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What I Worked On

paulgraham.com

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Re: What I Worked On

#321

Post by benrbray »

oivey wrote: post #163
timr wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do people feel entitled to "usable" ML at all? Yeah, people are annoying, with their demands to use software themselves. It would be much easier for everyone if computers were controlled by an elite group of engineers who could hide the complexity from the rest of us. Perhaps they could wear labcoats. > What the fuck more do you want? If I knew the answer to that, life would be a lot simpler.

You can say, with your voice, “who won the Super Bowl last year?” to a device that fits in your pocket and it responds with its own voice with the correct answer. That’s pretty accessible.

Most of these systems are so far behind any real understanding of your words, though. They behave like Text-to-Speech followed by a Google Search, whether that's how they're implemented or not.

Re: What I Worked On

#322

Post by egypturnash »

selimthegrim wrote: post #311
egypturnash wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Art is my career and trust me, the "nonsense and PR side of art" is an important part of making it work. One I am absolutely terrible at and do the bare minimum I can get away with, because it's just not fun, and because getting good at it requires some very different mindsets from getting good at art. Anyway. I think Paul Graham should think about his time trying to be an artist, take some of the absurd amounts of m…

I hear Julia St has plenty of gallery space these days...

See, right there. Renting space in the local Gallery Row for a few months, printing stuff to fill it up, and promoting it is a serious chunk of change for me, but nothing for YC. Art grant or some kind of investment scheme, either way. Do it with thirty artists, maybe one blows up to the levels where people outside the gallery scene hear about the ludicrous prices their "I can't believe people are buying this shit" experiments start going for, profit.

Re: What I Worked On

#323

Post by 1970-01-01 »

Paul's essays always hit the sweet spot of excellent writing, genuinely interesting subjects, and life struggles. As some kind of bonus, they also seem to be sprinkled with good advice on how to run a startup.

Re: What I Worked On

#325

Post by solveit »

xapata wrote: post #269
nostrademons wrote: post #60

This is a good essay. It's interesting to contrast it with some of the psychological/self-help literature around being your "true self", where the true self is fluid and amorphous and avoids being rigidly defined. Or with Drew Houston's commmencement address [1] - "That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little…

> So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. Equally plausible is that we only write quotations from the people whose dots serendipitously connected.

A bit of both surely. There's going to be a lot of selection bias, but you should always be asking yourself "is this the kind of thing that might connect with other things in the future?".

tl;dr When in doubt, study maths.

Re: What I Worked On

#326

Post by username90 »

MayeulC wrote: post #275
zip1234 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in that constraints can make for creativity, but as a parent, it is very very difficult to create that environment.

Not a parent either, but constraints such as "you can only play videogames that you code yourself" could be an entertaining way to teach: they might want the reward, teach them to enjoy the path as well. I am not saying they should learn computer science, but it's one of the best ways to use computers, and having some basic skills with it is incredibly useful still.

You can't really do that today. In 1980 Frogger was the state of the art of video games, a kid could code a clone of it over a few weekends so the hurdle was reasonable. However modern games takes years to clone even for professionals, even the indie ones, so you banning them from games they haven't made themselves today essentially means you banned them from ever playing games.

The main problem is that basically everything a kid would want to do with computers is already done in neatly packaged binaries, so the reward for exploring is just the exploration itself. And preventing your kids from using those binaries wont make your kid excited to recreate programs from the 80's, it will make your kid resent you as a conservative parent who wants his kid to relive his own childhood.

Re: What I Worked On

#327

Post by wrycoder »

gist wrote: post #168

This essay is very long. It would benefit from at least a summary at the top of each paragraph so you could scan through and read what you found interesting if you didn't have the time to read the entire essay. Quick check over 13500 words. At 500 word per page that's 27 pages. I am coming up (again quick check) with 45 minutes to read this (including footnotes). [1] [2] Are 'Trevor Blackwell, John Collison, Patrick…

If you want to read something quickly, just start at the end and scan backwards, looking for paragraphs that pop out at you. That way, you don't get sucked into the flow.

A couple of centuries ago, it was common to put a summary at the beginning of each chapter in a book. But it would be very strange to do that for each paragraph in an essay, which itself is about as long as a book chapter.

This essay was one of the most absorbing things I've read in quite a while. What a life!

And yes, I'm quite sure the people you mention read every word.

It took me 65 minutes. I'm a slow reader (too many physics texts), and I tend to pause to reflect on what I'm reading.

Re: What I Worked On

#328

Post by lovecg »

deedubaya wrote: post #227

What struck me most about this essay is the privilege required to make it all possible. From educational institution to educational institution changing focus and whimsically studying other fields without much care for how to make a living or how it all would be paid for. Perhaps just omitted from the story because it wasn't relevant or doesn't need explaining. Kids these days sure don't have it so lucky, and if they…

Have we read the same essay? Like half of the time he’s running on zero or negative dollars in the story. Some people just value different things in life.

Re: What I Worked On

#329

Post by [deleted] »

DataWorker wrote: post #142
dsr_ wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than an outright hoax, I like the term "fad". There are fads in technology, some of which are directly inspired by what has become possible and some of which are mutations of of other ideas. Some fads have more worth or more longevity than others -- in the world of clothing, denim jeans are now a foundation on which to build; I might consider object-oriented language features to be similar.

Like stocks, you can buy ideas “low” and sell them “high.” Some ideas are cyclical too, AI, mainframes/cloud, etc... And this extends beyond tech for instance “equity” is currently hot but that may be short lived which is unfortunate.

[deleted]

Re: What I Worked On

#330

Post by yters »

slibhb wrote: post #148
yters wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, pg comes across as remarkably uninformed about philosophy. But, it is a general tendency I notice among programmers, including myself, to dismiss philosophy as vague speculation. The accusation is as old as Aristophanes' play The Clouds mocking Socrates for his questioning of the status quo. Yet you don't condemn bumbling absentminded professors to death, as Aristophanes did to Socrates during his trial. I belie…

He doesn't come off as uninformed. Plenty of philosophers who were well informed have variously proclaimed the death of philosopy or that philosophy is useless or that it has reached the end of its usefulness. Hume foreclosed on the possibility of metaphysics altogether. Kant disagreed but considered all metaphysics prior to him a failed project. Since Kant we've burrowed into the human mind and into human language.…

I will follow up my negative take on pg with a positive. He already has a lot of flack for that essay online. I do agree with the general frustration. Philosophy taught in school seems to somehow miss the mark in our scientific discourse, and my exposure in school left me quite disatissfied. So, I do agree with PG's overall approach of starting with concrete useful things and generalizing from there.

After all, Plato and Aristotle had a very concrete purpose for their philosophizing, which was: how does one live a good life? That is why Socrates went around asking all the sophists how to become virtuous, since virtue for him is defined as being skilled at living the good life.

A fair amount of subsequent philosophers missed this original goal, and I suspect that is why a lot of philosophy seems pointless.

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