ngriffiths

5 ms·

31.
by ngriffiths 4mo ago
My biggest struggle with this question is that "going bad" sometimes coincides with not just financial incentives, but also more people getting value out of it. For example Spotify gradually shifting from "we make it easy to
32.
by ngriffiths 4mo ago
Yes, and there are sometimes many layers to it, which is why you can think "cool, I get that" while still missing something important that would be obvious to an expert.
33.
by ngriffiths 4mo ago
So be it? Everyone under 30 being permanently worse off due to a decline in education is an extremely depressing outcome, that seems like the whole argument for fixing it
34.
by ngriffiths 4mo ago
It is not written though
35.
by ngriffiths 4mo ago
> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow. Obviously literacy is super important but these are examples of thin
36.
by ngriffiths 4mo ago
I don't know. I used to feel this way about IDE autocompletes/suggestions. Now they are widely used, and it doesn't necessarily seem hostile. It's not that hard to imagine the same thing could happen here.
37.
by ngriffiths 4mo ago
> The key to surviving in such an environment is to let go of your ideas of the truth . The customer doesn't want to hear it, and doesn't want to know it. This is exactly it! Like you might think "the promised features ar
38.
by ngriffiths 4mo ago
In addition to covering the IPO in general last week, Matt Levine also wrote about this specific question Tuesday[1]: > Historically index providers were in the business of making these sorts of quality decisions, so that index funds w
39.
by ngriffiths 4mo ago
That's interesting, thanks. I only read the abstract so far but was immediately reminded of this recent HN submission[1] and the whole thing that certain ideas go together, and so they are adopted together, but the resulting bundle of
40.
by ngriffiths 4mo ago
The original decision is interesting because at first it seems very stupid (as acknowledged right there in the article). It's a more expensive way to do the same thing. But man , what a sales pitch, not only for their own customers bu
41.
by ngriffiths 5mo ago
Yeah, I mean it's obviously meant to be a marketing pitch but it's not a very good one. > The hardest computational problems are not waiting for faster chips – they are waiting for machines that compute in a fundamentally diffe
42.
by ngriffiths 5mo ago
Exactly, and correlated errors, where a polling error in one state predicts similar errors across the board. I disagree that it's all pointless though. Most basically it's smart for campaigns to have a good model and let that info
43.
by ngriffiths 5mo ago
Discussion of stats models is always complicated by the fact that a lot of people will read "30%" as a "no" prediction and claim your model is wrong if the thing happens. On the one hand, one strategy is to "hide&qu
44.
by ngriffiths 5mo ago
The thing jumping out at me is these really are mini businesses (even though they are bad). Combine it with the main idea in "Emacsification of Software" (from recent HN front page [1]) and I guess you end up with lots of nerds ru
45.
by ngriffiths 5mo ago
I would have been all over this if we had one of these when I was in school. Very cool project.
46.
by ngriffiths 5mo ago
I think there are many ways someone with his lack of expertise can still be valuable, including: - Making connections to other subjects that an expert would miss. The hall of fame of sigmoid predictions is just excellent, I already know I&#
47.
by ngriffiths 5mo ago
As a fun exercise replace AI with "junior" and "junior" with "mid-level." It holds up pretty well, as a manager you have responsibility for the work your team does and "make everyone put in more hours for
48.
by ngriffiths 5mo ago
Wow, this really changes how I think about working with software and with LLMs. Sharing ideas and amateur remixing and setting up something weird for you and your friends is so much easier now. Things you had to have lots of time and expert
49.
by ngriffiths 5mo ago
It's kinda fascinating how dominant LaTeX is, how nice its output is, how respected Knuth is as a computer scientist, and at the same time how totally awful it feels to use it. Hard to figure out how it can be so good and so bad at onc
50.
by ngriffiths 5mo ago
Good point. You sort of have a purpose for opening it up, then you get distracted, or fired up or whatever, because the app just unloads tons of information at you. I sort of claimed that everyone enjoys it when they use these apps, maybe i
51.
by ngriffiths 5mo ago
Sure, making instagram as addictive as possible seems bad but I disagree with the framing a bit. Dark patterns get users to do things they don't want, that's why they get super annoyed at the design or the process or the outcome
52.
by ngriffiths 5mo ago
Isn't the super dramatic shift in public opinion on this topic the exact thing that makes it such a good example? Isn't the point that anonymity is not considered a universal right yet it is obviously a good thing once conside
53.
by ngriffiths 6mo ago
I guess it's too extreme to say there's no difference, I just don't love the explanation of there being some hard ceiling because it seems like the real process is incredibly uncertain and unpredictable. There's a millio
54.
by ngriffiths 6mo ago
One of my high school piano friends went on to become a concert pianist. The difference between him and the rest of us was that music was everything for him - its what he did to relax, his social life, his hobby, his work, and his passion.
55.
by ngriffiths 6mo ago
It's also extremely nonlinear. I look back on my years of studying piano and the first 7 or so as a kid were basically screwing around compared to the next two, when there was this huge breakthrough. Then another couple years at that l
56.
by ngriffiths 6mo ago
I think you are a little over the 250kt speed limit under 10000
57.
by ngriffiths 6mo ago
In mice, but not even real mice. That's a new one!
58.
by ngriffiths 6mo ago
It would be easy if all you had to do was make it simpler, but I don't think that's it. Good writers always sound like themselves, you're reading along and you feel like there's a whole person there saying something to y
59.
by ngriffiths 7mo ago
I think in an ideal world, programming languages[1] would allow you to express key behaviors, interfaces, states, etc very precisely and sharpen your own understanding while writing, but importantly, also leave unimportant behaviors, struct
60.
by ngriffiths 7mo ago
Raises a few questions: 1. Is there still value in a trusted source of high quality, relevant information existing in an easily accessible place? To me the answer is obviously yes, whether a human writes it or an agent, and also whether a h

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