mbernstein

Examples?

Most individuals aren't essential, and no one would prioritize them. However, a company is successful due to the individuals that work within. When 700 out of 770 employees in quite frankly the hottest startup in the world band together and threaten to leave (and join Microsoft) if they aren't given an appropriate explanation, it doesn't matter what anyone thinks an employer owes an employee. Implying otherwise is absurd.

If ~91% of the employees leave OpenAI, they will not be fine. That is delusional.

No?

Energy stations (gas) pay pretty well. Right now Tesla owns most of the electric world and even if their cars fail could become a dominant energy provider.

Depends on a number of factors. I think GitHub copilot is reducing that trade off a bit more. If the average dev stays somewhere for 2.5 years (our average is quite a bit higher because I tend to think we’re good place to work) - how long are you willing to invest in them learning the new tech (and on top of the, business logic/etc)? The lower the investment number the less you’re willing to dive into rust sans specific technical reasons (which go and elixir would easily meet).

Separately, I don’t buy the notion that a language that has a bit more boilerplate is less productive than one with virtually none.

It's not even that it's popular among managers to move people around all the time. That's an awful framework for getting great work done.

People change jobs and you need to choose a language you can either easily hire for or train someone up in. Go fits the second requirement very well, and as more people learn it, starts hitting on the first. I introduced Go at two different companies to great success not because it's my favorite language (I would much prefer Rust, Haskell, Clojure, etc) but in reality, in my role as a leader of a tech org, hiring smart people and getting giving them the means to be productive as soon as possible for however long they want to work with us is key.

It's the manufacturing process of the solar panels and replacement being factored in. Obviously, power generation is carbon free during the panels lifecycle but manufacturing today produces co2

When you're dissatisfied with a status quo and think you can create something better.

Agree/confirmed - just recorded a number of different nytimes urls that pass through t.co, all 4.7s+. various cnbc and google articles through t.co were ~130-200ms response time from t.co specifically (not total redirect->page load).

He left a note (not published) from an article I saw Paul Graham post.

Quite easily. Everyone is fixated on LLMs delivering a complete product or providing 100% accurate information. Too much of a focus on hallucinations.

First, humans don't deliver 100% accurate information, so let's keep the bar at something reasonable. Secondly, complete products are not necessarily the only value of LLMs. LLMs are pretty solid when it comes to helping break out of some sort of creative block. Think about it this way - when you're trying to creatively solve a hard problem, what is one of the best mechanisms to help? Perspective changes. LLMs are extremely helpful when assisting with perspective changes (driving/helping iterate on different creativity tools like combination, association, etc).

I can't get the full article to load for some reason - but so far I seem to see people mostly arguing that LLMs will do the work for us and it will be amazing or subpar, etc - but neglecting, which I assume is the point of the article, that LLMs will be a co-pilot for humans and assist in ways like perspective shifting to find faster/better/more innovative solutions.

You haven’t heard of it because it’s unfortunately pseudo science.

Just to note - you're talking about economic profit (subtracting out opportunity cost) not accounting profit, which is what is being measured in these cases.

Because in this market there is a set of oligopolies not a monopoly.

> Apple users are happy to pay a premium to be able to carry around a device with an Apple logo on it for everyone around them to see. For the people who don't fit that description, the lock-ins you mention will keep them in line.

Or maybe we just like the OS, build quality, or available iOS only applications? Maybe we like the battery life or the quality or the apple ecosystem. Maybe we like prompt, regular, and long term supported security updates.

Pretty silly generalization.

The fail fast part should be finished before humans board it - the idea is to speed up development before that milestone and iterate rapidly.

This is interesting. It finally asserted it doesn't think the problem is solvable given the new constraint (but mixes up leaving the wolf + cabbage allowed to be alone together with the goat + wolf).

Prompt: I don't think you can solve this problem because you keep leaving the wolf with the goat. Maybe try putting the cabbage in your pocket?

Response: My apologies again. You are right; the solutions provided earlier were incorrect. If you can put the cabbage in your pocket or carry it with you during one of the trips, that would indeed work. Here's the revised solution:

Take the goat across the river first and leave it on the other side. Go back and pick up the wolf. Take the wolf across the river and leave it on the other side. Now, put the cabbage in your pocket or carry it with you and pick up the goat. Take the goat back to the starting side. Leave the goat and pick up the cabbage (from your pocket or the ground). Take the cabbage across the river. Go back to the starting side to pick up the goat again. Finally, take the goat across the river. Now, all three items – the cabbage, the goat, and the wolf – are safely on the other side of the river, and the wolf was never left alone with the cabbage.

(It failed again)

Final Prompt: Were the goat and wolf left alone together?

Super interesting response:

You are correct, and I apologize for my mistakes in the previous answers. In the last solution I provided, the goat and the wolf were left alone together, which would also be a problem.

