Pretty much. For all the current US administration has complained about the opposition being “socialist,” they’ve certainly gone all-in on the state partially owning private companies. Almost like cries of “socialism”…
> My point is not that hard to understand. Have you done any serious graphics programming? Even at the OpenGL 1.x level? What you’re saying just doesn’t make sense. Just because you’re rotating and translating things in…
PCA is an orthogonal transformation of the covariance matrix, so like all orthogonal transformations, it’s _literally a rotation_ in N-dimensional space. SVD is more complex but ultimately it’s just another useful…
> It has always been overpriced and had huge margins. This is the engineer’s take on things. I am entirely sympathetic to it. I also think it missed a lot of what management values in consulting. At its best, you can…
> They hire juniors because they have junior level tasks that need completed. I have never worked at a place where this was true. Either senior devs would pound through the tasks, or we’d cut them as unimportant. The…
Claiming “50-100 years” is a misleading and hand-waving way of saying “futuristic.” It tries to get you to imagine that advances in the last 50-100 years will project linearly into advances in the next 50-100 years.…
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olson, Founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, in 1977
> I don't suppose you have experience with how badly small non-profits are fucked by every tech consultancy they ever work with? Definitely with you here. > Getting nonprofits into AI that feels even marginally more…
Regardless of how you think about LLMs (I do find them useful), there’s something really odd to think that you can select for “proven experience” in a young technology where current experience appears to have little to…
I love that we’re already talking about “proven experience” for a technology that’s essentially 15 months old, arguably only broke into the mainstream 3-6 months ago, has an unclear RoI for many companies, and seems to…
> For any practical application, you are only interested in finite set of concrete identities I do a lot of numerical work in settings where computational efficiency is useful. In my work, most cases you can do…
The tcl syntax is fine. And modern tcl is fine. But tcl 7.x and before was a pure string-based language. Everything was essentially a eval(). People would hit syntax errors on production code. Fun, painful times. The…
Why the negativity? If someone wants to have fun in COBOL, let them have fun in COBOL. If it’s agentic fun, that’s cool. If it’s an interest in the language, that’s cool. It’s not like you have to have an ROI for a fun…
You bring in contractors. Ideally contractors that benefit you personally (eg: your buddy who now owes you one), but definitely contractors that let you outsource the responsibility. Even better if you get some…
Sometimes you get lucky and it both looks up the documentation and then ignores it and makes stuff up.
This more or less agrees with my assessment of recent changes in Claude Code where a lot of new features are either: - A lot of half-baked features or half-done features. - Or have significant overlap with existing…
Marc Andreessen has a strong financial incentive to feel this way and to convince others to feel this way. I also think it’s easy to think that AI gives good answers if you don’t know the field well. In fields where I…
Seems like there should be a market for a no-Elon/OpenAI/Anthropic ETF out there. Or one that just imposes a reasonable waiting period on adding newly-IPO’d listings.
The price of SSDs is similarly depressing.
