WoodenChair

Read the Tape gives players the same 5 S&P500 stock charts per day to predict. You select low, medium or high confidence and then call the chart UP or DOWN. It's a 1d chart which then resolves over 5 days. Alpha is scored against the Monkey Index, a basket of 11 random coin flips at low confidence which provides a tangible win/lose condition.

Your description here and on the website is not clear to me about what I am predicting. Am I predicting whether the stock is going to continue to go up the same day? Is the chart of one day and I am predicting whether it will go up or down the next day? In my opinion, you need to get the explanation of what I'm looking at and the directions of what I am predicting down to one clear sentence.

These debts mean nothing if the US government actually views AI technology as being on par with the Manhattan project. They'll just bail them out or nationalise them.

According to Wikipedia, the Manhattan project only cost $28 billion in 2024 dollars. That's a completely different order of magnitude compared to what we're talking about here. I imagine the size of the investment here would even be hard for the US government to swallow.

Thanks, much appreciated.

You can get a 1.67Ghz G4 Mac Mini on eBay with OS 9 preinstalled. It's wicked fast (especially with an IDE SSD adapter)

The fastest Mac mini G4 topped out at 1.5 GHz, not 1.67. I'm the guy selling many of those Mac mini G4s upgraded with SSDs on eBay... just a hobby business. Also sell on my website at https://os9.shop where there's a FAQ where you can read more about it and why it's a good model/upgrade to buy or build yourself.

Self promotion but relevant:

I have a hobby business doing something very similar, except I focus on a specific model—pretty much the most power efficient PowerPC desktop Mac you can get that can still run Mac OS 9, the Mac mini G4. It's at https://os9.shop

What's stopping anyone else from using AI and eat into Oracle's market?

Open source databases have already been doing this for decades. You can’t just clone its products and expect to eliminate it. Oracle is driven by a strong sales culture and ruthless business strategy.

Apple very rarely admits mistakes. The fact they're rolling back some of the extremeness in Liquid Glass and actively mentioned in the keynote that they very seriously took the user feedback shows just how bad it was, at least initially.

“ It is a tough market that has cut off the consumer end because all the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions…”

Sounds like a natural fit as a feature, not a product.

Yes, CHIP-8 is kind of the standard "I want to get into emulators" first project. In my latest book Computer Science from Scratch we go CHIP-8 -> NES in chapters 5 to 6. GBA is quite a step up from CHIP-8. I would suggest doing NES or GameBoy next, but of course with today's LLM help GBA is very reasonable if you are going that route.

Syntax is not the focus of your testing, but it’s often a pre-requisite to be clearly and accurately speaking the same language. Think not of taking off points for missing a semicolon but instead understanding the difference between the syntax for a method call and a property access. The different syntax conveys different meaning and so we should expect some basic level of accuracy to the language in question. At least that’s how I see it.

I agree with your premise about why accurate evaluation matters, but your post comes across as pretty bitter. Unless you’re at the job with him, you really don’t know that it’s a “I just need to show up” job he has at Booz Allen. Perhaps he has other great traits like a high social or emotional intelligence that make him good at his job beyond whatever was being evaluated on those projects you helped him with.

He definitely didn't have the book ghostwritten. It does have advice on issues that go beyond faith. But I think it's much more useful as a guide to the faithful than the non-faithful. We interviewed him last year about the book:

https://pnc.st/s/business-books/9720205c/the-juggling-act-wi...

He gets into many of the issues discussed in this thread: having faith while being a CEO and how to handle that.

I understand this if you’re not a native speaker. But if you are, I think this will generally make you sound wooden.

Their Mac UI is a thin layer of AppKit. Even there they're currently using Objective-C++ it looks like, not Swift:

https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/tree/master/UI/A...

No, I don't think you're missing anything. He never answered the title of the post ("Faster Than Dijkstra?"). Instead he went on a huge tangent about his experience writing software for routers and is dismissive of the algorithm because the router problem space he was working in did not deal with a node count high enough to warrant the need for a more complex algorithm. Dijkstra's algorithm is used for problem spaces with far higher number of nodes than he mentions... basically an article that talks about some kind of interesting things but doesn't say much about its central question.

(based on the table of contents)

So your opinion is based on just reading the table of contents? I always find it disconcerting when someone writes a multi-paragraph commentary on a work they didn't actually read or see.

