msteffen

6 ms·

1.
by msteffen 4d ago
I haven’t played The Store is Closed, but to everyone saying IKEA had some obligation to shut down a parody…videogames parody real brands all the time, including their colors? Why was this different? Some examples offhand: - Fallout’s Nuka
2.
by msteffen 4d ago
> whether an autonomous running task can continue after being cancelled shouldn't be Idk, I think this might be quite important in servers, or any application where the running task might spawn subprocesses (can those continue auton
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by msteffen 6d ago
I love this framing. I have a lot of ideas about why this is true, but the best (IMO) pat explanation I've been able to come up with is: 1. Much of constructing software is math of a sort. In math, you write proofs that say why X is tr
4.
by msteffen 16d ago
lol, we’re all writing the same thing. I’ll give you one example, because I particularly liked it. My therapist always talks about separating people from problems, and I never had any idea wtf he was talking about. And then he gave me this
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by msteffen 16d ago
Therapy, which (at least for me) has focused dually on adhd management strategies that can be very helpful (including, in particular, enhancing relevant social skills related to setting expectations and boundaries) and on identifying and mo
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by msteffen 23d ago
1. At an old apartment complex, there was a little playground in a common area, and it usually had at least one family from the complex there at any given time between about 4:00pm and 8:00pm. It was a terrible playground—small, poorly-main
7.
by msteffen 29d ago
Uh, I think at the very least you have to caveat on the age of the kids. Babies need a lot of fussy obsessiveness. Kids arms aren’t long enough for them to wipe their own ass until they’re about 4. Don’t know when you get them to start doin
8.
by msteffen 29d ago
> without much concrete evidence that it hurts long-term outcomes, assuming the child is otherwise healthy and well taken care of. Not to pick on others’ life choices, but I don’t think that this particular assertion is true. Depends on
9.
by msteffen 29d ago
Preach! Bryan Cantrill (inventor of DTrace and cofounder of Oxide Computer) comes to mind as someone who seems to do both. It’s hard to know somebody’s parenting quality from the outside, but he talks about his kids a lot. In his case, I th
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by msteffen 29d ago
For “parenting” and “startup”, I would say that each is extremely hard to do well even when it’s the only thing on the list.
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by msteffen 1mo ago
I saw an interesting article in the Atlantic[^1] somewhat recently predicting that the people who will thrive in the AI age will be ones who enjoy mental effort. That is, even when AI could do something for them, these people will choose
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by msteffen 1mo ago
I know less about this than every other commenter here, but both weather patterns and market performance do seem predictable based on past behavior when modeled at the right level of abstraction. “Sunshine on Monday” does not imply “rain on
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by msteffen 1mo ago
...Grapes of Wrath is American (John Steinbeck) . But I agree with you that parent comment is ridiculous. Proust wrote page-spanning individual sentences.
14.
by msteffen 1mo ago
I’m just saying, to the extent that there’s a moral question here, “how unreasonable was it for the author to ignore the sign?” I think it’s a lot more reasonable if there are no alternatives given. My take on TFA was that the lesson was “a
15.
by msteffen 1mo ago
I think the keys here are 1. It’s not clear who wrote the note, and they didn’t leave contact info or any opening to a negotiation. If the note had said “this AC must stay on at all times, please call 111-222-3333 with any questions - build
16.
by msteffen 1mo ago
> I think this is somewhere in the middle east - Dubai likely What led you to this conclusion?
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by msteffen 1mo ago
Well, I wrote my comment after an exchange similar to this, with the linked example chatbot (chatjimmy): https://pastebin.com/uEV7Pm8q I asked it a slightly tricky math problem (I re-asked it the same problem to create the
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by msteffen 1mo ago
This is neat but IMO a little crazy. Something I personally haven’t seen much of, in all the discussions of model benchmarks and AI breakthroughs, is a distinction between “peak performance” and “reliable performance”. The “peak performance
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by msteffen 2mo ago
I'd say that by the time you're considering jail, it's too late—these situations are better avoided than rectified. Per the article, one of the officers was evidently particularly stupid—he failed police academy once and was
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by msteffen 2mo ago
Interesting to read this right after reading about the pseudpocalypse ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48908886 ) That article proposes that, soon, it will be possible to connect any online identity to its owner's
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by msteffen 2mo ago
One use-case for curating commits other than git history is carefully structuring code reviews to be easy to review. Eg "commit 1 just rearranges existing code, no business logic changes"..."change 2 modifies business logic,
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by msteffen 2mo ago
> But this is also a factional concern; for reasons I don't understand, the Democratic left polarized hard against "abundance" (and thus YIMBYism). So these kinds of arguments now code as "centrist". I think a lo
23.
by msteffen 3mo ago
I read somewhere that almost every very successful person’s results can be attributed to 2-3 tricks that they consistently apply to great effect. With Elon, I think one of his is “build it as cheaply as possible, and then you can afford to
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by msteffen 3mo ago
> learn to turn off the over-thinking part of the brain that blocks creativity This is all pretty vibe-y but I think that might be what the post’s author found the ability to do and is trying to teach? TFA links to this other post in a s
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by msteffen 3mo ago
I wonder if some of these CEOs are anticipating a big crash and trying to lay people off now, so that (1) they can raise/hoard cash while the money-go-round is spinning and (2) their eng organization is already lean and used to it if&#
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by msteffen 3mo ago
> I'm not sure how you get from "LLMs work in mysterious ways" to "So we need more discipline" to "everything is fine." Are you referring to this part: > I am not worried, at least in the near term,
27.
by msteffen 3mo ago
> The Enigma of Reason (Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, 2017): their argumentative theory holds that reasoning evolved for social rather than individual epistemic purposes, to produce and evaluate arguments in group contexts. Yes! I love t
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by msteffen 3mo ago
I liked this article, and I see a lot of other commenters didn't, so I'll give my take: When starting on a new codebase, how do you make yourself into a helpful contributor as quickly as possible? I go straight for the humans and
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by msteffen 3mo ago
> The beginning of the end: The day I bought an Adderall from a classmate. When that amphetamine feeling kicked-in, it was as if life was perfect for the first time. I was happy, confident, felt I could do anything. You know, I had a sim
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by msteffen 3mo ago
IIUC, the most basic version is when you have a log where every entry has both “date added” and “effective date,” so you can add stuff to the log retroactively. For example, “the user just informed us yesterday that they moved last year” -&

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