madrox

The relationship between masculinity and power is interesting to me. Arguably much of his strength came from his position, and his position came from, as Tapestry argues, taking big risks.

I think it is best to say that each Star Trek would not have existed without the trek that came before. Each spoke to the time they were in.

I think one of the reasons we gave Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to kids was because it was a story easy to relate to without the gymnastics of interpretation like we'd do with Odyssey or Illiad. I could read Hamlet and understand it as a teenager, but I didn't feel like I had anything in common with him. I wonder if the same thing is happening with Tom.

To the article's point, I grew up in the 80s. Even though I lived a different life from Tom and Huck it wasn't so different that I couldn't relate to it. I wonder how many more generations we can go before that's all gone, or if it already has. There's still a lot of value in it as a work of literature, but I don't know if it has the same intuitive understanding it had in the 20th century.

I don't think that's a bad thing. We shouldn't put the past on a pedestal, but it makes me wonder who the Tom Sawyer of the 21st century is. I just hope it isn't Katniss Everdeen or Edward Cullen.

Patrick Stewart's life had the odds against in him in many ways. Abusive father suffering from PTSD. A bald british man in Hollywood invites typecasting. Constant imposter syndrome from growing up poor while entering a profession where many came from more educated or affluent backgrounds.

Shakespeare effectively changed his life, and it's incredible to think that you could map everything he did and his success to his love of the bard.

If I had to take a lesson from his life, it's to have something you love, even if it isn't trendy (especially if it isn't) because most good things flow from that.

Godspeed, captain.

It's to get more users. This is only applying to servers meant to be public, which is probably already getting scraped

I got a degree in statistics, and what I remember from those times is that we spent maybe 10% of our time learning how to build the model and 90% of the time correctly interpreting the model output. Of course, in the time I learned statistics it was almost exclusively applied in hard science, finance, and actuary. The wild west of machine learning hadn't gotten started. I wonder if they teach it differently now.

When we start using big datasets where n went into the tens of millions we kinda stopped bothering because margins were so small it was effectively certain you found the mean of some range. However I think in that time we forget what confidence scoring actually is and how quickly multiplied alpha can balloon on you.

I am not unaware. I reread the original books every few years, and every time the butlerian jihad comes up I never imagine a traditionally violent war. Something about how he describes it, I guess.

In defense of his son, he wrote Dreamer of Dune biographing his father. It was a great book.

I think you're mostly right. Herbert worked backward from sand dunes in Oregon to create his Dune universe. He needed reasons for people to look and act and fight in certain ways that would make people interested in reading his work. The Butlerian Jihad was justification for why there was no C3PO. It's why the events were told but never shown.

But it's still interesting to consider why he chose those particular devices.

Whenever I read the original novels, I always imagine the jihad to be a fairly benign if not peaceful exercise more akin to a protest than a war. Like if one day people started rolling across the world smashing data centers and laptops.

I was fairly surprised when his son wrote a novel that felt like a generic, bland robots run amok storyline that happened, more or less, because one guy/titan "ruined a good thing" by telling his AI to run in permissionless mode.

It is. From one of the chapter epigraphs.

A lot of long time Dune fans don't consider those books canon when discussing them in the abstract. Frank Herbert had a vision of what the jihad was and what it meant, and its eventual book depiction was fairly base.

What other countries describe is the equivalent of your public health system. If you're willing to pay out of pocket, like you describe, you can have a similar experience in the US. However, that can get expensive quickly since you normally don't have just one appointment with a vascular neurosurgeon.

I have a similar but more benign story, and cannot emphasize enough how correct this comment is. I had severe abdominal pain and vomiting. My PCP told me it was GERD and I should lose weight. Two days later I was getting an emergency cholecystectomy because my gall bladder had necrotized.

A good shorthand is that unless a doctor has positively identified something through imaging or biopsy do not trust them when they tell you what something is or what to do about it.

If you aren't sure how best to advocate for yourself, use AI to help figure out what tests and referrals to ask for. You might feel like a jerk, but don't expect anyone to care about you more than you do.

Call it what you want. Call it parroting. I don't really care. It's useful signal about what's working and what isn't when the user isn't directly using your tool. If the agent initially chains tool calls wrong, it will share that stuff. I've used this method a lot to iterate on tool design.

My advice is to not get too hung up on skeuomorphic language being used to illustrate a principle. Metaphor happens all the time.

Reading this post put me in a similar head space.

I believe you're mostly thinking of version history though. There’s plenty of other reasons to have source control we still need, like guarding against racing writes or continuous integration to ensure correctness. Even some industries require version history for compliance reasons.

I do love how AI is challenging us to rethink our tools though rather than blindly reaching to git for every project.

If you're building an MCP or CLI for agents to use, one of the best loops you can do is give your agent a task to perform with it then when it's done ask the agent what it thought about using it. It will give great feedback.

I don't think pivoting requires pivoting towards a career that won't be affected by AI.

