> why would you speak about a topic you know little about?
I have knowledge about adjacent topics. I add the caveat in case someone has a source that substantiates or refutes my hypothesis because I’m more interested in learning
alarmism is rarely constructive, and often undermines one's legitimate objections by giving your adversary a foothold to drown out your valid arguments AND because exaggerating a problem makes you suspect
Wow a lot of people have very strong feelings about this. Parent comment is fine but some of the replies are quite out there, calling this "arrogant" and "dumb". Let me provide my own opinion.
IMO content over style. Nobody owes you adherence to a particular set of rules, nor do they owe you their thoughts at all. If the writer's style is a bridge too far for you, kindly just close the tab, don't complain about it. Certainly don't use hateful words to describe them.
Remember, the same English teachers who taught you to capitalize also taught you that there is no singular "they" and that you should use "he/she" instead.
This hyper-fixation on replacing engineers in writing code is hilarious, and dangerous, to me. Many people, even in tech companies, have no idea how software is built, maintained, and run.
I think instead we should focus on getting rid of managers and product owners.
What is the problem the article is pointing out? A "democracy" index based on the "feelings" of some chosen experts is always going to be biased and problematic. Anyone getting the short end of that stick, if they were organised enough and had the resources, would fight against it irrespective of whether the rankings were justified or not. A large part of soft power is narrative control. There is nothing objective about narrative control. Which means powerful countries which weild a lot of soft power have managed to effectively control their narrative. And their narrative likely has little convergence with reality. No system should realistically expect the subjects to just cede control without any benefits accruing to the "controlled". So countries seeking to increase their own soft power will and should try to control their own narrative. It is easily one of the bigger captain obvious moments I have come across.
> Most won't care about the craft. Cherish the ones that do, meet the rest where they are
> (…)
> People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia remain insane weirdos to me. Focus on more important things.
What you call “stressing over minutiae” others might call “caring for the craft”. Revered artisans are precisely the ones who care for the details. “Stressing” is your value judgement, not necessarily the ground truth.
What you’re essentially saying is “cherish the people who care up to the level I personally and subjectively think is right, and dismiss everyone who cares more as insane weirdos who cannot prioritise”.
This is a basic concept in accounting. The general ledger is an immutable log of transactions. Other accounting documents are constructed from the general ledger, and can, if necessary, be rebuilt from it. This is the accepted way to do money-related things.
Synchronization is called "reconcilation" in accounting terminology.
The computer concept is that we have a current state, and changes to it come in. The database with the current state is authoritative. This is not suitable for handling money.
The real question is, do you really care what happened last month? Last year? If yes, a log-based approach is appropriate.
Tangentially related: I had the disconcerting experience of reading a Wired article about his arrest[1] while unknowingly sitting about six feet from the spot where he was apprehended. When I read that the FBI agents had stopped at Bello Coffee while preparing their stakeout, I thought, huh, interesting coincidence, I just had a coffee there.
Then Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me, and suddenly as I was reading I could look up and see exactly the chair he had been in, where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.
Having this tableau unexpectedly unfold right in front of my eyes was a fascinating experience, and it certainly made the article suddenly get a lot more immersive!
EDIT: to be clear, I was not present for the arrest. I was reading the magazine, some years after the arrest, but in the same place as the arrest. (I didn’t qualify the events with “I read that...” since I thought the narrative ellipsis would be obvious from context; evidently not.)
Have you ever written anything as introspective as this post, particularly about your own personal shortcomings in a public forum? He seems to still have ego in some sectors of life - as don't we all - but most of the blog was incredibly reflective and self-critical. Can you say you've endeavored to do the same?
> I'd heartily recommend maybe taking down the marketing vibrance down a notch and keep things a bit more measured, it's not entirely a meme, though some of the more-serious researchers don't take it as seriously as a result.
This is fair critique. ARC Prize's 2024 messaging was sharp to break through the noise floor -- ARC has been around since 2019 but most only learned about it this summer. Now that it has garnered awareness, it is no longer useful, and in same cases hurting progress like you point out. The messaging needs to evolve and mature next year to be more neutral/academic.
As a rather experienced ML researcher, ARC is a great benchmark on its own, but is punching below its weight in terms of claiming that it is a gate (or in terms of this post -- a "steward") towards AGI, and in my perspective and the perspective of several researchers near me this has watered down the value of the ARC benchmark as a test.
It is a great unit test for reasoning -- that's fantastic! And maybe it is indeed the best way to test for this -- who knows exactly. But the claim is a little grandiose for what it is, this is somewhat similar to saying that testing on string parity is the One True Test for testing an optimizer's efficiency.
I'd heartily recommend maybe taking down the marketing vibrance down a notch and keep things a bit more measured, it's not entirely a meme, though some of the more-serious researchers don't take it as seriously as a result. And that's the kind of people that you want to attract to this sort of thing!
I think there is a potentially good future for ARC! But it might struggle to attract some of the kind of talent that you want to work on this problem as a result.
