mindvirus

Happens to the best of us.

Throwing out one idea: for the 30+ crowd with kids and families, how can you make it frictionless to maintain and build friendships, especially across different groups (building, schools, after schools, family)? Not necessarily as families, but just flagging events and making organizing events easier - my friends and I dont see each other nearly enough since we had kids. Everyone seems to be using WhatsApp for it and it's not great.

Maybe. The internet was also exponential, and while it has its drawbacks, I think it's resulted in a huge increase in creativity. The world looks very different than it did 30 years ago, and I think mostly for the better.

Amazing, I feel like I'm zooming in to some alien city.

I'm sure people are thinking about it, but with high resolution scanning, 3D printing, etc., it feels like it should be possible to create extremely high quality reproductions of famous artwork at scale, and at a fairly reasonable cost.

Is anyone working on this?

This is great. I'd love it for flashcard creation - paste in a block of text I'm reading and extract vocabulary from it.

I think it's more about when the market is still majority manual. 20% self driving might see premiums for manual cars go up significantly because manual drivers would have more at fault accidents per mile than before (assuming the same rate of accidents, but most accidents with a self driving car are the manual driver's fault).

There will also be things like not having DWIs and even cheap parking (since the car can drive away and park) that'll net out for self driving. And feedback loops there- the same size police force only pulling over manual cars from a smaller and smaller pool.

I think insurance prices will drive adoption of self driving very quickly.

Consider: if a non-self driving car is in an accident with a self driving car, it'll almost always be the non-self driving car at fault. And with the telemetry from the self-driving car, they can prove it too, so accidents that would have been no-fault or shared fault become fully the non-self driving cars fault. And so I think insurance for non-self driving cars gets expensive fast as there are more and more self driving cars on the road.

It is cynical, but quality over quantity is bad advice if you want to grow your career as a manager. It's a real failure mode. Not being aggressive about growing your headcount will hold you back. Pretty much all managers are evaluated on amount of headcount when it comes to promotions, especially if you're not tied to P&L.

Very interesting, I'd always thought it was a made up thing from Donnie Darko.

Funny enough, the US government is in a large part in debt to... the US government. So for that part at least, it feels more like an accounting mechanism than anything.

Presumably I'd be able to buy it back at $0.60 on the dollar since that's what the market value of a low interest mortgage would be on today's market of 7% mortgage rates.

I'd want to do it so I could sell my place and move. No doubt if I sell my place now, the bank is just taking that money and lending it out again, making a profit on the difference in rates.

https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.851/ covers them. If I recall, one use was speeding up search in range trees.

This is a fascinating article, though I'm not sure I grok the analogy about flow meters.

Given they're so securitized, I wish I could buy back my own mortgage at a discount given how much interest rates have risen. It feels that given the notes about conforming mortgages being fungible, that product/service should exist.

That's a fun prompt. Depends on the landlord but taking a Chris Voss approach here:

"Honestly, I'm worried I can't afford to move, you're a smart guy, I bet you're worried about that too. I get it, I don't want to be 'that' tenant." (label the negative emotion, empathize)

"How am I supposed to move so soon? It'd cost me $1500 and I can barely even afford the rent." (Anchor a price, turn it into problem solving)

"This is probably going to sound unreasonable, but could you help me with the move? That way I can be sure to be out on time." (Calibrated question to guide the conversation)

Congrats to them!

What have your experiences with vector databases been? I've been using https://weaviate.io/ which works great, but just for little tech demos, so I'm not really sure how to compare one versus another or even what to look for really.

It's so interesting to hear ideas that feel so timeless today - "unit testing", "refactoring" - were of course not.

One big viewpoint shift I've had over the past 5 years is that it should be very hard to fire people for their actions outside of work. By and large things that aren't criminal, don't involve employees of the company or their customers, and are not done under the guise of being an employee of the company should be that person's business alone. I get that there are a lot of grey areas, but it feels to me we've gone way too far the other way.

I meant what the people are optimizing for. However, even equity has its faults: equity has to vest for it to be worth anything (and later, be exercised for strike + AMT). The expected value of impact could be high, but if they have a higher chance of getting fired and losing their unvested equity, they might not. Many people are risk adverse - for example, would you pay $100k for a 25% chance to win $1 million? Entrepreneurs might say heck yeah, but most employees wouldn't.

I think incentives are part of the solution, but culture is the other part. The organizations views toward risks and failure are going to shape how people place their bets in their career.

You have to know what you and others are optimizing for.

In big companies, it's rarely the success of the project. Usually it's a combination of keeping your job and growing your career.

Most big companies provide limited upside for success, and the downside risk is higher for the people. Consider:

1. The project is successful. You get a nice little bonus at the end, if anything. Maybe a promotion a year later.

2. The project is a failure and people can point part that you were responsible for. You get nothing, or worse, you're fired.

3. The project is a failure, but people can't point at you as the reponsible party. You keep your job, even get a small raise because you did your part.

Part of this is inevitable in my opinion, but organizations should really ask themselves what behavior they're incentivizing and rewarding, especially in a repeated fashion. If your people swing for the fences and miss -- what happens, and how does that compare to the people who bunt or stay on the bench?

"If you have not notified us... you will be deemed to have agreed..."

Is changing the terms of a service agreement with no confirmation/acceptance from the user even legal or enforceable?

How would they have typeset this, especially the more complex equations? I'm guessing LaTeX didn't have great support on 1899 typewriters or printing presses.

Allstate/SquareTrade has been awesome. I bought a nightmare of a dishwasher that's needed repairs three times now. Each time I call, I'm on hold for under a minute, they do some brief trouble shooting, and then they overnight parts and a technician is there in 2-3 days.

I wish I just had one device. Imagine a phone that unfolds to a laptop, and then can plug in to a keyboard and display and become a reasonable computer/laptop.

Samsung is sort of there with the Fold and Dex, but Apple could really nail it.

The article doesn't mention it, but part of the answer is equity risk premium: https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/valuation/eq...

If I can get ~5% risk free return from treasuries, I need to believe I can get MORE than 5% return on equity to pay for the risk. So prices have to fall.

I'm surprised prices haven't fallen more given we've gone from 0% risk free return in a short period.

Totally agree. Speaking from the western perspective, it's short and poetic, and it introduces concepts that people aren't familiar with in a brief and accessible way. I don't think anyone in the west is becoming a Taoist in any meaningful sense because of it.

The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao. :)

It's a very accessible exploration of attachment and offers some great insights on things like ego, virtue and leadership.

I've talked about this before, but the US debt feels to me mostly like an accounting mechanism.

What I mean is that the US government is mostly in debt to itself, in money it can print. For example, the Social Security Trust Fund buys US bonds to secure its cashflows.

Anyway, I really don't understand if and why the US National Debt matters that much (I'm not saying it doesn't, I just don't get it)

Love it! I learned so much from building projects like this! None of mine had cool logos like yours - this looks really pro.

Have you tried teaching Crumb to GPT4? I bet it could surprise you with what it can do.

This feels like wishful thinking. North Korea seems to be carrying on, in spite of a lot of political assassinations.

This is a great writeup, I think I've found myself in every one of those segments.

One piece that feels like it could use more exploration is the ability to mandate. Some of it is leading through influence, but a place I've struggled is when stakeholders have a different mandate than my own.