harrall

Red Bull doesn’t just market, they bankroll and support.

Most companies just sponsor a team or something, but Red Bull has paid for the baseline infrastructure of many sports.

I 100% agree but Starlink is the only profitable space division of SpaceX.

The truth is diverting money to space exploration is not that popular.

We only got the moon because we were in a battle with the Soviet Union about capitalism vs. communism. It was never about space or science. The instant the Soviet Union collapsed, we reduced NASA’s projects and budgets.

So while I’m not a fan of the circumstances, I need some way for money to go to space exploration and I’m riding this like people rode the Cold War as an excuse to build a moon rocket.

But since you built the bot, you can have it do anything? Answer all HATCHAS and then do anything according to my instructions?

But the architecture doesn’t matter as much as the implementation. You can write standards however strict but Bob might not care.

Now you could try to enforce more onerous requirements but then people will simply just find an alternative — my own area has its own alerts on top of whatever else is already there.

Technical solutions are important but past some point, you’re dealing with a product or people problem and further technical improvements bring marginal benefit.

It’s easy to understand but most people don’t naturally think of ways people try to break in. Without thinking about that, the importance of security is low.

It isn’t a knowledge thing (though it could be), or a capability thing, or intelligence. It’s pure mindset.

Ask yourself: is the average person noticing holes in fences and trying random doorknobs… probably not.

But on the other hand, most security people don’t think of product or UX (but some might) so that’s why you have roles.

It’s not a technical problem. And the problem is that it’s not centralized.

Everyone and their mom has their own system, managed by different people with different standards.

It’s like USB cables — yes there are strict technical standards but when you have a million different manufacturers, they all do it differently and some cut corners and bend the rules how they want to.

Look at how two different cities handle their water supply or their police — different management, different priorities.

CSS is a general rendering solution, not something built for rendering 3D games.

And no one has spent any time optimizing 3D transforms to make a game workable because no one would be able to justify the use of their time like that. It wouldn’t even give you brownie points ‘cause most people would just ask “why?”

In cognitive science, it appears your brain has two modes of thinking:

- A very parallel type of computation that is fast and generally accurate and integrates hundreds of variables. It’s sometimes labeled as intuition or system 1 thinking.

- A much slower, step by step, analytical type, commonly linked with your pre-frontal cortex (one of the newest parts of the brain). Sometimes called system 2 thinking.

Maybe the way the universe works is that all computation more or less is one of those two types. In which case, an LLM alone is only the first part, which is often right but its results also cannot ever be proven.

That’s only if you look at the final price without understanding the makeup of that price.

The components of computation have been getting cheaper every year… it hasn’t lately because the demand for memory suddenly massively started outstripping supply.

But I think that is overly presumptuous though.

Some people have a different moral framework. Some people think Saddam’s brutal dictatorship was for the better because it finally brought stability. When forced to choose between stability and freedom, they choose stability.

There are also just simply amoral people too who just don’t care.

So I wouldn’t automatically assume someone working in an “evil” regime as “trapped as a cog” — they might frankly be OK with it. This is why sometimes just cutting off the head doesn’t enact change.

Decaying rural areas happen in every country, throughout history, throughout time. It’s just how the world works.

The only reason it recently reversed in the US was due to COVID.

Second, many countries are modern in some ways and backwards in some other way. To label a country as modern or not is silly.

Here how it works: I build a porch today and my neighbor builds a pool. In 30 years, he builds a porch but I build a pool. If you cherry pick porches, I look outdated and he looks modern, but it’s reversed if you cherry pick pools!

I’m in constant code switch mode.

Among a larger % of my tech friends, AI is cool.

Among my non-tech friends, AI has been uncool.

Among by artist friends, AI has been really uncool for years.

I’m personally in a “water is wet” position.

JWT is secure.

I just noticed that after JWT was created, people would just slap on JWT like an end-all because JWT sounded secure and they thought it was all that they needed to do.

That’s my only “problem” with JWT but to be honest, people will build insecure systems anyway.

A big portion of GPU driver updates are actually just that, same with Windows updates.

Windows 95 patched a bug in SimCity just to get it to work.

I don’t know about everyone else but “nerds” have never had a positive image to the general population.

Nerds as honest or incorruptible? In popular media, from Revenge of the Nerds to The Simpsons to Big Bang Theory, the defining feature of “nerds” is that they have poor social skills and less regard for their fellow humans.

Now people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk look like the nerds that now have money and power! Ah ha! “It doesn’t matter what others think of me now! This is revenge for looking down on me before!”

But VPS providers share the same hardware and overprovision. They don’t need to add new hardware every time a new customer signs up.

If you buy a dedicated server at Hetzner, you actually need immediate hardware.

Many VPS providers also just resell Hetzner, OVH or other dedicated servers so they won’t increase the price until their own provider does.

It’s not a “nerds” thing.

Most CEOs are completely private.

Most people don’t post their thoughts on Facebook on random topics either.

Because when most people post all their private thoughts on matters publicly, it’s kind of embarrassing.

This isn’t an AI problem. You can’t ask anyone to “be truthful” on any subject because everyone sees through their own world perspective.

Two people might say “they love camping!!”

But does it mean…

- Going camping twice/year and partying by the river?

- Or going 20 times per year, sometimes on 4 week long trips?

Both types of people will, with complete honesty, tell you “they love camping” and only you, the asker of the question, can decode what that means. ayli can’t

Laws aren’t made that way and laws made that way usually aren’t good. Like a farmer writing rules for people in the city or vice versa purely based on what they think the other side wants.

It’s much better if the farmers directly tell you what they want and the city folk tell you what they want and together they figure it out.

Census details is great for understanding long term trends. It’s not to be used directly for decision making, even if the intention is good, and the intentions have also been very bad.

