Viewing profile — cweld510

Math is based on axioms because you need some a priori axioms to do logical deduction, but the axiom selection is also historically fluid. Mathematicians suggest new axioms or move…

We try to spread out sandboxes evenly across the cluster (at least, across the workers which are available to take new sandboxes) to minimize conflict. But in general we don't get …

We make a probabilistic routing decision based on worker load and attributes of the sandbox request. I compare to a load balancer because it's essentially just forwarding an HTTP r…

I'm a huge scheduling nerd, and the container scheduling system in this post is probably the most impactful system I've worked on. It's quite different than existing solutions, and…

The PM’s job in this situation is to articulate some sort of high level strategy generalizable across customers, based on information gathered from customers, which includes featur…

The skillset is different. SAs everywhere I’ve worked are solidly salespeople. They can do AE work in a pinch, they use Salesforce, they know how to understand the state of an acco…

Is the point of math really to prove the statement? Arguably interesting, unproven statements are interesting often specifically because they are hard to prove with existing techni…

It definitely is at the youth level. I don’t think any football or basketball pros could be soccer stars, but absolutely there are kids who are star point guards on their youth bas…

Sure, but then the interesting question becomes how people decide whether or not an action is in their self-interest.

AI is only eating some of that though. For instance, everyone who does performance work knows that perhaps the most important part of optimization is constructing the right benchma…

I agree with this — there is at least some bifurcation by skillset and capabilities. Lots of engineers are overfitted to working on consumer web apps or SaaS products, but those ar…

Context windows are a natural improvement, but new architectures are completely speculative and it’s unclear we can make any sort of predictable progress with new, better architect…

You said above that our country “needs the best engineers and doctors.” Are the tests you mention really objective, direct measures of which student is likely to be the best engine…

Depends on the team — managing can be quite a bit more scope than being a senior IC, depending on expectations for that role. You have broader ownership of technical outcomes over …

I don’t agree with that though, plenty of places practice agile well. Maybe big corporations don’t practice it well, but startups often do agile correctly and understand the philos…

I think the primary benefit of LLMs for me is as an entrypoint into an area I know nothing about. For instance, if I’m building a new kind of system which I haven’t built before, t…

What matters is whatever he believes the likelihood to be, not what it actually is.

Big companies hired a lot, but I don’t think this specifically is true? In theory a high-value engineer would be productive, or else they aren’t worth stealing. The simpler explana…

What does it mean for someone’s model of the world to be accurate? My experience with mild depression is that you notice many negative things which are true but then lack perspecti…

It’s probably also the case that being physically fit and healthy helps one think more clearly. Carlsen notably spends a lot of time on physical health in addition to prep.

Doesn’t that imply an interface is necessary though, so you can compile (and potentially release) the components separately? I don’t use .net but this sounds quite similar to pulli…

Reading between the lines, my guess is that the standup was the only forum for communication that the team had, and lots of communication was required because people weren’t workin…

I don’t think this is because of AI. Rather, it seems a continuation of a shift which has already been occurring for my entire career, which is that the tech industry continually s…

You're right -- we do relax the integrality constraint, gaining performance at the expense of some precision, and we're generally able to paper over the difference at scheduling ti…

Great to see this post here -- really enjoyed writing it! I think it's really cool how an algorithm from an operational research context can play a critical role in a high-availabi…