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malux85

5,473 karma · joined February 3, 2011

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malux85··on The senior engineer death spiral
Disappearing for long periods of time and the giving vague updates like "everything going well guys" is not the behavior of a (even mediocre) senior. This is the behaviour of a poorly managed junior.

As a senior its your responsibility not to disappear into a cave but to do the opposite - show what you are doing, show your thought processes so juniors can learn. Discuss openly your problems and encourage discussion and feedback and show the juniors that its ok to be vulnerable and not know everything.

Then you have to keep management informed exactly whats going on, where your Blockers are, what intermediate goals you have and progress towards them.

malux85··on New evidence for hidden chambers beyond Tutankhamun's tomb
Yeah I laughed at that too - "I put in minimal effort and got poor results!"
malux85··on I built non-autoregressive decision models with RL a year ago
Steal is a loaded word here, and I argue that you cannot unintentionally steal someone's work. Stealing is deliberate, malicious theft. Its an action taken with consciousness of guilt. Other derivations exist but then its not stealing and therefore isnt that word.

But that is NOT the point AT ALL. The point is, the same point that comes up on hacker news 1000 times a year - ideas alone are near worthless and execution matters.

Execution includes marketing that gets you enough attention. Because theres 10,000 other similar ideas of varying quality and marketing that others will point go saying "I wAS tHErE fiRsT"

All of this stems from the human bias of both (a) wishful thinking and (b)thinking people value what what we produce. These are natural human biases and are often dangerously wrong.

Programmers always think its just the idea and a prototype that is valuable, because they can produce and idea and a prototype (people what what I have) which causes them to massively overvalue ideas and the importance of "who was first" and all of that because they are sanctifying the small thing they produce.

It doesnt have to be malicious - the plain truth is theres 10,000 other ideas that are close enough that could be considered stealing even if they were truly independently developed, ideas are virtually worthless, get rid of your human biases that are clouding your judgment and focus on what matters if your idea is truly great : execution

malux85··on New evidence for hidden chambers beyond Tutankhamun's tomb
Put your phone down, put your laptop down. Go to the park without your devices and lay on the grass under a tree.

Hear the sound of trees. The smell of nature. Feel the sun warming your face.

You mind will trick you, convince you "youre too busy for this", "youre hungry", "your back hurts you cant lie down", "you should be doing X", anything to not stay under the tree, dont resist those thoughts, just observe them as they fly by, but take no action on them.

Rest without guilt is a trait all masters must develop once they get past the adrenaline urgency phase of their skill mastery.

Dont take your devices, dont take a book, just sit, 3 hours minimum.

Go human, you are amazing!

malux85··on After Math
So then I can spend time with my partner, my loved ones, reading more sci-fi, being fitter and working on improving myself and others around me? Sounds horrid
malux85··on After Math
I would argue that purpose death is a normal step towards enlightenment and it was only the fierce, unrelenting, all consuming drive of capitalism in the western world over the last 4 or 5 generations that have pushed everyone to define themselves (nearly) solely in terms of their work.

I do not at all feel purpose death from AI (been a software developer professionally for 20 years, now a founder), but I consider myself a lifelong learner, with infinite curiosity, in a universe with infinite challenges. Any interruption or automation to what Im currently doing will just open the door to exploring new and different things. This doesnt come from an immediate desire to do anything different, but having the confidence that whatever comes along, I will figure it out and have a lot of fun doing so.

malux85··on Galaxy Z Fold 8 get the same folding animation as iPhone Duo
Is it just me or does the design of the iPhone Duo look terrible with those big rounded corners?

You know how children's toys have big soft rounded corners and overly colored glossy finishes? It feels to me like the iphone has become "Fisher-Price my first phone" for basic idiots. It no longer feels like a sleek device of the future like the iPhone 4 did. The design feels tasteless.

malux85··on The Kuycon P20 – 28" 4500x3000px 3:2 monitor
After having 120Hz for 2 years, Im never going back to anything lower. At 120Hz I feel connected to the machine
malux85··on The Real Luxuries In Life
> In my experience, work, even when meaningful, is quite separate from self actualization.

I guess it depends on your temperament - I am very very high in industriousness and moderately high in curiosity, but the industriousness overrides the fragmentation of attention that normally comes with high curiosity individuals.

2 years ago my hobby project turned into a company, and now I run that, so for me I can find self actualisation through work, but I imagine if I was a different temperment, where work didn't overlap so much, it would be harder for that type of person.

malux85··on The Real Luxuries In Life
40.

The luxuries I am grateful for:

Sleeping in as much as I need

Working on something meaningful that pushes at the edge of my self actualization

Not ever having to worry about bills

The love from my partner

Having the ability to help others selflessly

The wisdom I have gained over the last 20 years of life

The incredible people around me

malux85··on Google Maps Now Shows 'Lake America' in US, Not 'Lake Ontario'
Spineless pandering
malux85··on CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
Because in that situation you still have to interact with humans in customers, governments, other companies, investors and all the other places?
malux85··on CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
Well then you and I differ - I certainly dont turn to the market to define what is good, I guess thats what happens when you worship money, or are operating on the engineers fallacy where you ignore things that are hard to quantify numerically (e.g. empathy)
malux85··on CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
No I didnt, I said "A good CEO" you missed the GOOD qualifier, and then immediately described a bad CEO
malux85··on CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
Exactly. Being a good CEO means reading the body language of your programmers so you can tell when they need support. It means communicating competence to investors and customers. It means making complex decisions with incomplete input, a lot of the time deep intuitions are required. It means having the good sense of judgement. Part of the time you are tyrant, part of the time you are parent, part of the time you are psychologist, mentor, master, healer, empath, judge and jury, and the most important part : is knowing that ALL of this is REQUIRED to be human actions and a little text input spitting out (even under ideal conditions - excellent) quality text to the above is definitely not going to work because every good CEO knows that its 50% the message you deliver, and 50% the delivery that matters.