I didn’t see anything about LLMs here. If you’ve never written or worked in a Forth-like language, it’s not a hard system to bootstrap up. If you’ve done it before and know assembly, you can even get something that…
It’s not about that. It’s the constant drumbeat of “AI will take your job.” It’s the constant news of “layoffs because AI makes us more productive.” It’s the constant background discussion of UBI because no one will…
The number of businesses and business departments that run on spreadsheets and earn money is almost mind-boggling. It works until it doesn’t. The failure mode can be that the spreadsheet wizard leaves and no one…
Non-cynically: the frontier providers have a projection for demand. Cynically: it’s become an executive-level gpu measuring contest. If you’re not making huge commitments on data centers, you can’t be a serious player.…
> Besides the people in this thread bemoaning the state of research funding, international students, etc. (all of which are valid), a lot of people are becoming disillusioned with academia. This is not disconnected. It…
Why do people rebuild classic cars or remodel old houses by themselves? Because they enjoy the work itself and the learning process. You don’t have to. It’s perfectly okay to take your modern car to a mechanic and hire…
Pretty much. For all the current US administration has complained about the opposition being “socialist,” they’ve certainly gone all-in on the state partially owning private companies. Almost like cries of “socialism”…
> My point is not that hard to understand. Have you done any serious graphics programming? Even at the OpenGL 1.x level? What you’re saying just doesn’t make sense. Just because you’re rotating and translating things in…
PCA is an orthogonal transformation of the covariance matrix, so like all orthogonal transformations, it’s _literally a rotation_ in N-dimensional space. SVD is more complex but ultimately it’s just another useful…
> It has always been overpriced and had huge margins. This is the engineer’s take on things. I am entirely sympathetic to it. I also think it missed a lot of what management values in consulting. At its best, you can…
> They hire juniors because they have junior level tasks that need completed. I have never worked at a place where this was true. Either senior devs would pound through the tasks, or we’d cut them as unimportant. The…
Claiming “50-100 years” is a misleading and hand-waving way of saying “futuristic.” It tries to get you to imagine that advances in the last 50-100 years will project linearly into advances in the next 50-100 years.…
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olson, Founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, in 1977
> I don't suppose you have experience with how badly small non-profits are fucked by every tech consultancy they ever work with? Definitely with you here. > Getting nonprofits into AI that feels even marginally more…
Regardless of how you think about LLMs (I do find them useful), there’s something really odd to think that you can select for “proven experience” in a young technology where current experience appears to have little to…
I love that we’re already talking about “proven experience” for a technology that’s essentially 15 months old, arguably only broke into the mainstream 3-6 months ago, has an unclear RoI for many companies, and seems to…
> For any practical application, you are only interested in finite set of concrete identities I do a lot of numerical work in settings where computational efficiency is useful. In my work, most cases you can do…
The tcl syntax is fine. And modern tcl is fine. But tcl 7.x and before was a pure string-based language. Everything was essentially a eval(). People would hit syntax errors on production code. Fun, painful times. The…
Why the negativity? If someone wants to have fun in COBOL, let them have fun in COBOL. If it’s agentic fun, that’s cool. If it’s an interest in the language, that’s cool. It’s not like you have to have an ROI for a fun…
You bring in contractors. Ideally contractors that benefit you personally (eg: your buddy who now owes you one), but definitely contractors that let you outsource the responsibility. Even better if you get some…
Sometimes you get lucky and it both looks up the documentation and then ignores it and makes stuff up.
This more or less agrees with my assessment of recent changes in Claude Code where a lot of new features are either: - A lot of half-baked features or half-done features. - Or have significant overlap with existing…
Marc Andreessen has a strong financial incentive to feel this way and to convince others to feel this way. I also think it’s easy to think that AI gives good answers if you don’t know the field well. In fields where I…
Seems like there should be a market for a no-Elon/OpenAI/Anthropic ETF out there. Or one that just imposes a reasonable waiting period on adding newly-IPO’d listings.
The price of SSDs is similarly depressing.
I didn’t see anything about LLMs here. If you’ve never written or worked in a Forth-like language, it’s not a hard system to bootstrap up. If you’ve done it before and know assembly, you can even get something that…
It’s not about that. It’s the constant drumbeat of “AI will take your job.” It’s the constant news of “layoffs because AI makes us more productive.” It’s the constant background discussion of UBI because no one will…
The number of businesses and business departments that run on spreadsheets and earn money is almost mind-boggling. It works until it doesn’t. The failure mode can be that the spreadsheet wizard leaves and no one…
Non-cynically: the frontier providers have a projection for demand. Cynically: it’s become an executive-level gpu measuring contest. If you’re not making huge commitments on data centers, you can’t be a serious player.…
> Besides the people in this thread bemoaning the state of research funding, international students, etc. (all of which are valid), a lot of people are becoming disillusioned with academia. This is not disconnected. It…
Why do people rebuild classic cars or remodel old houses by themselves? Because they enjoy the work itself and the learning process. You don’t have to. It’s perfectly okay to take your modern car to a mechanic and hire…