tech_ken

6 ms·

1.
by tech_ken 5d ago
> Car debt is terrible. But many people can’t get car debt, because many banks won’t write a $3,000 car loan, much less to someone with unsteady income. The bottom quintile often can’t even reach the $1,000 car - it’s hard to get out of
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by tech_ken 5d ago
> I would burn my stake to the ground if it meant 1% higher chance of not dying to an LLM Then why aren't you? If you genuinely believe this then industrial sabotage seems both ethical and achievable (to me anyways).
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by tech_ken 20d ago
It’s wild to me that the US tries to resolve labor issues with immigration control rather than just having good unions. Back in the 80s we decided we wanted free commerce at the expense of all else. Well guess what, that means you’re compet
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by tech_ken 22d ago
I like having both :)
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by tech_ken 22d ago
Idk I think it's kind of neat
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by tech_ken 22d ago
I think there's a very interesting history to be written/read about the emergence of the persona of 'founder'. I'm seeing it all over the place these days (alt. 'entrepeneur' or 'changemaker', th
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by tech_ken 22d ago
> Lots of people are building fantastic Tools or pulling down million dollar salaries without groking the precise representation of a single weight. I'll borrow my response from a far greater applied mathematician than myself: htt
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by tech_ken 23d ago
Oh yeah I absolutely agree that there's lots of greenfield for relative newcomers to find some big improvements! I'm just saying that reasoning about 'best practices' in terms of what works for something like a CPU is mi
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by tech_ken 23d ago
But in the case of CPU architecture there are SOME people who understand how things work 100%, and they've built and vetted abstractions/mental models that enable other engineers and scientists to have that kind of mixed shallow&#
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by tech_ken 23d ago
Developing an intuition about high dimensional systems is pretty different from understanding the character of some specific point on a 1e9+ dimensional manifold of parameters, in my professional opinion (setting aside all the degrees of fr
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by tech_ken 27d ago
> it makes me wonder what more democratic, free market companies would be like. I was wondering the same after PRW lol. Recently I had the chance to ask a friend of mine who worked in Google Infra (years ago) if they had ever tried to &#
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by tech_ken 27d ago
I'd honestly recommend checking out the People's Republic of Walmart; it's a super short read and anything I say would be basically a warmed up rehash of whatever I remember from it. Basic point is just that operations resear
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by tech_ken 27d ago
Back when I read "Cybernetic Revolutionaries" I followed it up with "People's Republic of Walmart" and came away with a bit of a different conclusion to your point 1. IMO lots of US-based hyperscalars are managing w
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by tech_ken 2mo ago
Oh duh
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by tech_ken 2mo ago
Finally I'll be able to properly follow JJK season 2
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by tech_ken 3mo ago
> It's an abstraction, not an error. Extending an abstraction beyond its expressive capabilities is an error IMO.
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by tech_ken 3mo ago
Right but “upgrading to the next level” is exactly the type of cognitive error that I’m against, it’s forward-looking Whig history. There is no “levels” of civilization, there’s only the arrangements we have now and the ones that will occur
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by tech_ken 3mo ago
Tech development != tech tree, history is nonlinear and ecological. Linear, unlockable "tech trees" are an ahistorical fantasy necessary to make some video games fun and digestible. Applying them to the real world is like trying t
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by tech_ken 3mo ago
From the article: > We said criticality in 2026, electricity production in 2027, and power to the warfighter in 2028. Are there any other examples of land-based militaries using nuclear power? Seems kind of like since they can't tal
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by tech_ken 3mo ago
> moving up the tech tree of civilization Life isn't Civ 6, there is no tech tree to climb.
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by tech_ken 3mo ago
It's more of an engineering call than something that can be purely determined from inductive reasoning. I think most engineers working in the space would say "both" are needed, but partisans exist on both sides.
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by tech_ken 3mo ago
I think there’s a difference between full-on “bullying” and what I’d call “blunt criticism”. I think bullying requires an intent to silence or otherwise coerce through fear. Blunt criticism is more about skipping the niceties and saying it
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by tech_ken 3mo ago
> The government is going to suck at funding the right things I'm pretty sure you have this totally backwards. People who study scientific development seem to think that the government is actually a really effective funder of resear
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by tech_ken 3mo ago
I can think of a few angles that might have pushed them towards gas, mainly (a) they wanted on-demand generation cap, (b) they didn't want to get into the batteries game at the volume they'd require, or (c) they didn't want t
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by tech_ken 4mo ago
> Starship will bill NASA 1/20th what SLS does Is that before or after the program achieves profitability?
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by tech_ken 4mo ago
Because the buyer is the one monopolizing industries and stripping them for parts
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by tech_ken 4mo ago
> Selling labor for money is the exact same transaction as walking into Walmart and buying a banana. In the same comment you say that the government has to help guarantee that Walmart won't exploit you in this banana purchase transa
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by tech_ken 4mo ago
> When we talk about labor negotiations, that word should indicate theres no exploitation happening So in a world where no labor negotiation is happening, is exploitation possible? If Uber drivers had no legal recourse to form a union (o
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by tech_ken 4mo ago
> Insisting they know better for someone else Well it's the drivers themselves who voted to join the union, so presumably there's something they want to see changed. No need to speak for people who've already found their
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by tech_ken 4mo ago
> No doubt good for them, but I am curious how this is realistically going to work. Seems like kind of a pilot-program nationwide TBH. The article links to another article last year about an MA ballot measure which made it possible for g

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