wenc

27 ms·

421.
by wenc 2y ago
I used to wear a Tissot, but my Apple Watch is so much more practical. I never thought I'd go for Apple Watches since they look so.... nerdy. But within a week of wearing one, I was sold. Today, I use it to Apple Pay for everything wit
422.
by wenc 2y ago
It's a surprising factoid that Phoenix the city is the 5th larges tin the US. But if we take metro areas (MSA) -- which is somewhat more representative of size -- it falls off to 10th place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
423.
by wenc 2y ago
Maybe not. But point about limited liability still holds.
424.
by wenc 2y ago
Public companies are not personal assets though. These are public corporations with limited liability, not sole proprietorships. Limited liability is what made modern commerce what it is today.
425.
by wenc 2y ago
This book surprised me by how good it is -- it distills a lot of tribal knowledge about how software engineering works at the mid-level to (early) senior engineering levels, based on the author's experience working at SV companies. ht
426.
by wenc 2y ago
Python's list comprehensions are close to set notation in math. Here's Python: [2*x for x in range(n + 1) if x <= 100] Here's set notation: {2*x | x in 0..n, x <= 100} So it reads pretty easily for tho
427.
by wenc 2y ago
Legality aside, I used to work in Hinsdale and I’ve visited Fermilab in Batavia. I could be all wrong about this but the location didn’t seem that desirable. Batavia is far away from major highways and feels like a forgotten sleepy town out
428.
by wenc 2y ago
This is pretty amazing. It's fast enough to converse with, and I can interrupt the model. The underlying model is not voice trained -- she says things like "asterisk one" (reading out point form) -- but this is a great previe
429.
by wenc 2y ago
I wonder why so many of these earlier GUIs didn't seem to have gotten typography right? I remember Geoworks looking cool, but the typography was not great. Even worse were Apple Mac inspired GUIs like Digital Research's GEM Deskto
430.
by wenc 2y ago
I was a gifted child and in the 1980s before the internet it gave me a community of adults who had a life of the mind and were for the most part professionals, whose experiences I really benefited from a lot from as a 12 year old. I don’t k
431.
by wenc 2y ago
Why do you feel so strongly justified in holding this opinion? Is it just vibes? Do you have data?
432.
by wenc 2y ago
Interesting -- I looked up automated folding tables [1] but even those don't have automatic positioning. I'm curious: how do they fold with high throughput? I can't imagine shirts are folded manually at industrial scale. [1]
433.
by wenc 2y ago
Yes. Most of the work in folding clothes is in garment positioning. If you can train robot arms to uncrumple a shirt from the wash and position it, you're 90% of the way there. The folding itself is trivial with a folding board (10% of
434.
by wenc 2y ago
I remember Olivetti PCs from the late 80s to 90s. They were beautifully designed -- not SGI or Sun beautiful -- but beautiful for PCs. I like the "grate" design. https://www.ebay.com/itm/325569104545 The IBM
435.
by wenc 2y ago
This didn't work for me, "Why are you browbeating me for asking that" did.
436.
by wenc 2y ago
Just tried a controversial question on Claude 3.5. I got: "I apologize, but I don't feel comfortable interpreting that type of request charitably or assisting with research that could promote harmful stereotypes or biases." A
437.
by wenc 2y ago
I pay for both Claude and ChatGPT. Claude 3.5 is now my daily driver but it still refuses to answer certain questions especially about geopolitics so I still have to go back to ChatGPT. I don’t agree that Claude is insanely superior to Chat
438.
by wenc 2y ago
You just have to double check the results whenever you tell Claude to extract lists and data. 99.9% of it will be correct, but sometimes 1 or 2 records are off. This kind of error is especially hard to notice because you're so impres
439.
by wenc 2y ago
If you're talking about IQ and wealth, they are not strongly correlated. IQ is correlated to income, but income is not wealth. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
440.
by wenc 2y ago
Absolutely. No matter how gifted a person is, there is going to be some point in their lives or some domain where pure talent will be insufficient. Even super geniuses like Terence Tao struggled (he nearly did not pass his generals). https
441.
by wenc 2y ago
Also gifted child here, but grew up with parents who drilled into me that "effort matters, you might not be the best, but with effort you can be better than who you were yesterday and that is a worthy endeavor" It's just a sl
442.
by wenc 2y ago
Would be helpful to list the features. This link has the details: https://github.com/duckdb/pg_duckdb Sounds like it would be useful for Postgres users to interact with Parquet and CSV data within a single SQL query an
443.
by wenc 2y ago
This is a book about mathematical optimization, not code optimization. It has its place in the world (kinda like an engineering handbook), but the field is constantly evolving and actively researched (especially in frontiers like global opt
444.
by wenc 2y ago
That’s a fair point. I guess for me it’s extremely rare for me to need (large amounts of) money “now” apart from daily needs but that’s usually charged to my credit card and paid off from my Fidelity cash management account on an interval.
445.
by wenc 2y ago
In theory correct because large sums of money wired out of an account can be subject to holds for any number of reasons. But it’s the same with banks too. The only difference is there is one fewer party in the transaction to trace (whereas
446.
by wenc 2y ago
> large amounts of money, the extra layer due to not being a real bank makes a huge difference. Can I ask why?
447.
by wenc 2y ago
Thanks for engaging. You're right in that the ideas are not new, but I feel the language and the framing somewhat is. I'm not sure if you've come across N. N. Taleb's work -- he's the guy who coined the term "a
448.
by wenc 2y ago
No, I replied to your full post. Just wanted to point out that your examples showed stability, not antifragility.
449.
by wenc 2y ago
> A pencil on it's tip is a fragile system, one burp and it falls to the table, far from the intial state. Marbles in fruit bowls are anti-fragile, given a good shake (up to a threshold) and they remain in the bowl and return to the
450.
by wenc 2y ago
Naive question, why are vertical tabs in the sidebar desirable? I tried TST once but didn’t get why they were bettter than horizontal tabs. I might be missing something.

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