neilk

It’s beautifully done. A few questions

I noticed that complex patterns - marble, some paintings, some stained glass - are rendered in what seems like stretched, hazy ellipses. Is that the fundamental building block of a splat?

Also, I was interested if any specularity would be captured by the splat. Or any other aspect of the building which shifts from viewpoint - like lights reflected on the marble floor, or where a metal element outdoors is reflecting the sun but only from one vantage point. I didn’t see that. As I understand it, splats are a kind of solution to the “problem” posed by the series of photos so they are capable of capturing that sort of thing. Is that present here, and I missed it? Or is that something that you need a lot of processing power for, to generate a more complex solution for the light fields?

I haven’t read this book, but I noticed the author makes much of their empirical research available with a CC license.

https://catharsisinsight.com/ , scroll way down to “Developers deserve science.”

I found this one interesting. The authors note that often, developers avoid code reviews, and engage in a lot of unproductive behavior around them. They claim that a pretty simple one-session cognitive-behavioral intervention can dramatically change that.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-024-10550-9

Anyway, the longer I work in this field the more I see psychology as the dominant factor in team productivity. Assuming the job is doable, and you’ve hired good people, and the team has adequate control over their own work, that’s what’s left. You might argue that tool use or team practices are more important, but what stops you from adopting them or using them correctly? What stops you from learning from your mistakes? Usually something about your group psychology.

For (literally) decades no one there would have even thought of forming a union!

Why do you feel so certain about that?

You're right that it's become a stock phrase, is somewhat redundant, and I used it without thinking. I strive to avoid such stock phrases (see Orwell's Politics and the English Language), so I thank you for drawing my attention to that.

I don't think it's a dog whistle. A dog whistle is when you signal something to a subgroup of your audience, using language that only they will understand. I have not seen "lived experience" used as a dog whistle.

I have seen it used to contrast official or elite discourse with what happens in one's daily life. For example, official statistics may show that crime is down in your area, but that does not comport with how you are now avoiding certain areas of town completely. Or a woman might be told that their company does not penalize them for taking maternity leave, but in practice they see they are sidelined. The "lived experience" trope is usually deployed when you start trusting your own biography, even the reactions of your own body, as a source of knowledge, opposing dominant narratives.

According to my very some brief research, it seems to have entered English from German, in the writings of Simone de Beauvoir.

I understand why the parent post felt it was clankerish. It has the same feeling - many signposts on a road to nowhere.

But it's also got the structure of marketing. Or a pitch for a cult. Or both.

It is literally book-ended - they mention the new book in the first and last paragraphs.

As far as I can tell it's no different from a pitch for other popular spirituality books. A tease that there is an answer, the author discovered it, but now is not the time for that revelation. Boring.

It's just targeted towards an audience that has different filters, and different expectations for what enlightenment might look like. Apparently for some it involves PKD-like psychonauttery, name-checking Bay Area grifters of past and present, post-rationalism, etc.

Yeah this is a bit sad. I think maybe this person actually had some real lived experience and wrote bullet points and then generated the book. I don’t even want to think about the possibility that the whole thing, including anecdotes, might be generated.

I skimmed the content (it has no immediate relevance to my life) but even the chapter headings are sloppadocious.

A friend of mine has this problem with their D&D campaigns. He makes huge efforts and there’s always one or two people who flake or don’t have the same commitment level. He’s gotten quite angry and sad about it.

He is trying something different now, to make a hybrid campaign where there’s a lot of one-shots in a broader story arc. It’s structured like missions in an ongoing struggle.

Maybe if you want to do board games, we need more games that scale up and down easily. I’m not a board game person, IDK.

You have to be the one who creates things to do.

Really, that’s it.

You want to play D&D together, you host and DM.

You want to just hang out, you reach out and propose what you’re doing.

You want more purposeful and meaningful time, join a volunteer group you vibe with.

Even if it’s meeting for coffee. You have to be the one who reaches out. You have to do it on a regular cadence. If, like me, you don’t have little alarms in your head that go off when you haven’t seen someone in a while, you can use automated reminders.

I have observed my spouse (who is not on social media) do this and she maintains friendships for decades this way. Nowadays she has regular zoom check ins, book clubs, and more, even with people who moved to the other coast. You do now have the tools for this. I have adopted it into my own life with good results.

Note: you are going to get well under a 50% success rate here. Accept that most people flake. It may always feel painful (and nerds like us often are rejection-sensitive). You have to feel your feelings, accept it, and move on.

