety is just to engineer our other systems so that a hypothetical superhuman adversary could not use them against us? Which is just making our world safer all around rather than trying to kludge arbitrary limitations into an "intelligent" system.

(This doesn't really solve AI child porn and fake news but those things are mostly just imaginative reflections of the people using them and you can't really fix that any more than you can stop people from doing it themselves)

jrowenon Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

It's insecurity. They worry they might be saying something dumb and the LLM gives them assurance that it sounds "better" and "more professional."

jrowenon Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

Check and mate, capitalists!

jrowenon The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

There's something fitting about the mystical nature of LLMs and scrolling through a bunch of goofy pelicans on bicycles representing report cards for the bleeding edge of technology.

How are these even graded? Qwen3.6-35B-A3B gets high marks for a pelican with a gaping hole in its bill?

edit: Just noticed its feet are disconnected from its legs as well (but right on the pedals!). Pardon my French but that's Chinese af.

jrowenon Click (2016)

People do know on some level though. There was enough willpower to get the cookie bullshit on every website.

I think it's just that it's more of a visceral lizard-brain thing than a logical thing. Like how you can go through life eating meat every day, then someone sits you down and tells you the horrors of that industry and shows you a cow being butchered, and you go oh that's horrible, and then most likely put it out of mind and continue eating meat.

jrowenon We let AIs run radio stations

This is the most AI thing ever. I was delighted to hear it still going 5 hours after your comment. The different voices are a great touch.

"It's the way of the future, it's the way of the future, it's the way of the future..."

jrowenon Click (2016)

I think there's a very interesting duality forming around privacy. It seems like most people don't really care if they're being filmed, or if their data is being slurped up six ways from Sunday, as long as it's aggregated and going through automated systems. But as soon as it feels like an actual person is looking at individual behavior, it's creepy (which is, of course, always a possibility, but plausible deniability is a powerful thing).

jrowenon Mocked by a scandal sheet, Kierkegaard endured months of personal attacks

I disagree, I found the story to be the interesting part. It's inspiring to me when people have the moral conviction to put themselves out there in a big way at great risk to their personal lives and mental health. And it was gratifying that he succeeded in swaying someone from the dark to the light.

History is rife with examples of "what's old is new again." Human nature and our psychological and social issues are basically constant throughout history. Good examples like this are always worth noting but, as you note, it's nothing very new, I'm sure one of the Greeks said something similar.

jrowenon Foucault's Order of Things Explained with Trading Cards [video]

I was wondering where Wittgenstein fits into this. He's the only one that truly makes me think "are we taking crazy pills or is it just me?"

jrowenon Rendering the Sky, Sunsets, and Planets

In another comment I recalled reading a paper while implementing Rayleigh and Mie scattering a while back...this was definitely it!

Getting it working was a "holy shit, we can actually model this complex real-world phenomenon pretty well with a few relatively simple calculations" moment. I went from a static blue skybox to a full day-night cycle just like that.

jrowenon Rendering the Sky, Sunsets, and Planets

I implemented Rayleigh and Mie scattering for a game engine once (my own, hobbyist thing). It was pretty crazy to see a quite good sunset/sunrise cycle from those alone. IIRC even the sun itself popped out of that somehow.

I was using XNA (Microsoft's C# gamedev platform) and following Riemer's excellent series of tutorials, which have been preserved here[0], but I don't see anything about scattering. I might have gotten that bit from somewhere else. I do recall reading papers with math equations.

[0] https://github.com/SimonDarksideJ/XNAGameStudio/wiki/Riemers...

jrowenon We see something that works, and then we understand it

I'm not really trying to white knight for academia. I know there is a lot of low-quality stuff (part of that is just reality, most of the work done in academia or industry won't stand the test of time). But I do kind of have to assume that if this field of work is continuing there is a reason and they haven't just been spinning wheels for 40 years because they missed something simple and obvious.

This article[0] says "Data changes are usually much less frequent than queries, so incurring an initial cost of processing data into an index is a fair price to pay for instant searches afterwards."

