1,289 karma · joined February 18, 2011
> It is so rare that a new moving part beats other factors
Fair! I will restate that we were growing very fast, so that's probably an outlier environmental factor that I am potentially overly discounting. If that's not the case (likely for most startups), then maybe this is less of a problem.
In practice, this eventually ended up being very awkward because extending the functionality (since we had "built" it) and had to work around internal pg semantics (we should have just moved off much sooner). It also did not scale well. We ended up getting a ton of disk contention on our RDS instance in non-obvious ways, and the vacuum runs on that table was a nightmare. Additionally, it was hard to get other engineers to really debug and take ownership of the system because they automatically viewed a queue (very easy to understand) implemented in a foreign way (off pg internals) as something "scary". It was emotional, not rational, but we are emotional beings, and I do not blame them. These were good engineers with a lot of other things on their plates.
Obviously, this is all hand-wavy without discussing the internal schema, indeces, etc. that we had set up, but my main takeaway with core technology from this experience was to always reach for the dumb, expected, simple thing. Even if it adds another moving piece in the infra stack. Unless I need very strong data consistency guarantees, it's always better to use something like SQS, Redis queues, etc. where the understanding is that it is just a queue (or at least the API contract suggests simplicity), and then everything needs to work around it.
The fewer mechanistic responsibilities per core data store, the better in my experience.
I know this is dramatic but I genuinely fear a future where this is the default state of all writing and I still need to get information important to me.
I have never colo'd my laptop, but I do work off my Windows laptop from my Mac via Parsec (remote viewing software for gaming) and by flipping system settings so my Windows machine never turns off when connected to the power bank and lid is closed. There are obviously hiccups (if internet goes out, if Windows decides to restart from an update, etc.), but it mostly just works and I think I've only had 2 instances in the past 3 months where it's gone offline. I use Tailscale on top to provide a universal mouse server for my 3d mouse, and I'm able to magically CAD from my Mac.
Highly recommend if you need to use one OS/machine for some specific software (especially if it's beefy/heavy) but prefer using another as your daily driver.
It would be really cool to see a visualization of redundancy measures/utilization over the course of the trip to get a more tangible feel for its importance. I'm hoping a bunch of interesting data is made public after this mission!
> King plans to use the system — which occupies one-fifth of floor space than Eve does — to model how genes, proteins and small molecules interact in cells. Part of that will involve taking around 10,000 mass-spectrometry measurements each day.
The throughput here is astounding, especially when driven by researchers who really know how to chart a path. I feel every time a critical feedback loop is made both faster and cheaper, it makes everyone participating better. I wonder whether we will see many more "whiz kid" scientific researchers than we have today.
I don’t know the answers to these questions, but if the answer is “yes” to at least 1 or 2, then I think the equation flips quite a bit. This is what I’m seeing in the world right now, and it’s disconcerting:
1. Ukraine and Russia have been in a skirmish that has been drawn out much longer than I would guess most people would have guessed. This has created a divide in political allegiance within the United States and Europe.
2. We captured the leader of Venezuela. Cuba is now scared they are next.
3. We just bombed Iran and killed their supreme leader.
4. China and the US are, of course, in a massive economic race for world power supremacy. The tensions have been steadily rising, and they are now feeling the pressure of oil exports from Iran grinding to a halt.
5. The past couple days Macron has been trying to quell tension between Israel and Lebanon.
I really do not hope we are not headed into war. I hope the fact that we all have nukes and rely on each others’ supply chains deters one. But man does it feel like the odds are increasing in favor of one, and man does that seem to throw a wrench in this whole thing with Anthropic vs. OpenAI.
People have no idea what’s actually going on inside, but I guess it’s simpler to just be upset and take sides. There are people associated with DOGE (Sam included) who are tirelessly doing unsexy and thankless work while not being sensational like Trump or Elon. But they still get trampled on by people who simply want to be upset and ignorant.
What do we actually know?
1. People are inherently selfish. If you give me this shit for free, I'm gonna use it for free. Obviously everyone is doing this. Spare me the "but I go to this conference or that conference".
2. Code is cheap. Why would I ever pay for something that is not gated behind a service with API limits and costs?
3. Coding as we know it is getting commoditized. That's correct. We are all going to lose our jobs as we know it today. Clearly that's the future. Wake up!
But when making these points, open source devs (and honestly a lot of people on hacker news) whine and complain. I don't really know why I'm leaving this comment - I just feel like I'm at an annoyance breaking point. This guy is obviously struggling to pivot and all the grandstanding and virtue signaling just feels like additional noise and wanting to feel good with very little action.
1. The output from Grok doesn’t feel constrained. I don’t know how much of this is the marketing pitch of it “not being woke”, but I feel it in its answers. It never tells me it’s not going to return a result or sugarcoats some analysis it found from Reddit that’s less than savory.
2. Speed. Jesus Christ ChatGPT has gotten so slow.
Can’t wait to pay for Grok. Can’t believe I’m here. I’m usually a big proponent of just sticking with the thing that’s the most popular when it comes to technology, but that’s not panning out this time around.
On the wealth weighting, I’m a fan of a 100% inheritance tax tbh. I’m in the “top 1%” and I don’t plan on giving my kids more than a great upbringing and education. I’m not giving them any additional cash injection. I think that solves a lot of the wealth weighting problem by shortening the lifecycle of capital holds, but I don’t know if I’ll ever live to see it (or some form of it like inheritance caps).
I have more faith in our ability to solve world peace and AGI than I do in us getting to a more objective way to measure value that everyone can agree and adhere to.
Regardless of that, I don’t think prohibition or criminalization is a bad thing. The government is defined by their ability to monopolize violence. To say we should never wield that violence against certain behaviors as a vote of the culture, I just don’t buy.
That said thanks for the thoughtful response!
One other reason to not overbloat your images (besides physical storage cost and perf) is security considerations. If you find yourself in a place where you need to meet enterprise security standards, keeping more dependencies in your image and linked to your app code widens your risk vector for vulnerabilities.
Not a ban. A restriction. Which does have evidence of reducing use.
> There is no way to draw a boundary around any behavior other than theft without comparing outcomes to a subjectively valuable ideal
Isn’t this more to do with a society’s viewpoint on moral subjectivity vs. objectivity? And not the act itself?
> It's a costly systemic virus we wield out of desperation
Desperation or practicality? There is always going to be a downside to any prohibitive law put into effect. But should there be no prohibitive laws to curb self harm in a society? To reflect the values of that society? That seems extremely idealistic.
> Social media's most fundamental problem is… it creates an environment that allows people to sidestep existing restrictions
I think it’s pretty well understood that this is not social media’s most fundamental problem. I don’t think sidestepping porn guardrails (for instance) is anywhere near as damaging as ever-radicalizing echo chambers or exposure to ideas that accelerate depression and anxiety and contribute to low self worth and self harm.
I’m sorry but this whole post just comes off as overly idealistic and completely missing the point of how harmful social media is to everyone (but especially children). I actually sympathize with the war on drugs creating more issues around drug use, but I don’t think we should then conclude that all restrictions are bad and cause more harm.
Not saying it’s wrong to get married as you’re trying to immigrate into the most competitive country in the world, but you do assume responsibility that this might impact your application.