edanm

24 ms·

361.
by edanm 2y ago
I'm somewhat certain that people who worry about whether they're good people are usually better than people who don't think much about it. I've not met many people who thoughtfully engage with the question of how to li
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by edanm 2y ago
Most effective altruism people very specifically put money in places that are doing things and can prove they are effective. So no, I don't think this is where a lot of EAs go wrong.
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by edanm 2y ago
Fantastic article. One small point - consistency is a pretty good rule in small codebases too, for similar reasons. Less critical, maybe, but if your small codebase has a standard way of handling e.g. Auth, then you don't want to imple
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by edanm 2y ago
> No-one's actual business problem takes 5M lines of code to describe, those 5M lines are mostly copy-paste "patterns" and repeated attempts to reimplement the same thing. I'm pretty sure this is trivially untrue. Any
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by edanm 2y ago
Very interesting what you write about caffeine. I've never been a coffee drinker, having never "developed the taste" for it, but I drink a lot of sugar-free soft drinks (Pepsi Zero is my preference). I'm fairly sure it
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by edanm 2y ago
Totally respect your position, given that you actually tried the tool and found it didn't work for you. That said, one valid explanation is that the tool isn't good for what you're trying to achieve. But an alternative expl
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by edanm 2y ago
I love 3blue1brown and have followed the channel for years. One of my absolute favorite content creators. But I think you're vastly overestimate how popular he is compared to other channels that have gotten copyright strikes, or how
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by edanm 2y ago
Oh that's cool. We've been blogging about AI eng recently, but the project is often "try this idea/tool/library in order to write a blog post about it". Having some kind of standard "I need to integrate th
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by edanm 2y ago
Yeah weight loss or whatever aside, this challenge is awesome!
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by edanm 2y ago
One thing I'd love to know - how do you balance time spent "building" vs. time spent "researching"? The writing, I understand - you do it relatively quickly because of a lot of practice. But I feel like just reading
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by edanm 2y ago
> LLMs are awesome but I haven't felt significant improvement since the original GP4 (only in speed). Taking the outside view here - maybe you don't "feel" like it's getting better. But benchmarks aside, there ar
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by edanm 2y ago
Yes, but quantity of calories is what ends up determining whether you're gaining or losing weight over time, and at 1300 calories a day, most adults would be losing weight. (Which was a half-goal of the challenge, iirc.)
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by edanm 2y ago
Hebrew speakers also read top to bottom and left to right, when they're reading code, because coding is (almost always) in English languages. :)
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by edanm 2y ago
> I don't have a great opinion of marketing in general and therefore I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs" or "adding efficiency to the market". I
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by edanm 2y ago
This was a great book. If you haven't seen the tv show Madam Secretary (minor spoiler warning), there's an episode that more or less films this scenario playing out. You can find clips on YouTube of just the "nuclear war is a
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by edanm 2y ago
That's a very good reason to talk about this. I do think that this is a very "lightly held" belief. It's something people kind-of believe, they'll tell this to each other, but it doesn't affect any behavior - n
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by edanm 2y ago
Yeah, they're into trillions, but aren't they like 5% of most pension funds, which are the biggest stores of wealth? Also, if you're looking at trillions invested, I'd hardly call them startups or speculative investments
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by edanm 2y ago
First, I think VC makes up a tiny percentage of invested capital, so I'm not sure the intuition of "so much money is thrown at it" is right. There's far, far more capital and talent in e.g. traditional non-software busin
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by edanm 2y ago
That's kind of true, but also, there really is a difference between everything is allowed all the time and the current situation the cartoonist is gesturing at. I read it as "the Overton window for what is acceptable discourse h
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by edanm 2y ago
This is a very common sentiment on HN, but... why? I don't get it. It's not like there aren't people focused on sustainable businesses. 90% of businesses are probably SMBs - just not in tech. For most people in the world, t
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by edanm 2y ago
> You just glossed over Nakba again: I'm not glossing over it, we disagree about it. Also, the Nakba doesn't usually refer to the founding of Israel itself, but rather the ethnic cleansing of Arabs as part of the war, which is
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by edanm 2y ago
> There's no chance for peace with the current Israeli regime, at least as long as it has unshakable support from the US; Hamas is a symptom of the problem (one actively fostered to both divide Palestinian opposition and provide a l
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by edanm 2y ago
I'm not "glossing over" the Nakba. Firstly, we probably don't 100% agree on the exact events of the Nakba or the interpretation of them. But more importantly, I'm not sure how actually relevant it is today. Israel w
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by edanm 2y ago
Listen to audiobooks. The amount of "spare time" most people have, time they're doing random things that don't require full focus, is enormous, at least it is for me. Arranging breakfast for the kids before the school da
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by edanm 2y ago
Yes, it "counts". There are differences, but the main point of books (the conveying of a story and/or information) happens perfectly well with audiobooks, at least for me.
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by edanm 2y ago
It's really interesting how strongly Pargin has managed to "brand" himself, at least in my mind. I read the title you mentioned, and despite only having read "John Dies at the End", I insta-guessed it's the sam
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by edanm 2y ago
As someone who reads a lot - probably more than 99% of people, I guess? - I mostly agree. > People should be able to have hobbies and self improvement separate and each one delivered in whichever medium they happen to prefer. Agreed. &gt
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by edanm 2y ago
Look, the question of how Israel can remain both Jewish and a democracy is a complicated one that no one has a good answer to. I won't pretend otherwise. I do think people think about this as if it's unique to Israel though. It&#x
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by edanm 2y ago
> > A generation ago, Israel was working towards a two-state solution. > Yes, very briefly, until Netanyahu’s faction murdered Yitzhak Rabin, and not since. I think we've talked about this before? This is just wrong. Firstly,
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by edanm 2y ago
> > the later negotiations ended with the Palestinians walking away from deals that gave them almost everything they supposedly wanted > You can't possibly believe this. Every side had to compromise quite a lot. Israel had to

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