opportune

I struggle to think of a planet that wouldn't have the necessary ingredients for an industrial revolution. I don't think you need fossil fuels at all; on Earth, even without fossil fuels, we probably could have eventually gone from biofuels to wind/hydro power to solar/nuclear (these requiring a lot of energy for the refinement/processing of raw resources). It would have been a slow and gradual process, but if this process took about ~150 years with fossil fuels, I bet it would have only taken something like 500 years without them - a tiny blip in time, really.

I think any planet capable of hosting carbon-based life would be able to at least produce wind energy, and probably most (assuming a rocky planet with liquid water and an atmosphere containing oxygen) would be able to develop all the energy types I mentioned. Solar and nuclear might be relatively less feasible if certain elements aren't common on that planet, and battery storage might also suffer from lack of resources. But wind and hydro alone are probably sufficient to eventually be able to develop controlled fusion down the line and have most energy-resource issues obviated.

Even if you imagine some exotic form of life not like ours at all, on a planet that doesn't necessarily have water or an atmosphere, the life has to be able to derive energy from some kind of external source, whether it's by facilitating some chemical reaction like our deep sea micro-organisms or photosynthesis. Most likely that energy can be harvested in an automated fashion, and it's probably relatively abundant if life is able to evolve to the point of intelligence. For it to be completely inaccessible due to lack of resources, IMO you'd have to get into truly strange scenarios like intelligent life somehow developing in a nebula or the atmosphere of a gas giant.

If I can offer some unsolicited advice, try to seek out ML educational material with polished visualizations. If you're struggling with the math, trying to learn the concepts by reading libraries or textbooks or papers will be very hard - you might understood a specific thing if you look at it closely, but it will be hard to conceptually develop an intuition for why it works. A good visualization, or a strong educator explaining by way of analogy, can make a huge difference.

For example, gradient descent in conjunction with your learning rate can be visualized as calculating your error vector (your gradient), stretching it by your learning rate, applying it your parameters, computing the next error vector, and so on. If you think of what applying this vector might look like in 3d space, training your model is basically getting all your parameters to fall into a hole (an optimum). This kind of conceptualization helps you understand the purpose and impact of the learning rate: a way to stretch out the steps you make to descend into holes, so that you might hopefully "shoot over" local non-global optima while still being able to "fall into" other optima.

You could read papers and stare at code for a very very long time without developing that kind of intuition. I don't think I could ever come up with this myself just dabbling.

And as a side note, in mathematics at least for me, the most unexpectedly hugely important factor in understanding something is exposure-time. In college and grad school I found I didn't fully intuit most material until about 12mo after I had finished studying it - even if I hadn't actively studied it at all in the interim. I think it has something to do with the different ways our brains encode recent/medium/long term knowledge, or sleep, or something - not really sure, but I do know the earlier you started learning something and exposing yourself to the concepts, the sooner your subconscious builds that intuitive understanding. So you can do yourself a huge favor by just making an effort to dive into the math material even if it feels like a slog or that you're not getting it right this minute - you might make up one day in a few months and just "get it" somehow

> Target audience is a big factor too, I think the article failed to emphasize this. And, secondly, the nature of what is being documented.

Right, I'd say screenshots are crucial for certain kinds of documentation and terribly amateurish for others. A guide walking you through a user journey in a UI should definitely have screenshots.

But there should be "real" documentation for things like APIs - if the only kind of documentation that exists for an API is guides with screenshots, you end up with a bunch of useless "hello world + a feature" documentation that doesn't help you understand the big picture, or how features/options interact.

I think a small source of confusion/varying opinions here is that this is from the perspective of a technical writer. Technical writers are usually producing documentation for external users (author mentions "customers") as their key deliverable.

At least for me, I'm not too bothered by the docs I write looking a little unpolished or going out of date every now and then. Only a couple dozen people are likely to ever read it, it's not a big deal if I miss something because they'll know I wrote it and reach out directly if they need clarification, and as a corollary I'm mostly optimizing for "make it so explicit that they don't need to reach out for help, but not so verbose that they give up before reading it and reach out for help". Everyone knows it's a best-effort side task and you're not being held to a high standard - for guide-like documentation, just show the critical path most people care about and hope for the best.

