nilkn

8 ms·

61.
by nilkn 4mo ago
It's been speculated for at least a decade now that geochemistry spawned biochemistry and life as we know it. This appears to be the latest instance of this pattern. One of the most notable examples is geothermal processes simply creat
62.
by nilkn 4mo ago
In management, what it means is having to repeatedly make decisions that are in the best interest of the company, but not necessarily in the best interest of the people on your team. This could mean needing to fire people, conduct layoffs,
63.
by nilkn 4mo ago
This approach is great for peacetime and for when the team is already reasonably functional and performing. The really hard leadership problems occur during wartime (the business is in crisis, or shrinking, or responding to a serious compet
64.
by nilkn 4mo ago
I don't think that part is true, either. The average human could be trained to use an agent to synthesize information in their job to help make product decisions. The average human could not be trained to evaluate whether a reasoning m
65.
by nilkn 4mo ago
Synthesizing a ton of inputs to help clarify a decision or set of options is exactly one of the easiest and most powerful use cases for AI agents right now.
66.
by nilkn 5mo ago
Anthropic looks a lot more like early Google -- not the first mover, but "lightning in a bottle" culture, talent, focus, and product direction that causes them to become a dominant, enduring figure. OpenAI looks a lot more like ea
67.
by nilkn 5mo ago
I'm not religious and haven't been since 2008. However, the world today is very different from then. It's fragmented, far more authoritarian, much more dangerous, with "us vs them" mentalities just gaining more and
68.
by nilkn 5mo ago
We have about 600 million years before we'd need to perform serious planetary engineering to remain on Earth and about a billion years before humanity must leave Earth to survive. Right now, the greatest threat to our survival and pros
69.
by nilkn 5mo ago
Actually, I think you're really underestimating how many people struggle to find clothes that fit them well. Most people's bodies are not perfectly average. For clothes not to fit well, you don't need to be a significant outl
70.
by nilkn 5mo ago
I don't view Gemini as falling behind. I actually view it as a somewhat distinct type of intelligence compared to the latest iterations of GPT5 and Claude. The latter are, increasingly, very focused on productivity and automation of wo
71.
by nilkn 6mo ago
Organizational power comes in various forms. If an executive cares about the project and believes the junior PM is capable of running it, then that can be all the "power" that the PM needs to herd more senior engineers. If the eng
72.
by nilkn 6mo ago
They're pointing out that run-rate revenue is based on essentially sampling revenue over some limited time interval, then extrapolating from there assuming revenue always occurs at the same rate (or greater) over all similar intervals
73.
by nilkn 6mo ago
I'd think of it this way: Folks who have institutional knowledge that is really critical to the company are likely treated quite well in prestigious roles and paid handsomely. If they take a modest buyout offer, it's probably beca
74.
by nilkn 6mo ago
I believe this is exactly what's going on -- they're buying parts in bulk, often months in advance, and locking in deals that a single consumer can't easily go get on the open market right now. Hardware pricing and availabilt
75.
by nilkn 6mo ago
As an aside, recently I wanted to refresh my gaming PC, but the price shock and general lack of availability of buying components individually made it seem hardly worth it, so I just kept deferring the project. Then, mostly by chance, I saw
76.
by nilkn 6mo ago
I don't completely agree. Estimation is nontrivial, but not necessarily a random guess. Teams of human engineers have been doing this for decades -- not always with great success, but better than random. Deciding whether to put an inte
77.
by nilkn 6mo ago
This take is out-of-date by months (which is an eternity in this space). Codex today has caught up and is very much on par with CC.
78.
by nilkn 7mo ago
The free Google AI mode got it for me on the first try by just pasting in the comment and asking what TRAA was in that context.
79.
by nilkn 7mo ago
> Look at popular projects -- a few minutes after an issue is filed they have sometimes 10+ patches submitted. All generating PRs and forks and all the things. I think this is a really important point that is getting overlooked in most c
80.
by nilkn 7mo ago
I feel like it's pretty easy to predict what OpenAI is trying to do. They want their codex agent integrated directly into the most popular, foundational tooling for one of the world's most used and most influential programming lan
81.
by nilkn 7mo ago
This sounds like grief and depression to me. You're struggling because you're still mentally filtering everything you do through another person who is no longer part of your life. You must learn to do things for you, not for someo
82.
by nilkn 7mo ago
Same here. The initial version of WSL back in the day could certainly be rough, but modern WSL2 seems totally fine to me. It is the key ingredient that allows me to have one workstation that can do "everything".
83.
by nilkn 7mo ago
That's not clear to me. He's been in charge for over a decade, and the company he's in charge of has the most dominant position in AI in the world.
84.
by nilkn 7mo ago
I'm surprised people still think this. Google has the strongest position of any company in the world on AI. They have expertise and capability across the entire stack from chips to data centers to fundamental research to frontier model
85.
by nilkn 7mo ago
You're confused because you're taking everything the people involved are saying literally and trusting everything plainly at face value. The existence of the contradiction you're pointing out should be evidence that you need
86.
by nilkn 7mo ago
He didn't talk around it. He wrote down specifically what the two issues were, which is precisely why now the entire world knows what's actually going on. If risking your company's existence to prevent a (potential) atrocity
87.
by nilkn 7mo ago
I don't know what you're referencing, but it doesn't matter. I judge people by their actions more than their words. The actions in this case are simple: Anthropic doesn't want their models to be used for fully autonomous
88.
by nilkn 7mo ago
Obviously Anthropic does make a product that could do that -- just give Claude classified data and ask it who to target. Obviously the military wants to use it for that purpose since they couldn't accept Anthropic's extremely limi
89.
by nilkn 7mo ago
Anthropic specifically called out systems "that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets". I take that to mean they don't want the military using Claude to decide who to kill. As a hype
90.
by nilkn 8mo ago
If you'd been DCAing a fixed amount monthly into stocks for 10 years prior to the 2007 peak, then during the crash continued doing so without selling, the total value of your portfolio would've matched its pre-cash peak in just 3

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