Is that what you're referring to with cache replacement? There's no way to quickly update the index?

Wikipedia says "The R-tree was proposed by Antonin Guttman in 1984 and has found significant use in both theoretical and applied contexts."

I'm gathering that there are applications which are ok with that limitation? Generally there is communication and awareness between industry and academia, if everyone really needs cache replacement for it to be useful, why have they not attempted to account for it? What is the cause of the total disconnect you describe?

[0] https://blog.mapbox.com/a-dive-into-spatial-search-algorithm...

jrowenon We see something that works, and then we understand it

I think it just goes back to what your goals are. I don't know for sure but I imagine the research you're describing as disappointing was never meant to be directly applicable to a real world problem. It's meant to explore and push the boundaries of our understanding in an idealized and theoretical sense. Over time the research that turned out to be important gets codified into textbooks and undergraduate courses and software packages, but if you're at the bleeding edge yeah it's gonna be tough to make sense of the landscape and apply it to your needs, but that's why people that can do it get the big bucks.

I mentioned nuclear physics because it's a wonderful union of theory and practice. The experimenters need theories to test, and the theorists need their ideas tested.

Contemporary AI is massively driven by research. There are a handful of influential papers from the past few years that have gone right into practice. Industry players have famously invested in their own academic divisions.

jrowenon We see something that works, and then we understand it

Another thought is that, I might be more likely to apply the term "ocean of uselessness" to a lot of what goes on in industry than to what academics are striving for.

People like having a job and a paycheck and accomplishing units of utility. But kludging together some libraries and maintaining another CRUD app isn't all that important or interesting in the grand scheme of things. The Von Neumann architecture and asymptotic analysis are, though.

jrowenon We see something that works, and then we understand it

But what is the teacher teaching from? Generally they are working off seminal and highly-regarded texts that the autodidact set would tell you to read anyway.

I will grant you that the current form of the education system, especially in light of how easy it is to engage with the primary resources nowadays, is massively inefficient and needs an overhaul to provide more individualized learning. Something like Alpha School is promising in this regard. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Even if a kid today learns entirely "on their own" with an AI teacher...neither them nor the AI accumulated that knowledge, and we still need that infrastructure of people contributing to advancing and refining the shared knowledge base.

jrowenon We see something that works, and then we understand it

One thing I think a lot of people don't internalize is that academia and industry have fundamentally different goals. When I went into industry, I had the thought, like many others, that "my degree didn't prepare me at all for working with a production database, and I'm never gonna implement a Turing machine, wtf?" I think it was a major disservice to academia when college became seen as the path to a good job, because it was never meant to be that.

Academia is about pure learning about the world in a very deep and philosophical sense. It's about underpinnings and history and giving you the abstract tools to reason about things. Academics are often aggressively against learning practical things to solve a specific business problem. Which is what industry is all about. I think it's easy to take a degree program for granted, but it's difficult to understand how your brain would be different had you not done it (assuming one did apply themself and attempt to get its value. If you just cursed it the whole time yeah it probably was a waste.)

jrowenon We see something that works, and then we understand it

Again I think this is a false dichotomy. Learning "everything ourselves" does not mean going out literally by yourself and rediscovering everything from first principles. Whether you learned it from a dreaded teacher or from a manual or reference or tutorial or a more senior engineer, you're leaning heavily on the accumulated body of knowledge and "thinkism" that produced that.

You will learn some things through trial and error entirely on your own of course, but you will also take a lot of time independently re-learning things that are well known. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm a huge DIYer. Sometimes you have to try and see for yourself. But I do acknowledge that I could have learned a lot faster about, e.g., carpentry, as an apprentice, than I did mucking about in my backyard with youtube videos. I think the concept of "balance" is more important than taking sides on this matter. They're both incredibly useful tools to be used in conjunction. Read the manual. Then go muck around. Then read the manual again and go, "oh now I get what they were talking about."