You are struggling against many aspects of the way we in the developed world/nerd world live. We have a wealth of passive entertainment, often we have all consuming jobs or have more time-consuming relationship with our families than our parents ever did. We move to different cities for jobs, and even as suburban sprawl has grown, you’re on average probably further away from people who even live in the same city! You get from place to place in a private box on wheels, or alternatively in a really big box on wheels with a random assortment of people. You don’t see people at church, or market day, or whatever other rituals our ancestors had. On the positive side, you have more tools and leisure than ever before to arrange more voluntary meetings.

Read it carefully.

He's not saying that these are all common values or practices at Google.

He's saying he learned those lessons while working at Google.

Despite the metaphor of a "lesson", a "lessons learned" post is almost never about something the author was explicitly told. It was something that you had to learn from experience, or at best from informal advice. Where you had to swim against the flow of your circumstances.

I neither think Osmani means to say that Google is _against_ these lessons. Every organization as big as Google has a lot of accumulated wisdom that will help you. These are just the things which remain hard, and some of which are even harder in a large organization.

Yup. I nearly had this movie memorized when I was a child.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWXuDNmO7j8

Peter Weller, playing Buckaroo Banzai, is late for his military-particle-physics-interdimensional-jet-car test because he's helping Jeff Goldblum's character with neurosurgery. Later that day he will go play lead guitar in an ensemble.

Scriptwriting gurus advise that your protagonist should have flaws and character progression. The writers of this movie disagree.

In Mad Men, we have these little moments of mind=blown by the constant sexism, racism, smoking, alcoholism, even attitudes towards littering. In 2040 someone's going to make a show about the 2010s-2020s and they'll have the same attitude towards social media addiction.

It has never been about small government. You can just look at the Republican record on deficit spending or military funding to dismiss that. “Small government” was just an acceptable way to say you were for reducing benefits to people deemed undeserving.

There are people who called themselves Republican who started to believe their own propaganda, but it’s never been an empirical fact in the modern era that Republicans acted to reduce government spending in toto.

Thanks for bringing Vancouver into the discussion.

We have SROs here still, and they have a contentious relationship with both the government and the population they serve. Sometimes it's hard to tell if they are good or bad, other than they're probably better than people living on the street.

For example, a few days ago it was announced that a major SRO downtown would close. It was perceived to be causing nuisances, but also, we have FIFA coming soon and many cities do this sort of "cleanup" when events like that happen.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-gr...

You're right that Eby has shifted rightwards somewhat. In my estimation it's more to do with where the voters are. Sometimes we're electing socialist advocates for the unhoused to be premier and then we're electing Bitcoin-happy bagel merchants to be the mayor. Make it make sense.

So details were left out and it doesn't adhere exactly to this author's idea of what a good security report is.

Nothing to see here IMO.

The simpler explanation is that:

- They're a young organization, still figuring out how to do security. Maybe getting some things fundamentally wrong, no established process or principles for disclosure yet.

- I have no inside info, but I've been around the block. They're in a battle to the death with organizations that are famously cavalier about security. So internally they have big fights about how much "brakes" they can allow the security people to apply to the system. Some of those folks are now screaming "I TOLD YOU SO". Leaders will vacillate about what sort of disclosure is best for Anthropic as a whole.

- Any document where you have technologists writing the first draft, and PR and executives writing the last draft, is going to sound like word salad by the time it's done.

XSLT is being exploited right now for security vulnerabilities, and there is no solution on the horizon.

The browser technologies that people actually use, like JavaScript, have active attention to security issues, decades of learnings baked into the protocol, and even attention from legislators.

You imagine that XSLT is more secure but it’s not. It’s never been. Even pure XSLT is quite capable of Turing-complete tomfoolery, and from the beginning there were loopholes to introduce unsafe code.

As they say, security is not a product, it’s a process. The process we have for existing browser technologies is better. That process is better because more people use it.

But even if we were to try to consider the technologies in isolation, and imagine a timeline where things were different? I doubt whether XML+XSLT is the superior platform for security. If it had won, we’d just have a different nightmare of intermingled content and processing. Maybe more stuff being done client-side. I expect that browser and OS manufacturers would be warping content to insert their own ads.

He's not making an argument.

With these characters, from Trump on down, discourse is not the point.

He is flexing his power by showing he can make an obviously fatuous point and get away with it. Because there are no consequences, for someone like him.

Working on: to teach myself Rust, I’ve been working on a NYT Letter Boxed solver, with some ambitions to turn it into a game by itself. I think this game could be made a lot more fun.

Thinking about: A new take on LinkedIn/web-of-trust, bootstrapped by in-person interactions with devices. It seems that the problem of proving who is actually human and getting a sense of how your community values you might be getting more important, and now devices have some new tools to bring that within reach.

