d136o

llama-2-70b-chat (courtesy of llama.cpp on m2) says:

  Pretend to be a commenter on hackernews. Respond to the comment below:

  [parent comment inlined]

  what is your response?
  "Wow, that's great to hear! It sounds like you had a really positive experience with the 34B last night. I'm also excited to see what's in store for Phind and its potential applications. Have you tried using the 34B for any specific tasks or projects yet? And do you think the text completion feature would be useful for your use case if it were improved further?"

The suckers aren’t just investors, but also employees who work at companies that hinted/promised liquidity via one of these transactions. I didn’t work at a company that failed to ipo via spac, but I almost did and although every technical interviewer felt earnest, something felt off about their lack of detail around business and the equity part of the comp.

Too much of it felt like hot air and I went elsewhere. This was two years ago, and indeed some BS press release from a year ago says their “deal” fell apart. Seemingly reputable investors too, wtf.

Keep your BS detectors on at all times.

Ideally transactions denominated in Western coin align with western values (Good Things).

Some people say that the common folk now have cheap mass produced gadgets that were previously only available to the wealthy, and some rant about the enshitification (great term whose origin I need to learn more about of) of our society.

I nod along to this piece and yet I don’t want to be so cynical.

I am not a finance professional but…

Say you make $1 of profit, does that translate into $1 your company can control for its benefit? If kept as profit part of that dollar flows out of the company, to other companies and possibly to the government as taxes (god forbid).

If the company reinvests then it fully benefits from its would be $1 as opposed to someone spending it elsewhere.

IMO Accounting is the only reason many companies don’t turn an external “profit”

Perhaps a silly question: If there were previously no profits does that mean they had previously paid no taxes and now will?

Agreed, this tornado thing sounds like a made up excuse.

These companies, which are granted legal monopolies, have not safeguarded US interests.

Are there any chemical precursors these drugs all have in common that could have been exhausted by something else that is more important to manufacture?

Alternatively is supply being commandeered somehow?

So much weird stuff is happening with supply chains that it feels like the US is purposefully being squeezed.

So… what’s going to happen now with all the behavioral science people and their fabulous data

When I was looking for an apartment to rent in Palo Alto I found a great deal on rent because I visited a place listed on Craigslist that had awful photos.

It turns out the owner was just an older man who wasn’t good with tech, the place was pretty great in person and I ended up living there for a couple of years.

Normal untouched photos are more honest. I also dislike when photos make it ambiguous which unit in a duplex is for sale, or don’t make clear/hide that it’s only part of a lot or something like that.

One of the Montessori schools in SF (across the street from blue bird hq) was bought by some Miami PE fund… that and some other data points informed our decision to pass on it.

Which hotel?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35748566

Old threads lock! Enduro 2

Anytime now I’ll run my second marathon…

At the beginning of the pandemic I obsessed over large land listings on Redfin/Zillow. I thought I’d finally found the bargain when I saw something near a Clearlake here in CA. It was something like 80 acres for less than $400k…

Well it turns out Clearlake was heavily contaminated with mercury when there was an active mine right on the lake…

Buyer beware!

Love this.

Semi relatedly, the reason I chose my current smart watch is that it can go weeks without charging, I simply don’t worry about it. Yes it has a limited number of colors and I can’t browse the web on it or w.e. but that’s a feature.

Maybe I’ll seek out a phone with similar battery use profile…

I wonder how much of it is explained by all the company retirement plans that are set to auto invest via an index fund.

They says it’s retail meme stock buyers… but what if it’s everyone who doesn’t have time to look at things and these publicly traded companies are now just selling into those reliable biweekly/monthly retirement account contributions.

Giving the cops great bike equipment seems like an amazingly creative way to fund the police. Get them the best e-bikes.

I recently learned that cops can’t drive after fleeing vehicles in SF.

I looked into this because I saw multiple instances of cars driving insanely fast near me, and soon after seeing cops with their lights on. These cars were doing 45+ in a residential area where max 30 or 25 would be appropriate.

This rider could have been you or someone you know. I feel for them, their family, and their friends.

I did a pretty regular bike commute while living in LA, Westwood to Santa Monica. Years later while driving through I noticed one of the white bikes (shown in article) memorializing a bikers death at a particular intersection I crossed every commute (Santa Monica Blvd and 405 intersection). It was utterly tragic and a reminder of how often I had been in the same danger that killed another unlucky rider. It could have been me.

