pradn

14 ms·

151.
by pradn 2y ago
I don't think the pay angle got serious until after like Google went IPO - somewhere around like 2005-2010. Before that, tech workers were paid well, but not so much beyond like a financial analyst. Now there's a mass market of FA
152.
by pradn 2y ago
Windows XP was rather beloved as well.
153.
by pradn 2y ago
Taste is a nebulous and rare thing. Microsoft rarely had it - it continues to flail around, with brief rays of hope - many of the Surface products are lovely. Will Microsoft enshittify Windows? Yes, it already has.
154.
by pradn 2y ago
There's a whole term for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth-generation_warfare
155.
by pradn 2y ago
This is so baffling to me. Is it just to reduce traffic to OneDrive or something?
156.
by pradn 2y ago
Pernicious assumptions! Google Cloud projects have three attributes: user-friendly names, system numbers, and system names. System names are alphanumeric. They can be chosen by the user, derived from the friendly name if there's no col
157.
by pradn 2y ago
Hyperthreading is also useful for simply making a little progress on more threads. Even if you're not pinning a core by making full use of two hyperthreads, you can handle double the threads at once. Now, I don't know how importan
158.
by pradn 2y ago
This shop is brilliant, thank you!
159.
by pradn 2y ago
These aren't creative tasks. They're research and summarization tasks. No one is asking a legal AI to write an opera.
160.
by pradn 2y ago
Part of the reason why LLM summaries are so attractive IS a UI problem. The economics of the web has led to every publisher stuffing their websites with ads. No one wants that. Its much nicer to see a clean paragraph of text. But we clearly
161.
by pradn 2y ago
Your comment makes a lot of sense to me. What I wonder though is - we've been a year and a half into the LLM craze and we still don't see a really good information processing system for them. Yes, there's chatbots, some that
162.
by pradn 2y ago
I'm with you on this. The vector embedding craze seems to be confusing mechanism and problem. The problem is semantic similarity search. One mechanism is vector embedding. I think all this comes from taking LLMs as a given, seeing that
163.
by pradn 2y ago
Thanks for extracting the details. It doesn't seem like they'll be competitive with blocklist-based approaches like uBlock Origin, because their features are fundamentally expensive to compute - parsing JS and such, not just match
164.
by pradn 2y ago
What's fascinating here is AdFlush is a classical feature engineering approach: define a bunch of features on the data manually, and then use ML to figure out the most useful / impactful ones. This is not the "throw terabytes
165.
by pradn 2y ago
I assume the majority of people are autoscaling merely for diurnal and weekly traffic swings, where the signal window could be as high as 30 min or 1 hour. Do folks really see sub-minutely autoscaling? Are customers that are so cost sensiti
166.
by pradn 2y ago
Every commodity service like flights needs to be available through a standard API. We need to maximize the impact of market forces, via price discovery and then competition, for the benefit of passengers.
167.
by pradn 2y ago
There's a lot of value in coming up with a clear problem statement and giving it to the right people. We see this with DARPA, at a much bigger scale. A lot of the value in engineering leadership is in making sure the right problems are
168.
by pradn 2y ago
There's a lot of value in coming up with a clear problem statement and giving it to the right people. We see this with DARPA, at a much bigger scale.
169.
by pradn 2y ago
The website is good. But I urge people to get the book. It's a charming object. Every time you open it you land up at a charming, humanistic idea - with wonderfully evocative images. I cherish the summer I spent reading the patterns wi
170.
by pradn 2y ago
I find it far more tiring because I don't have "micro-breaks" where I'm slowly typing code. I just have to be in a serious "check the logic" mode for a longer period of time. It also makes it a lot easier for j
171.
by pradn 2y ago
It's also a way to compel action across all professors, not just professors from historically-underrepresented groups, who would likely be bearing the brunt of the work.
172.
by pradn 2y ago
That's because caring and liquidity/fungibility are at opposing poles. People sell cattle but not their pet cows. Something like that.
173.
by pradn 2y ago
It's worthwhile to note the big impact a small set of driven volunteers can have in archival and preservation work! This was not inevitable!
174.
by pradn 2y ago
The key thing is AI models are services not products. The real world changes, so you have to change your model. Same goes for new training data (examples, yes/no labels, feedback from production use), updating biases (compliance, chang
175.
by pradn 2y ago
It might be helpful to catalog a few reasons why software engineering can be so stressful. Many of these are common to other professions as well, to varying degrees. * It's hard to predict how long something will take so you stress out
176.
by pradn 2y ago
> In any case, I added a secret preference to do it the right way It's harder to do these sort of guerrilla things when every line is code-reviewed. Or maybe you snuck it past your peer?
177.
by pradn 3y ago
I think OSs are generally over bundling helpful software, unless its a funnel to a paid version. The security risk is too high, and so is the legal risk of anti-monopoly action ("why are you killing independent movie editor businesses?
178.
by pradn 3y ago
That's probably true. In my ideal world, the OSS community comes together in a suite of offline-first, in-browser alternatives to common user needs. We need a site for document conversion (using WASM Pandoc?), PDF merging, image conver
179.
by pradn 3y ago
If it's 2-3x of native code, that's plenty good enough. Everyone uses Handbrake in an async mode - just set up the conversion and let it run overnight. Of course, a website would be better for smaller conversion jobs (in case you
180.
by pradn 3y ago
This proposal is to offer competition to web-based conversion websites. If users are willing and able to find Handbrake and download it, it can work for them. But everyday users are right to distrust software downloaded from the Internet. M

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