blagie

59 ms·

721.
by blagie 4y ago
Plywood edges, nicely finished, with a clear seal, can be beautiful in some contexts. That said, they're ugly, noisy, and distracting in *most* contexts I've seen them used. It takes a good designer to make them beautiful.
722.
by blagie 4y ago
The debt crisis is primarily why I think we need inflation right now. Credit card debt. Subprime mortgage debt. Federal debt. College debt. It all feels brittle.
723.
by blagie 4y ago
I don't think so. I think the core problem are network effects and momentum. If someone could wave a magic wand, and there were OS, app, compiler, video game, etc. support for both MIMD and current architectures, I think MIMD would tak
724.
by blagie 4y ago
I think the major architectural leap would be MIMD with a standard ISA. I think something along the lines of a Pentium Pro or an ARM core. Pentium Pro had 5.5 million transistors. A modern CPU has about 1000x more, so about a thousand Penti
725.
by blagie 4y ago
Up to this point, anyone anywhere in the world could buy a $100 notebook computer (~1/3 years' income for much of the world), take a few courses in Python or JavaScript, and find work for ~$10k. Although this impacted a small mino
726.
by blagie 4y ago
I'm not quite sure of the impact of AI on any particular industry. Generative AI reduces costs and increases efficiency and means that I use a lot more art than I used to. I can develop better software systems faster too. Does this mea
727.
by blagie 4y ago
I think the key problem is anchoring from low-end prices. If a laptop makes an employee 1% more efficient, that has returns of $2k/year to the employer for an employee whose cost is $200k/year. Note that cost >> salary, so t
728.
by blagie 4y ago
The trick here would be to do a static scrape of all of dpreview, and post it on archive.org or similar. It's copyrighted, but I can't imagine enforcement of a discontinued resource. Amazon is imploding a huge amount of value here
729.
by blagie 4y ago
> There are lots of forces other than markets to appeal to - nations, industry groups, religions. Most of which suffer from an analogue of market forces. For example, elections are won by playing the "getting elected" game near
730.
by blagie 4y ago
> Being a bit careful, taking it slow, maybe, why not? Market forces: * Google is about to be steamrolled by Bing, and vice-versa if Bard gets ahead of Sidney. * Programming companies who don't have code written by GPT will fall beh
731.
by blagie 4y ago
The number of potentially world-ending technologies is growing exponentially: Chemical, biological, nuclear, etc. I don't think any of them individually are high-risk, but put together, I increasingly believe we need to fundamentally c
732.
by blagie 4y ago
> They'd have spear consisting of a pointy metal tip on a wooden stick, because that's cheap and works great. "Cheap" wasn't always the major factor. Some spears were cheap, but others were pretty darned expensiv
733.
by blagie 4y ago
People have different tastes, so please don't pounce on this, but I found this computer genuinely beautiful, more so than the objects which inspired it. No, it's not perfectly functional, ergonomic, or otherwise an ideal device, b
734.
by blagie 4y ago
That's actually how I spent a lot of my time. GPT drafts code of mixed quality, and I spend a lot of time reviewing it. What's interesting is that GPT isn't trained to produce high-quality code. It's trained as an autoco
735.
by blagie 4y ago
GPT can't do full code reviews. GPT is very good at finding improvements, such as making code more functional, bad variable names, etc. In some sense, it's like ESLint or pycodestyle on steroids. It won't find subtle race con
736.
by blagie 4y ago
I find ChatGPT is pretty helpful for debugging. A big chunk of debugging is missing stupid things, and for debugging, it's like having a second set of eyes. It's almost useless for high-level design and architecture. Those tasks d
737.
by blagie 4y ago
From my vintage, among the most competent governing institutions are the Supreme Court and the Fed, neither of which has any oversight. I'm not claiming any sort of perfection, but compared to congress, it's like night-and-day. It
738.
by blagie 4y ago
I would hope it's more stable. I like s3fs, sshfs, and similar solutions, but it gets wonky in corner cases, like gaps in connectivity. What I'd really like is a kernel-level file system abstraction which: (1) Has capabilities, an
739.
by blagie 4y ago
It depends on the work and the sanctions regime, but in general: - The best sanctions impact targeted industries (e.g. anything needed to build tanks, warplanes, etc.). - The worst sanctions impact communications and collaboration. Change c
740.
by blagie 4y ago
Google has been secretly incompetent for at least a decade now, probably more. It's been weird. They started out a head-neck-and-torso above everyone else in competence. Interviews were neigh impossible, and it was a hyper-elite team a
741.
by blagie 4y ago
> no one who didn't use dpreview will look unfavourably at Amazon for it True, but many tech nerds (who make decisions about services like AWS) visited dpreview. Right now, I won't use GCP or anything related to Google in busin
742.
by blagie 4y ago
Probably not. This is an incredible knee jerk. It's closing with 2-3 weeks notice. This does not reflect well on Amazon. This could be sold, spun out, archived, given back to the founders, or many other things. 20 days is not enough ti
743.
by blagie 4y ago
This gets into an inception-style loop. A completion ML being used as a chat bot being used as a completion tool.
744.
by blagie 4y ago
> Does adding 2 months between your 5-20% rounds recover that continuity? Yes. The knowledge is consolidated in fewer people that way. > It still looks like an incredibly stupid thing to do, but it will spread enough knowledge to keep
745.
by blagie 4y ago
My philosophy on multiple rounds (which I'm not attributing to big techs): 1) Any business can tolerate a 5-20% layoff without loss to business continuity. 2) A 50% layoff results in losing critical knowledge about how to keep the busi
746.
by blagie 4y ago
Off topic: This problem was fun. I would really enjoy a site with a pile of nonstandard, fun, and interesting problems like this one. Coming up with a working algorithm took about 30 seconds (I got lucky, not brilliant), but it stretched my
747.
by blagie 4y ago
It's actually pretty hard to dig into it unless you're a member of the community, and even then. There is financial fraud at the top. It's really easy to skim off the $25B. I'm not too worried about that. What worries me
748.
by blagie 4y ago
This shouldn't be a downvote. Step 1: Download the MIT Epstein transparency report. http://factfindingjan2020.mit.edu/ Step 2: Go to archive.org, and pull up Epstein foundation web site photos. See MIT faculty on sex i
749.
by blagie 4y ago
Please don't. If you'd like to support OCW, you can support to the Consortium: https://www.oeglobal.org/about-us/history-of-oeg/
750.
by blagie 4y ago
PLEASE don't do donate to MIT. MIT is overcapitalized, and this, in particular, is waaay overcapitalized in light of the super-sleazy sale of edX for $800M. I'm a member of the MIT community for over a quarter century (including r

More ›