will-burner

The advice about deleting youtube history and setting and auto-delete cadence (though every 3 months looked like the most frequent possibility for me) is good and I wasn't aware of it. I don't have social media, but I do have a personal gmail email address, which links to youtube making it hard to avoid spending time on my phone watching youtube videos.

It's crazy that insurance companies are (rightfully) viewed so negatively that the killing of a CEO is responded to positively in a lot of circles. No doubt the jokes on twitter have been great, and it is a good release like I've heard people say about breaking a window with a brick during a protest. It (edit: represents) a lot more than just property damage. It's unlikely but maybe some good will come of this from insurance companies.

Capitalism baby, you always need to grow to increase share holder value.

True, but you could also frame this as a way for Anthropic to try and break that trend. IMO they've got to try and compete with OpenAI, can't just concede that OpenAI has won yet.

https://www.tonic.ai/products/textual offers NER models through an API or with a UI for managing projects. You can sign up for a free trial at https://textual.tonic.ai

Is there any reason why this would work better or is needed compared to taking audio and 1. doing ASR with whisper for instance 2. applying an NER model to the transcribed text?

There are open source NER models that can identify any specified entity type (https://universal-ner.github.io/, https://github.com/urchade/GLiNER). I don't see why this WhisperNER approach would be any better than doing ASR with whisper and then applying one of these NER models.

It would be cool to see one of those word diagrams where the size of the word is how often it appears (a word cloud), and to have one of the word clouds for the word in 1970 and one for the words in 2018 with maybe some years in between. That would make it a lot easier to digest the information than a grid of frequency line plots. It's information overload when I open the page and it takes a lot of energy to read all the different words and compare the plots. The word clouds would get the point across easier and clearer imo.

Love the name Chonkie and Moo Deng, the hippo, as the image/logo!!

edit: Get some Moo Deng jokes in the docs!

An assumption of the article is that in addition to getting readers, bloggers want to make money from their blogs via advertising, brand endorsements, etc. That's fair and true for the author in this case, but not necessarily true of all bloggers, especially the tech type that are on hacker news.

I agree that's most people's problem, but it's now mine. I've tried to think about effective altruism from first principals. For me, I can rationally understand effective altruism and why it's attractive. I even believe people that follow it (and actually do good) may in some sense be "better" people than me. But it none the less rubs me the wrong way and I can't follow it, so I've tried to understand why.

Lol this is a perfect encapsulation of the white savior problem. Thank you.

I'm surprised the article and non of the comments I've seen in this thread mention effective altruism, which in the framing of the article is an attempt to scale caring in some sense.

The article helped me realize why so many people in the startup/tech/software engineering scene are drawn to effective altruism, it's a way to scale helping humanity in the best way possible. The effective altruism argument is that it's more productive to by mosquito nets in Africa than to volunteer at a food shelter because buying mosquito nets will save more lives.

But this article helps explain why I don't personally feel drawn to or buy into effective altruism. Because caring doesn't scale, you can only really care about a handful of people close to you. And to me that altruism feels better and seems like it goes further than donating money to help more people that I can't truly care for.

>What’s something you’ve learned that you believe gives you an edge - something that you’re almost surprised more people don’t know about?

I don't know if it's just me but I would not be stoked to be asked this question during an interview. During interviews you're implicitly trying to differentiate yourself from others vying for the position. You usually do this by talking about your experience in different ways. I find it annoying when the interviewer explicitly asks you to differentiate yourself from others vying for the position. In part it annoys me because I think that should be the job of the interviewer to determine based on how I've answered their concrete questions about my experience. But also explicit questions like this one give such an opportunity for bs that I do not think they give a lot of signal. I guess I could be wrong though and don't spend enough time thinking about what makes me better than other people.

I also like mathematician's apology and would recommend it for understanding now a mathematician's brain works and in particular a mathematician's perspective and mindset on being a mathematician.

But I'm curious what prompted you to bring that up in this thread? I don't see how it's connected to the blog post.

This is a well written article with some good tie bits and lots of links. The author clearly spent a lot of time thinking about Palantir, why Palantir is successful, and what makes a good employee at Palantir. As a Palantir skeptic, it made me more interested in the company, and aside from that there were some good learning resources linked in the article like books and other blog articles.

At the end of the day though, I get the feeling the author is too concerned with status and the rat race of business in America. His view of what it’s possible for someone in tech to work on is very narrow, at some point he says you can either work at google on google search or work at palantir or a few other things.

I’m thankful to the comments here for pointing out more of the bad thing Palantir has been apart of, and so while i feel this article is interesting, Palantir still sounds pretty bad.