I understand that you're commenting on the approach more than the contents, but you're pretty dismissive of it without actually reading the details of how they went about things.

You're not quite judging a book by its cover, but you're not that far beyond that.

Ironically this post comes across to me as written by an LLM. The em-dashes, the prepositions, the "not this, that" lines. As a college instructor, I can usually tell. I put it through GPTZero and it said it's 96% LLM written. GPTZero is not full-proof but I think it's likely right on this one and I find it very ironic.

PureScript is a programming language. English is not. A better analogy would be what would you say about someone who uses a No Code solution that behind the scenes writes Java. I would say that's a much better analogy. NoCode -> Java is similar to LLM -> Java.

I'm not debating whether LLMs are amazing tools or whether they change programming. Clearly both are true. I'm debating whether people are using accurate analogies.

The article starts with a philosophically bad analogy in my opinion. C-> Java != Java -> LLM because the intermediate product (the code) changed its form with previous transitions. LLMs still produce the same intermediate product. I expanded on this in a post a couple months back:

https://www.observationalhazard.com/2025/12/c-java-java-llm....

"The intermediate product is the source code itself. The intermediate goal of a software development project is to produce robust maintainable source code. The end product is to produce a binary. New programming languages changed the intermediate product. When a team changed from using assembly, to C, to Java, it drastically changed its intermediate product. That came with new tools built around different language ecosystems and different programming paradigms and philosophies. Which in turn came with new ways of refactoring, thinking about software architecture, and working together.

LLMs don’t do that in the same way. The intermediate product of LLMs is still the Java or C or Rust or Python that came before them. English is not the intermediate product, as much as some may say it is. You don’t go prompt->binary. You still go prompt->source code->changes to source code from hand editing or further prompts->binary. It’s a distinction that matters.

Until LLMs are fully autonomous with virtually no human guidance or oversight, source code in existing languages will continue to be the intermediate product. And that means many of the ways that we work together will continue to be the same (how we architect source code, store and review it, collaborate on it, refactor it, etc.) in a way that it wasn’t with prior transitions. These processes are just supercharged and easier because the LLM is supporting us or doing much of the work for us."

"Earlier this month, top executives at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting said while jobs would disappear, new ones would spring up, with two of them telling Reuters that AI would be used as an excuse by companies planning to cut jobs anyway."

Yes, there are degrees of everything. There is cool, kinda cold, cold, very cold. I'm not exactly sure your point? Seems like you are arguing with a straw man. Who said there are not different degrees of flatness or degrees of hierarchy? The previous poster was just saying that there's always some hierarchy, even if it's unwritten, which aligns with "degrees of flatness."

I don't know but $7 million seems high for a non-profit that's in the midst of layoffs, dramatically losing marketshare, seems to have no direction, and has all of the other failures I mentioned above as Mozilla did in 2023. But point taken, without looking at a scale of other people in similar non-profit positions, it's hard to judge. I think the other points are strong though.

See the sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550083

you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others

I mean yeah, if you think Mozilla has been well managed over the past two decades, then yeah we're on different planes of understanding the world.

- The only product it makes that anyone cares about, Firefox, has gone from 30% market share in 2010 to 2% market share in 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

- It has put itself in a position where the vast majority of its funding comes from its main competitor, Google, who makes Chrome. Conflict of interest much? And now Google is being sued for that in an antitrust case. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2772034/googles-search-monop...

- Despite being a non-profit, its CEO was paid $7 million during a period of layoffs in 2023 https://www.i-programmer.info/news/86-browsers/16844-firefox...

- Mozilla was founded to support the development of an open source web browser. That's a critically important mission. Yet, it spends most of its money not on the web browser (maybe why the web browser is at 2% market share). https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

- It has started many other initiatives with a big splash that all fizzled (FirefoxOS, Pocket, etc.)

I don't know, doesn't sound like "a very successful company and philanthropy" as you put it. I would call it a *formerly* "very successful company and philanthropy."

I mean I think there's a pretty stark difference between a charity feeding the poor and an app startup (even a non-profit one). So stark that it feels almost weird writing this comment, but I'll take your question at face value. Okay, here's a few:

- Decisions at a charity feeding the poor are likely less controversial and binary in nature than decisions for a product focused app organization. If people are making a lot of decisions bottom-up at the charity, as long as more people are getting fed, it's probably fine as long as it's not chaos. In a product-focused organization you need to make binary decisions: will we use this app icon design or that one? Will we have one app for professionals and one for laypeople or a unified app? Will we use SVM or a neural network? Somebody ultimately has to be the decider on these binary decisions. They cannot all be bottom-up decisions if you want to have a cohesive vision for the product.