Whenever I read articles like this and the ensuing "just relax and go have fun/travel" comment chains, I think to myself I'm living in an alien universe. Not having a job is a pants-on-fire emergency, and I would be interviewing 24/7 until I corrected it, even if the hiring market meant that was hopeless. I'd be a nervous wreck until I found a job, any job.
It's absolutely wild to see people 1. with the privilege of having $80K in liquid savings to just... chill while unemployed, and 2. with the willingness and mindset that allows them to do that chilling without freaking out. Total Zen Masters you all are. I couldn't do it.
Every $10K I blew through while unemployed, I'd be thinking to myself: Accounting for time value of money, that's just pushed out my retirement date by 3 more months.
EDIT: I guess I should add that I'm married with a kid, since that obviously does affect the math on this one. Still, I don't think I'd change my opinion if I was single.
This post was written exceedingly well. Few posts execute humour and whimsy without coming off as insincere or just not very funny (I'm guilty myself).
"When art critics get together, they talk about form and structure and meaning. When painters get together, they talk about where to get the best turpentine." (Picasso, supposedly [1])
To be generous to OP, I think their point is about how to communicate in an elevator pitch, or a resume bullet point, or the first few minutes of an intro call. And in those contexts, OP is pretty reasonably correct.
What it comes down to is details.
The person citing numbers about growth, hiring, or whatever is proving they know the details of the work. And that's a great start.
The next step for the interviewer comes in following up to find out whether they actually know the details of how the work was done, why it was done that way, what was good or bad about how the work was done, and why it's good or bad.
A good follow-up question would be something like: "Great, please walk me through the story of how you took ${METRIC} from A to B, what you think went well, and what you think went poorly." That should yield a solid 10-15 minute (or more) discussion where the executive candidate can prove they have the ability to handle both minute details and grand strategy at the same time, as well as the discretion to know when they're supposed to be doing which one.
Failure to do this on the part of the interviewer is how a company ends up with so many sub-par executives. And a failure on the part of the executive to push themselves in this way, in the first place, is how our industry has ended up with so many sub-par executives.
> Lee became Dr. Fermi’s sole doctoral student in theoretical physics, meeting with him every week. It was an extraordinary learning experience, partly because of Dr. Fermi’s teaching technique, which Dr. Lee explained in the 2007 interview with the Nobel Institute. “‘You see,’ he said, ‘there are things that I would like to know,’” Dr. Lee recalled Dr. Fermi saying. “‘Lee, why don’t you look up and give me a lecture next week.’” “I was very happy to teach Fermi,” Dr. Lee added. “Of course, this is an excellent way of building the student’s confidence. And then he would ask me questions and I would have to answer.”
Was fascinated by this. His advisor, Fermi, made Lee teach him stuff, not the other way around!
There is an expression which I think is fitting, in a weird way - a successful marriage does not have to last forever. For some reason, we always tend to imagine that, once a company or organization is created, it must last forever. That for it to ‘close its doors’ or ‘wind down’ is somehow a failure. And that’s just not true; a professional athletes career does not last forever, and neither does the lifespan of most corporations or non-profits.
The organization accomplished what it set out to do; make the tech industry more inclusive and accessible to women. To a large extent, though it wasn’t a primary factor, it aided that journey nicely with its thousands of events that it organized over the years, according to this announcement.
It didn’t last forever, but it was never meant to - that would mean the presence of women in tech would never become truly equal to the presence of men. While its goal wasn’t ‘achieved’, this organization did what it could to move things in that direction and now, with its energy spent, it leaves the door open for new contributors to take the next step.
The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. Thank you to everyone who helped organize the events this organization hosted in the last seventeen years.
Without delving too far into the philosophy of math as concerns existence vs convention...
e pops up quite often when taking limits on a surprising number of varied phenomena. It is much more than a mere convention, unless you subscribe to the nihilistic, anti-epistemological notion that all of mathematics is merely convention. It seems to be the center of the conceptual space particularly around questions of relative and absolute scale.
It's true you can use any base for computing things but some are more natural than others in that specific parametrizations have natural interpretations especially when it comes to physics (timescales, information-theoretic optimality, etc.).
As a founding engineer, you'll be responsible for contributing across the entire codebase. We'll compensate accordingly and with high equity. It's currently just the two founders + a part-time contractor. We're all technical and contribute code.
Stack: Typescript/React, Go and PostgreSQL.
To apply, email alexander [at] hatchet [dot] run, and include the following:
1. Tell us about something impressive you've built.
2. Ask a question or write a comment about the state of the project. For example: a file that stood out to you in the codebase, a Github issue or discussion that piqued your interest, a general comment on distributed systems/task queues, or why our code is bad and how you could improve it.
Asking a large language model about facts is like asking an image model for photos. That's not what it's for, or what it does.
It's a bit weird that we're building tools that make the large scale pollution of the information space approach a marginal cost of zero. I get that it's a bit useful for artists, and for helping dyslexics write emails or whatever, but it's highly doubtful this will be worth it.
We already have huge issues with humans being stupid, why would we insert this not-even-stupid noise into the information space?
