SeanAppleby

7 ms·

1.
by SeanAppleby 8mo ago
One thing I've been tossing around in my head is: - How quickly is cost of refactor to a new pattern with functional parity going down? - How does that change the calculus around tech debt? If engineering uses 3 different abstractions
2.
by SeanAppleby 10mo ago
Animal studies seem like the best tool for untangling this, and they indicate that high plastic doses cause a variety of health effects, some of which seem to align with broad health trends we see in our population over time, like in fertil
3.
by SeanAppleby 3y ago
I am quite confident that at least some use cases for injecting context in at inference time are going to stay for at least the foreseeable future, regardless of model performance and scaling improvements, because IME those aren't the
4.
by SeanAppleby 3y ago
This is my problem with every end to end system I've seen around this. I find that, even building these systems from scratch, all of the hard parts are just normal data infrastructure problems. The "AI" part takes a small fra
5.
by SeanAppleby 4y ago
I grew up working class and found that VCs were more accessible than, in my experience, any other upper class institution I have seen. When I was younger I had an easier time getting meetings with partners at decent VC funds (including YC)
6.
by SeanAppleby 5y ago
The implicit assertion is that this behavior wouldn't happen if not for Zuckerberg personally causing the behavior. As someone who has worked at large tech companies though, I find that to be an extremely questionable assertion. FB has
7.
by SeanAppleby 5y ago
Eichmann in Jerusalem is the book that coined the phrase for anyone passing through, and it's a pretty wild story. It's essentially Arendt, a Jewish exile from Berlin who fled the holocaust, wrestling with her realization that Eic
8.
by SeanAppleby 5y ago
I believe the point is that the answer begs another question of "why". In their drinking example, alcoholism literally is overdrinking, but we accept that there is an underlying mechanism of physical and psychological dependency t
9.
by SeanAppleby 5y ago
I promise you that you have a vastly higher opinion of people who work at google than people who work at google do.
10.
by SeanAppleby 5y ago
I think it depends purely on your definition of "tech". Impossible engineering soybeans to produce more heme to make fake meat behave more like meat is a technology, in that it is a novel innovation applied to solve a real world p
11.
by SeanAppleby 6y ago
My understanding is that SAT scores are significantly correlated with wealth (resources, time, externally imposed motivation), but not by as much as other admissions criteria, and that equity in educational attainment dramatically improved
12.
by SeanAppleby 6y ago
People want to provide a stable home for their children. Having to move can mean your kid has to find all new friends, and if buying a home is a complete impossibility for you, you might be further down Mazlowe's hierarchy than startin
13.
by SeanAppleby 6y ago
Particularly, most kinds of inequality tend to follow a Pareto distribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
14.
by SeanAppleby 6y ago
I think the point was, if you're going to invest in someone reckless, you might as well invest in a reckless company where at least if they deliver what they claim, the returns will be substantial. At least if Theranos had delivered wh
15.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
IMO engineer implies the same direction of thing it implies anywhere else: a deep understanding of the fundamentals of what you're building, an ability to rigorously model and optimize for the key aspects of your problem space and turn
16.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
Yeah, this seems game theoretically problematic. We clearly want a deep warchest of antibiotics, but new antibiotics won't sell in any meaningful quantity likely, or even hopefully, until after their IP rights expire. I don't see
17.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
When you say "low impact factor", you're referring to a combination of lack of prestige and lack of readership that leads to few citations and subsequently little influence on the field, right? If so, why is the prestigious c
18.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
The consequences are so low that I would seriously question calling it a collapse. It's just been shuffled under a new banner as Emerdata under the same parent company with really no consequences outside of having to file some paperwor
19.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
You're completely correct, diminishing returns of income on happiness is well established, and I would be surprised if people here were not aware. This community skews very hard towards high earners though, so people here probably view
20.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
This is how I see it too. Technology is inherently about dynamic navigation of unknowns. Having your employees laser focused on things the company knows it needs leaves your company with a dearth of information about the landscape around it
21.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
My understanding is that the most significant nonconventional heuristic that Cambridge Analytica got from FB data and exploited was by using FB like data to approximate OCEAN personality scores for almost all voting Americans using this tec
22.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
While I agree that it should be possible to mention nationality without being labeled racist, what legitimate value do you think his nationality adds to that sentence other than to preload whatever preconceptions people have about African b
23.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
Is there substantive evidence that studying humanities or even ethics is causal to people behaving more ethically?
24.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
Couldn't you just use income reported to the IRS? Then any odd payment scheme to get around repayment terms would necessarily be tax evasion, which is much more serious and lets you lean on the IRS for enforcement and legislation.
25.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
Are you allowed to switch between them at will, or is there a legal inertia that pushes you to continue reporting using the same one?
26.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
Eh, if I did this and I came up in the black off on a play with $1M in free leverage I would just close the position, pay off the margin and dip without posting about it. If like five people posted about it and lost money, there are probabl
27.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
GPT-2 doesn't do a _great_ job at this, but it does to some extent seem to have learned some relationships in structures of text in different programming languages. For example while toying around with it, I gave it a javascript functi
28.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
Literally anything else. Whatever makes them happy, petting their dog, having a conversation with their friends/family, make some music that one person listens to, literally anything produces more value for society than performing arbi
29.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
Eh, I feel like if you were just trying to whitewash your reputation, effective altruism wouldn't be the way to do it. You could get a lot more PR per dollar spending on something more emotional, less abstract, and more visible to the
30.
by SeanAppleby 7y ago
I agree, but that sounds like a case for a carbon tax, not for tariffs.

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