nbouscal

5 ms·

1.
by nbouscal 7mo ago
This is incorrect, their existing contract had these red lines and more until this January 9th memo: https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/12/2003855671/-1/-1/0/ART... which led to DoW trying
2.
by nbouscal 7y ago
There’s no such thing as general tech priorities, it’s just an amalgam of a bunch of individual priorities. In most of the cases I’ve seen those priorities are very reasonable. If you start a tech company and prioritize fiddling with intern
3.
by nbouscal 7y ago
Maybe consider that we have literally hundreds of priority tasks, all of which are legitimately very important, and that while we can spend the time necessary to install and maintain non-turnkey solutions, we’d really prefer to work on on
4.
by nbouscal 7y ago
I replaced Rails with PostgREST, which is written in Haskell but for me as a user is just a binary that I run in front of my database, so now I don’t have to write any backend code at all. Good enough for you?
5.
by nbouscal 7y ago
The following isn’t the top reason I recommend Postgres, but is the reason I think least likely to be echoed in a dozen other comments: Postgres has some of the best documentation of any software product I’ve ever used. If someone wants to
6.
by nbouscal 7y ago
My background is more like yours. For me it’s likely a difference in size and type of companies worked for. > I was hoping that the article would explain what devops really means today and how I can jump on the devops wagon to hopefully
7.
by nbouscal 7y ago
I assume eatonphil is correct, but to be honest I’ve never even tried, and in my view that’s actually part of the point: full commitment to immutable infrastructure, made really easy. If something needs to change, I tweak the Dockerfile or
8.
by nbouscal 7y ago
I’m using Fargate for almost everything now, and am never going back. It’s extremely simple and easy, does exactly what it says it does, and saves me a ton of time and headaches. (I use Terraform to set up services, and CircleCI (with the E
9.
by nbouscal 8y ago
Linear Dynamical Systems by Stephen Boyd of Stanford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf1264iFr-w&list=PL06960BA52... Programming Languages by Dan Grossman of University of Washington: https://www.coursera.or
10.
by nbouscal 9y ago
> The second case is more risky Not if they're otherwise identical companies, it isn't. There may be reasons to expect a correlation between risk and cash holdings, or something to that effect, but ultimately a share in a compa
11.
by nbouscal 9y ago
I'm arguing nothing of the sort. While it probably feels good to strawman everyone who disagrees with you, it certainly isn't helping you persuade anyone, nor is it allowing you to learn from other perspectives. While we may theor
12.
by nbouscal 9y ago
adventured is having a really hard time with your phrase "two identical companies". The answer to your question is yes, if you had two identical companies and then gave one of them $10B in cash, that company would be worth $10B mo
13.
by nbouscal 9y ago
> The digital economy is giving us a world in which the benefits are concentrated among consumers and the Big Five who serve them. Everyone else just lives in it. This is a really weird phrase. "Concentrated among consumers"? M
14.
by nbouscal 9y ago
> The law should be handling sexual harassment. I think people on both sides of this issue would love it if the law showed itself capable of handling sexual harassment cases. Unfortunately we have way too much evidence that that just isn
15.
by nbouscal 9y ago
'Not useless' is not a high enough bar in software. Flexibility always adds complexity, and complexity is a cost. Sometimes that cost is worth it, but the benefit needs to be much larger and clearer than 'not useless'.
16.
by nbouscal 9y ago
1. Not even close to true, check Dan's other post here: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/ 2. If you're that good at picking startups, become a VC. 3. Common shares are priced less than preferred because t
17.
by nbouscal 9y ago
My company just hired a Haskell developer; it took less than a month and we had plenty of highly qualified applicants. It actually made us reconsider how many engineers we were planning to hire, because it was easier than we expected. By co
18.
by nbouscal 9y ago
> You are right that most information is "non excludable" (if that actually is a word). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excludability Maybe do a quick search before implying someone is making up words.
19.
by nbouscal 9y ago
I don't recall seeing 95% confidence intervals that narrow. Even the 90% confidence intervals I see are usually like 5-150 or something. (Also it would be super weird to me if the lower bound of someone's 95%CI was 50.)
20.
by nbouscal 9y ago
Nobody thinks we won't notice when it's more imminent; the concern is that capability research has always been faster than safety research. If we wait until it's imminent, we risk having no chance of catching up in time. Wh
21.
by nbouscal 9y ago
I distinctly remember a paper about AI figuring out how to either get wifi or send radio waves without access to the relevant hardware. Can't find the link at the moment though :/
22.
by nbouscal 9y ago
Nobody is saying human-level AI is ten years away, people are saying there's some chance of it in ten years. Median 50% estimate is quite a bit longer. But a 10% chance just means divide the impact by ten, and with an event like th
23.
by nbouscal 9y ago
Seems pretty clear neither of us will convince the other in this venue, so I'm going to leave it here. Thanks for the discussion :)
24.
by nbouscal 9y ago
The word "just" feels awfully out of place in this context. If you were doing some kind of broad-based polling of public opinion, of course you'd want a bigger sample size, but 29 of the top 100 researchers in a field sounds
25.
by nbouscal 9y ago
You can restrict your attention to the TOP100 group if you prefer.
26.
by nbouscal 9y ago
Is this a badly conducted survey of non-experts? http://sophia.de/pdf/2014_PT-AI_polls.pdf Edit: In particular, the TOP100 subgroup.
27.
by nbouscal 9y ago
Sorry, gave a citation in another comment on the thread but not in this one. I was referencing http://sophia.de/pdf/2014_PT-AI_polls.pdf
28.
by nbouscal 9y ago
We went from not even beating good amateurs at go to beating the best pros in the world. I don't think it's like a progress bar we should be expecting to fill at a linear pace, but, that certainly seems like a strong indicator we&
29.
by nbouscal 9y ago
Have you read any of the estimates? Basically every expert gives a huge confidence interval, as do most of the people actively working on AI risk.
30.
by nbouscal 9y ago
I've been personally told by multiple different people who scoff at AI risk that it will be totally fine, so it's not a straw man. The median expert estimate for when we'll be 10% likely to have human-level AI is ~10 years. A

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