wcfrobert

6 ms·

1.
by wcfrobert 4d ago
Don't conflate your self-worth with your ability to produce in the economy, or your test score, or which college you went to, or how good of a programmer you are. It's such a tragedy that we are so obsessed with achievement and co
2.
by wcfrobert 11d ago
The modern world has way too much content to commit to memory. Our brains would explode. Maybe 2500 years ago it was still possible to functioned as an adult without writing things down.
3.
by wcfrobert 15d ago
Yes, pizza, after intense and scrupulous reasoning, is indeed a salad. This goes to proves that you can reason your way out of everything.
4.
by wcfrobert 23d ago
It's like interest rates. I used to think it's weird why people are so obsessed with a couple percentage points. But it's turns out those couple of percent could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars difference for a 30 year
5.
by wcfrobert 25d ago
Completely agree! I find writing deeply memetic - in that I often catch myself imitating the flow, style, word choices, punctuation and grammar of whatever reading material I'm currently immersed in. This unfortunately does not bode we
6.
by wcfrobert 1mo ago
Another reset tip I've implemented to great success is to drive in complete silence. No music, no podcast, no radio. This way, I've turned my daily commute into a kind of meditation practice. At first, you'll think about a mi
7.
by wcfrobert 1mo ago
This was basically solved by massive subsidies from the Chinese government. https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-clean-tech-developing-cou...
8.
by wcfrobert 1mo ago
A few snippets from his full post here: https://gwern.net/guardian-angel . > "The chatbot personas are deeply misaligned with you, and aligned with their owners; and the economic incentives are to farm you with ads a
9.
by wcfrobert 2mo ago
My opinion is that juniors need time in the saddle to develop good engineering judgement and taste. Outsourcing critical thinking is seductive and a slippery slope. LLM lures juniors into feeling productive, and molds them into ineffectual
10.
by wcfrobert 2mo ago
I like the _idea_ of reading continental philosophy, and then I opened up Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Here is a random sentence from a random page verbatim: "Spirit contains this actuality here because the extremes whose unit
11.
by wcfrobert 3mo ago
People say jobs with the "human touch" will stay relevant after AGI. And I'm like have you seen customer service? I can't even find the phone number anymore on amazon
12.
by wcfrobert 3mo ago
I think this is what makes Asian food more exciting and innovative. No whiff of elitism. No status-signaling or having to appeal to the taste of King Louis the 14th. Just cook stuff and make it taste good for as many people as possible; let
13.
by wcfrobert 3mo ago
I read pg's collection of essays (Hackers and Painters) in my 20s, and it single-handedly prevented me from being radicalized by leftist ideologies. The one insight from the book that I will always remember from the book is this: if yo
14.
by wcfrobert 3mo ago
Approximate monthly cost of owning a car in the city: Lease or loan: $350 Parking in city: $300 Car insurance: $180 Gas: $120 License/Registration: $42 (~$500 per year) Maintenance: $17 (~$200 per year) If you live in the city and you
15.
by wcfrobert 3mo ago
> "Now I have CLIs that one-shots bugs across distributed systems for me. Bugs that I couldn't solve in the past. Bugs that would take 2 days of full-time debugging. Bugs across distributed systems that lack distributed observa
16.
by wcfrobert 4mo ago
This is so accurate wtf!? - "United States is a service and information economy": Finance, real estate, insurance, SaaS. - "Nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away": here's a video from Smarter eve
17.
by wcfrobert 4mo ago
> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. The AI subscription that was supposed to be an investment in efficiency turn
18.
by wcfrobert 4mo ago
> "Whatever its flaws, the writing you find online is authentic. It's not mystery meat cooked up out of scraps of pitch letters and press releases, and pressed into molds of zippy journalese." - PG in 2005 Look how low we&
19.
by wcfrobert 4mo ago
This entire thread is drenched in class consciousness and I am here for it.
20.
by wcfrobert 4mo ago
On point 1: I generally agree with you about the benefits of technological progress on a long enough time horizon. But what about the short term? What mechanism of redistribution are you assuming for the displaced workers? A scary number of
21.
by wcfrobert 4mo ago
"If there is less deep poverty in San Francisco than in New York, is it not because San Francisco is yet behind New York in all that both cities are striving for? When San Francisco reaches the point where New York now is, who can doub
22.
by wcfrobert 4mo ago
I think the answer is to do multi-disciplinary work. Venture outside of pure theoretical math. Learn some other domain knowledge and combine it with your mathematical ommph. That's the easiest way to make an impact now rather than pote
23.
by wcfrobert 4mo ago
> "Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. Status updates that were once three sentences are now bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries. Retrospective notes, post-incident reports, design memos, kickoff decks:
24.
by wcfrobert 5mo ago
But you've just perfectly described the tacit knowledge problem. Yes, you can spend all your time writing docs, or just mentor a junior and let them grok the system through osmosis. Also your doc won't ever have 100% coverage unle
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by wcfrobert 6mo ago
NIMBYism has never been about preserving neighborhood characteristic, or noise and traffic concerns. Menlo Park is not Big Sur. Sure, some concerns are reasonable and should be investigated, but most of the time they're bureaucratic di
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by wcfrobert 6mo ago
Master planning has never worked for my side projects unless I am building the exact replica of what I've done in the past. The most important decisions are made while I'm deep in the code base and I have a better understanding of
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by wcfrobert 6mo ago
For most working-class Americans, education is a form of job-training. In the AI maximalist world where humans are obsolete and cannot contribute to the economy in any meaningful way, there is actually no reason for public education to exis
28.
by wcfrobert 6mo ago
To borrow a concept from Simon Willison: you need to "hoard things you know how to do”. You need to know what is possible; you need to be able to articulate what you want. AI is a fast car, but it’s empty and still needs a driver. As l
29.
by wcfrobert 6mo ago
Good advice to the younger folks. You can afford to look stupid. So go ahead and do that thing you wanted to try. There's more acceptance because of your age. You're expected to fail in some ways. Once you have a mortgage, a reput
30.
by wcfrobert 6mo ago
My solution to this is to prioritize. There isn't enough time in a person's life to learn everything anyways. Selectively pick and struggle through things you want to learn deeply. And let AI spoon-feed you for things you don&#x27

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