Viewing profile — wcfrobert

Another reset tip I've implemented to great success is to drive in complete silence. No music, no podcast, no radio. This way, I've turned my daily commute into a kind of meditatio…

This was basically solved by massive subsidies from the Chinese government. https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-clean-tech-developing-cou...

A few snippets from his full post here: https://gwern.net/guardian-angel . > "The chatbot personas are deeply misaligned with you, and aligned with their owners; and the economic i…

My opinion is that juniors need time in the saddle to develop good engineering judgement and taste. Outsourcing critical thinking is seductive and a slippery slope. LLM lures junio…

I like the _idea_ of reading continental philosophy, and then I opened up Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Here is a random sentence from a random page verbatim: "Spirit contains t…

People say jobs with the "human touch" will stay relevant after AGI. And I'm like have you seen customer service? I can't even find the phone number anymore on amazon

I think this is what makes Asian food more exciting and innovative. No whiff of elitism. No status-signaling or having to appeal to the taste of King Louis the 14th. Just cook stuf…

I read pg's collection of essays (Hackers and Painters) in my 20s, and it single-handedly prevented me from being radicalized by leftist ideologies. The one insight from the book t…

Approximate monthly cost of owning a car in the city: Lease or loan: $350 Parking in city: $300 Car insurance: $180 Gas: $120 License/Registration: $42 (~$500 per year) Maintenance…

> "Now I have CLIs that one-shots bugs across distributed systems for me. Bugs that I couldn't solve in the past. Bugs that would take 2 days of full-time debugging. Bugs across di…

This is so accurate wtf!? - "United States is a service and information economy": Finance, real estate, insurance, SaaS. - "Nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped awa…

> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. The AI subscription…

> "Whatever its flaws, the writing you find online is authentic. It's not mystery meat cooked up out of scraps of pitch letters and press releases, and pressed into molds of zippy …

This entire thread is drenched in class consciousness and I am here for it.

On point 1: I generally agree with you about the benefits of technological progress on a long enough time horizon. But what about the short term? What mechanism of redistribution a…

"If there is less deep poverty in San Francisco than in New York, is it not because San Francisco is yet behind New York in all that both cities are striving for? When San Francisc…

I think the answer is to do multi-disciplinary work. Venture outside of pure theoretical math. Learn some other domain knowledge and combine it with your mathematical ommph. That's…

> "Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. Status updates that were once three sentences are now bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries. Retrospective notes,…

But you've just perfectly described the tacit knowledge problem. Yes, you can spend all your time writing docs, or just mentor a junior and let them grok the system through osmosis…

NIMBYism has never been about preserving neighborhood characteristic, or noise and traffic concerns. Menlo Park is not Big Sur. Sure, some concerns are reasonable and should be inv…

Master planning has never worked for my side projects unless I am building the exact replica of what I've done in the past. The most important decisions are made while I'm deep in …

For most working-class Americans, education is a form of job-training. In the AI maximalist world where humans are obsolete and cannot contribute to the economy in any meaningful w…

To borrow a concept from Simon Willison: you need to "hoard things you know how to do”. You need to know what is possible; you need to be able to articulate what you want. AI is a …

Good advice to the younger folks. You can afford to look stupid. So go ahead and do that thing you wanted to try. There's more acceptance because of your age. You're expected to fa…

My solution to this is to prioritize. There isn't enough time in a person's life to learn everything anyways. Selectively pick and struggle through things you want to learn deeply.…