if you look at the nuclear industry outside of Valor, it's mostly a modeling and simulation uh industry. Like when you think of a nuclear company, right, there's like nuclear companies out there that everyone knows the name of. And you kind of look under the cover. It's actually a modeling and simulation company, right? They produce um very very precise what we call paper reactors which have really good predictions of how a theoretical thing might behave.
it's just so easy for me to imagine the situation being like totally manageable but brutally mismanaged in practice in the same way as like maybe CO could have been avoided in the first place if the like Chinese response to CO was less of like a cover up and more of a like pandemic response and similarly like I could imagine a world where like the US response to CO was like way more functional but just like sometimes the the the response to societal problems is extremely dysfunctional.
If you count all the permutations, you can write all the tests you want. It is impossible to cover all of these and not break things from time to time. It is infinitely harder to evolve software that has users.
the number of people who present incredibly well, and then you give them a prompt and some data and ask them to come back with a PRD on something, and then we make them verbally defend it, how quickly the thinking decays from folks who are good at the theater, but not the specifics, uh is kind of really telling, I think.
And even for things like coding interviews, allowing candidates, of course, to use AI tools because that's going to be part of what the work requires now.
you can't you can't you can't launch something to three billion people and not test it first, but you can't test something at our scale and not expect people to cover it
And DSA interviews were never the best for that. Well, thinking, sure. But in terms of like does that skill translate to what you're doing on the job? It never really translated to that. It was more about evaluating like does somebody think?
I'm not going to spend four interviews going through and asking somebody data structures and algorithm stuff. I just have them do work that might be similar to something I'd give them on the job or even just have a conversation with them. See how they think. Like can they think through trade-offs? I don't even care about what answer they give me to a problem. I care about like what's like why did they say that?
I think Google has pretty much gone to on-sites at this point, back to the traditional whiteboard format. And they'll let you code on a laptop if you want to, as well, but it's going to be in person. Somebody's going to be watching you code, and you're probably not going to be able to cheat your way through that.
The result is something that's beautiful, sharp, critical and lingering. Long after I closed the cover, I found myself mulling over the delicate ways that Lai raised the contradictions, sorrows and beauty of queer love, racial identity, camaraderie, self-control, and self-indulgence. Lai's characters have no answers, only questions that can never be fully resolved. Instead, these questions are the defining puzzles, defeats and triumphs of their lives.
So, I think of them as the top of the long long tail long tail problem. Like, something very common issues that a lot of people experience. AI will get really good at it. And over time AI will cover more more edge cases, but the edge cases will never go away.
it's it's kind of purely a practical and empirical thing that we've observed that by teaching the model principles, getting it to learn from principles, its behavior is more consistent, it's easier to cover edge cases, and the model is more likely to do what people want it to do.
They learn to trust you that if you're interested, they'll be interested. That what in fact what they're buying into is not the subject, but your interest in the subject.
For much more on that side of things, you should read Money Stuff or listen to Odd Lots, which cover “private credit is the new bank lending” all the time.
For much more on that side of things, you should read Money Stuff or listen to Odd Lots, which cover “private credit is the new bank lending” all the time.
When this is good and on point, it is very, very good, and provides essential perspective I couldn’t have found elsewhere, especially when doing key interviews.
Cut and cover will sometimes be the best choice from a basic cost-benefit perspective, as will elevated rail, and both are useful to have in the tunnel construction toolbox for that reason.
you want to hire people for their unique strengths, not their lack of weaknesses. If they’re strong where you need them to be strong, it’s okay if they aren’t equally superpowered at everything — that’s why we build teams, to supplement and balance each other out.
If you think about how we teach quantum mechanics to our students, the Copenhagen interpretation, it’s a God-awful mess. No one’s going to accuse that of being very beautiful. I’m a fan of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and that is very beautiful in the sense that fewer ingredients, just one equation, and it could cover everything in the world.
I use Calendly to schedule podcast interviews and other meetings. So much nicer than trying to work out a time to chat by going back and forth in an email thread.
It's a solid, well-sourced ("based on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with each of the twenty-four moon voyagers, as well as those who contributed their brain power, training and teamwork on Earth"), general overview of the heart of the Apollo program. Also an excellent entry point.
Regular Rotation Investing Focused Interviews The Meb Faber Show Master in Business with Barry Ritholz Capital Allocators with Ted Seides Bloomberg’s Odd Lots with Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal
Economics or Business Interviews Conversations with Tyler with Tyler Cowen EconTalk with Russ Roberts General Interviews North Star Podcast with Dave Perell The Tim Ferriss Show
Economics or Business Interviews Conversations with Tyler with Tyler Cowen EconTalk with Russ Roberts General Interviews North Star Podcast with Dave Perell The Tim Ferriss Show
Economics or Business Interviews Conversations with Tyler with Tyler Cowen EconTalk with Russ Roberts General Interviews North Star Podcast with Dave Perell The Tim Ferriss Show
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