>I’ve done Ayahuasca several times, each ceremony fundamentally life-changing. In one ceremony, the shaman helped heal years of abuse. One led to my divorce. The penultimate ceremony convinced me to make this film, instead of using my savings to buy a house.

Yeah the author seems to think this paragraph is pro ayahuasca. Healing years of abuse - definitely good. Getting divorced - could be good or bad depending on the situation. Spending all your savings on making a film instead of buying a house. This one is leaning (could be good) towards more of a bad decision than a good one to me.

I think Psychology is really interesting - what could be more interesting than studying why humans behave the way we do.

For a while in undergrad I was a double math and psychology major. I spent a semester doing undergraduate research in a psychology lab where I would take people in to do be subjects in the experiment and then write them a check afterwards for participating. During the experiment they'd listen to one syllable sounds some from a english and some not from english and the experiment tested whether the subjects were better at remembering the one syllable sounds from the english language when played one syllable sounds back after listening to the first set.

As I type this I think it's an interesting experiment, but it felt to me that the interesting questions in Psychology need to be so dumbed down to be able to run an experiment to test any hypothesis that what's actually interesting about Psychology get's lost in the weeds of trying to rigorously so the scientific method. I don't know a solution to this or whether it's even a problem, but it's problem endemic to the question of whether we're actually making progress in psychology. For the record, I do think we're making progress in Psychology.

A great fantasy book is "The Fifth Season" by N. K. Jemisin. The whole broken earth trilogy by Jemisin is amazing. Here's to fantasy books!

Yeah, my strategy is to when I start reading move my bookmark from where I am in the book to where I am in the footnotes so that while I'm reading I use the bookmark to quickly find the correct place in the footnotes.

I feel like there were many instances where something would be described, either a a character's internal feelings or an observation about the world and I would think, "damn that just perfectly put into words something that I've thought or experienced" or I'd be like "wow that's so true and insightful." And I would be thinking this all the time while reading.

On top of that I liked all the drug stuff and the kind of dystopian world created in the book.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

It’s kind of cliche for a white male nerd of a certain age, but it has stuck with me. How imaginative the book is, the huge mix of characters and stories in the book, and the style of writing are incredible. The pace of interesting ideas is very fast and engrossing, and the language used to describe things is complex but not overly so.

Who buys chips like this and what are they used for?

It's obviously important to push the cutting edge, and it's imaginable that someday a chip like this could be in a personal computer (over 100 cores and over 4TBs of memory!).

The only things I can think, which I don't have experience with so I don't know if it's reasonable, would be high performance instances at data centers, supercomputing, and high performance main frames (is that a thing?).

Apple killed new social apps. What's the value of a social graph nowadays? Most of the big social media platforms like instagram and facebook that used to present you content based on your friends, now present general content from anyone a la tiktok, and users like it better based on time spent on the app. People interact with their friends via messaging apps. It's not clear to me how a new social media app could use a social graph in a new interesting way.

At the same time, I can't help but think that this practice buys lock in for Apple in some way in the form of potentially new iphone features. And it's just veiled as a pro consumer privacy measure.

Time will tell.

For me, it wasn't just about a feel-good thing, I enjoyed being around and had the most fun time on a day to day basis when hanging out and working with the high school teachers. I met them all at a summer program, so it was probably the more engaged teachers. Also, the teachers were from the same demographics as the students, so it wasn't white savior type people, but people from the actual community.

> Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company makes the Cerebras chips. Cerebrus warned investors that any possible supply chain disruptions may hurt the company.

They get their chips from the same company that Nvidia does.

This is the first I've heard of Cerebras Systems.

From the article

>Cerebras had a net loss of $66.6 million in the first six months of 2024 on $136.4 million in sales, according to the filing.

That doesn't sound very good.

What makes them think they can compete with Nvidia, and why IPO right now?

Are they trying to get government money to make chip fabs like Intel or something?

This is something I think about a lot and I thought the article was pretty solid. My father is a musician, so he always told me to do what I love. I tried to do that by becoming a research mathematician, that didn't work on and now I do something I don't love (but like some days) that consists of sitting at a computer writing code.

>One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at who your colleagues will be. You'll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people?

I've had 3 careers: working with high school students in low income areas, being an academic research mathematician, and now being a data scientist. The people I liked the best and who I would like to become like were the teachers I worked with at the high schools in low income areas.

>Indeed, the difference in character between different kinds of work is magnified by the fact that everyone else is facing the same decisions as you. If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well it pays, you'll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it seems from the outside. Whereas if you choose work you're genuinely interested in, you'll be surrounded mostly by other people who are genuinely interested in it, and that will make it extra inspiring.

This pretty well states the soul-suckingness of working in industry.

I can't tell if this is a serious comment or a joke. Tons of people make "a little bit of money" and mange to get by and are even happy.