neilk

11 ms·

91.
by neilk 3y ago
I feel like no one is willing to face up to the obvious truth: founders are not magical, they’re lucky. There isn’t a magic spark that gets lost. They get lucky with breakthrough products. They are incredibly smart annd hardworking but also
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by neilk 3y ago
Like any engineer, I know more than a few instant-millionaires. The ones who were capable of being happy before money continue to be capable of being happy. They had sources of self-worth outside of money, social connections outside the off
93.
by neilk 3y ago
I’ve noticed many posters using Doctorow’s term “enshittification” here. In the interest of preserving a useful word for a few more years - I don’t think it fully applies. Enshittification is about how _platforms_ die, in the ultimate phase
94.
by neilk 3y ago
The smallest 1x1 BMP file is 30 bytes, which has the advantage of still being displayable in my browsers. Here's a 1x1 red pixel: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mathiasbynens/small/master... Check out the
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by neilk 3y ago
Plot twist: the Hawaii bunker is just the decoy bunker
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by neilk 3y ago
While there are many legitimate questions about Wikipedia’s openness to new edits and editors, this is such a wild topic derail that I find it a little suspicious. Are you arguing that this isn’t a great loss for freedom of speech?
97.
by neilk 3y ago
I learned a lot from Wordlebot analysis, though I hardly look at that now. According to Wordlebot I scored 99 on skill on today's puzzle. I always start with SLATE, and then if there are no matches at all, CRONY. I'm not sure exac
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by neilk 3y ago
I honestly don’t know what to tell you if you think these pieces are similar to random TikToks that are constructed to inspire horror and disgust. Andrew Callaghan does some interesting work that focuses on lurid topics but with unexpected
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by neilk 3y ago
You mean this one? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/health/opioids-drug-consu... The focus seems entirely different. It’s not about shock value. In any case, turning aside from the NYTimes specifically
100.
by neilk 3y ago
But we're dealing with such small numbers and such perishable materials! This isn't like modern humans - billions of individuals each generating tons of waste materials over their lifetime, stuff like concrete, plastic, glass, and
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by neilk 3y ago
oh wow i only get spam there these days. ok i will look
102.
by neilk 3y ago
If you mean Vancouver, Canada, that’s where I live. A friend of mine used to work with a social service agency. He might know where I could put up flyers or something. It is common to see these sorts of things just pasted up on lampposts, t
103.
by neilk 3y ago
You’re not wrong, but the web won because it had a superior delivery system: URLs. Everything weird about the web era of development has been about contorting everything to be URL-oriented. But consider how WASM is now turning the browser i
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by neilk 3y ago
I’m familiar with this project - the creator is a friend. I’ll try to get him on here to answer questions. He’s a seasoned database architect. With SQLsync he’s made a way for frontend developers to query and update a remote database as if
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by neilk 3y ago
I didn’t say “certain success”, I said “interesting”
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by neilk 3y ago
I am neither a mathematician or LLM creator but I do know how to evaluate interesting tech claims. The absolute best case scenario for a new technology is that it when it seems like a toy for nerds, and doesn't outperform anything we h
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by neilk 3y ago
Tyler Cowen found the rationalist/EA people impressive. But was skeptical that anybody had enough information and wisdom to see thousands of years into the future. After the fall of FTX he pointed out that they couldn't even predi
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by neilk 3y ago
You should look into how Futurism, the cultural movement, preceded fascism. Our era may seem frustrating. I guarantee that accelerating the causes of pain does not lessen the pain. Giving the reins to strongmen, to technology-enriched busin
109.
by neilk 3y ago
I agree that David Gerard is more bombastic and leaps to more conclusions than I would prefer. But I follow this story a little and the connections he and Amy Castor draw here make a lot of things make more sense. The "staff psychiatri
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by neilk 3y ago
typo! I meant “not”
111.
by neilk 3y ago
I don’t have an informed opinion about Portland or its police. But I think that’s not exactly the issue here. Others have already noted that the author overstates the support for true police abolishment. Let’s set that aside. The police are
112.
by neilk 3y ago
You should come up with any belief from first principles
113.
by neilk 3y ago
Let’s consider the contrary. Do poor people sometimes hold highly questionable beliefs, promulgated by institutions, and does professing these beliefs in expensive and flamboyant ways confer status? Religion ticks all these boxes. In some c
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by neilk 3y ago
The median wage in Philadelphia is $55K USD. A $500K townhouse is a good deal for some kinds of remote workers, but not for anyone else. EDIT: I found an interesting page about a useful metric - household income versus home price. You'
115.
by neilk 3y ago
The housing crisis is (in part) a transport crisis. A city is a technology for optimizing time. In North America, the car made suburbanization possible. You could live much further out, and still get everywhere you wanted. (Or at least, tha
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by neilk 3y ago
You may laugh at how weird this is, but there is one thing that came out of the Kai Krause aesthetic that is everywhere today: buttons that light up on mouseover. I have a distinct memory of him announcing this unfamiliar idea as "slig
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by neilk 3y ago
It definitely could not have done that. In the same year that Google had Borg, and AWS released EC2, at Yahoo, David Filo was still personally reviewing hardware requests.
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by neilk 3y ago
Vespa was actually very cool at the time as a document-oriented search engine, occupying the same niche as Solr and elaborations of that like ElasticSearch. But I don't know if it's competitive today. This blog post says it's
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by neilk 3y ago
You're right about all of that. But people use different media to convey different things, and to reach different people, and engage different states of mind. Every advantage you list is also a disadvantage from another perspective. Vi
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by neilk 3y ago
You should write about that sometime! /s

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