IKantRead

7 ms·

1.
by IKantRead 3y ago
The old crypto chants were that crypto would lead us away from the ills of traditional markets/finance. Glad to see that it's been watered down to "just as bad as" arguments.
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by IKantRead 3y ago
Who in the world is still long on crypto? In the past few years we've seen ample evidence that crypto is largely a complete scam, and likewise strong evidence that none of crypto's hoped for value will come to fruition (we didn&
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by IKantRead 3y ago
Not to my knowledge, which is why I used the word "suspected" since I think this falls on the "makes intuitive sense, but would not surprise me in the least if it turned out to be completely incorrect" category of hypoth
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by IKantRead 3y ago
To be clear, I'm absolutely not promoting increased sulphur emissions as a solution to our climate problems. Moreso pointing out that all those emissions are potentially masking the true severity of our current predicament.
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by IKantRead 3y ago
I never claimed that they "require a traditional publisher", in fact I explicitly point out that you can pay for these yourself (though I can't imagine putting together a good team of editors without having prior publishing e
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by IKantRead 3y ago
Which is fascinating because sulphur emissions counteract (mask might be a better term) global warming. Reduction in sulphur emissions is suspected to be one of the main culprits of this years sudden rise in Earth sea-surface/land temp
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by IKantRead 3y ago
I know plenty of authors and none of them are subsidized by wealthy families. All of them do it part time in the evenings out of a labor of love. It is worth pointing out that there's nothing particular odd if it were the case that w
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by IKantRead 3y ago
> only reason for using a traditional publisher is the cash advance then? A few really important things come to mind: - Editing . I'm not talking about mere copy editing which you can get done reasonably cheaply, but rather having
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by IKantRead 3y ago
I've always found it fascinating that geophysicist and earlier advocate for Bayesian methods, Sir Harold Jeffreys, didn't believe in continental drift and plate tectonics because he felt there was no known source of energy on th
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by IKantRead 3y ago
This quote in particular struck me as relevant: > And now Google is unusable: using LLMs even just as a compressed form of documentation is a good idea. Beyond all the hype, it'd undeniable that LLMs are good at matching your quer
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by IKantRead 3y ago
> A lot to be said for not defaulting to data frames, in both r and python I would even add especially in Python. The main issue I have found is that pandas heavy code is just not as easy to integrate into other Python tools/featu
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by IKantRead 3y ago
Recent experience at a fairly young startup has shown me that open office culture has also started to breed a very different type of programmer. People will often be pairing nearly all day long, any claim that you need a moment to focus and
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by IKantRead 3y ago
It's worth pointing out that most of the best science happened before peer review was dominant. There's an article I came across awhile back, that I can't easily find now, that basically mapped out the history of our current
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by IKantRead 3y ago
I'm pretty sure Sam Walton didn't establish Walmart with the hope of being acquired. It's bizarre that we live in a time where we can't even fathom a business that is fundamentally very profitable, we just envision growi
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by IKantRead 3y ago
As an ex-smoker, I also used to just toss cigarette butts anywhere without thought. Decades after quitting it's still surprising to me that I ever thought this was normal (I've never, otherwise, been a big litterer). At least when
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by IKantRead 3y ago
> I can see how it feels like cheating to coax the model to produce the answer you want. But... it's not! If it's for a single example, it is absolutely cheating. As an AI engineer this is a particular point of frustration w
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by IKantRead 3y ago
A good QA person is to a software developer as a good editor is to a writer. Both take a look at your hard work and critique it ruthlessly. Annoying as hell when it's happening, but in my experience well worth it because the end result
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by IKantRead 3y ago
> don’t waste your time writing your own neural net and backprop. I don't think you should be combining writing a neural network with doing backprop since I don't know anyone working with serious ML who is not using some sort o
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by IKantRead 3y ago
I have a few friends who had major liquidity events happen to them and they each own 3-5 homes as investment homes. I believe these properties were paid full in full and in cash, so no mortgage. This small proportion of my friends is mortga
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by IKantRead 3y ago
As this other comment pointed out [0] 40% of homes are mortgage free, but that says nothing about home owners . Anecdotally I know that none of my neighbors are mortgage free. However I also have a few friends that had major cash windfal
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by IKantRead 3y ago
Of all the ex-FAANG people I've worked with, I've found the ex-Amazon ones to be, by a wide margin, the least impressive group. I'm not huge fan of Google, but will readily admit that, on average, the ex-Googlers I've wo
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by IKantRead 3y ago
I feel the same way and would also never work at a FAANG. That said, I suspect this is would be viewed as a benefit of the process since I'm fairly confident Amazon and the like don't want people who feel this way working for th
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by IKantRead 3y ago
I think they're saying the interaction effect of doing drugs, drinking and considering oneself a victim is negligible on overall success. It doesn't seem like a bold claim to me. I've known plenty of poor, struggling working
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by IKantRead 3y ago
> But is there is something inherent to Lisp that makes it "clunky" to work with matrices? s-exps are basically coding at the level of the AST, which for many programming tasks is a powerful level of both abstraction and cont
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by IKantRead 3y ago
As a huge Lisp/Scheme fan, I don't find it surprising that Python became the language of choice for neural networks over Lisp. NN in general just boil down to doing lots of linear algebra, which is a lot about mutating very large
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by IKantRead 3y ago
> trying to solve innovative business problems with incremental improvement. This describes pretty much every AI startup I know, both good and bad. I suspect the places where AI will really succeed will be places that entirely change exi
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by IKantRead 3y ago
Expensive restaurants, fancy restaurants, and 3-star Michelin restaurants are not the same things. I've eaten at a few 3-star Michelin restaurants and the experience at each was worth living imho. 3-star means not only is the food worl
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by IKantRead 3y ago
A world where we let people's failings and faults dominate their success and virtues is a world inherently destined for incredible mediocrity and the creation of only tepid works.
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by IKantRead 3y ago
Provided we can keep riding this hype wave for a while, I think the logical long term solution is most teams will have an in house/alternative LLM they can use as temporary backup. Right now everyone is scrambling to just get some basi
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by IKantRead 3y ago
I would add that this creates the problem, which I think most tech companies have forgotten about: if you try to attrition out staff and the market is competitive, you'll only attrition out your best employees. Last place I was at ever

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