MikeTheRocker

I have also really been enjoying these lectures. Sarah is quick witted and insightful. I recommend the Dwarkesh podcast to anyone interested in AI in general (though Sarah Paine lectures are completely unrelated).

I already feel like text models are already at sufficiently entertaining and useful quality as you define it. It's definitely possible we never get there for video or 3D modalities, but I think there are strong enough economic incentives such that big tech will dump tens of billions of dollars into achieving it.

IMO current generation models are capable of creating significantly better than "slop" quality content. You need only look at NotebookLM output. As models continue to improve, this will only get better. Look at the rate of improvement of video generation models in the last 12-24 months. It's obvious to me we're rapidly approaching acceptable or even excellent quality on-demand generated content.

Generative AI is going to drive the marginal cost of building 3D interactive content to zero. Unironically this will unlock the metaverse, cringe as that may sound. I'm more bullish than ever on AR/VR.

Meta actually has a native SDK for apps that appears very similar to what Google announced today with Android XR.

https://github.com/meta-quest/Meta-Spatial-SDK-Samples

No, the 7950X is a CPU. CUDA is an API for computing on GPUs.

Not your compute, not your girlfriend, as they say.

With >150,000 employees, I think they can probably do both

I'm hoping they're building a commodity AR/VR operating system -- essentially spatial Android. They've already announced a partnership with Samsung and Qualcomm so I've got to imagine some interesting hardware is coming soon.

In contrast, buying my Tesla new was about as easy as any Amazon order. I don't know why other car manufacturers don't make D2C a bigger focus for their business.

One of my all-time favorite records is entitled Crown Shyness. The eponymous track [1] uses this phenomenon as a metaphor for feeling alone while depressed. The branches are so close, but just out of reach. I always thought it was a beautiful analogy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHkdU105HNA

I suspect for people like Sam who are compulsively ambitious and competitive, it's not about the dollars. It's about winning.

Further, based on anecdotes from friends and Twitter who know Sam personally, I'm inclined to believe he's genuinely motivated by building something that "alters the timeline", so to speak.

This made me laugh out loud

Curious what your sample size is on evaluating IC8s. In my experience the small handful I’ve known have been very pleasant people.

Just curious, with so much runway do you still work? What motivates you?

> WFH is here. its not going anywhere.

I hope you're correct, but empirically this appears to be wishful thinking, at least among larger organizations. How many tech big-cos have implemented a mandatory return to office policy in some capacity? Some big ones off the top of my head: Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Snap. It's my observation that smaller companies tend to follow larger companies culturally, especially as they scale.

I love seeing this kind of detailed analysis of everyday things like this. It always seems to reveal intriguing correlations and insights.

Snap has 397 million DAU, up 14% YoY. They're far from irrelevant among young westerners. They just have a remarkably weak business for their scale.

https://investor.snap.com/news/news-details/2023/Snap-Inc.-A...

As someone deeply interested in AR/VR as an industry, it makes me really sad constantly seeing Snap fumble.

This is misleading. $36B is for all of Reality Labs, which includes Virtual Reality, but also their Augmented Reality glasses in development, Ray-Ban smart glasses, Horizon, Meta's AI org, the Portal product line (now discontinued), the unreleased smart watch, tons of R&D, etc.

I think you're conflating currency with interfaces to the financial system. The currency is the medium of exchange: the dollar itself. A debit card is merely a tool to transact using dollars.

Kotlin has the internal access modifier which can be useful for this

One datapoint: In 2022, I had an offer as engineer #2 at a venture backed startup in San Francisco for 1%. Not sure if this is typical, but I did some research at the time and it seemed about right.

Curious if you've ever done this personally? I've only ever worked at companies with tens to hundreds of thousands of employees, and my perspective has been that the bureaucracy is such that any nonstandard interaction with the company is pretty much off the table.

I am coming around to this line if thinking much more lately. Especially if you work at a big company in a fungible role. The power imbalance is such that it costs the company essentially 0% of their assets to abruptly terminate you, but for most people it would start a countdown to financial ruin measured in weeks to months. The only snag is that I would feel remorseful for the former coworkers I would be saddling with undue additional workload.

Good luck getting something like that in writing at any big tech company

Is this project associated with Meta? The creator Hongbo Zhang worked at Meta on some of their open source programming language projects (ReasonML and Flow). According to LinkedIn, he's still employed there.

I'm going to make some assumptions, so please forgive me if this is not accurate. You said you were in San Francisco and looking to buy property, so I'll guess you were probably a Senior Software Engineer at the time, based on presumed age and Hacker News demographic/location.

The median wage for that position and region is $295,000/year according to levels.fyi [1]. I happen to also live in the same city with the same job title, so I can confirm anecdotally this feels about right. It might have been lower back when you were saving though. Not sure how long ago this was, but let's roll with it.

5200 / 295000 = ~%1.8 of your gross income.

I'm a bit doubtful that you were able to prepare a week's worth of food in just 1.5 hours, including shopping and cleaning, but if so, that's incredibly efficient. Let's assume 16 waking hours per weekend day.

1.5 / (16 + 16) = ~4.7% of your weekend.

So very roughly speaking, we're looking at a marginal difference of saving around 1/50th of your income at the expense of around 1/20th of your free time. Personally I feel that's not worthwhile, and in my case the numbers are actually more stark.

This of course does not factor in the non-zero time to go out for lunch. This could significantly change the calculus. We're also not including non-financial factors which might play in.

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/senior/loc...

That's interesting because I find home cooking to be very expensive, if you value your time. Cooking for one, the marginal difference between the price of groceries vs eating out is easily outweighed by the time cost of shopping, food preparation and cleanup. Of course if you enjoy cooking it's a different story.

I don't know what to make of this. It just seems so incredibly implausibly that extraterrestrials would have the technology or motive to come to Earth without widespread detection.