maxgiraldo

My understanding is that collusion among competitors is illegal (although I’m not a lawyer). I was referring instead to the prisoner’s dilemma that Bruce Greenwald discusses in Competition Demystified. In theory, competitors, like prisoners who are pitted against one another to rat on one another, are usually better off cooperating rather than turning against each other.

OpenAI could still have a significant moat. ChatGPT occupies most consumers’ minds when they think about AI and has become a household name. Google won because search became a habit-forming product people grew accustomed to using. Bing was once effectively indistinguishable from Google Search, yet still failed to achieve mass adoption because users had already become accustomed to “Googling” things. The same could be said for people "ChatGPT-ing" things. If OpenAI and Anthropic are smart, they will maintain similar pricing rather than aggressively undercutting each other, allowing the market to resemble Home Depot and Lowe’s, or cloud computing, where AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure coexist as highly profitable competitors. Unfortunately, I doubt OpenAI or Anthropic will pursue this strategy, as both companies appear to be acting as though the race to AGI is winner-take-all even if the market may ultimately support several highly profitable competitors.

I'm making an assumption here, but I think paulg is implying that "learning LLMs" today is like the equivalent of "learning computers" in the earlier days. We could even divide civilization into two eras: Before Transformers (BT) and After Transformers (AT).

I watch Khan Academy videos because they explain topics like mathematics in an easy-to-understand way. But it's just one tool in a student's arsenal. Khan Academy is by no means the one-stop-shop for education and should not stop learners from inquiring, constructing, expressing, and communicating as part of their learning journey. I hoped that the author would at least make that distinction a bit more in their article because it seemed a little unnecessarily critical. I _think_ the article makes the assumption that most students are just passively watching videos and _are_ using Khan Academy as the one-stop-shop and that the site (and Khan) are missing out on an opportunity to provide a better experience that is more in line with John Dewey's principles of learning.

If anyone is looking to brush up on their Algebra fundamentals, I built an app for that and it's free to use: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pensend/id1571322730. I had a similar problem where I didn't understand where my fundamental knowledge gaps were so I ended up starting from the beginning (pre-algebra). I hope this is helpful for people!

(sorry for the shameless plug)

IMHO Javascript is "unusable" because you can mutate state (among other things). Rich Hickey has a few other arguments against static typing and OO such as names dominating semantics and "types are an anti-pattern for program maintenance and extensibility because they introduce coupling. They’re also parochial." I think he said that in his talk called "Effective Programs":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V1FtfBDsLU

Hours spent at the office do not equate to hours worked.

Regarding take-home assignments, if you do decide to incorporate this into your hiring process, I think pulling a page out of Aaron Swartz's "How I Hire Programmers" [1] is a good place to start. Important points being to keep the task small and non-proprietary. If it is legally and financially possible, then also pay the programmer for her/his/they time.

[1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hiring

I'm still under the impression that if you gave the same set of companies to every VC in the world and had each of them bet on the winners, that you wouldn't see that much of a difference in portfolio performance from the very worst to the very best VCs. There's no magic formula for choosing companies that firms like KP have--a lot of it is based on their reputation. Plus, the next Facebook is not going to look like Facebook or whatever that maxim was. The better companies tend to go to the VCs with the better reputation and the cycle continues.

I can't speak about lein or maven, but it is in no way a requirement to use emacs as your editor. In fact, there is really interesting work going on in other editors like Atom with proto-repl[1]. For the web, you can spin up a Gorilla REPL[2] which basically gives you a Jupyter notebook but for Clojure.

[1] https://atom.io/packages/proto-repl [2] http://gorilla-repl.org/

> To be perfectly honest, Clojure's biggest mistake, from my point of view, was to be so heavily JVM-dependent.

With Clojure being a hosted language, there's nothing stopping it from adopting a new platform or expanding to other platforms or languages. It has actually already done this with Clojurescript (run in the browser or Node.js)[1] and Clojure CLR (run on Microsoft's .NET)[2].

[1] https://clojurescript.org/ [2] https://clojure.org/about/clojureclr

Could you speak more on the use of macros and bottom-up programming as well as REPL-driven development at Walmart Labs (if applicable)? Would be interested to know if those lisp-like attributes play as important a role as functional programming and the JVM in general.

The docs for the API, especially for a company whose primary users are software developers, is a core part of the product offering. Just look at the investments that AWS, Twilio, and Stripe make in their docs. This stuff matters.

Why not plant trees? https://forestsnews.cifor.org/10316/make-it-rain-planting-fo...

Chief Architect of Warby Parker Robert Lefkowitz's presentation on technical debt and his proposition for a microservice architecture called the von Neumann.

Some interesting ideas include:

1. Remove dependencies. 2. Store data in the code (inside AWS lambdas). 3. Technical debt is "borrowed" code.

Agreed. One of the core tenets of bitcoin, in my opinion, is that it's borderless --or international as you say-- and not centralized in any way. National cryptocurrencies won't work (IMO) because they violate the principals of decentralization. Open vs closed/government-based crypto is like comparing the internet to a closed off intranet.