When I consume official external documentation though, screenshots are a smell, especially in the case of "[having a screenshot] For every step in a task." You can't just message the writer to ask for clarification if you deviate from the happy path. So documenting the user-journey with screenshots instead of the functionality no longer works, because you have no real escape hatch as a confused user.

I think you might be inferring too much about my phrasing. I wasn't trying to add token disclaimers to pass off praise of socialism/communism - I was trying to get ahead of the reply "yeah but the cons far outweigh the pros"/"there are better ways to ensure equality than making everybody poor", which are actually positions I'd agree with.

I don't know exactly how to articulate this, but I wish people were willing to consider "capitalism vs socialism" less as a black and white "good vs evil" dichotomy, and more as a vast spectrum or cluster of policies. In reality, those are the kinds of systems we live with. Even if you find yourself firmly on one side of the spectrum, or in favor of policies mostly in one cluster, I think we should be intellectually curious enough to look at the other side and see what kind of ideas they have, because some of them might be good.

Humans are social creatures with an innate sense of “status”. Absolute material inequality is only one form of inequality.

You can feed, clothe, and give iPhones to the very poor but if they are at the bottom of a very deep social hierarchy with no hope to climb out of it, that inequality is still going to cause a lot of problems. People might turn to a life of crime for lack of better options, or participate into a violent machismo culture in an attempt to salvage their masculinity/status as a man.

Of course, the fallacy of every attempt at socialism is that “abolishing class” simply replaces the capitalist social hierarchy with a new hierarchy based on position within the Party or blessed sectors like the military, science, or intelligence, complete with large differences in material living standards. However, a greatly reduced disparity in living standards and material conditions does have positive social effects IMO. Consider that deaths of despair, poverty, and desperation are much higher under the Russian Federation than the USSR. I’m not saying that communism or socialism are good by any means, but I think there are real net benefits to low inequality sometimes even if they come at the expense of overall lower living standards.

> A 15min downtime window announced in advance is fine for approximately 100% of SaaS businesses

What? As a customer, this would piss me off to no end and honestly be a dealbreaker for something like payments or general hosting.

It's pushing dysfunction onto your customers, and if your customers are technically experienced, they'd know it's a completely avoidable problem.

You're still focusing on median which I think is a valid measure on its own but not wholly representative of mobility at all. I'm personally very biased, but I think social mobility is most important between upper-middle (usually the most educated and hard-working) and upper-classes because that's where the most value creation happens, and personally I think that it's much more motivating to have a chance to become very wealthy than it is to increase your income by $10k

> But once you remove sterotypes, what makes you think it's easier to climb to the top in America?

We have lower marginal income taxes, self-funded retirements, and proportionately less capital tied up in generational assets like buildings. My impression of the EU is that most of the upper class and upper-middle class are land/building/family business inheritors, whereas in the US equity in large businesses take a larger share of the upper/upper-middle class asssets.

Those are income-based and the quoted generational figures look at mobility from poor to median, not median (or above median) to rich.

I would like to see these figures for wealth. I have a hard time believing it’s easier to climb from the top 20% to top 1% of wealth in any European country vs the US or China. Wealth is a more consequential measure of socioeconomic status than income anyway.

This might be a controversial opinion here and I don't mean to offend anybody, but the distribution of engineers' effectiveness is not the same around the globe.

Thought exercise: what kind of profile would you expect of someone going into software engineering in a country where the good jobs pay 5x median wage (and ~25x global median wage) vs a country where the good jobs pay 2x median wage (and ~6x global median)?

Thought exercise: what kind of skills and experience would you expect of a 90%ile senior engineer in a country that gets lowest-bidder outsourced contract development work, vs a country that is directly employing engineers in "cutting-edge" development?

A lot of “data engineers” are former db analysts and such that don’t know much of anything technically outside of SQL and even that might be something they only are “certified” to know rather than actually good at.

