importantbrian

7 ms·

31.
by importantbrian 3y ago
> Considering Klarna's business is in lending I could see some regulatory attention here in the future. I hope they've solved the hallucination problem because I would be terrified to trust LLMs to handle customer service issue
32.
by importantbrian 3y ago
We might eventually get a good LLM to SQL tool, but my experience with them is that they make slick sales demos, but are worse than useless in the real world. You have to know SQL to use them. They produce a lot of code that looks correct a
33.
by importantbrian 3y ago
> (specifically: it's the vector that rejects pluralism, divides the polity into "the people" and "the elites", and declares that a particular political agenda, in its entirety, represents the true will of the pe
34.
by importantbrian 3y ago
It's so buggy right now. It feels like it's gone back to the old fail whale days. "It works" is a pretty low bar to clear. On the upside, it gave me back a lot of free time, because the Twitter experience is just too fru
35.
by importantbrian 3y ago
I don't think it even technically works as well as before. The iOS app seems mostly fine, but on web the feed or tweet fails to load and shows the blue retry button probably 1/3rd of the time for me now. Combined with all the bot
36.
by importantbrian 3y ago
Buybacks being more tax efficient are a part of the story, but I don't think that's the primary reason companies use them. They're also a lot more flexible. If you pay a dividend you set the expectation that you will continue
37.
by importantbrian 3y ago
Really, no one? Flag participation is already higher for 6 to 12-year-olds than tackle. Lots of girls participate in flag. I suspect they'll be interested in watching the sport they grew up playing. It might never be more popular than
38.
by importantbrian 3y ago
While American Football won't end anytime soon -- depending on your definition of soon. It's worth noting that youth participation rates are falling dramatically, and there are big regional differences. It will take a while, but f
39.
by importantbrian 3y ago
That's wild. I wonder if you just have a couple of jerks in your area. I grew up in a rural area and my parents still live out there, and I cannot ever remember someone driving on the road with their light bars on. I used to have one o
40.
by importantbrian 3y ago
$80k in 1990 dollars is equivalent to $192k in 2023 dollars. I'm not sure salaries are all that inflated compared to the .com days.
41.
by importantbrian 3y ago
Meta's choice of license doesn't indicate that Yann is clueless about open-source principles. I don't know about Meta specifically, but in most companies choosing the license for open source projects involves working with a l
42.
by importantbrian 3y ago
I don't think that's entirely true. I know a few A+ people who enjoy being in the office and hate working from home. I don't know how many of those folks there are, but I don't think company A would be totally stuck with
43.
by importantbrian 3y ago
Getting the extra reading time is nice, and if I didn't have a family I'd be all about that. But for me I get to spend mornings and evenings with my son, but if I had to commute half an hour then the morning would become just a ru
44.
by importantbrian 3y ago
I have often thought about creating an everything app for myself. Do you have it as a desktop app, or is it a web app you host somewhere? Would love to read a blog post about it if you have one or would like to write one.
45.
by importantbrian 3y ago
It seems to me that it would be in YouTube's best interest to provide me with accurate recommendations. The more content they can get me to watch, the more ads I view, which is how they get paid. It would seem that more accurate recomm
46.
by importantbrian 3y ago
I also find that I often experience the modern version of "no one gets me" quite frequently, which is that none of the algorithms really get me. Maybe I am interested in too many disparate things. Probably the worst offender here
47.
Discovery is the original sin of the modern age(strangeloopcanon.com)
21 points by importantbrian 3y ago|22 comments
48.
by importantbrian 3y ago
Being able to get your book published and having the publisher spend enough on marketing to get you on the NYT Bestseller list means something.
49.
by importantbrian 3y ago
I went to grad school with a guy who was in that situation. He worked at a bank and got laid off during the financial crisis. The plan was for the bank to port the old system over to Java or something like that, and they were "close&qu
50.
by importantbrian 3y ago
I think that's a compensation problem more than anything else. I've known some QA folks who enjoyed QA and would have stayed in that role if they could have justified the massive differential in comp between QA and SWE or product
51.
by importantbrian 3y ago
> OK are you suggesting that people who don't have kids of their own don't care about other peoples' kids as much as those who do? It seems you're pretty deep into logical fallacies. That's a bit of a leap, but l
52.
by importantbrian 3y ago
I used to consistently read a book a week. Then I had kids and now I feel pretty lucky to get through 10 or 12 a year. I'm consistently amazed by folks with young children who are still able to read a ton. My time management skills are
53.
by importantbrian 3y ago
This is next-level cynicism. Zuckerberg has 3 kids, most of their execs and a lot of their employees are parents. They've also employed a team to try and keep that stuff off their platform for a long time. The idea that they don't
54.
by importantbrian 3y ago
I actually do see DL research on tabular problems come out, but it seems like they generally aren't better than xgboost or similar boosted tree models on the same dataset, and when they are better it's only marginal and not worth
55.
by importantbrian 3y ago
When AGI finally comes around are you going to just stop doing anything? After all, what's the point when a machine can do it better?
56.
by importantbrian 3y ago
Divide and conquer actually does seem to be the strategy. Each department within the DoD does its own audit, and a few of those departments actually have passed. But most of them have failed with a few still ongoing. The bigger issue is the
57.
by importantbrian 3y ago
Also, audits are not 100% about saving money. They're also there to enforce conformity to standard accounting practices and try to make sure the books aren't getting cooked. Even if the books aren't getting cooked the only wa
58.
by importantbrian 3y ago
All of that sounds like bog standard kinds of stuff that we and every other private company have to go through during our annual audits. I don't totally understand why these things are so burdensome to DoD personnel that they can'
59.
by importantbrian 3y ago
This has become my workflow too. Admittedly though I've spent most of my career writing large amounts of SQL, and was a pretty heavy Tidyverse user for a while, so that all makes a lot more sense to me than Pandas. I generally get my d
60.
by importantbrian 3y ago
But as we've seen with human societies once you reach a certain level of affluence you tend to reproduce less not more. Why would we assume that civilizations that are presumably far more advanced and affluent than ourselves would desi

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