ericmcer

23 ms·

271.
by ericmcer 10mo ago
> I wasted years of my life in crypto Yeah you are a software engineer. That means like 80% of your work will probably get minimal traction for a few years before burning into nothing. 8 years on crypto, probably a ton of people interac
272.
by ericmcer 10mo ago
Most of my transactions go through credit card, that means every time I exchange money for services/goods a private corporation takes a 3% cut. That makes sense to you but the dream of BTC doesn't? Of course it turned into a gambl
273.
by ericmcer 10mo ago
That seems naive, it would be like if we started dumping tons of deer food into the woods and the next year when deer are grossly overpopulated we thought "why are there so many deer now?". Humans are as a mass dumb animals, if we
274.
by ericmcer 10mo ago
Can we stop designing society like people won't game the system? I swear every social program or benefit or corporate relief program we roll out is designed to be exploited. In fact they use specific requirements (a doctors note, a set
275.
by ericmcer 10mo ago
Our previous information was coming through search engines. It seems way easier to filter search engine results than to fine tune models.
276.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
> "Companies replace junior positions with AI + Senior engineers have been excused from mentorship responsibilities + Companies optimize for immediate results = A systemic issue that no one person can fix" The
277.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
It's a dogs nose with a scab on it lol
278.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
The last 10 years has seen CA spend more on homelessness than ever before, and more than any other state by a huge margin. The result of that giant expenditure is the problem is worse than ever. I don't want to get deep in the philosop
279.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
I felt the same way until I saw a friend (engineer not a recruiter) post an opening for a hybrid job on LinkedIn. There were literally 100s of comments from people who didn't even live in the same country. Not to point fingers but they
280.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
Necessity is too fallible though, if Bezos was driven by necessity he would have sold Amazon in 1996 and retired. That level of success requires either just pure psychopathic drive or some kind of deep anger that forces you to keep proving
281.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
Yeah they aren't like, outlier wealthy though. They all had lawyer/doctor/banker parents. If having your student loans paid off for you is enough, then there are 10s of millions of people in their shoes. Why did they not succ
282.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
I dunno... based on having worked for ~10 small to midsize companies now and getting to interact frequently with the founders at almost all of them, I wouldn't say a safety net was the common thread. They were however all highly driven
283.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
It is complex. There was another posting on HN where commenters were musing over why software projects have a much higher failure rate than any other engineering discipline. Are we just shittier engineers, is it more complex, or is the cult
284.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
That feels like part of why some juniors are so confident while more senior engineers are plagued with self-doubt. Juniors know how much they have learned whereas a 10+ year senior (like the author) forget most people don't know all th
285.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
I think it has to do with their CDN and edge caching? If you can get everyone to watch the same 10 videos it’s easy to serve content.
286.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
I mean if we view it as a prediction algorithm and prompt it with "come up with a cool line to justify suicide" then that is a home run. This does kinda suck because the same guardrails that prevent any kind of disturbing content
287.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
Oh weird, was he also bad at socializing? I often have to remind myself of the quote "Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours" when socializing to remember to ask questions and let the other party explore whatever
288.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
It is probably a good time to view the root goals of education instead of the markers of success that we have been shooting at for a long time now (worksheets, standardized tests, etc.). A one hour lecture where students (especially <20
289.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
You can extrapolate this on to anyones life, not just someone with such a huge and dramatic secret they were hiding for the stability of their family life. If your parents get old/sick or you have kids or a bad relationship or you get
290.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
I am not sure if they still plant fish at Crater lake. If you have spent much time fishing you will pretty quickly learn that almost every accessible lake in the US is regularly stocked with fish. I would say the "native" freshwat
291.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
Did you read the post I was replying to?
292.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
I mean it is noble to act like you are some being of infinite sympathy and forgiveness. The reality of being alive though is that many people will 100% hurt you for their personal gain. > That's a worse crime than selling someone a
293.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
My conspiracy theory is that the administration recognizes the current media climate (a flood of frantic but ephemeral media/social media coverage of everything he does) and are leveraging it to combat things like immigration and drug-
294.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
Yeah... If you are smuggling large amounts of fentanyl or weapons into another country and they shoot you that seems pretty ok.
295.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
We are just in a weird transitory period right now so it is all shitty implementations replacing what we are used to. I am semi-confident that LLM backed interfaces will be the future of many UIs though. When it works it just is a way bette
296.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
How could it even achieve that? GCP and AWS don’t follow some higher standardized setup. If you use GCP app engine nothing exactly like it exists in AWS, not to mention even similar services like s3 have totally different configs and behavi
297.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
It must be interesting being an Uber driver right now and literally watching the robots that will replace you driving around with you. This has been a 15+ year process and will probably take a few more years. I don't feel too bad if th
298.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
5X is a terrible return if you have a magic orb that can tell you the future.
299.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
It's also hard to trust due to alienation. Currently society has this rigid demand for conformity that is fueled by social media/internet shame culture. We continually see people online who step outside the line and are torn down
300.
by ericmcer 11mo ago
Generally agree, but I also don't like how dogmatic people are about this. It feels like a cult where there is no room for nuance on either side. Are we too dumb to believe some vaccines are life saving miracles and that others may not

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