I’m far from an expert (just an engineer who likes to download and try out demos) but one dark view of the alignment chatter is that it’s really about whether can you can get this new big artificial brain to push any user in the direction of BigCorp goal, while letting the users think that it’s answering their questions etc.

I’d love to think that we can have AI agents working locally (with privacy) in alignment with our personal goals, but that seems like one of those things that won’t happen. (Will apple come through in terms of enabling local+decentralized inference/training?)

I tried out some AI autocomplete by Notion and wanted it to tell me about tools to do schema evolution on a database.

It seems to blurt out two paid products, which surprised me because my guess is there’s some open source package that’s ready to for this type of thing.

BTW question for anyone, what would you reach for to track evolutions on Postgres?

I don’t know if wiping out bond holders is good… aren’t some of these rolled up into fixed income investments by people who are retired or close to retirement?

I mentioned the same thing to my wife. Today, if you get stuck in some corner case of software, you can eventually reach a human who will observe the buggy behavior and get you unstuck. With this stuff… may we all never get caught in a buggy corner or edge case…

Wonder if any of the SVB owned private equity or debt will be sold off or marked down because of all this.

Sometimes I think it’s also naive to think that food and modern conveniences (for you and your descendants) will continue to arrive if you just do your job… today you may have food on the table for your family by just showing up to work. But are you sure that whoever you work for won’t keep upping their share and reduce yours as time passes?

Maybe just maybe “the system” (as you called it) is just a seemingly more civilized way of doing what was done before: surviving.

For the WSB crowd, here’s one of their bonds:

https://markets.businessinsider.com/bonds/wework_companies_i...

Ultimately you have to live somewhere and people don’t choose to live in the cheapest place “in the country at any point in time.”

At the time we bought we found a house that gave us more space than the apartment we rented previously and where our newly arrived daughter could spend her first few years. It’s not one of the trendy neighborhoods and yet it’s close to downtown SF and the peninsula, where we work. We can afford it on one income. All those factors made it a good deal for us. I feel ok about it so far, but I’m certainly open to the possibility that there are better options.

We bought at pretty much the rock bottom of 2020/2021 interest rates (nothing like wiring away your hard earned money on the very same day when the US capitol was being overrun and the government seemed just about to topple…)

We had to work hard to avoid areas in SF that had been overbid. We didn’t find a bargain but we found a good deal, something that the prior owners needed to let go off but which wasn’t in a super popular area. This was in a hot market. So I think in the coming market you will find good opportunities.

So, as I obsess over listings today pondering if there might be an opportunity… I think that there will be good deals to be had, but not necessarily steals. In the Bay Area, people trip over themselves to live in a few neighborhoods so I think prices in those highly sought after areas won’t reach absolute bargain levels.

But If you are prepared and ready to step in you can already find properties that I think are marked down.

I’ve been watching closely dreaming of a place for our parents, or maybe more space for us, or maybe a rental…

Great SNL skit: https://youtu.be/yEfsaXDX0UQ

You could try to change jobs before kiddo arrives, and line up start date 2 months or however long you want to take off. Start by having conversations and not putting so much pressure on yourself, plenty of teams need someone with experience.

I left a job with a few weeks to go until birth, which allowed me to prep in a different way, by fixing things around the house, preparing food, getting baby stuff etc. I accepted an offer back at BigCo the week baby arrived with a start date that was about two months out.

I definitely leaned into my savings, but I kind of valued not having my first kids birth being held over my head at a job that I wasn’t thrilled with.

Of course this was possible because my wife and I were both working and had solid savings cushions.

Happy to talk if you want, our kiddo is 3months this week and it’s been an amazing ride. Plenty of people have done it with fewer resources, you can do it OP!

First of all, I want to be respectful of the parent comment, much much respect for all the hard work that it must be.

To your question, prenatal screening is a thing, but maybe non-invasive techniques (that don’t risk miscarriage) are newer. I don’t know how widely recommended they are throughout the country (US) or world, but they were prescribed for our kiddo born San Francisco this year. They seem to stagger the tests, so that the less invasive ones are used at first, and then the more invasive procedures are recommended if there is information that would indicate an increased risk of whatever condition.

See for example: https://www.ucsfhealth.org/education/prenatal-testing-for-do...

Some might say that these tests are being over used… it’s very personal imo.