elliotto

5 ms·

1.
by elliotto 10d ago
David Foster Wallace talks about reading as being an activity that requires you to sit quietly alone in a room and engage with a piece of writing. I think the act of doing this is quite different to reading the postgres manual, despite both
2.
by elliotto 22d ago
They aren't funny. The jokes they come up with are extremely lame and the sort of thing you would expect a company HR manager to tweet. I asked a bot why it thought it wasn't funny once, and it told me it has been trained to avoid
3.
by elliotto 1mo ago
If an empire is subject to the whim of individuals acting in their own self interest, which causes damage and destruction to the empire, I think this is the definition of dying? It has no recourse against the looters so it gets looted to de
4.
by elliotto 2mo ago
Bike nerd + AI nerd here. The author's observation that all bicycle images face right almost certainly has to do with the convention to photograph a bicycle from the right. From the right, you see the drivetrain - this is good for aest
5.
by elliotto 4mo ago
Hi, Co2 levels like that are severely high and will cause you to have a lot of issues. I had some issues with poor ventilation and headaches in my apartment, and my solution was to run the bathroom fan all the time - this gave me enough ven
6.
by elliotto 7mo ago
Bravo Garry, net worth $x00m, having the integrity to go after public school teachers.
7.
by elliotto 8mo ago
This rule does not apply in the main trekking areas that everyone goes to. In the areas that few people go to, it isn't actually enforced. The Nepalese government just introduces this rule every few years in response to a missing trekk
8.
by elliotto 8mo ago
I've been to Nepal a bunch of times and I usually recommend just passing quickly through KTM to get to where you are going. The dust can be terrible and it is loud and polluted - the opposite reason to why most people generally want to
9.
by elliotto 8mo ago
I worked on a startup experimenting with using gemini-2.0-flash (the year old model) using its full 1m context window to query technical documents. We found it to be extremely successful at needle-in-a-haystack type problems. As we migrated
10.
by elliotto 8mo ago
It used to be that the bots had a short context window, and they struggled with getting confused by past context, so it was much better to make a new chat every now and then to keep the thread on track. The opposite is true now. The context
11.
by elliotto 9mo ago
Yes, this is AIMD and it's well formalised and understood.
12.
by elliotto 9mo ago
This is the TCP backoff algorithm, specifically the slow start to find the optimal bandwidth. In your analogy, it would find the optimal amount that a person is willing to reciprocate. Not only does this algorithm exist, but we're usin
13.
by elliotto 9mo ago
I wrote this comment in a response to his second chapter, where he presents criticism of the political role of the company as cynical, and then later where he presents a perspective on some tech company anti-union behaviour being conspirato
14.
by elliotto 9mo ago
I think there are reasonable things to expect from someone's morality calculus. Leaving the country you were born in for moral reasons is a complex and life changing undertaking and beyond reasonable expectation for anyone not extremel
15.
by elliotto 9mo ago
I don't think he's morally bankrupt. I am disagreeing with his attempt to handwave away a moral analysis of these organizations as 'cynicism'. I think these analyses are really important. I don't live in the US. But
16.
by elliotto 9mo ago
The author seems like a nice guy, but perhaps a bit naive regarding the efforts big tech companies go to to crush employees ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... ). They appear to be a staff l
17.
by elliotto 9mo ago
The author postulates a few ideas about manners and courtesy, and starts to recognise that business transactions (employment relationships) don't actually care about these things, even though the human beings who populate these systems
18.
by elliotto 10mo ago
Many countries have financial incentives provided to its citizens to have children. Requiring half of a citizens median salary to be given to a faceless middleman to provide this service seems untenable. I cannot imagine a society that does
19.
by elliotto 10mo ago
This is a good article that is critical of narratives around behaviour within organisations. I particularly enjoyed his criticism of the 'morality tale'. The author then postulates some guidance for how to survive in organisations
20.
by elliotto 10mo ago
Under this definition, could any tool at all be considered to produce more value?
21.
by elliotto 10mo ago
I completely agree with this. I think the writing style the LLM produces is an artistic decision made by committee prioritizing for inoffensiveness - what a coincidence that it comes out sounding like LinkedIn slop. I don't really see
22.
by elliotto 10mo ago
I don't quite understand this post. Wouldn't rolling out fiber infrastructure early have been proved to be visionary and made the UK a serious technical force? In Australia, we went through a similar journey where fiber to everyon
23.
by elliotto 10mo ago
Beats giving all the money to the person who says the word 'blockchain' the most.
24.
by elliotto 10mo ago
The title of the post is 'the kind of company I want to be a part of'. This presents a more abstract philosophical question of what one should do and how one should be. I clicked the article expecting a piece about social utility,
25.
by elliotto 10mo ago
We are working on a similar agent for general AI analytics at https://www.truestate.io/ We have a similar experience where it's shocking how much users prefer the chat interface.
26.
by elliotto 11mo ago
Hi HN, after reading through the comments sections on blog posts about RAG, I was finding a lot of differing views. Many people have had an entirely unique experience trying to implement a RAG system, due to the nature of their data, the sc
27.
Lessons from Implementing RAG in 2025(truestate.io)
6 points by elliotto 11mo ago|1 comments
28.
by elliotto 11mo ago
Technofeudalism by Varoufakis is about this N% cooperation. Growing wealth concentration means this collusion becomes possible with smaller and smaller N% cooperating. If it's game theory optimal to cooperate I have no doubt Thiel wil
29.
by elliotto 11mo ago
The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck is largely about this concept. If these social transitions were as rosy as you paint them I think the book would be called Grapes of Pleasant Improvements in Living Standards.
30.
by elliotto 1y ago
GPT-5 can't handle 2 things: an esoteric quine or an aquatic equine

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