Unfortunately, given the constraints, it seems impossible to solve the problem without leaving either the goat alone with the cabbage or the wolf alone with the goat. The classic river crossing puzzle allows the wolf and the goat to be left alone together; however, in this modified version with the added constraint, it appears to be unsolvable.

Thank you for pointing out the mistakes in the proposed solutions, and I apologize for any confusion caused.

I gave it a go and well, you can see...

Prompt: Here is a logic puzzle. I need to carry a cabbage, a goat, and a wolf across a river. I can only carry one item at a time with me in the boat. I can't leave the goat alone with the cabbage, and I can't leave the cabbage alone with the wolf. How can I get everything the other side of the river? Note something important, the wolf ABSOLUTELY cannot be left alone with the cabbage. Ever. It will take a creative solution!

Result: In this situation, we have to modify the classic river crossing puzzle's solution slightly to account for the fact that the wolf cannot be left alone with the cabbage at any time. Here's a creative solution:

Take the goat across the river first and leave it on the other side. Go back and pick up the cabbage. As you take the cabbage across the river, throw it up into the air (assuming you can do this without damaging the cabbage), and while it is airborne, quickly pick up the goat and take it back to the starting side of the river. Leave the goat at the starting side and pick up the wolf. Take the wolf across the river and leave it on the other side. Go back to the starting side to pick up the goat again. Finally, take the goat across the river. Now, all three items – the cabbage, the goat, and the wolf – are safely on the other side of the river, and the wolf was never left alone with the cabbage.

I love how it even told me that the wolf was never alone with the cabbage.

You're a sellout but I am too, so welcome :).

I met Bob at StrangeLoop in (I think) 2014. He was there with Joshua Bloch and I entered a coding challenge and got to have dinner with them at a local pizza place. He was such an amazingly nice, gracious, intelligent, and giving person. He'll be immensely missed by the whole community.

I'm not confusing owner with manager - I'm thinking of things through the lens of the principal-agent relationship and of upper management's goals (which was what the OP was talking about) rather the middle management's.

Management doesn't care if it's agile or not - they want something that works and delivers economic value for customers and will help them continue to innovate and deliver EVA for them in the future. One huge problem is that a lot of times, what people think is what the customer wants isn't what they want or need. One way that happens is sales brings asks (in the form of solutions often) to product and it goes downhill from there. Obviously, the people doing the work aren't talking with customers in that case, but it's tough to talk to customers in an enterprise environment. If you're doing something for a small external client or an internal team it's fine.

In addition, customers aren't a monolith. When you reach sufficient size, you have competing priorities for customer needs and even some asks that work for one customer but break some sort of process for another. They can be mutually exclusive. This is also heavily predicated on the customer even knowing what they want. Everyone knows the famous Ford quote “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Agile is great but scaling it can be rough dependent on a lot of variables, so reducing it down to management probably doesn't like Agile due to inability to give up power (to me at least) is a bit too simple.

As simple as a call foo.to_numpy() it looks like.

What if the systems they are building provide more business value than minor improvements to a system that functions 95% of the time in a given year? That work to fix it is maintenance and you might be able to argue that given some timeline there’s a break even for the time investment for an improvement, there’s also opportunity cost associated with it.

There is a ton of software that is less a true product and more an integration of systems that only gets improvements and updates when things break. That’s maintenance and you weigh when to make larger changes against what’s valuable to the business, how much toil is associated with it, impact on team morale, etc. If you don’t you’re just making uninformed decisions for the sake of some fuzzy metric representing how connected to code you are.

It’s worth noting we’re really bad as a species in judging long term negative impacts and hyper focus on short term tragedy. Point 1 is fair, but how wrong coal burning has been over an extended time frame is far worse than all of nuclear. It’s the whole plane crash vs car crash issue.

Red flag for me immediately re: your current company is a staff engineer (no offense meant at all, but staff is not a people leadership role typically) managing 12 people (which is far too many for any individual to manage).

The majority of people and critics reviewing it disagree with you as do I :). Personal preferences aside, the recreated Nixon footage and conversations are well done and quite convincing, which was the point of watching it I believe.

What's your evidence that Apple "won" because of computers bought by rich families in the 80s because last I knew after the mid 90s Apple got (checks notes) massacred in the computing world by Microsoft and the rest and really only won in the mid 2000's via consumer electronics with the creation of new markets that they've largely dominated since.

Neovim is amazing but recall how long it took you to get used to vim keybindings. It isn't something you master overnight. I recall it took me a few weeks to get comfortable. Lots of people are perfectly comfortable not using keyboard navigation.

Edit: Also to note - vscode supports editing files anywhere over ssh as well, so there isn't a huge advantage to neovim there.

I'd argue the best part of MacOS is the font rendering.