Viewing profile — marcusf

Random, horrendous and indiscriminate killing! [/joke]

Egan is always dense. It's some mind bending physics/comp sci, but all cooked up in his brain so doesn't really apply to anything productive. I struggled with his books and his wri…

man, a comment that brings back memories. you and me both.

An extremely layman answer is that most interesting innovation in parsing in relatively modern times has happened seems to be in the context of IDE's. I.e. incremental, high-perfor…

Parameters and training corpus size matter. Last year a new paper (Google "Chinchilla optimality") focused on compute-optimal LLMs found that we'd been under-training models -- i.e…

Eric, want to echo what folks are saying here. I stumbled on your blog in high school (ca 2003?) and you (and Raymond Chen) fueled so much of my passion for compilers and API desig…

Exciting

Huge difference between a brand likey Disney able to pull off a streaming service and smaller producers. Smaller producers need demand, and for video demand = youtube.

Happily we announced Chromecast support today: http://www.wired.com/2015/09/spotify-might-best-new-thing-ne... . Hope you like it!

Caveat that I might be completely off, but if, say, 10 bn people tried once a nanosecond since the inception of the universe, you'd still have only 10^10 * 2^86 ≈ 2^33 * 2^86 = 2^1…

I think it's a mistake to compare Le Corbusier-style "areas for living" with modern urbanised zones. The big issue there is that – sure – there's highrises, but no urbanisation. Us…

Not to discard your comment, but wrt Stockholm: Build higher! Urbanize areas outside of the core inner city. Lots to do in planning and building to not create artificial social pol…

Great to hear. And yeah, Henrik is teaching wizard. I'm sure he'll be happy to hear though :-)

Hey! Thanks for the long question. I'll pass on your regards to Henrik :-) > From what I understand, Spotify squads each focus on one area and each squad has very different members…

Sometimes. But as a general principle, we ship on quality, not time.

That's a good question. I think about it as a way to distinguish from e.g. departments, projects etc and set the connotation that these are different things. If you use them to mea…

Cool to hear our model is getting adopted. A big difference here is that chapters at Spotify aren't departments, they are usually fairly small (5-10 people), and that squads are lo…

Sorry for late answers here but thanks for asking questions! > How does accountability work at Spotify? It looks like your squads have a specific goal (and maybe a leader?) but whe…

I'm subjective, but I think Spotify uses slightly innovative ways of organising. See: * https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-cult... * https://labs.spotify.com/2…

Can't disagree with GDrive being awesome. However, I was responding to the parent's suggestion that the parent's parent's quote was negated by e.g. GDrive. With less double negativ…

Dropbox?

I like the Henrik Kniberg definition of culture, 'culture is the stuff people do without thinking about it'. E.g. you could codify most things as processes (which is basically the …

What I took offence to was comparing Europe as a whole to America. It doesn't necessarily make sense given the different make-up of the continents. I have to volt-face that a bit t…

> There's not much point comparing working conditions between Europe and the US when one of these places has widespread unemployment and there is literally rioting on the streets, …

Stockholm, Sweden, has a fairly unregulated taxi market in that pricing is set independently. This causes massive issues, specifically for tourists who have no idea what to pick. T…