Viewing profile — blacksmithgu

I have a family member who is quite into "ancient aliens" and who has read all of von Danikens books. The main thing I realized from arguing about it with them was that rigor and s…

I want to learn how to sleep well again. The difference in how I feel when sleep deprived versus fully rested is staggering.

Everything is peak software. Extremely fast, can be bound to a global keybind to bring up anywhere. I use it so often now that I forget to recommend it to people sometimes.

People would turn to games and other forms of escapism even if the governments were stable and honest and the churches preached only love and acceptance. Reality cannot compete wit…

The titan submersible made for good entertainment while the migrant ship did not. This isn't a grand moral failing, it's just business.

I'm sure people have thought about it, it's just hard, annoying, and asking a lot of mostly unpaid OSS contributors. Many mod developers are high school / college aged. Sandboxing …

Individual contributor means people who directly write code (individuals who contribute), as opposed to people who manage (managers and project managers).

Being social nowadays is like exercise - it not longer naturally happens frequently in our lives and so we have to consciously choose to do it. Also like exercise, it seems impossi…

Violent crime in general is dominated by men who have faced "major life stressors"; it's just a fact of life that is unlikely to ever change. Men are much more likely to react to h…

$10000/video seems crazy to me, but it makes sense if each video is averaging 10M views for ad-friendly content. It'd be interesting to see how many Youtube channels make it to thi…

Speak to more humans.

ChatGPT could probably pass most FAANG programming interviews - it's successfully done linked list inversion, binary tree searches, dynamic programming like knapsack, and will even…

CSV, for all it's faults, is probably the closest thing we have to a "universal 2d table format you can import anywhere."

I messed up the wording on the above comment - I'm only skeptical of all the "performative charity" that you see on social medial.

Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, or simply the "frequency illusion". Or maybe just dumb luck :)

There is definite survivorship bias; I suspect it's so strong that virtually all "do-gooding" you see on social media is for gaining status. It makes me extremely cynical of charit…

I'm not sure there is really anything to fear here. "Traditional white Christian" is a declining demographic on all three axes, and no amount of pronatalist thought will be enough …

I respect the opinion in this article that Linux should be simple and Rust is adding a lot of complexity to the build and ABI, but the advantage of Rust is not just memory safety. …

I would say closing that gap is exactly what engineering is - optimizing your existing systems to maximally use the hardware. Its very quantitative and extremely detail oriented; y…

I think "systems engineering" has won out over "systems research" - optimizing existing systems instead of creating new ones. Part of it is that we are constrained by our hardware,…

This is amusing as a thought experiment, but it would end up being new-age feudalism. Can you imagine the crazy tricks people would use to evade taxes? Adopt a child and buy the ri…

No, we don't need more "smart" people working on important problems in transportation, health, education, and so on. We already have plenty of smart people with good ideas, they ju…

I expected more multi-monitor setups. I feel half as productive with only one screen - how do people do it?

I've noticed a visible split between product-facing teams and customer-facing teams where I've worked. The customer teams generally all used real selfies. The development teams all…