- If you're feeding the poor you're probably a charity or a government. People who work for a charity or a government are more likely to be motivated by the common good. So they don't need as much extrinsic motivation from leadership. An app startup, even a non-profit one (which I guess can be technically a charity), is going to have workers who are also motivated by money (yes even if it's a non-profit, they have other high paying options), technical decisions, and sure the mission too. I have a couple friends who have hopped around between non-profit software organizations due to these non-mission reasons. Corralling those motivations often requires a different management mindset than working with people who are just happy to be there.

- If you're feeding the poor you're probably a charity or a government and you therefore probably need to answer to your donors or voters. You need full transparency. This was an app startup, albeit a non-profit one. It doesn't really answer to anyone except who it gets grants from and even then is not fully transparent/open (has a proprietary machine learning model).

These are just a few but do you really think any governance structure can just be applied to any organization? They're not all compatible.

Looks like cool stuff, cheers. Always interesting to learn about new ways of organizing. The great thing is if the world is free enough we can all experiment with different structures if others will agree to experiment with us. But these do sound like they fall into the social side of the dichotomy of social focused versus product focused that I mentioned. The author of the post was trying to be in both at the same time which I think is hard to do.

One that would've helped is "Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days" which is a collection of interviews with startup founders by Jessica Livingston. Even though this was a non-profit it effectively sounds like it was a tech startup (he was building an app that was based on, at the time (late 2000s), cutting edge machine learning technology). I think by hearing other founders' stories building other tech products, he would've learned about how they structured their organizations and led their teams. I liked the book personally, but the interviews will be hit or miss depending on the participant.

Here's the book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3N47TG3

Here's a podcast summary of it: https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/1127af729a0d4aec/foun...

But frankly even just a basic textbook or video course on leadership/management would've helped or something like High Output Management by Andy Grove (Amazon https://amzn.to/3NCAZME, podcast summary https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/095f226633d34496/high...).

In terms of dealing with all of the personal conflict between team members, Radical Candor may have helped (Amazon https://amzn.to/4qNa7bf, podcast summary https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/938d044a/radical-cand...).

First, I'll just say I think the iNaturalist app is great and I've used it before and enjoyed it.

I assume he had good intentions when experimenting with non-hierarchical governance, but this wasn't the right organization with which to experiment with them. If it was feeding the poor, maybe "sociocracy" makes sense. But its main goal was to make an app (and although it's a non-profit it maintains a proprietary machine learning model mind you, this isn't Wikipedia).

And when you make an app you need direction. You can't be going in 5 different major directions based on individual contributors' whims. And beyond even just the structural issues, he also needed basic leadership/management skills to direct the product which he didn't provide. "Scott and I were titular “co-directors” but we did not provide a lot of direction and most of the big moves and features were driven largely by individual initiative."

So he was a director who didn't direct. Then later on when he chose to step down from being a leader, he decided he wanted to direct again. Isn't that ironic?

As far as can we criticize? Of course we can. If someone's going to write a public essay calling out other people by name and criticizing them we can criticize their essay and what they wrote about their experience.

Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here, but I never read an essay where I more thought "wow this guy really needs to read some basic business books." Even though it was a non-profit, there is so much wisdom in them about management and leadership that was clearly lacking throughout his experience. It's too late now. But maybe if he understood some of the reasons back when they were starting the app why organizations are structured the way they typically are, he wouldn't have experimented with so many poor (and ultimately failed) governance structures.

It seems like he was looking at his organization through a social lens (democracy, everyone should have a say) from a governance perspective but having it focused through a product lens (the app). That just doesn't mesh well. Social organizations typically have social missions, not products. When the two mix it doesn't always go well (see Mozilla).

He also explicitly gave up his leadership position and then later wanted a say in management's direction. Ultimately, he sounds like a caring, nice guy, who was more interested in "having everyone heard" than learning some management skills. What happened later after he dropped out of the leadership circle is just a product of that and I imagine significant bad blood between him and those who remained.

If you want to learn more about those formative beliefs around the time that this horoscope program was written, I recommend the book The Bite in the Apple by his former girlfriend (and mother of his daughter) Chrisann Brennan: https://amzn.to/4aN2DQX