thewarrior

What is a creative field ? Can you write a novel this way ?

All concurrency tools are foot guns but go seems to be the safest foot gun :)

This model is good for I/O heavy code that is typical for most web services. However if your load is a mix of I/O and compute something like Go should do a lot better.

Because they understand consent a lot better.

Interesting. Isn’t IQ also based on PCA. So would similar criticisms apply to IQ.

“ PCA is a formative model and not a reflective one”. Can’t understand this.

I think comparing people in groups who are competing for glory and promotions to idealistic scientists trying to find the truth of the universe isn't accurate.

Science is a collective endeavor that transcends any group boundaries. The objects of study are simple physical entities. They don't have dreams or goals and cannot be negotiated with.

People in corporations have a strong vested interest in being attached to goals that would help their own careers. People job hop so often it's easily possible that any concern shown for the good of the company isnt sincere. Nobody will come out and say - I built this solution and my promotion depends on it so we just go with this. Anyone savvy will learn to couch their interests in the language of collaboration and solidarity. Repeat this across hundreds of people at many different levels and you have the dysfunction that is typical to any large organization.

The only way to fix this is to work on culture and incentives. And it's a constant work in progress. At scale everything becomes about culture.

Even science isn't free of this hence the saying - "Science advances one funeral at a time".

Eventually this happens to companies too and hence we need a way for companies to die without taking down the world with them. Hence I would say - Capitalism advances one dead company at a time.

That's interesting. I was actually just guessing that Apple is not data driven.

I would be grateful if you can share Apples general approach to product development.

I recently had a revelation that merely using a product can often reveal the organizational structure and the cultural incentives that went into making it.

A company that is famous for being metrics driven and having teams that optimise for their own metrics is Facebook. You can tell that the product has "seams". Each page and widget feels like it was individually optimized and then stitched together. Overall it somehow feels off.

Apple puts design on top and has a kind of dictatorial veto over all aspects of the product. Hence products made by Apple feel seamless and cohesive. They are also more polished because when you solely rely on metrics you make it as good as it needs to be and then stop.

A post about the pitfalls of social media is a cliche at this point. None of these posts with very moralistic tones acknowledge that the ability to participate in a real time text and image adventure with millions of others is something that brings great power.

Reading Hacker News has changed my life.I don't always agree with Paul Graham but in my opinion Hacker News is his greatest creation. It changed my outlook as an engineer and I went from being a no name engineer at an ordinary company to a senior engineer at a FANG. Someone I met on Facebook helped me on my journey. I found room mates on Facebook and they're now my friends. Certain obscure subreddits have given me fresh new perspectives and changed how I look at the world. I've been in Twitter DMs with really interesting people. Instagram is a way for a lot of creatives to find an audience whether its photography or art. The feedback mechanisms and publicity have led to some people getting insanely good. I'm still trying to understand TikTok but perhaps I'm getting too old to rewire my brain for it.

I do realize how this is all a little too much for my brain that evolved to forage berries and roam jungles. Our brains were not designed to handle the volume and speed. A lot of it is undoubtedly useful but social interactions often have an adversarial element to them. In real life the slower speed and repeated interactions allows us to stay on top of it. Keeping up with all of this imposes a cognitive load.

I have started meditating and trying not to respond in anger or indignation to everything I see online. What meditation gives us is the idea of "enough". Everything that we've ever known and more people than have ever lived are a tap or swipe away. We are miniscule in comparison and should try and adjust our expectations for what we hope to accomplish.

I use social media knowing my limitations. A tiny brain trying to stay afloat in a sea of information and cyber predators. I'll never comprehend more than a fraction of my filter bubble or keep up with the discourse as it ricochets around the world 10 times before I see it.

The next generation will be able to use the highly plastic brains of their childhood to mould themselves to survive and even thrive in this brave new world. I am not going to try and stop them from mastering this new reality. I would educate them about the pitfalls and the need for moderation.

I am not going to stop using social media. My life would be poorer for it. The problem is not social media. The problem is that technology has outrun our brains.

Well actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said

Sure but what if I decided to ban you from using caffeine and throw you in jail because it’s addictive ?

And that generation was a powerhouse of business, innovation and culture. Counter culture laid the foundation for what we now call Silicon Valley.

“ Colleagues worried that Erdős might have become addicted. In 1979, he accepted a $500 bet from his friend Ronald Graham. Graham challenged Erdős to abstain from speed for 30 days. Erdős met the challenge, but his output sank dramatically. Erdős felt the progress of mathematics had been held up by a stupid wager. In an article by Paul Hoffman published in November 1987, Atlantic Monthly profiled Erdős and discussed his Benzedrine habit. Erdős liked the article, “…except for one thing…You shouldn’t have mentioned the stuff about Benzedrine. It’s not that you got it wrong. It’s just that I don’t want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics to think that they have to take drugs to succeed.”

The truth is far more nuanced. Like I said no one will openly admit to this as it sets a risky example for others.

Yes exactly.

I think that people thinking that mind altering substances cannot be a useful tool should keep an open mind about it and let those people who are getting real results out of it keep doing their thing. And yes these people do exist. They are not going to be too open about it because of how taboo it is.

It’s well known that many of the greatest rock bands, highly productive mathematicians like Paul Erdos and comedians like George Carlin found great benefits in the disciplined use of mind altering substances. Not the addictive side which he regretted but the occasional one as a creative boost. Steve Jobs swore that it changed him. Not that it was perfect but he himself claimed it played a pivotal role in shaping him into the unique person that he was.

