Viewing profile — capitalsigma

Tokens measure "how much work the model did" in the same way that step counts measure "how far the person went" GPUs "generate tokens" in the same sense that human feet "generate s…

Supposedly it was named "caml" because the author was a smoker who enjoyed camel cigarettes, hence the joke that [later implementations]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caml#History…

This is more or less my belief too. But I think there are probably domains/companies where the "promo video" is actually good enough to ship (or at least, where that's the quality …

People don't write blog posts about how they wake up at 3AM to assign new tasks to their intern, nor do they build "orchestration frameworks" that involve N layers of interns passi…

Also the process sounds like a nightmare: "it broke and I asked 4 different LLMs to fix it; my `AGENTS.md` file contained hundreds of special cases; etc." I thought this article wa…

I'm pretty sure that "lack of market opportunity" isn't the reason that nobody has yet managed to invent eternal youth

It seems like they're targeting AI chip start ups with the promise of a compiler framework that can integrate with a custom backend

"matchmaking"

It seems a little disingenuous to call something written in an obscure Haskell dialect a "high performance UDP packet parser"

Money allows for economic specialization, leading to greater productivity. You don't build an economy that produces cell phones when you're stuck bartering goats for wheat.

I thought that Fortran was traditionally faster than C++ for numerical code due to stricter aliasing rules in the language, which I wouldn't expect to carry over to an IR?

Most big tech firms give engineers RSUs for this reason

Ponzi scheme is when the price collapses for something that I don't like, and the more that I don't like it the Ponzi-er it is

SWEs at Apple are not "barely able to afford rent"

Techies (at least at meta) are owners in the sense that a large % of their comp is in the form of equity, so it is in their interest for the company to maximize stock price.

Would you prefer subsistence farming?

There are overheads in server workloads that scale with the number of machines (network traffic, serializing/deserializing requests). There are also fixed costs per server that don…

We're not talking here about being overly critical in a code review, or even criticizing someone who pushed bugs to prod. This is someone who intentionally violated company policy …

Increasing salaries will increase the cost of goods and services, meaning that more savings are required. It doesn't necessarily balance.

It's unclear to me how making these divisions dramatically increase their infrastructure costs (by either pulling them in-house or paying a premium to the original parent company) …

These models are very impressive, but the issue (imo) is that lay people without an ML background see how plausibly-human the output is and infer that there must be some plausibly-…

The point is that ICs are judged based on their individual contribution s, i.e. their own code, design docs, etc, whereas managers are judged based on their team's contributions

Stock traders already use ML models. "Replacing traders with ML models" means "making the job 'trader' into a job that develops ML models, rather than more traditional things like …

Obviously no, they shouldn't. You're not going to be able to keep that 6+ figure salary in a world where layoffs are illegal.

I'm personally happy to accept this volatility in return for higher comp and the opportunity to be part of a leaner, higher performing team. I don't want to work with people who ar…