Except he couldn't have even if he wanted to. There's always the risk some former 3dfx or SGI graybeard comes out with some paper binder with the original implementation, and calls you out on your bullshit if you do. When you're such a famous public figure no way you ever risk lying in public. Even if he were to getaway with it there was nothing for him to gain: he already has all the fame and money from honest work, there's no point risking it all to claim some piece of code.
I feel that something happened at Google gradually and over the past few years but did happen.
They initially paid a lot of money to hire the best and brightest minds, they created crazy algorithmic interviews and a lot of hoops and became known as the place where the best went.
Then it got inverted that the best go to Google so if you were at Google you were the best. Which led to people optimizing for the money.and optimizing to get into google. The problem was what was once a singal and a filter then became an objective and a goal.
Overtime the organization crew and people left due to culture changes from being a scrappy startup to being a F50 company, or retiring or just wanting something new.
The problem was the best and brightest had put together systems that couldn't be maintained by those that weren't also fantasticaly competent, after debugging is twice as hard as coding and all that, and so slowly over time the whole house of cards is rotting slowly overtime as more and more problems accumulate but the individuals left aren't competent enough to fix them or address them, and I don't just mean at the engineering level but the whole stack from engineering to upper management.
The Goths showed up sacked Rome for its wealth and treasure but can no longer keep the grain coming and the fountains running.
This is probably the most ground axe in the software dev blogosphere, I wonder if something is going on like the way Triplebyte paid bloggers to write articles titled “Hiring is broken”.
> You don't need to be Facebook or Google to have more than one service in your infrastructure that needs to authenticate a user's existing session without forcing the user to log in again.
Thank you. This middle ground between hyperscaler infrastructure and super simple web apps is where most of my career has been spent, yet the recent trend is to pretend like there are only two possible extremes: You’re either Facebook or you’re not doing anything complicated.
It has an unfortunate second order effect of convincing people that as soon as they encounter something more complicated than a simple web app, they need to adopt everything the hyperscalers do to solve it.
I wish we could spend more time discussing the middle ground rather than pretending it’s some sort of war between super simple or ultra complex.
If you are running a startup, you should not go to a recruiter and ask for an engineering manager as an outside hire. You are likely to get someone totally incompetent, and if this is your first manager hire, it's almost guaranteed, given what's out there. You also run the risk of triggering an exodus of talent, since engineers will recognize this as the part where the bozos come in, and now the workplace isn't run by smart people who they can learn from.
Instead you should notice the natural hierarchy that forms based on everyone's desire to build things. Some of your engineers are already deferring decisions to other engineers, and you just have to pick up on that as you develop a leveling system. That's where a hierarchy should come from if you insist on it.
It sounds like this is already what's going on given that you have clumps of 3-4 engineers around leads. And the author even says "hierarchy is a property of self organizing systems". So clearly this system is self organizing and working. But the author has no skill for designing organizations, and doesn't know what to do if he can't hire managers and make it look like what he's used to.
It sounds like a bad culture fit. The CEO needs a VP who isn't stamping out the same organization job after job, and can embrace and extend what is already working at this company.
Sorry to slap this on your comment, but it seems a good place to put it.
We don't know who Jobs or Woz are.
At best, even most people in the field are using 3rd or 5th hand information. Quotes from Jobs or Woz don't show even the tiniest real glimpse into who a person is. Stories about persons, especially those with significant media presence, are often tailored, and invariably seen through the optics of the author of the article. Certainly, anyone who has been through an interview knows that what they say is cut, altered, quoted in partial context, etc.
Only people who have actually worked with Jobs and Woz know them. And even then, they often only know them at work. A brief interjection into a work day once a month isn't "knowing someone" either. Sitting in a room of 1000 people for a company wide meeting isn't knowing them.
My point is, these sorts of deep thoughts aren't something we can gauge from 2nd party discussions about someone. You need to know a person, personally, to actually be able to gauge what they actually believed.
I've always been sort of... sad that so much of the world looks at people from so far away, and then takes stock in what they hear/gleam. Quotes from figures religious, from every religion, are a popular theme here. "Some guy said something 2000 years ago", filtered through a half dozen translations, and church dogma, are taken as if a person had known the person for 20 years. Meanwhile, we literally haven't a clue what was said in such cases.
Yet the same is true of all hearsay strewn about all such figures. It's just word snippets taken out of context, of a single hour in a person's life.
For example, if I asked anyone here the same question 10 years apart, would the answer be the same? Would the response even remotely resemble the prior? If the answer is "yes", then the topic isn't complex, or the person hasn't learned anything in their life.
So to this I would say, irregardless of how many dislike Job's work ethics re: employee interaction, what would a 70 year old Jobs say? And say in person, without being "on"? Or worried about a quote in the media, where single words uttered could shatter or change the image of a cult icon?
Ugh, Scientism at its best (worst?). Do you also back up Watson statements about race? I'm sure you don't, as that's not part of your training.
Accomplished researchers can say dumb things too, it happens all the time.