It’s basically becoming a title I’d associate with being low-skill. I used to be a “software engineer in data” and never call myself a data engineer because people would think I don’t know how to write/maintain production services, just write ETL pipelines

Beyond Good and Evil touches on this a lot with its master vs slave (Christianity) morality comparison

There is at least one exception to this, which is that as technology improves, it necessitates the creation of new capital to utilize that technology commercially, and the people involved in creating it (whether as founders or wage workers) stand to capture a lot of the value in delivering it.

Case in point, see how valuable it is these days to be an AI scientist or software engineer. Both are involved in the creation of capital in the form of AI models and software, both are paid a lot and able to adequately catch up in wealth to old money.

Even this article IMO subtly demonstrates the mindset that leads nontechnical founders to not think they need a technical cofounder, by phrasing the search for one as “recruiting” as if they were a subordinate or code monkey. It should be a partner relationship, not a subordinate relationship.

This mindset that technical cofounders are essentially “coders” (a term I hate) is very prevalent among inexperienced nontechnical founders. I know I’m preaching to the choir here but a lot of technical people have deep industry/business/product knowledge and have social skills. It is very frustrating when some Ivy League 25 year old PM/management consultant tries to pitch you on their vision while treating you like an idiot savant they can easily take advantage of.

I made the same argument to myself when I bought an AMD GPU for gaming 4 years ago. What doesn’t show up in a side by side comparison is that AMD’s drivers (or Windows’ treatment of them) fucking suck. Until I bought an NVIDIA replacement recently I was very frequently having to reinstall the drivers and also intermittently encountering driver crashes in games and browsers.

That’s not to mention having to fiddle with the drivers/games more than I was accustomed to, which IIUC is more a consequence of having less market share and thus not being a priority for game developers to work out of the box. I can excuse that, but not crashes or reinstalling every couple months.

They grew their employee count massively (400->2000) as their revenue grew over the past few years though. Part of that is, yeah, you have to spend money to make money. But I know for a fact not all of those employees were doing ad sales or direct monetization.

You can speculate as to why they hired so many people: pandemic tech hiring FOMO, looking more attractive to investors, empire building, not being willing to settle for a paltry 10-figure valuation and so trying to build out to hit 11-figures. But they don't need that many people and they could easily become profitable by doing a big layoff (just as money software companies could). At this point it's not a question of survival or existence for them, nor of IPO readiness, so much as it is IPO optimization.

I think a lot of commentary on this problem doesn't fully account for the historical conditions that allowed for such a rapid increase in material prosperity for the average person in the 20th century (especially in the US), and the historical conditions leading to its partial reversal.

The population was expanding so rapidly, and enough actual investment (in terms of value delivered in the form of usable roads, not $) was made in infrastructure, that a young family could acquire a home without having to buy from existing homeowners. Because of suburbanization and very high demand, massive amounts of new housing was built on inexpensive land.

Retirements were generally funded with pensions, and there was still a general societal expectation that you'd take care of your parents when they became old. This was more practically workable as most women became homemakers or only worked part-time once they had children. Medicine was not as advanced as it is now, so people weren't kept alive in poor health for as long as they are now, and there weren't as many uber-expensive treatments necessitating people to save up large amounts in case they needed them for care later. With way more working adults per retired adult than now, and with retirements more funded via cashflow (of children's jobs or from a company's revenue) rather than ROI like they are now, there was a lot less pressure to extract value out of businesses.

And on top of all that, Asia (except Japan) was basically undeveloped, and Europe (and Japan) was destroyed - the rest of the world almost non-factors economically. There was very little pressure to lower wages due to international competition.

There are no simple or obvious fixes to these problems. Promoting housing construction could help a lot, but besides that, we don't have a ton of options. The "pie" of existing assets will always grow unless it's destroyed (in war mostly), so it will always be harder and harder to earn your way into a decent slice. As technology improves international competition will only become more of a factor in price, not less. And there is no "solution" to the increased number of retirees per worker, or more advanced medical care costing more, that isn't horrific. But on the bright side it doesn't seem like these problems will get that much worse than they are now.

I think the simplest explanation is that we're just not accurate enough at determining the trajectory of the particle in question. They tried matching against sources "just outside its arrival direction" but without access to the paper (the DOI link just doesn't work for me, loads an empty page) or knowledge about the instruments being used it's hard to say how much that rules out.

