How much you save has a far greater impact than your investments early on in your career. But as your portfolio grows, investment returns swamp your savings because of the wonders of compounding.
everybody on your team who is making architectural decisions, those people must know performance and they must make decisions that will allow the other people downstream of them to use an architecture which can be optimized later. If you don't do that, you're just rolling the dice.
there's so many people that are not willing to fight for the best idea because they're going to upset somebody else. And if you don't fight for the best idea, then what idea are you fighting for? You're fighting for the mediocre idea, the politically expedient idea
I mean, I know I always think, "I can do this in an hour." When really, nothing takes an hour. And um so many projects I've worked on you optimistically think you know exactly what you want to do, but it's still allow extra time.
it is always tempting to add this one feature that looks really cool but what you rarely think about is when you merge this feature it really means here's this pile of code that I don't that the person probably doesn't really understand that I don't fully understand
And that's why every hype cycle produces a wave of absolutely spectacular demos and very few real products. And the recurring mistake of every cycle is spending on the demo when you should be saving for the nines.
if you are using these systems right you can just grow more quickly you can build more things you can take on more stuff so you know I would be surprised actually if we ended up with like net fewer
It was instead a very strongly held opinion that that you get to excellence by giving people a lot of agency and accountability. By pushing decisions as deep in the organization as possible, hiring great people who can be trusted to have good judgment and make good decisions.
Paradoxically, the organization that demands trust can get less of it, while the organization that shows their work - thereby not asking for trust - builds up more of it.
As is the case with most businesses, suppliers in the housing industry generally set prices based on market conditions and what buyers or tenants are willing to pay, rather than on production costs.
if you ask a person when was Abraham Lincoln born and they don't know the date. They could sit there, they could think about it for a week, if they if they don't have access to Wikipedia or something, they're not going to be able to do better answering that question if they thought about it for a week compared to 5 seconds. Same with the model.
And then you look at the actual trial records, and maybe one in a hundred convictions for that crime actually ends in a capital sentence. And almost all of the other ones end in a fine or a public flogging, but not in the sentence that's on the books.
the council does not simply keep the best bits from everyone. It keeps a minority of the good ideas, while peer review seems to give consensus ideas an extra push.
things have to go really wrong for us to like just get over the threshold of uh you know, capital being productive enough to automate lots of work, but not be productive enough that that the interest rate is high and or the price of capital produced goods is falling a lot, okay? So, even without redistribution, a little bit of savings will save a lot of people.
So, I think there is a world where it is concentrated, in which case it's going to be really hard to index AGI. There is another world where it is not It's electricity, then like basically every company has access to AGI. So, you just buy you use buy the index. So, like, you know, Nigeria just needs to buy the index.
know your goal or suffer a death by a thousand compromises. Because what I had done my whole career and most of us do is compromise to get that next engineer, CTO, investor. You put a jerk on your board because you impressed with their firm name and the valuation and all your friends are going to be impressed and it's going to be so much easier. We make all these compromises and contort ourselves and eventually we wake up and it's company we don't want to work at.
The way I think of the abyss is it's this place that we go to as founders and entrepreneurs after our thing, after it dies or it's bought or it's over for whatever reason. It's this amorphous place that we are in our life that has no structure.
If AI-driven labor displacement ends up being large in magnitude and permanently drives down the demand for labor, it will likely be necessary to go beyond mere incentive programs to long-term income support for a significant fraction of the labor force.
You give them a button that lets them do their work faster. The natural place for them to do is hit that button as much as possible, do the same amount of work, and just cash in that extra time, right? Which makes total sense.
my sense is that these complex traits have not pushed in one direction because there's advantage there's spectrums where there's advantages to both ends of the spectrum
people say that uh you get into tech in order to change the world. If you want to change the world, then thinking about the impact that your technologies have on the world is part of your job.
The staggering and fast-growing cost of AI datacenters is a call for performance engineering like no other in history; it's not just about saving costs - it's about saving the planet.
It's just that it caps this price and this value that is they perceive that you do. Whereas if you deliver more of the value that they already value, it's I don't want to say uncapped completely, but like the cap is maybe an order of magnitude higher than saving.
And so what ends up happening is the emails that the AI write are pretty good. Okay? If you're getting terrible emails, it's a poorly trained product from a bad vendor.
I just don't know where this is going. I don't know what the end is. When I don't know what the end is, I don't know what the beginning is. And it's that simple.
PMs are no longer saying to the designer, hey, can you draw this thing out for me? That frees up designer time to go explore more deeply the stuff they need to go into and it allows anyone to kind of add to that first conversation of where should we go and look further and wider and broader at the option space.
This means that working on neural networks is NOT getting us closer to AGI, except indirectly.
Their words now
It’s become very difficult for me to maintain the belief in the stupidity of ChatGPT when every time I laugh at it, it ends up ridiculing me 6 months later.
