tikhonj

10 ms·

91.
by tikhonj 5mo ago
My guess is that they're currently nowhere near robust or effective enough to make that realistic. They need to bootstrap somehow, if only get good enough to convince hotel management that their approach will be realistic in the future
92.
by tikhonj 5mo ago
I broadly agree, but expensive homes are an odd example because, like, you can just sell the house later. There might be some opportunity cost relative to investing in a broad market ETF or whatever, but that's not the sort of differen
93.
by tikhonj 5mo ago
Presumably it was and they got acqui-hired.
94.
by tikhonj 5mo ago
This is definitely not uniform. I worked on inventory management at Target, and stores had quite a lot of shelf space—to the point where we'd hold large amounts of cheap, non-perishable stuff like cat litter because, well, we had the s
95.
by tikhonj 5mo ago
Sounds like OxCaml is pretty close to what you want. You get access to similar capabilities as Rust, but also stricter typing and an (optional) effect system. I don't know of an equivalent to Liquid Types, but it seems like the same
96.
by tikhonj 5mo ago
Over my time in the industry I've become increasingly convinced most people haven't seen what good human programmers are like. Otherwise we wouldn't have the popularity of things like Scrum, Clean Code (the book, not the
97.
by tikhonj 5mo ago
I browse the web moderately zoomed in, and the actual definition is almost entirely below the fold for me. Google gives the AI summary so much blank space it takes up my whole screen! Absolutely wild.
98.
by tikhonj 5mo ago
The top trading firms had top-end recruiting figured out for ages, without jumping through all these hoops. There are plenty of other reasons to acqui-hire, but it is not the only or even the most effective way to hire the strongest enginee
99.
by tikhonj 5mo ago
I'd guess it's more a way to avoid YouTube's copyright detection/etc rather than AI scraping per se .
100.
by tikhonj 5mo ago
Reminds me of my favorite math essay: "When is one thing equal to some other thing?" It's a great question, much deeper and more interesting than it seems. The essay suggests thinking in terms of isomorphisms (relative to the
101.
by tikhonj 5mo ago
Eh, Facebook today is farther from what anybody "wants" than macOS 26, and Facebook is about as blindly data-driven as they come. Turns out you can get away with a lot when you have a quasi-monopoly on an addictive product, and yo
102.
by tikhonj 5mo ago
Ceremonies and tickets aren't especially effective for actual collaboration. They're primarily tools for making work legible and controllable to management. There is a reason (well, many reasons) that, if I'm working on a cre
103.
by tikhonj 5mo ago
Everything exposed programmatically would have been great even without agents—the NixOSes and Emacses of the world show just how amazing a fully flexible and programmable world would be—but I'm glad that the advent of AI is getting peo
104.
by tikhonj 5mo ago
The real trap of modernity is treating "productivity" as some sort of quasi-religious moral imperative.
105.
by tikhonj 5mo ago
You can do a great job of navigating that as long as you have some experienced engineers with taste building the core pieces. You can't have it all, but you can have a lot . I interned at Jane Street years ago and they seemed to do a
106.
by tikhonj 6mo ago
I've gone in the opposite direction: on projects I've led, I decided to have no recurring meetings at all, very much going against the flow of the broader organization. Instead, I would set up a time when we had something specif
107.
by tikhonj 6mo ago
A large part of the effect that cars have come from massive subsidies and policy choices that push for cars over alternative options. The comparison shouldn't be "cars vs literally nothing" but rather "car-dominated infr
108.
by tikhonj 6mo ago
It's the folks pushing cars that are both the most strident and the most successful at pushing their "obviously correct" way onto everyone, at least in the US.
109.
by tikhonj 6mo ago
Ah yes, a non-profit reaching out to a broader audience for its activism is clearly a "certain ideological concern" separate from their core mission.
110.
by tikhonj 6mo ago
We can't read everything, so we need markers of taste to figure out what is and isn't worth engaging with. AI tells are markers of drastically bad taste.
111.
by tikhonj 6mo ago
It's a great time to get into programming languages stuff: designing domain-specific languages, building new tools/abstractions and, especially, formal verification. If you're mathematically oriented, you can explore formaliz
112.
by tikhonj 6mo ago
Yeah, fraud is what happens when you don't make it.
113.
by tikhonj 6mo ago
You can have both: you start with a small, mathematically inspired algebraic core, then you express the higher-level more user-friendly operations in terms of the algebraic core. As long as your core primitives are well designed (easier s
114.
by tikhonj 7mo ago
I wonder how much of that is posturing (less charitably, lying to outsiders) and how much is the organization effectively lying to itself. Both are indictment of today's ambient startup culture, and I'm not sure which is ultimatel
115.
by tikhonj 7mo ago
The most productive teams I've seen (eg at Jane Street) rewrite things all the time, and still move faster than any "normal" teams I've seen. I remember when I interned there over a decade ago, they were already on like
116.
by tikhonj 7mo ago
> No one has ever made a purchasing decision based on how good your code is. This is very much a "it's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end" sort of thing. (Same with the other variant I&#x27
117.
by tikhonj 7mo ago
Google's R&D budget is like $60B. Make of that what you will.
118.
by tikhonj 7mo ago
Based on some rough numbers, NASA's budget (around $24B) would be <4% of the US's total spending on entertainment, with a pretty great return in research, engineering and education to boot. I also looked up the NSF's 2024
119.
by tikhonj 7mo ago
There are a lot of small, informal and fuzzy communities around specific interests in Twitter. For example, I routinely run into the same folks talking about some specific areas in PL/FP or in complex systems/resilience engineer
120.
by tikhonj 7mo ago
I rather like this. A represents major changes like a substantial redesign of the whole API, while B catches all other breaking changes. Tiny changes to the public API of a library may not be strictly backwards compatible, even if they do

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