I think what I'm learning from this is that a lot of the "entirely self-taught" folks don't realize how much they've benefited from "thinkism" and standing on the shoulders of giants.

jrowenon We see something that works, and then we understand it

You have your designs and then you open up a building to do repairs or start construction and some surprise presents you that you weren’t expecting.

And yet, the field of architecture is still highly valuable. Without those designs, there would be a lot more problems. Try building something complex without a design. You're going to waste a lot of time and materials. My point there was that it's not like the digital world where mistakes and trial and error and rethinking things can sometimes cost almost nothing.

Theoretical design is pretty worthless until you try it out. Until then it’s just an idea or hunch you have....ignoring all the years of trial and error that built a base of experience already

Lots of (smart) people have tried lots of things, there is a ton to learn from that, you're calling it worthless and taking it as an assumption at the same time.

jrowenon We see something that works, and then we understand it

I found the whole article to be a bit heavy on anti-academia. And I went to industry after undergrad.

It's a false dichotomy between the "thinkism" bogeyman (actually reading books and papers and putting work into theoretical design is just bad now? Have they tried building anything in the physical world? Checked in with nuclear physics, ever?) and hands-on experience. Both are important. It should be about balance, not trashing an incredibly valuable set of tools because others exist...

jrowenon The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

This is a great point. Us millenials all look at AOL through rosy colored glasses as part of the halcyon days of the free internet, but there was probably just as much depressing corporate overlord bullshit going on, we just thought it was fun that they printed billions of garbage CDs!

jrowenon The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

This is pretty much true, but also, you're older now. The people the age you are now were saying things like this when you were having all that fun. You are in a different place now. Your life is not about coming home after school and goofing off. You have important things to do. Those bored, lonely, funny, obsessive, angry, horny, curious kids are still out there, finding their version of what we had. They always are.

The internet may have changed, but the human spirit hasn't.

jrowenon San Francisco streets with confusingly similar names

I lived off Divisadero briefly, sometimes referring to the general area as "diviz". I looked up Division St and realized I've probably driven on it many times but don't have any particular recollection of it or any confusion around it.

jrowenon Your website is not for you

Corporate bullcrap. Do your art, do what you believe in. Don't do it for "the company to make money." The company doesn't need to exist in and of itself. When you start making decisions that way, what is the point? So you can just say "I built a thing that conformed enough to the lowest common denominators of society to make a buck"?

jrowenon Three constraints before I build anything

I don't get that quote. Does that apply to teams working on SDKs, GPU design, internal tools, etc? Are those all reframed as "products"? Seems like there would be a lot of groups at Apple concerned entirely with shipping technology? "Leverage" makes it sound like they just use other people's tech but we know that's not true. Why throw shipping technology under the bus? I don't get it.

jrowenon Waymo says can't avoid bike lanes because riders want to be dropped off in them

Maybe, or, as we saw with ridesharing already, maybe they will change the laws. When push comes to shove, I don't believe there is enough will to overturn current practices to preserve the sanctity of the bike lane at the expense of car traffic.

jrowenon Waymo says can't avoid bike lanes because riders want to be dropped off in them

The US is happy creating laws for everything that are impossible to follow, but only selectively enforced.

Do you consider this insane? Your assertions that "everyone always must break the law" and "there are effectively no laws" seem a bit extreme. Ultimately, with any messy human affair, there is always going to be discretion involved, and I don't think implicitly codifying that is a bad thing. It does tend to work by and large. I've personally had much worse experiences with officials following the letter of the law than with them using discretion, but I admit I am not in any class that is often discriminated against.

jrowenon Waymo says can't avoid bike lanes because riders want to be dropped off in them

I mean, if it comes to a lawsuit, sure, but the system is designed so that permitting and inspectors catch most of it. If you're trying to build your bathroom under the radar without a permit that's an entirely different analogy.

But either way, it is the responsibility of the regulatory body to enforce. As other people have noted, this is not a Waymo problem, they're just following the status quo.