ericdykstra

AI didn't X, it Y. Where Y is write this post.

The Artisan of Glimmith is so good! Biggest surprise of the year for me so far.

I got 12/18 on faces as an American-born Caucasian living in Japan for over 10 years. Since the subjects were photographed in New York City (and from the other comments, at least a decade ago), cues from fashion and makeup only helped me get about 4 of them, another 6 had pretty strong ethnic features. Of the remaining 8, it was a bit of a tossup and I did worse than guessing, getting only 2 correct.

13/18 on food. Even with a lot of the same general types of food, the presentation and specific ingredients made a lot of them somewhat simple. I got tripped up on a few, though, where I overthought it ("a Japanese X is usually not like this") or ones where it was really a tossup for me between Chinese and Korean since I'm less familiar with those foods.

I won't ever put my name on something written by an LLM, and I will blacklist any site or person I see doing it. If I want to read LLM output I can prompt it myself, subjecting me to it and passing it off as your own is disrespectful.

As the author says, there will certainly be a number of people who decide to play with LLM games or whatever, and content farms will get even more generic while having less writing errors, but I don't think that the age of communicating thought, person to person, through text is "over".

I studied poker a lot in high school, and it still influences how I think today.

Probabilistic thinking about the EV of your decisions is a good framework, but "Just keep making good decisions" is the hard part. Same as in poker, though, the hard part about making a decision in life isn't the middle-school level probability math, but about making the right estimates about payoff potential and success rate based on incomplete information.

Analyzing things as they are rather than how you wish they were, being able to separate useful information from noise, and taking a step back to look at second-order effects are all useful skills that will help you make better decisions the more you develop them.

There is a bit too much emphasis on the relationship between the manager and individual subordinates as the only thing a manager does. It's certainly the relationship that programmers have with their manager, but it ignores the reason why managers exist at all. In the end, managers are part of the translation layer between the company's top-level goal of acquiring customers and improving profitability and code that gets written and deployed.

The day-to-day responsibilities of a manager vary by company, but in essence can be boiled down to: Take priorities that are handed down from above -> apply those priorities as efficiently as possible to the team -> assist in execution.

The manager might be part of the discussion of priorities and clarify them before relaying them to their team, they may actually have quite a bit of freedom of interpreting the priorities, or they may literally just be a task-assigner-and-enforcer. The manager might also have technical leadership authority, architecture responsibility, or anything else, but these are still all in service of coordinating a team to produce the best output possible.

How a manager relates to their subordinates is important, of course, and the best managers treat their subordinates as individuals that have different needs. There's a responsibility to give them room to grow, keep them happy, and keep them productive as part of the job, but that alone isn't the job.

I've seen it work in a few ways; these are not mutually exclusive:

* You have someone whose job or as part of their job is to it is to discover these kinds of internal organizational efficiencies and automate them. Something that organically comes up like this gets assigned to that person.

* Managers are not incentivized to stick to a rigid schedule or metrics based on an inflexible roadmap.

* Flexibility and autonomy is built into developers' schedules so they can work on things outside of just their rank-ordered task list.

Hi HN, I've been primarily a backend engineer (10 years) and have managed as many as 8 engineers (2 years). I use an analytical and systems thinking approach to my work, and it has helped me succeed in both building out early stage products, and growing/fostering a cohesive team of engineers.

I'm open to backend roles as an IC or engineering management roles. I love programming, but I also love working with programmers, and I can help a company achieve their goals from either position or a mix of the two.

  Location: Hokkaido, Japan (permanent resident)
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Ruby, Go, Elixir, Prolog, SQL, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, Phoenix, Gin,  Tailwind, Git
  Résumé/CV: https://dykstra.jp/en/cv
  Email: [email protected]

RTS has always been my preferred competitive genre. Yes, basic build orders are pretty well mapped out. In Starcraft 2, for example, the first 1:30 or so for beginners, the first 3-4 minutes for intermediate players, and the first 8-9 minutes for pros have "standard" build orders.

But once you get past this, there's so many things to worry about - balancing tech versus units versus upgrades versus economy, micro, scouting, unit composition, harassing and defending harass... And then the meta layer, which is allocating your limited time and APM to those decisions and actions! Really challenging and rewarding to improve at, and the only "e-sport" I find interesting to watch.

This article, like Duke's book, has a solid premise, but fails to provide any actionable advice aside from a simple risk/reward framework. When I read the book, I was hoping there would be more information about how to properly handicap various situations, but there just wasn't.

Business and life decisions aren't as simple as calculating pot odds and outs. Anyone who has estimated a complex and unfamiliar programming task knows that the unknown-unknowns are the biggest part of any equation.

There's a kind of vicious cycle here where people feel disconnected from their surroundings and communities, and attention-stealing apps make a business of providing a surrogate through parasocial relationships and infinite access to the spectacle and new ways to interact with it.

Parasocial relationships aren't real relationships, and the spectacle replaces doing anything directly, there is no fulfilment and the cycle continues. There's an epidemic of people who can't have hold a conversation or relate to anyone without mediating the conversation through a common topic that they've experienced on mass or social media. They're addicted to watching a simulation of having a life, and not actually living the one life they have.

I like the feature of being able to select what equipment you have available. Lots of us lost access to a gym with COVID and don't have the ability to put a power rack in our abode. A simple concept, but great execution!

