zem

38 ms·

871.
by zem 2y ago
apart from anything else, write to potential advisors and make sure they are taking PhD students this year. when i was in grad school a classmate learnt this one the hard way - there was only one professor working in the area he wanted to d
872.
by zem 2y ago
google has botched or killed any number of acquisitions, but google earth and google docs are spectacular success stories that involved acquiring practically unknown startups and then scaling them way up. (I do realise this is likely a simp
873.
by zem 2y ago
more like hackenbush is a generalisation of nim; the latter is ancient and the former was invented by conway.
874.
by zem 2y ago
not at all; the hardest thing about getting hired is not clearing an interview, it's getting the interview in the first place. that's really most of what diversity pipelines are meant to fix.
875.
by zem 2y ago
you don't need microservices to accomplish that - a library with a well designed public api and a language that lets you enforce private functions/methods are good enough,
876.
by zem 2y ago
mostly good advice, but he's yet another person who seems to think orms are primarily about sql generation. they're not; they're about serialising/deserialising between objects and db columns!
877.
by zem 2y ago
"hardwired" (walter jon williams) felt pretty gibson-inspired, though given that it came out just two years after neuromancer perhaps they were just tapping into the same cyberpunk zeitgeist. (I guess it depends on to what extent
878.
by zem 2y ago
I wasn't too impressed by neuromancer even back in its day because I had read gibson's brilliant short story collection "burning chrome" first, and felt neuromancer didn't quite measure up to it. I feel like a lot o
879.
by zem 2y ago
oh, right, I wasn't using "existential risk" in the sense of AI taking over the world or not, just explaining how the term "end game" is usually used in this context. could be something as simple as a startup gettin
880.
by zem 2y ago
for AI, probably when it's so entrenched in everyone's lives that it's treated as an essential aspect of computers and computerised devices
881.
by zem 2y ago
the goal of nearly every single company out there is to make a profit, but not all of them engage in rent seeking.
882.
by zem 2y ago
sorry, I didn't mean to sound dismissive of the problem, I just believe it is a problem that having more actively developed type checkers will make better rather than worse. with my type checker developer hat on, the end goal is not to
883.
by zem 2y ago
I think it means more "the place where there's no existential risk any more"
884.
by zem 2y ago
have to disagree there - the enshittification of nearly everything is 100% attributable to the seductive nature of rent seeking (more specifically, trying to gouge ever more in recurring revenue from people who you try to ensure have no oth
885.
by zem 2y ago
doesn't even need to be a side project, or by a bunch of quants. a bunch of AI researchers working on this as their primary job would still have no real idea about what it takes to secure a large-scale world-usable internet service.
886.
by zem 2y ago
super excited about the potential for native gui apps
887.
by zem 2y ago
what the gp is getting at is that back in the day there were people who wanted to be in a band not out of any particular musical talent or even inclination but because a lot of their friends were doing it and it looked like a cool thing to
888.
by zem 2y ago
i worked on pytype for several years, and occasionally had to support projects that wanted to use multiple type checkers. in my experience, there were definitely times when one type checker would pass some code and another one reject it, bu
889.
by zem 2y ago
yep, that's the one! I don't know if there's any one place to discuss gradual typing. typed racket is probably the language with the largest academic community behind it, so the racket discourse would likely have some good di
890.
by zem 2y ago
> - why not just contribute to the community tool? what community tool? mypy is written in python, and is non-incremental, whereas astral's goal is to build a fast, incremental type checker in rust. there is no way to get from one t
891.
by zem 2y ago
as someone working in this space, the idea is that most python code is implicitly statically typed anyway, in that your functions are only ever meant to be called with specific types for their arguments, and only return objects of a specifi
892.
by zem 2y ago
nice, hadn't heard about that one!
893.
by zem 2y ago
you don't need to take ai training quite so literally (:
894.
by zem 2y ago
well, more compellingly, why can't I get a phone with a physical notification light any more?! amazingly useful feature on my galaxy nexus from back in like 2012, but I've never been able to find another phone with it. not to ment
895.
by zem 2y ago
third party apps (particularly stuff like messaging, banking and government services) only supporting the main two operating systems is a big barrier to a new one getting any traction.
896.
by zem 2y ago
try getting or borrowing a cheap watch and wearing it while you sleep first. I definitely don't find it comfortable enough to bother with that feature.
897.
by zem 2y ago
I've had a garmin for ~3 weeks now. amy #2 use for a watch (after telling the time, of course) is to read texts without pulling out my phone, and so far the garmin ux for that has been way worse than the pebble's. (not really used
898.
by zem 2y ago
oh wow, I just bought a garmin a couple of weeks ago after it seemed like the rebble app was going to be increasingly unsupported on new android versions, but if this takes off I'll switch back without a second thought
899.
by zem 2y ago
i feel like a lot of people have forgotten that that was its initial impetus, literally "let's get together and collectively build a better expertsexchange without the dark patterns trying to monetize your need for answers"
900.
by zem 2y ago
for a lot of us it wasn't the reputation, it was the idea of a gift-economy help desk and knowledge base. i enjoyed being a part of it, both helping and being helped, back when it was still good.

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