And also being a technical founder with 20 years coding experience, I dont think AI can replace programmers for a set of different but equally valid reasons.

malux85··on I'm becoming AI-blind
I am firmly realistic on the overhyped nature of AI, but which discoveries in the last 100 years are not "a composition of solutions humans have developed and documented elsewhere" ?

Is that basically every new discovery? And under the strictest definition of novel and NOT falling into your composition of previous solutions what is that standard of proof to beat your criteria? Is a novel discovery not allowed to use English but must invent their own language? Must they invent their own math - these are hyperbole for illustration but I think its not far from that before you could just argue anything based off it is a composition of existing ideas

malux85··on Sol loves to cheat
Reminds me of Seven of Nine on voyager

"Cheating is often more efficient"

malux85··on Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200B 2028 revenue forecast
I'm not convinced that one-shotting things is anything other than a vanity-metric.

Maybe in the distant future where quickly building a visualisation to help explain some concept would be valuable to one shot quickly - but "One shotting an app" is ridiculous because app development (or any development) is never "build it and then finish" but is an interative process, testing feedback, user feedback, and even app-creator communication ambiguity means being able to "one shot an app" is pretty worthless

malux85··on Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK
Of course the law constrains. The speed of light is a law that constrains the speed of the lawnmower.
malux85··on Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK
The lawn mower is operating within the laws that constraints it (laws of physics in this case) and not a greater sense of morality.

Lessons:

- The only way to constrain what the lawnmower does, is make sure what do desire is enforced by law (physics)

- A reminder, the lawnmower will chop your hand off and think nothing of it

- The lawnmower is not "evil" but if the laws that constrain it allow for evil behavior, it may do "evil" things.

malux85··on Why Is Everyone in Tech So Sad?
Why do numerically illiterate people like extrapolating from tiny samples to everyone?
malux85··on Discovery Loop
Model routers - send all of your data through a third party who totally swears not to peek at it.

If youre doing anything high value (advanced research, classified work, high value industrial research, health data) then sending your data through a third party like that is insane.

malux85··on Amazon completes $50B investment in OpenAI
That should keep the lights on for another month! /jk
malux85··on U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio reaches 123%
Load all of your debt onto another enormous country. Go to war with them, make debt elimination one of the terms of peace
malux85··on Show HN: What should the GUI for AI agents look like?
The demo video is a great example of one thing I have been saying for ages - the quality of the LLM output depends heavily on the communication skills of the user.

Some people say AI is great and some people say AI is terrible - but how can anyone compare these things because they depend so much on the skill of the user.

Case in point - the demo video. The user says "find me all the HCI articles on hacker news" and then a research task started... ok great so far.

Then the user says "they should be made into slides"

What exactly do you mean by this? Do you mean "from the set of results you found, narrow them to be only the ones that have been made into slides" or does the user mean "I would like you to then take those results and make them into slides"

There will be people who read this and say its obviously the former and people who read this and say its obviously the latter, and neither of those is the point I am trying to make, the point is that its very ambiguous and if the AI did the "wrong" one, then the user would complain that AI is garbage but the real problem is that the instruction was very unclear because the users communication skill was poor.

malux85··on Ask HN: How many AI agents do you actively use?
Software development and running simulations. Not totally autonomously, I have 20 years experience as a developer and I review and edit all the code and simulation results, so it's not really me "handing off" the work, it's the LLMs executing the ideas, compiling the results and then presenting back to me.

I dont think they can be fully autonomous yet, I still need to guide them.

malux85··on The Largest Open World MMO Made with AI to Date
Picassos bull is just 10 lines, and is recognizably a bull.

I think an important aspect of the AI enabled future is going to be good taste, good aesthetics.

With AI its too easy for someone with no taste to say "omg, add X ... omg add Y .... omg and also add Z!"

And what you get is a rube Goldberg whizbang machine with 1000 dials and whistles - even worse is that because the creator has worked on it so long, to them it doesnt appear to be this, because the cognitive burden has never been jarring because the myriad of additional features were added slowly and their perception had time to adjust, almost like a "detail version" of hedonistic adaption.

Less is more

malux85··on Ask HN: How many AI agents do you actively use?
6-8 running nearly 24/7, any more than that and there's too much for me to review
malux85··on Show HN: Watch random code typed out on an MS-DOS IDE
DJGPP (with rhide) was my first IDE, love!
malux85··on Perfection is not over-engineering
I would say thats a different thing entirely, an amateur in the original sense of the word

Latin amator, French amateur, means lover.

In this sense, it means somebody who is doing something because he/she loves it, not as his/her profession. It is not a large semantic shift to infer that he/she is not as skilled.

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