baron_harkonnen

51 ms·

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by baron_harkonnen 7y ago
Anyone who does knowledge work in a large company knows a huge amount of the "work" is just a weird game we all agreed to play. Sure everyone is busy, but surprisingly little is really getting done. We agree to work 40 hours beca
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by baron_harkonnen 7y ago
Sorry by that only applies to US passenger rail, US freight rail is an impressively efficient system. US freight trains are diesel-electric allowing them to benefit from the high mechanical efficiency of electric engines coupled with the hi
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by baron_harkonnen 7y ago
I've gone the full cycle from renting -> own -> renting, and I can tell you that you're forgetting about a lot of the limitations that come with renting. There are a huge number of things that are out of your control and hob
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by baron_harkonnen 7y ago
I find a common error when reading technical books is to focus on understanding everything deeply the first pass and going through all the exercises. In my experience this quickly leads to burn out and you give up on a book half way through
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by baron_harkonnen 7y ago
In general folks working in in-demand areas of tech are pretty out of touch with how hard it is it "just quit" a job. If you're an engineer or data scientist making $200k+ then you very likely have some moderate savings to cu
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by baron_harkonnen 7y ago
> points of reference such that it does or doesn't It's too bad (but not surprising) that you couldn't have gotten a bit deeper into general relativity where even the idea of "points of reference" gets a lot tric
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by baron_harkonnen 7y ago
You can watch the Arctic melt before your eyes[1] and we will very likely see an ice free Arctic for the first time in at least 100,000 years in our lifetime. Claiming that isn't happening isn't "skepticism" it is denyin
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by baron_harkonnen 7y ago
People tend to think that around 200 years ago humans suddenly became much more enlightened and we just randomly started to see rapid technological progress, which will forever be the solution to any and all problems humans face. But techno
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by baron_harkonnen 7y ago
> mean something beyond basic calculus and linear algebra. "Fluency" in mathematics, in my experience, isn't about being able to perform more complex computation, that's what computers are for. The key to fluency in m
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by baron_harkonnen 7y ago
Whenever people make this comment I have to seriously question if they've ever worked with any actually data scientists or at a company doing any data related work at scale? Data science is a unique skill set that is quite different th
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by baron_harkonnen 7y ago
There's also a lot of senior devs who think they are a false negative who are not. I speak from personal experience. I failed my first FAANG style interview both because I had not prepared nor understood how white board interviews real
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by baron_harkonnen 7y ago
As an older, experienced developer, this is honestly just a sign of a changing shift in the nature of software companies, and, like it or not, if you want to survive you have to adapt. I started in software over 10 years ago. At that time a
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by baron_harkonnen 7y ago
"progress has been accelerating" mostly due to an abundance of cheap energy, which is both limited and now showing consequences far more destructive than we initially imagined. I wouldn't worry too much about people in 10,000
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by baron_harkonnen 7y ago
The future of programming languages is and has always been to simply reinvent smalltalk. Seriously, read the original "Design Principles Behind Smalltalk" [0] and it still sounds very fresh, even radical today. [0] https:/&#
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by baron_harkonnen 8y ago
> Sea level is stable Wow, this level of denial is amazing. You can literally see how the rising sea level is effecting parts of the US. If you live on the East coast it's not too hard see the rising sea level with your own eyes. Dr
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by baron_harkonnen 8y ago
> We just have to continue solving difficult engineering problems in order to harness it. But that requires large amounts of cheap energy to do. The last 200 years haven't been an insane time of innovation just because we, as a spec
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by baron_harkonnen 8y ago
edit: Anyone care to explain the downvotes? The fact that we can't even discuss the possibility that "our way of life might not be sustainable" to me is a huge part of the problem facing us. It's extremely misguided to t
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by baron_harkonnen 8y ago
lower income people in nearly all major cities tend not live in the suburbs since that require owning an maintaining a car (or two), usually they live in high density housing in areas adjacent to larger metro areas and accessible by public
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by baron_harkonnen 8y ago
I think you could arguably entirely remove non-commercial vehicles form dense cities like Boston and New York. You could build massive parking garages at the limits of the city and suburban commuter could just park and take alternate transi
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by baron_harkonnen 8y ago
It's worth noting that Clayton has a much more thorough, mathematical response to Taleb's paper (written back in November): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tQj4ZGja6jKADJGiFj-dcQAirWo... Since Taleb del
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by baron_harkonnen 8y ago
So far it looks like, at least in the US, renewables are being used to expand energy capability, not replace fossil fuels. It's also worth that 45% of US "renewables" are biomass, so biofuels and wood burning. Even if we do s
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by baron_harkonnen 8y ago
The problem is that the cost of "actually doing something" and the penalty for doing nothing converge over time. Global CO2 production increases to go up, as does global oil production. These are just the byproducts of the energy
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by baron_harkonnen 8y ago
How do you come to the conclusion that biking to work does anything significant to offset the 20 tons of co2 emission you produce? Let alone bring it anywhere near 0? If you want to get a sense of what 0 per capita emissions looks like you
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by baron_harkonnen 8y ago
>If the light switch was connected to clean energy, who the hell cares if you left it on? The problem is not so much the consumption, it’s the supply. And your scrap paper did not hasten the end of the world. The major issue this misunde
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by baron_harkonnen 8y ago
Even at the time there were articles in Nature protesting this just like people do global warming today: >THE curious associations with lung cancer found in relation to smoking habits do not, in the minds of some of us, lend themselves e
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by baron_harkonnen 8y ago
You can read everything of Zapffe's that's ever been translated into English tonight[1]! If you want more pure pessimism you shouldn't leave out Ligotti's "Conspiracy Against the Human Race", which also cover&#
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by baron_harkonnen 8y ago
I just wanted to second this. It's astounding that there continues to be a large dispute over the influence of Stirner on Nietzsche. I personally like Nietzsche's ideas but really don't enjoy his style of writing. Stirner on
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by baron_harkonnen 8y ago
I think you misunderstand the real purpose of these major companies fighting to hire as much talent as possible. Anyone in the Bay Area that cannot afford FAANG total comp knows how hard it is to hire top engineering talent. This is the end
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by baron_harkonnen 8y ago
Why is there so much focus on just the language generation aspect of this model? The language generation examples are to show how well the model generalized the language it's trained on, but the whole point of releasing the pretrained