So you if you look at the leverage in some of these securitization books and mortgage books if you have 30 times leverage and you're getting 20% of the profits you'll go to 40 times leverage. It's just going to it's literally will add you know 25% to your bonus.
Whereas, there’s also another point, which is having large armies is actually inherently impractical and inefficient, because the larger the army, the more people you’ve got to feed, the more barracks you’ve got to have, the more space you’ve got to have for training, the more people you’re taking out of your workforce to produce tanks and shells, and all the rest of it, because they’re tramping around with rifles.
In other words, the singularity ends up in their future and they can no more avoid the singularity than they can avoid time coming their way. There’s no shenanigans you can do once you’re inside the black hole to try to skirt it.
We'd constantly be improving the tools and just the iterative process and the speed at which that improves products is the critical element to success in games. The slower the iteration cycle, if you make a build every week and you prove, you go through one iteration every week, you're going to be way way way worse by the end of your project than a game company that makes new stuff every day.
Sometimes you have to move fast at the sacrifice of knowledge, and I'm totally on board for that, but I worry that what we'll create is an entire generation of incompetent programmers who can do some amount of things well, but anything that is unique, bespoke, or requires some extra like little elbow grease, might become very difficult. It might cause a whole chasm where juniors remain juniors forever.
The biosphere is not going away. There's nothing we could do. The idea that we have to save the Earth is a little ridiculous. The Earth is not a furry little bunny that we need to protect. But it's the conditions for us.
In fact, there’s a handful of dates that tell us that the fourth creation does continue farther on, that that baktun place should have 20 baktuns in it, like their counting system would dictate, not 13.
The principle in Perplexity is you’re not supposed to say anything that you don’t retrieve, which is even more powerful than RAG because RAG just says, “Okay, use this additional context and write an answer.” But we say, “Don’t use anything more than that too.” That way we ensure a factual grounding.
But their latest study is for only 7.1 million miles. They need something like 40 times more data prove they are actually saving lives with statistical confidence (likely even more).
if I just try to do half-an-hour and then later in the day I do half-an-hour, I won’t retain that information as long as if I do half-an-hour today and half-an-hour one week from now. So doing that extra spacing should help me retain the information better.
The 100-megawatt facility might have ten 10-megawatt blocks served directly by a 1500V DC feeder line without connections to other blocks that would require extra switches and routing.
And what we learned from his declassification is that no matter how nuclear war starts, there was a bunch of different scenarios, with NATO involved, without NATO, all different scenarios. No matter how nuclear war starts, it ends in Armageddon. It ends with everyone dead.
The more addicts rely on these stimuli, the less pleasure they receive. At a certain point, this cycle creates anhedonia—the complete absence of enjoyment in an experience supposedly pursued for pleasure.
With an extra $10 billion over 10 years I’m pretty sure we’d get to 5 or 6 of the 10 on the list, and millions of unnecessary deaths would be prevented.
At a higher level, the real event was a catastrophic failure of the industry's strategy of relentlessly shouting as loud as they can "Hey, get off our case, we're busy saving lives here!"
The problem with these grand ambitions—saving humanity from extinction and enabling our species to reach its full potential millions of years from now—is that they ostensibly justify any cost in the present.
I liked Mem’s editing experience within notes because it resembled word processing, without extra steps getting in the way. But I found the app otherwise surprisingly lacking in basic functionality, despite its polished appearance.
But we run the simulations to see what happens, not if we knew what happens, we wouldn’t run the simulation. So whoever created this existence, they’re running it because they don’t know what’s going to happen, not because they do.
We’re actually going to build that, I think, but it’s not going to be one static tape. I think the human brain is too complex to be stuck in one static tape like that. If you look at ant brains, maybe they can be stuck on a static tape, but we’re going to build that using generative models. We’re going to build the TikTok that you actually can’t look away from.
Therefore, we have the perverse situation that the richest people are hiring some of the most talented and technologically sophisticated people on the planet to engage in innovation aimed at driving down the demand for labor—the major and often only asset of the world’s poor.
Mind candy horror, continuing Hand's interest in beautiful places where people just go missing (and come to bad ends). It's exciting and creepy, and also one of the better fictional depictions I've found of the strangeness of 2020.
Programming, of course, is forgetting, but we need to at least try to be aware of the costs of the abstractions we choose and consider who it is that ends up being forgotten.
So there are sharp limits to how much extra range an army can get by adding carrying capacity; in practice about a month and a half’s logistics buffer is the maximum that’s possible and even doing that is expensive.
while the growth rate may well affect saving and investment, there is no tight
relation between growth rates and interest rates, either on theoretical or empirical
grounds.
I actually prefer more frequent major versions with smaller sets of breaking changes. There is a real danger in saving up all your significant changes and releasing them in one whopping major version once a year.
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