The importance of the pivot is that you're going into a field without preconceived ideas about how it's done, which allows you to learn and grow as the field adapts to AI. That was my experience pivoting away from web dev in the early 00s, anyway.

It isn't that I think you're asking for the moon. I'm trying to impart wisdom from a long career that I think may be useful to you. Unlike the XKCD, neither the blog author nor myself are acting smug that you don't understand CI.

In general, it is not a good strategy to expect people to make things easy for you. "LMGTFY" has a long history. Rather than get so bothered that you make an HN post and double down in comments, better to develop the muscle memory to look it up and move on. This is about more than just acronyms but all problems life throws your way, which is why I ask: do you want to feel wronged by this blog post not explaining CI, or do you want to learn and move on? No one else in life is on the hook to educate you. If you think this blog post is an offender, try reading an academic journal.

I'm merely trying to impart advice I wish I heard in my 20s, so take it how you will. I wish you luck in your career.

Yeah, your interpretation of the constraints of the problem are wrong, so the strategy of the secretary problem does not apply even for sidestepping it.

The very specific rules of the problem are that you are evaluating one person on a single metric, and you must choose to hire/reject them before viewing the next. You must know in advance how many people you will be evaluating. This is why it's the "secretary problem." You're interviewing 10 candidates and only evaluating them on typing speed. Once you see their typing speed you must hire or reject on the spot. The optimal strategy is to always reject the first 37% of your sample candidates, then hire the next candidate to beat their score (or hire the last person you interview if none beat them).

In college, we joked that this is optimal dating strategy, because dating still kind of works this way. You decide how high you're willing to go on your body count, and then use this strategy to decide who to settle down with.

As you describe it, (A) does not apply because it isn't about "the best person in the world" it's about the candidate sample you have. (B) doesn't apply because this is a post-hire rejection. You can keep your candidates "warm" and interview the entire batch, then decide among the batch who you want to hire, or not hire and continue.

It's a nice idea, but there's probably a better optimal stopping model than secretary problem for what you're doing.

Fair, though I'd argue businesses are even less entitled to operating the same way long term. I haven't stepped foot in a department store in years. Disney isn't making movies the way they used in Walt's day.

I considered myself to be a web developer in the 90s and early 00s. Then things began changing very quickly into something I didn't recognize. I came from an era that did layout with table tags! I felt like an old dog having to learn new tricks. I chose to pivot into statistics rather than adapt, though I've since come back around via data science and systems engineering.

I don't think what's happening is a uniquely AI phenomenon. If it wasn't AI, it was going to be something else. The ground is always shifting beneath you. It's happened to me in multiple fields through my career. You adapt or you pivot. Like a startup.

For many people who feel negatively affected by AI, my advice to them is to do what I did when my professional disciplines changed to something I didn't recognize: pivot. The great news is that AI makes it really easy to be a beginner in a new adjacent field.

I'm going to be fascinated to see how the regulatory arbitrage shakes out long term. What legal provinance applies to infra in space? Does GDPR apply? Can you even enforce GDPR? And you have line of site to users who could connect to it directly, bypassing government-regulated backbones.

When I was in college it was raining heavily outside, and I had to walk from the lab to my dorm at some point in the next hour. I started thinking about the secretary problem and derived the continuous case for it (surprise! It's 1/e) to figure out how long I should observe how heavily it was raining before I trying to head out.

I mention all this because modern hiring is nothing like the actual Secretary Problem, which is about when to stop given unknown information on future samples and a known retry limit. No one hires that way anymore, so I don't feel like the author side-stepped anything about it. I guess that doesn't matter, but it irks me as someone who's spent time on optimal stopping.

It used to be a standard expectation, but that was before google or AI could have answered your question in less time and typing that your complaint on HN required. Especially when the author is writing a blog post for an audience that knows what CI is.

Do you want to be right, or do you want to learn?

I recommend making a habit of googling or asking AI about terms you run into. As someone who is in tech, you will hear tech jargon your whole career that will not be explained if it's considered standard terminology for the audience being spoken to. It is better to learn to educate yourself than expect others to go out of their way.

I have found not all open source to be the same in the modern era. The FOSS of yesteryear has been replaced by a lot of projects aimed at enterprise where the FOSS offering is the "free demo." This may have been novel and clever of the original pioneers of the practice, but there's a lot of cargo culting going on.

This may come out of left field, but Dario seems terrified to be in charge. I don't get the impression that he ever had a desire to run a company like this. Now that he's a CEO, he keeps trying to make uncompetitive decisions and calls for someone (anyone) to stop him. It regularly blunts Anthropic's edge.

It's the only explanation I can see when it's obvious to any student of history this is going to backfire. It doesn't take much imagination to know how such a governing body will be abused, and I'm sure it will only get wilder in ways we can't imagine right now. Dario does NOT know what he's creating, and for once it's not AI.

We should, which is why anthropomorphizing the lawnmower is bad. It misdirects you away from who built the mower and aimed it.