Viewing profile — throwyawayyyy

Either people are being really, really silly (which cannot be discounted), or the potential reward is so high as to override whatever qualms a normal person must have. Is that it? …

I think this is the thing. Companies have always been forced rather against their immediate interests into the cost of hiring junior engineers. As soon as the idea gained traction …

I'm about to get a junior engineer to work with at my Big Tech company. This used to be normal, it's now slightly extraordinary. I've not worked with a junior engineer in literally…

It's the Silicon Valley circular-reasoning meritocracy in action: those with the billions deserve to have the billions because they have managed to get the billions. Every extra do…

Kind of serious question: in tech circles is the Manhattan project generally seen as a _good_ thing, these days? Why use it as the example and not, say, Apollo? "We're working real…

Hmm, also saying the scale is 0 to 5 is... something. In my experience, which was a while ago, no one cares about SEV 3, and I only ever saw SEV 4 used as a placeholder or TODO lis…

I'm sure it's about power. I am also sure that having that much wealth, that little accountability, being surrounded by people who've a vested interest in telling you you're a geni…

There's being fed up with something and there's fomenting civil war. The huge wave of immigration, which has since subsided, happened under the Tories.

I mean, if Japan is the world's future, isn't that kind of... good? It's not the first place I think of when I think of a failing country.

One solution is not to advance anything of course. I'm not even joking, is there going to be a successor to React? I suspect not, with the vast amount of training data for React no…

The Stasi had one informant per 6.5 people. We're moving to a world in which everyone can have their own personal informant. I really don't think I am being hyperbolic here.

I think this gets to the conflation we naturally have with consciousness and a sense of self. Does a tree have a sense of self? I imagine probably not, a tree acts more like a clon…

I'm mainly saying it's impossible to know, at least without a theory of consciousness that doesn't exist. Do we consider bacteria to be conscious though, is there something like to…

One question I am genuinely wondering about is whether a self-driving car _is_ cheaper than a human driver, once all of the externalities are priced in. In SF right now a Waymo is …

Current LLMs prove that the Turing Test was insufficient all along. But they also prove that intelligence != consciousness. One can, after all, be conscious without a thought in on…

There's a story to tell in that: 1) Google has a transformer-based AI that hallucinates too much to release 2) OpenAI replicates the tech then YOLOs it 3) Everyone says: look how G…

> Going back to the analogies: This is like copying answers through university and then showing up to a job that requires independent thought. That's exactly what is happening now.…

AI could be a huge net benefit, and justify large layoffs. AI could be a huge short-term benefit, justify layoffs now, so long as you (the exec doing the laying off) don't have to …

Same! Every so often I remember that I can juggle, and spend a minute or two juggling, and feel better for it. And then I forget for weeks or months. (I taught myself while procras…

I do find it hilarious that after all the machine learning optimizations done on people's feeds over the years, all the promos got for a 1% improvement on this metric, every E7 and…

Vibes-CEOing! Only one person at Meta actually matters of course.

Well hang-on, in this case it is _neither_ reliable in terms of availability _nor_ correctness. Worst of all worlds.

I am afraid that we are heading to a world in which we simply give up on the idea of correct code as an aspiration to strive for. Of course code has always been bad, and of course …

I'm reminded of Douglas Adams's take on video recorders as machines to watch television so you don't have to. He should have been around to see Marvin built for real!

I learned about Therac at college in the 90s. Some years later, I interviewed at Knight Capital, just a couple of weeks before their blowup. (Dreadful interview at which I did drea…