wpietri

7 ms·

91.
by wpietri 6mo ago
You are confusing pointing out that people are morally responsible for the their actions with suggesting "that someone should leave their job on ideological grounds". I get that you (and most of them) want to cash the checks witho
92.
by wpietri 6mo ago
What's this website? Who put it up? Those have always been good questions to ask, but especially these days.
93.
by wpietri 7mo ago
For those interested in a keep-everything-hot approach like this, it's worth checking out the 25-year-old library Prevayler. Full ACID guarantees, and radically faster than a database. I happily used it for a project forever ago and wa
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by wpietri 7mo ago
I read that as being his emotional reaction, not something he'd say in an interview context. This being an internet forum and all. What I think he's sincere about is not wanting to work at a place that builds unnecessary stuff. An
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by wpietri 7mo ago
When I ask an interviewee a technical question, what I want is an answer that is correct technically. If I want them to give me a different kind of technical answer, then I think it's on me to ask a question that actually requires what
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by wpietri 7mo ago
Agreed. To me that's related to the question of minions vs professionals. If I go to a doctor and say, "Hey, please prescribe me a lot of morphine," the answer will be some version of "hell no". That's because
97.
by wpietri 7mo ago
Just to be clear, I'm absolutely not kidding here. E.g., this is the kind of hiring process I favor: https://williampietri.com/writing/2015/slightly-less-awful-h... To rethink hiring, you have to spend some t
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by wpietri 7mo ago
Humans are primates, and primate dominance dynamics are going to be the default absent some conscious choice otherwise. Our whole executive/worker dichotomy is a descendant of the British class system. (E.g., note that airlines specifi
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by wpietri 7mo ago
> Although it was originally intended to be cash it actually now is used as a "store of wealth" It's also terrible at that. Bitcoin is down by something like half off its peak. The odds of me losing money to "governme
100.
by wpietri 7mo ago
Right? I'll often structure interview questions like this. I give a basic problem, hoping for a basic answer. Then I add complexity, seeing how they respond. In my experience, it's much easier to train somebody on how to scale a b
101.
by wpietri 7mo ago
> yes you might be right but you also understand what the point of the interview is To make the interviewer feel smart and powerful? To hire people who will do the thing the boss wants whether or not it makes sense? To find people who wi
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by wpietri 7mo ago
I'd call it an interviewer failure, not an interviewee failure. I absolutely want people I hire to be "difficult" when the moment calls for it. If the scenario is one where the right business/user choice is "let the
103.
by wpietri 8mo ago
It seems entirely accurate to me, at least in a POSIWID sense. The original theory of Bitcoin was, as described in the paper, decentralized digital cash. But in practice it was never optimized for what normal people use cash for. As system
104.
by wpietri 9mo ago
As a former Wikipedia admin, I think the best way to think of it as a massive text-focused battle MMORPG that happens to produce an encyclopedia as a side effect.
105.
by wpietri 9mo ago
> Instead it's usually used as a last resort when the "exploiter" doesn't get their way I am not saying the phrase can't be used legitimately. Like the article's author, I just think it's often used in
106.
by wpietri 9mo ago
Sure. As background, when power is misused, you'll often find somebody immediately showing up to explain why it was the fault of the person harmed. In the US, for example, this happens basically any time a cop kills somebody. In analyz
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by wpietri 9mo ago
Every community is the sum of its members. Each person who joins changes it, at least a bit. And each of those members is changing and growing. When community members have different needs, forking should be a last resort. It's expensiv
108.
by wpietri 9mo ago
Ooh, this is gold: "The slogan pretends to be anti-authority, but in practice it is used to protect informal power." Spot on. I almost never see "just fork it" brought up in a context that acknowledges what that would ac
109.
by wpietri 9mo ago
Drive-by PRs don't come from people interested in participating in the community in question. They have infinite places to juke their stats. I see plenty of nuance beyond the bold print. They clearly say they love to help junior develo
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by wpietri 9mo ago
"Good artists borrow. Great artists steal." -- me
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by wpietri 9mo ago
Well, this is explicitly public ridicule. The penalty isn't just feeling shamed. It's reputational harm, immortalized via Google. One of the theorized reasons for junk AI submissions is reputation boosting. So maybe this will help
112.
by wpietri 9mo ago
No society can function without enforced rules. Most people do the pro-social thing most of the time. But for the rest, society must create negative experiences that help train people to do the right thing. What negative experience do you t
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by wpietri 9mo ago
I think it's better to say that LLMs only hallucinate. All the text they produce is entirely unverified. Humans are the ones reading the text and constructing meaning.
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by wpietri 9mo ago
Setting aside the concerning level of anthropomorphizing, I have questions about this part. > But we think that the way the new constitution is written—with a thorough explanation of our intentions and the reasons behind them—makes it mo
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by wpietri 9mo ago
Thanks for the correction!
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by wpietri 9mo ago
And on top of those things, I'd add that good artists use that time to deepen the work and their understanding of the work. If you're doing, say, factory work, you can just zone out. You do the same thing over and over, and you do
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by wpietri 9mo ago
As somebody who has been reading them since the first year, I think you have it wrong. That self-driving prediction was always about Level 5 autonomy. What's changed between now and then is that we've basically stopped talking abo
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by wpietri 9mo ago
I think this is true for essential complexity. And indeed it's one of the best reasons to release early and often, because usage helps clarify which parts of the requirements are truly required. But plenty of projects add quite a lot o
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by wpietri 9mo ago
I think this "first opportunity to be the bully" thing is spot on. Everybody learns from being bullied. Some of us learn not to do it when we have power; others just learn how.
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by wpietri 9mo ago
Nobody, least of all me, is saying people should work for free. But not being paid to do something you don't want to do is a reason to go do something else, not hang around and be a hostile, superior dick about it, alienating the users

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