msteffen

6 ms·

1.
by msteffen 5d ago
I liked this a lot. I have also struggled with this, and I feel compelled to suggest my own angle: this is often caused by issues that are not (just) professional skill gaps, though closing those gaps can help resolve it. Avoiding status up
2.
by msteffen 8d ago
> The value to mathematicians is knowing that the conjecture is probably right, and knowing the rough path the LLM has taken to it. Ah, or is the value to mathematicians that their LLMs can build results on top of this? (In which case, d
3.
by msteffen 8d ago
> Your comment is a personal attack I don't think stschaef is a bully; in fact, if my guess that he's a researcher is correct, I think he's likely highly altruistic (I've never met him, but categorically, researchers
4.
by msteffen 8d ago
I find this whole post fascinating in the context of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49738091 and particularly this excerpt from Gowers: > Instead, I have a more complicated view, which I actually expressed in my es
5.
by msteffen 8d ago
To pick on a few examples: > a random vibecoded project > If this weren't slop... > I'm glad you're having fun vibecoding, and I like that you're interested in this area of research/engineering These impute
6.
by msteffen 13d ago
I haven’t played The Store is Closed, but to everyone saying IKEA had some obligation to shut down a parody…videogames parody real brands all the time, including their colors? Why was this different? Some examples offhand: - Fallout’s Nuka
7.
by msteffen 13d ago
> whether an autonomous running task can continue after being cancelled shouldn't be Idk, I think this might be quite important in servers, or any application where the running task might spawn subprocesses (can those continue auton
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by msteffen 16d ago
I love this framing. I have a lot of ideas about why this is true, but the best (IMO) pat explanation I've been able to come up with is: 1. Much of constructing software is math of a sort. In math, you write proofs that say why X is tr
9.
by msteffen 25d ago
lol, we’re all writing the same thing. I’ll give you one example, because I particularly liked it. My therapist always talks about separating people from problems, and I never had any idea wtf he was talking about. And then he gave me this
10.
by msteffen 25d ago
Therapy, which (at least for me) has focused dually on adhd management strategies that can be very helpful (including, in particular, enhancing relevant social skills related to setting expectations and boundaries) and on identifying and mo
11.
by msteffen 1mo ago
1. At an old apartment complex, there was a little playground in a common area, and it usually had at least one family from the complex there at any given time between about 4:00pm and 8:00pm. It was a terrible playground—small, poorly-main
12.
by msteffen 1mo ago
Uh, I think at the very least you have to caveat on the age of the kids. Babies need a lot of fussy obsessiveness. Kids arms aren’t long enough for them to wipe their own ass until they’re about 4. Don’t know when you get them to start doin
13.
by msteffen 1mo ago
> without much concrete evidence that it hurts long-term outcomes, assuming the child is otherwise healthy and well taken care of. Not to pick on others’ life choices, but I don’t think that this particular assertion is true. Depends on
14.
by msteffen 1mo ago
Preach! Bryan Cantrill (inventor of DTrace and cofounder of Oxide Computer) comes to mind as someone who seems to do both. It’s hard to know somebody’s parenting quality from the outside, but he talks about his kids a lot. In his case, I th
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by msteffen 1mo ago
For “parenting” and “startup”, I would say that each is extremely hard to do well even when it’s the only thing on the list.
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by msteffen 1mo ago
I saw an interesting article in the Atlantic[^1] somewhat recently predicting that the people who will thrive in the AI age will be ones who enjoy mental effort. That is, even when AI could do something for them, these people will choose
17.
by msteffen 2mo ago
I know less about this than every other commenter here, but both weather patterns and market performance do seem predictable based on past behavior when modeled at the right level of abstraction. “Sunshine on Monday” does not imply “rain on
18.
by msteffen 2mo ago
...Grapes of Wrath is American (John Steinbeck) . But I agree with you that parent comment is ridiculous. Proust wrote page-spanning individual sentences.
19.
by msteffen 2mo ago
I’m just saying, to the extent that there’s a moral question here, “how unreasonable was it for the author to ignore the sign?” I think it’s a lot more reasonable if there are no alternatives given. My take on TFA was that the lesson was “a
20.
by msteffen 2mo ago
I think the keys here are 1. It’s not clear who wrote the note, and they didn’t leave contact info or any opening to a negotiation. If the note had said “this AC must stay on at all times, please call 111-222-3333 with any questions - build
21.
by msteffen 2mo ago
> I think this is somewhere in the middle east - Dubai likely What led you to this conclusion?
22.
by msteffen 2mo ago
Well, I wrote my comment after an exchange similar to this, with the linked example chatbot (chatjimmy): https://pastebin.com/uEV7Pm8q I asked it a slightly tricky math problem (I re-asked it the same problem to create the
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by msteffen 2mo ago
This is neat but IMO a little crazy. Something I personally haven’t seen much of, in all the discussions of model benchmarks and AI breakthroughs, is a distinction between “peak performance” and “reliable performance”. The “peak performance
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by msteffen 2mo ago
I'd say that by the time you're considering jail, it's too late—these situations are better avoided than rectified. Per the article, one of the officers was evidently particularly stupid—he failed police academy once and was
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by msteffen 2mo ago
Interesting to read this right after reading about the pseudpocalypse ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48908886 ) That article proposes that, soon, it will be possible to connect any online identity to its owner's
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by msteffen 2mo ago
One use-case for curating commits other than git history is carefully structuring code reviews to be easy to review. Eg "commit 1 just rearranges existing code, no business logic changes"..."change 2 modifies business logic,
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by msteffen 3mo ago
> But this is also a factional concern; for reasons I don't understand, the Democratic left polarized hard against "abundance" (and thus YIMBYism). So these kinds of arguments now code as "centrist". I think a lo
28.
by msteffen 3mo ago
I read somewhere that almost every very successful person’s results can be attributed to 2-3 tricks that they consistently apply to great effect. With Elon, I think one of his is “build it as cheaply as possible, and then you can afford to
29.
by msteffen 3mo ago
> learn to turn off the over-thinking part of the brain that blocks creativity This is all pretty vibe-y but I think that might be what the post’s author found the ability to do and is trying to teach? TFA links to this other post in a s
30.
by msteffen 3mo ago
I wonder if some of these CEOs are anticipating a big crash and trying to lay people off now, so that (1) they can raise/hoard cash while the money-go-round is spinning and (2) their eng organization is already lean and used to it if&#

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