There are peer reviewed studies that show that psychedelics are among the most effective tools for treating depression. ADHD medication is prescribed quite often today and it’s a game changer for many people.

This is not without its dangers so proceed with caution and have other people in your life to check on you often. But let’s not deny the enormous power.

Why should some stimulants like caffeine or alcohol be permitted for responsible use while others have to be kept away ? Many of them are less addictive than either.

And besides far beyond any argument about utility it’s also one about aesthetics and spirituality. It’s an entire new dimension to the human experience.

If you don’t have a good track record of practicing moderation then stay away.

How do I sign up for your service :P

Can I use this to build an HN search where I can search for threads that discuss various topics, books or frameworks ?

These steps reduce the efficiency of the fuel.

We need more Nickel than the known global reserves to make enough batteries to replace just transportation.

https://youtu.be/DU6gWZav2T8 (46 minutes into this video. Whole video is an eye opener)

Cheapest source of generating electricity. Storage, distribution and conversion costs not included.

Do this for peoples stock portfolios and you have a good startup idea right there.

Or you could digest financial, health and content consumption data to create a personalized report with action items.

Very promising.

Electric cars are only a fraction of transportation energy costs. Electric trailer trucks and electric airplanes are far less feasible because of the poor energy density of batteries.

I’m also talking about the cost of the car itself. Sure there are improvements but they are not improving at the rates they used to.

An electric car is still too expensive for a lot of people around the world.

Hydrogen is a potential solution but it’s very difficult to store and transport.

Here’s some math

Electric mountain is pumped hydro electric storage. It can store 9 gigwatt hours of electricity.

The UKs total energy consumption is 1650 Terawatt hours. Let’s say you need to store 4 days worth of energy to account for any shocks. That’s 22 terawatt hours of energy.

You’d need to build 2500 electric mountains to store just 4 days of UK energy consumption. And 4 days is a dangerously low buffer for when things go wrong.

How much more efficient can a car become ? It’s not as much of a change as going from horses to cars.

The energy is there but it’s too expensive to extract store and distribute compared to Saudi Arabian oil. Hydrocarbons are not just a source of energy. They are also a storage mechanism that can also fuel their own transportation and distribution. There’s probably not enough rare minerals on the earth to build enough batteries to take care of all global transportation, electricity and heating let alone future needs.

Nuclear - fission and then fusion are the only way out.

There’s an angle that a lot of these discussions tend to miss. We are running out of easy energy. The step change in civilization we observed in the past 200 years was because we found an abundant source of energy.

Ideas don’t build sky scrapers energy does. If you don’t believe me you can look up the per capita energy consumption per American and observe that it is basically stagnant since 1970. Which is also curiously the date since when the American dream started to fade.

We got around this by outsourcing some activities to economies with a low energy intensity, loading up on debt and improving the energy efficiency of our devices. But these cannot result in the kind of step change improvements that we got used to over the last century.

Why have we seen such amazing progress in computing and the internet ? Moores law allows us to extract twice as much compute for the same energy every 18 months. The energy burned by a transistor scales with its area. This is nothing short of miraculous. It’s as if your car doubled its mileage every 2 years. This has allowed computing to cheat the stagnation in energy we have been seeing elsewhere. When compute gets cheaper transporting information gets cheaper as well as it is computers that transport the information. Hence the biggest growth industry continues to be technology and the internet. Batteries or solar panels do not double every 18 months. Batteries have barely moved in comparison. The newer iPhones feel heavier after they made the battery bigger.

There was a fear for a time that “Peak Oil” would lead to some kind of a total collapse. The reality is more of a slow burn stagnation as we wring the oil out of ever deeper deposits.

The much heralded green transition got a dose of reality this year in Europe as they realized how reliant they are on natural gas to not freeze to death.

Building tens of thousands of Nuclear plants is far from trivial although it is in theory possible.

We will in general struggle to maintain the standards of living we currently have especially as we expand it to the broader population. This is a harsh truth many don’t want to confront. Perhaps the elites realize this and have decided to squeeze every last drop out of the orange so they can experience the growth that was once the norm for all first worlders. The elites being the top 2-5 %.

The entire third world that was looted and colonized is also now stepping up to claim its fair share of global resources. The more they develop the higher energy prices will go. And yet it is inevitable.

Hence I struggle to see how first world living standards will not stagnate even in the presence of interesting new technologies and breakthroughs. The meta verse might be the answer as a simulation of prosperity may be cheaper than actual prosperity. It might also explain why everything is moving into the virtual world. Energy constraints apply a lot less here.

And don’t get me started on Climate Change.

And then lead poisoned voters with poor cognitive skills are more easily manipulated into voting against their own interests or their poverty is used to polarize the rest of the electorate and achieve the same outcome.

The line “coding is just if statements” really annoys me. I used to think this earlier in my career. It’s technically true but it means that you haven’t really grasped what makes programming hard.

The real challenge of programming is how you organize a million if statements in a way that the system can be understood and evolved predictably and cheaply over time.

And any tool that takes away the control of how you organize your code and allows for the creation of complexity without proper version control, debugging, testing and code review is doomed to failure.

No code is just code at a higher level of abstraction. No code works when you don’t need a lot of code to solve the problem to begin with. Which is kind of a mind bender.

Except it never can be that simple because many systems have millions of ifs when the entire system is considered. So architecture and parallel evolution of those millions of ifs becomes an entire field of study :)