At least looking into the Telescope Array's workings, it seems plausible that it'd struggle to produce accurate trajectory data. It works by analyzing the light produced by cascading collisions of particles with the incoming one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_shower_(physics). At first glance this seems like it would be very noisy for determining trajectory.

I honestly think this was a finishing blow to reddit, which had already started declining in ~2019 due to TikTok and (anecdotally) an aggressive user acquisition strategy that had led to a big decline in content/discussion quality. Or even earlier, as mobile users replaced desktop and so things like long-form replies with links died off.

The biggest problem from the blackout and API drama isn't that some clients had to shut down. It's that, as a new user or a user that only uses the platform a little, it's much harder to discover good content organically now that most subreddits are NSFW or not on the /r/all feed. Even as someone who used reddit way more than any human ever should, I find the site a lot harder to use because I have to expend a lot more effort manually curating my subreddits when previously I could exhaust my personal feed and then just switch to /r/all - and I don't think I could ever discover some niche or zany community I didn't know about beforehand since I'd have to know to look for it to find it.

Since I doubt I'm alone in this, I think it's the beginning of the end for Reddit. It'll be a lot harder for new communities to form, existing small/medium/focused communities will struggle to gain members, and new users will probably think the site is empty and leave.

There are plenty of transferrable skills you get from being an expert something that gets made obsolete by a similar-but-different iterative improvement. Maybe you're really good at implementing ideas from papers, you have a great intuitive understanding of how to structure a model to utilize some tech within a particular domain, you understand very well how to implement/use models that require state, you know how to clean and structure data to leverage a particular feature, etc.

Also, being an "expert in LSTM" is like being an "expert in HTTP/1.1" or "knowing a lot about Java 8". It's not knowledge or a skill that stands on its own. An expert in HTTP/1.1 is probably also very knowledge about web serving or networking or backend development. HTTP/2 being invented doesn't obsolete the knowledge at all. And that knowledge of HTTP/1.1 would certainly come in handy if you were trying to research or design something like a new protocol, just as knowledge of LSTMs could provide a lot of value for those looking for the next breakthrough in stateful models.

I would think of it as annealing/gradient descent instead of some kind of Markov process where maybe you get lucky every 2-5 years. You are not breeding for the purpose of getting one animal with the trait (well you can, but not necessarily) so much as you are trying to influence a population of animals to display the traits you want over time. Maybe first generation you have an average yield of X across 100animals. And you don’t let the lowest yielding 50% breed (or just have them breed less so you can’t counteract inbreeding), now generation 2 has an average yield of 1.05X across 100animals. If you know the trait is heritable it seems pretty straightforward.

What’s challenging is I guess you can’t know a priori much about the actual genetics at play so at a certain point it becomes hard to know what’s simply phenotypic variance independent of genetics and what’s actually genes - it could take quite a while to be certain you’ve “converged”. Or for something more subjective/without an obvious strong genetic link, it could take a while to rule out the possibility of breeding for the trait at all.

Like for humans, I’m highly confident you could do some basic process over 10 generations to breed some ridiculously tall people. But it helps we know it has huge variance, is highly heritable, is easy to measure, and is polygenic. Probably a lot harder to try to breed “nice” people or people with thick skin. The fact dog breeders can do things like that is much more impressive IMO.

I am surprised more people are not doing this and its variants. It only takes someone, or ideally a family, willing to start a project that spans multiple decades - something people do all the time with careers and other hobbies.

To me it seems strange how concentrated these efforts are in some communities while seemingly silent in others. Cannabis farmers and pepper farmers nerd out about it a lot. I think dog breeders do although I suspect the existence of “institutions” like AKC and dog shows channels their efforts into ossification of existing breeds. I’m sure plenty of regular livestock breeders are trying but you don’t hear about it and they don’t seem to have done anything truly crazy in a while (that I’m aware of) to the extent Pepper/Cannabis breeders have.