GStreamer doesn’t use ffmpeg’s pipeline at all. It implements a much more advanced directed graph with disconnect, connection and pad negotiation. You can dynamically swap out the entire filter graph during live playback with zero disruption. Swap feeds, outputs, effects… all at runtime.

ffmpeg and other media frameworks (Windows Media Foundation, Apple’s AVFramwork) only support static pipelines. You can use “switcher” components but the inputs are still static.

GStreamer is extremely special. The only thing that comes close was Microsoft’s DirectShow, which has since been replaced with Media Foundation which can’t do it. And while DirectShow did support it, it was fragile because many 3rd party filters did not support dynamic configuration.

GStreamer does use ffmpeg, but it just wraps the core encoder/decoder/filter code and discards the streams/graph/pipe part of ffmpeg.

Usually measures like these aren’t to stop the people with those kinds of deep resources.

With everything, there is a much bigger group of people in the middle that have “some resources” and “some desire” that these measures are surprisingly effective against.

Raise a $20 item by $1 and suddenly there’s fewer interested people, even though the cost difference is minor. Well, minor to some people but not to others.

But is limiting this information in an LLM the right move? Well that’s a different question.

I started doing it months ago and, to be honest, what the agent chooses to do isn’t unpredictable.

The problem is that different people prompt so differently.

For example, I may ask like “test different variations of this annotation on k8s pods of this service on this X cluster because it proves Y theory.”

But you know what my coworker asks? “Test Y theory.” If you were to ask two different junior engineers that, one might try random things on production and the other one might run local tests! It’s such an unguided “do anything you want as long you figure it out” request and the agent reads it like a junior who has not been told any boundaries but has been strongly told “figure it out.”

I believe the Escape Hybrid actually sold really well and was in high demand, but they actually ran into supply chain issues.

The F-150 Lightning I think was too early for its time... an electric truck doesn't work unless it's mostly for leisure (e.g. Rivian). If you are towing or moving a lot of weight, your range drops a lot.

The Ford F-150 Lightning was just an experiment... not a real effort by Ford. If you look at how much money they spent on marketing aluminum bodies or turbocharged engines, it's a lot more because that's something they believed in.

The issue with high repair cost is that you actually end up paying for it via higher ownership costs... via insurance rates. So you might pay upfront very little but every time someone has their car repair or totaled, the insurance companies have to pay for the full cost of the car and this ends up being subsidized via insurance rates.

Ford is probably going to do it.

They’re never the first but they consistently bring new major shifts in cars to the working class, without making some major compromises to the car (BYD) or being expensive (Tesla).

They:

- Brought affordable V8 engines to the working class

- Got rid of the V8 and brought much more fuel efficient turbocharged vehicles to the working class

- Made the first and a popular hybrid SUV, which is what Americans buy

- Brought the first affordable passenger aerodynamic cars to the working class

- Brought military grade aluminum bodies to a working class truck, massively increasing fuel economy

- They obviously invented the moving car assembly line and were the first to make cars affordable

Currently they’re working on an inexpensive electric car platform that borrows some of Tesla’s manufacturing ideas (but is way less complex because Tesla is actually unable to use it on their cars), switching to 48V, and trialing a new tree-based assembly line.

And it will be a fully repairable car unlike BYD’s which transfers all impacts to the battery frame, which is safe and saves a lot of money but makes the cars impossible to repair. (BYD started as a tech company so they tend to view things to be disposable, like smartphones.)

Ford watches all the other carmakers add new features and then figures out how to make it affordable and then they spend massive marketing campaigns to normalize it with regular people.

I think evil is an an artificial and subjective construct and therefore intelligence will somehow do something “evil” by someone’s or something’s standard.

But at the same time, I think it is an important construct because it prevents groups from descending into absolute chaos, which encourages the survival of the species.

As a construct, I see the concept of evil as the way that humans classify activities that cause psychological harm and those triggers are somewhat biologically and culturally shared.

And there seem to be people that don’t seem to “see” evil (e.g. serial killers), but once again I think it’s just they don’t share some biological trait with the rest of us (which doesn’t justify their actions either).

So despite having the opinion that evil may just be a construct, I still find it important because (1) I am selfish and don’t want to be psychologically harmed and (2) I am not selfish and am vaguely interested in the survival of the species.

Very few commercial and industrial products use a Pi though.

Pi - 73 million sold

ESP32 - 1 billion sold

STM32 - 13 billion sold

For every 1 Pi sold, there’s almost 200 STM32s sold.

No there are topics that are not important enough to bring up (yet) so they don’t warrant their own meeting, so you need a soft place to bring them up with low expectations.

A 1:1 is like asking to get lunch with someone — you don’t have anything specific to talk about but it puts you two together to talk about random things.

Unless you meet new people by exchanging printed lists of your interests and activities and marking which ones you are interested in, but the rest of us don’t tick like that.

I just don’t think your opinion is shared by most people.

Gmail is the most popular email service in the world, people are always telling me how they prefer Google Docs over everything else and their only competition is Microsoft.

Yes it’s free but there is no other service that I rather switch to, and I actually pay for additional storage.

I have standup every day so my manager knows what I am doing so my 1:1s are:

- General sentiment about problems with the team and company that bother me but that I don’t have a solution to yet or decided how to bring it up with the team.

- Fun / interesting projects I unilaterally decided to dedicate my working hours towards that I never asked permission to work on. Sometimes it ends up being something cool that my manager wants to join in on or promote to a bigger effort.

- About our lives and what's going on.

Agree with this too. OpenCV is functionality great but its constituent parts are written by many different people who all kind of do things a little differently and it shows.

But I can’t really complain because it’s open source and added to by contributors.