blagie

56 ms·

691.
by blagie 3y ago
Art of Electronics is popular but kind of horrible. 1) At the level you can understand it, you don't need it. There are better, more in-depth, shorter books. 1) At the level you can't, it's incomprehensible. You'll run i
692.
by blagie 3y ago
Here's my question: This seems wonderful for 2010. It's 2023. We have 3B1B, SoME, Python Tutor (which now does many languages), and various types of fairly smart tools to support kids as they're coding (e.g. Jupyter/Plut
693.
by blagie 3y ago
> If that's true, then you can write informatively rather than with hand-waving. He is neuro-atypical in some not-well-defined way. His behavior is perceived as anti-social by the typical person who interacts with him. He's pus
694.
by blagie 3y ago
You'd think so, but they're not acting like it. Usually when I see this, it symptomatic of major organizational dysfunction of some type. One time, I was in a firm where 100% of the energy was spent on quarterly objectives for som
695.
by blagie 3y ago
Who is considered good right now? Asus was my go-to brand for quality, but I haven't looked in a decade or more. I'm glad to pay a modest premium for reliability. I'd like parts which are well-tested, use high-quality capacit
696.
by blagie 3y ago
Work ethics dictate a duty to other humans, not to corporations. The two are sometimes the same, and sometimes very different. To the plumber point, if you work for a plumbing corporation which requires you to up-sell unneeded repairs, you
697.
by blagie 3y ago
Please define your terms. Most communities use "morally" and "ethically" interchangeably, and where there are distinction, they vary by field. https://www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference-be
698.
by blagie 3y ago
I would add: And doing the same thing over and over. I find GPT very useful in that I can quickly become mediocre in any domain. Need a legal filing? I can get a good-enough legal filing. Need some code in a framework I've never used?
699.
by blagie 3y ago
This argument is nonsense in that a corporation does not "wants to increase its profits and maximize shareholder value" or want anything "executed by its employees." A corporation is a signed document usually in Delware,
700.
by blagie 3y ago
No, a company's first and foremost interest is not profit for the shareholder. Corporations don't have interests. They're abstractions -- ways of organizing people to be productive members of society. Individuals within those
701.
by blagie 3y ago
I think the key, in both cases, is to learn more about relationships, and in the later case, about the nature of corporations. It's perfectly reasonable to make a commitment to "not be evil," and to "to organize the worl
702.
by blagie 3y ago
Your employer is a corporation, not a human. Corporations are an abstraction. There are two ethical perspectives one can take: 1) Mutual loyalty. This changed in the eighties, as jobs became transactional. Typical SWE tenure is three years
703.
by blagie 3y ago
Why wouldn't people do this? Employees are there to: - Collect a paycheck - Enjoy their job as much as the employer will let them - Progress in their career In 2023, there is usually zero loyalty in either direction. Much of management
704.
by blagie 3y ago
I think to sell me would require: 1) Actual notebooks / no lock-in 2) Coding integration Come to think of it, a better way might be for me to retro-kludge GPT APIs into Jupyter, Pluto, or similar. Nevermind. I think the key question is
705.
by blagie 3y ago
I wouldn't make categorical statements like that. Free forever (without the promise) has worked well for many businesses, for github/gitlab, to Google, to quite a few others. A few models which have worked: 1) Limited to a single
706.
by blagie 3y ago
No, I don't think that's right. I can name other scenarios: 1) I am at a megacorp. I want to rapidly prototype without going through purchasing / finance / bureaucracy. 2) I have a personal and a work account. I learn so
707.
by blagie 3y ago
There is. The goal of the "free forever" is to (1) exposure / publicity (2) lock-in (3) ecosystem / API integrations (4) eyeballs (5) customer counts for investor decks (6) etc. Consideration doesn't have to be fina
708.
by blagie 3y ago
Yes. It does not become a "verbal contract," but the concept is promissory estoppel. Look it up. If you make a promise, and I rely on that promise, and I suffer financial loss, you're liable. It's a good idea too. If you
709.
by blagie 3y ago
The level of confidence both sides give here is not warranted. We have no idea about what internal structures emerged within LLMs. We only know outer behavior. From a humanist / secular perspective, humans evolved to make babies. Emoti
710.
by blagie 3y ago
That sounds like technobabble, which is to say big words like "instability" and "Bellman equations," but with little connecting logic. If there is meaning behind those words, please write something with multiple paragrap
711.
by blagie 3y ago
I don't think that's a limit. If you give me $10M and 5 years, I can tell you a half-dozen ways to train models better than GPT4, primarily by having them do richer tasks than text completion, by having them evaluate themselves in
712.
by blagie 3y ago
I don't know. Having interacted with LLMs at different levels, they resemble a very sophisticated, alien intelligence trying to pretend to be human. It's like me pretending to be a dog; even if I were to emulate a dog perfectly, I
713.
by blagie 3y ago
<-- This post is accurate, but I'd phrase it more strongly. Not all the listed pens in the original post are even "good." The Montblanc is mostly jewellery. It doesn't write as well as pens a fraction of the price, an
714.
by blagie 4y ago
> (Not sure if your last sentence was a joke meant to undermine your argument preceding it? Maybe by mainframe though you're referring to servers.) No. It's reality. Mainframes are here to stay. IBM continues to develop and sel
715.
by blagie 4y ago
Intel is in the CPU market, not in the "corporate desktop" market. If you'd like to see how well trying to focus on that niche works, have a look at DEC Alpha, MIPS, PA-RISC, Itanium, Sparc, PowerPC, etc. At the end of the da
716.
by blagie 4y ago
> What makes you think windows is in a death spiral? They still have a good 75% market share and while that fluctuates, it doesn't seem to really drastically decrease. Of what? Most of what I see normal consumers doing is in Android
717.
by blagie 4y ago
No. Everyone I've met who learned how to program after e.g. age 40, they had a hard time. There's a certain mental agility which comes with youth which makes for good coders. I haven't met anyone who learned to program late w
718.
by blagie 4y ago
The problem is it's not clearly advertised. Apple has had the longest support life historically, but I most recently bought an Android, since Apple does not commit to any particular timeline forward-looking. Most of the other vendors a
719.
by blagie 4y ago
Those are extreme solutions. You don't want to make it impossible to revoke offers or to fire people, but companies should be liable for actual costs. In this case, Google should pay for: 1) The costs of replacing discarded items 2) Mo
720.
by blagie 4y ago
Wages, globally, are up at least that. Right now, wages in the US are much higher than most other parts of the world, but the fundamentals behind that are quickly disappearing. If I can hire equivalent talent in the US for $100k, EU for $50

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