Just to demonstrate what’s possible: Belyayev was able to make huge progress domesticating foxes in just 26 years [0]. Dachshunds [1] didn’t look anything like their current forms until the late 19th century (I think a lot of dog breeds saw huge changes around this time but not certain). Cannabis breeding didn’t even really start until the 1960s and we have an absolutely massive assortment of strains, not just differing in subjective “flavor” and “effects” but with quantifiable massive differences in concentration, overall volume of flower produced, and flowering behavior. Because people didn’t understand what it was, some say that the domestication of yeast [2] didn’t even start until the 16th century.

All that said it baffles me why more people aren’t trying to domesticate bears, otters, lemurs, raccoons, etc. Maybe not bears, but the rest could probably be domesticated in a human lifespan and (not bears) without many expenses year-on-year. I’ve always said I’d try this if I came into the means to do so at a young enough age. Even for medium-scale farmers of your regular-old cow, having some kind of special breed or phenotype seems like a great way to move up-market with a differentiated, unique product.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Belyayev_(zoologist)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachshund

[2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160908130552.h...

This is such a complex topic that an entire volume of books could be written on it. Unsurprisingly the article just scratches the surface barely enough to do it justice.

I wrote up a long “better” explanation I hope to share here later, but suffice it to say, this article greatly overstates the causation coming from the public’s political views when it really was a consequence of more material changes. Namely, communications technology, computers, and financial innovation started allowing smaller groups of people to produce value (obsoleting many low/mid provincial middle class jobs in the process) for much larger markets just as the rest of the developed world started to catch back up in manufacturing. As a double whammy plastics and aluminum hit prime time and disrupted the massive existing steel/textile base businesses they competed against. And the USSR began falling behind for their own reasons so nobody really worried about losing the lower/middle classes to socialism - but short of extreme isolationism it’s not like anything could really fix the competitiveness problem.

I love music and listen to it all the time, but frankly I do not care much about the artists, in the same way that I don’t care much about the person making my coffee or my house. Obviously I don’t wish harm on anyone out of pure malice, but if a robot could make better coffee or build a better (to my tastes) house I wouldn’t stay stuck in the past out of some sense of romanticism.

Same here. I live by a coffee shop with usually long lines and inattentive staff. But they take mobile orders so I just give them a few minutes buffer after they say it’ll be ready, then head over and it’s waiting for me.

It saves me like 20m which is the difference between that coffee being worth it or not.

Creatine is excellent. It takes a few weeks (maybe ~1 if you “front load”) to accumulate but once it does you’ll notice a difference if you’re looking for it.

It’s multiple times now that I’ve stopped taking it, felt fine for a bit and then started feeling sucky… I don’t eat a lot of red meat so I think I just default to creatine deficiency. Then I remember to start taking it again and feel better.

I think it’s the closest thing to a miracle drug we have. It improves cognition (in those that are deficient) as well. Cognition, energy, strength… just drink enough water to counteract the increased load on your kidneys and it’s wonderful. Unlike many other supplements you’ll see mentioned, it’s something naturally part of our diets. It’s really more like a vitamin than anything. Vegetarians and vegans in particular are likely to be deficient.

It doesn’t matter whether you believe in it or not lol, it simply is that way. I can send you a Google maps link to somewhere in the US that is a food desert simply by virtue of being a large suburb with residential zoning.

My guess is your conception of a suburban area (relatively densely populated?) is a bit different from ours in the US. Also for some reason you seem to think that because your area doesn’t have zoning or enforce it, other places don’t.

Less friendly how? I think you are confusing size with development pattern. A smaller community will always be more friendly than a larger one. The problem with suburbs is when they are forced on a community that has outgrown them.

Agree with this. It also goes beyond preference to the level of guidance and autonomy the person needs to be effective (even if they want a lot of autonomy, it might be better to not give them it). Also the nature of the work itself - if must-haves totally book your team you really can’t give them much flexibility or autonomy outside those must-haves.

I don’t think this is necessarily true. Delegation is the name of the game in any large organization - managers exist to sift down tasks to a doer. You can’t delegate many kinds of tasks by inspiring people. You can generally only inspire people into things they want to do and find interesting anyway but the unfortunate truth is that there is a lot of boring/annoying/not fun stuff that needs to be done and it can’t all be done by the CEO alone.