PS: Do you know where I can download more RAM for my computer? It's been a bit laggy recently.

Many companies implemented work-from-home policies very quickly, almost all public events (sports, standardized tests) were canceled, schools and sports gyms closed, and some companies that didn't go to remote work had employees stagger commute times so trains would be less crowded. This all started, iirc, while the number of cases was still in the tens (not counting the cruise ship).

It is also more accepted to wear face masks, as many people have pollen allergies so it's quite normal, and there is less direct physical contact between people overall.

I remember reading that the number of flu cases was about half that of a normal flu season because of the precautions everyone was taking, which points to a high percentage of people doing their part to help prevent the spread.

All the extraneous ads, tracking, etc in Windows 10 has made it so I have never bothered upgrading from 7.

It seems like it would be a huge pain to go through and disable or blocking everything, and even then how confident could I be that I didn't miss something?

There are certainly a number of factors, but the prevalence and addictiveness of entertainment technology is without a doubt a major factor.

Plenty of hikikomori in the safe, walkable Tokyo. What's keeping them inside?

Your great-grandparents were right, it's just hard to imagine listening to radio with family being "destructive", when today people have less friends than ever and are literally choosing Netflix, video games, and pornography over having a social life.

Mass extraction and consumption of oil and coal will happen until these resources are too sparse to warrant building new plants or maintaining existing ones.

I don't really see any future where this doesn't happen. If you remove coal subsidies, or tax them, then some of the energy production currently handled by coal will change to oil, but once the oil becomes expensive enough to extract, coal mines will open back up again.

This just seems inevitable to me. Is there an angle I'm missing?

This sounds a bit like Bill Gaede's Rope Hypothesis, but I'm not very well-versed in the topic to say for sure. Can anyone confirm/deny?

Humans are complicated creatures, and just replicating the macronutrients (and even micronutrients) into an ingestible substance is not a replacement for real food.

Can we stop trying to replace every last natural source of calories with some combination of soy, corn, perfume, salt, sugar, and vegetable oil?

Peer pressure is stronger, that’s why it’s important. Sure, it’s evolutionarily adapted to benefit the group, which may sometimes go against your individual interests. Overall, however, you just have to look at the results to see whether a deracinated society of people acting individually ends up better off than a community of people looking out for each other.

Look at my reply above. Maybe you are succeeding at resisting corporate and mass media programming, but the vast majority of people are failing miserably, and it’s lead to a society of people who are childless, more obese, more depressed, and have fewer friends they can confide in.

I’d personally sacrifice a bit of my individual autonomy to live in a more functional society.

I don't doubt that you can do it, personally, but you only have to look at American obesity rates to see that a lack of self-control is a system-level problem, not just an individual making a bad decision.

If we "figure out how to do it" on an individual level, there's no doubt that corporations will do whatever they can to subvert whatever it is that is causing you to indulge in less of their products.

The Amish have found one way to fix the problem on a system-wide level. It's not the only way, but I don't think we're going to find a way to do it without having a base in reality, family, community, purpose, and changing social norms.

A big part of it is the cult of individualism. Do you really think that you, by willpower alone, are going to be able to resist all the temptations of multinational corporations who collectively spend billions researching how to manipulate your lizard brain?

The Amish do it through community, accountability, and literally physically separating themselves from the vast majority of this influence.

Amish are not anti-technology, they are technology-skeptic and will only adopt a technology if they see that the benefit outweighs the cost, and they are very conservative about their decisions.

http://amishamerica.com/technology/

Just looking at the result, it seems to have worked out well for them. They're a community that has maintained a focus on family and community, and are in a good position to withstand collapse scenarios, since they are much less dependent on the global economic system.

So Twitter broke their platform, and they show ads. This is vastly different from a message board that shows all messages to all users.

Twitter isn’t a phone call, but it also isn’t a message board. You only see the tweets of the people you personally choose to follow; it doesn’t matter if there are 100 billion spam accounts posting ads to nobody.

There are millions of Twitter accounts in Japanese, but if you don’t follow any of them, and nobody you follow retweets them, you’d never know they exist. You can also block or mute specific accounts, mute keywords, etc for even finer control.

This sounds right, but what if the corporations are more powerful than the government? What if they have enough money to collectively rent enough politicians so that they never have to face the scrutiny that Naval is talking about here?

If social media platforms are picking the next congressmen and next president, and you’re in Congress vying to keep your seat, do you really want to introduce or sponsor legislation to upset these companies?

This seems pretty good to me! One of my most vivid memories from visiting the Netherlands as a child was the simple, but delicious breakfasts that consisted of a choice between a variety of delicious breads, and a few cheeses or other toppings to choose from to top it.

Certainly a more enjoyable and healthier way to have a utilitarian meal than Soylent, which is honestly just degrading.

YouTube doesn't seem to be interested in hosting any content that isn't manufactured from a giant media corporation or just vapid clickbait entertainment. Just take a look at the trending tab to see what YouTube wants to promote: http://youtube.com/trending

It's worth noting that "Trending" is curated by YouTube itself, and is not an algorithmically determined set of videos.

How does restorative tree planting work in the long run? Does it eventually lead to a stable ecosystem, or is it something that ends up less stable or otherwise worse off when compared to a natural recovery?