Microsoft and Oracle sold closed source software that had obtained tremendous leverage in their fields, if not outright monopolies. Historically, Microsoft and Oracle’s business models were threatened by open source. They have reacted in various ways over decades: alternately resisting, embracing, or acquiring control of important projects.

However, Shopify sells SAAS thst runs on open source. What does it benefit them to take over key aspects of infrastructure?

If they disliked what was happening with the OSS tools, they are big and rich enough to maintain forks or their own toolchain.

The OP seems to be associating the start of this controversy with some feud between DHH and the founder of Sidekiq. Shopify is indeed quite aligned with DHH. And there’s some controversy about so-called supply chain attacks, which I understand might inspire a call for a more locked-down organization. But as an outsider I am confused.

Seems a bit like webhooks?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webhook

Although your model is polling rather than making the other server push something.

I personally find these examples underwhelming. Most of them are processes that require time, like the pitch drop experiment.

I suspect that the things in our lives that truly have value and take a long time aren’t easy to identify as projects. No one person starts it with a clear idea of where it will end. Investment in future capabilities. Knowledge gathering without clear application or business model. Strengthening institutions and traditions of human rights to ensure that no one group can arrest history.

How long ago was "formerly"?

Signed, a formerly formerly fat person.

I like it, but when you make your guess the mystery color should change to the color it describes, not to green or red. You should use some other aspect to indicate success - shape, motion, font, anything other than color. You already have it shaking for an incorrect guess, so that’s good.

I am not a lawyer, but as far as I know this is completely wrong.

There is a conspiracy theory that “anchor babies” will help undocumented parents avoid deportation from the US.

As far as I can tell, the usual thing that happens when undocumented parents of a US citizen are deported is that they have to give the child to a citizen relative to raise, or they take the child with them.

It seems to be extremely rare, though “prosecutorial discretion” can allow for a parent to remain in the US. There is no guarantee; an undocumented parent can and is often deported later, sometimes for minor crimes. I couldn’t find any stats about how often this happens but immigration consultants stress to their clients that they can’t rely on it.

If the undocumented parents have been in the country for 10 years they can apply for relief for deportation but that is capped at 4,000 cases annually. If the child remains in the US until they become an adult, and can plausibly sponsor a relative, then they can also apply to reunify with their parent. The deported parent may have to spend a minimum of a decade outside the US.

Management theory, at least the aspects of it which become popular, seems fad-driven.

Matrix managment, holacracy, consensus, etc etc.

Is this a field where people discover things that last? For instance, fundamental limits to human communication, fundamental quantities that are conserved no matter what the configuration of management is.

Computer science has Brooks' observations on team size and communication, but that was only ever a guess, it's not really a law.

Generally people seem to adopt decision and management mechanisms that purport to address the pain they were having in their previous organization, while being proven enough to be plausible ("$FAMOUS_COMPANY does it") and not quantifiable enough to be a definite failure yet. Probably someone is writing a new airport book on "Founder Mode" right now!

So... what is known about human management? I'm not a fool, people are ever-changing and complex and what they want from their organizations changes all the time, but are there any eternal truths?

I suggest you try steel-manning this. Imagine that the people who want these things have rational reasons for wanting them. What might they be?

That is a more optimistic read of what he might mean by NPC. I cannot possibly know for sure, but I don't think so.

NPC is a meme with shifting meaning, but I have never seen NPC used as an adjective for an activity or aspect of someone's life. It is invariably used to condemn an entire person as unworthy of consideration, and maybe even subhuman.

It is frequently used by tech leaders that Vinay apparently admires, as a term of disdain for large groups of people. The analogy is that the person appears to be human, and go through the motions of being human, but they don't actually have thoughts of their own. Graphically they are represented by a primitively drawn grey figure who has limited capability for expression, just varying the eyebrows. The NPC is often presented in a group of identical figures.

Musk uses "NPC" loosely, often to refer to the media. His critics are always NPCs, as is anyone to his left. He implies they merely act in lockstep with whatever is trending on social media. For Musk, people who believe there is a genocide in Gaza are NPCs. Amazingly, even when a person who formerly idolized Musk begins criticizing him, it is because they are an NPC.

Sam Altman does not seem to have as open a problem with narcissism. But he also seems to be suggesting that many humans are more machine-like than AI:

in a few years, the important distinction won't be bot vs. human, but NPC (human or AI) vs. not"

we won't be able to be sure if text is human-generated or not, but it also won't be the most important question. 'independence' will be a very important metric."

https://x.com/sama/status/1574196546039517184

It seems to me that the tech-right, rationalist, EAs, TESCREALists, whatever we're calling it now, value agency above all. They often describe themselves as "high agency" people. And so the NPC, someone incapable of agency and maybe even lacking a soul, is the worst possible fate.

Musk claims to love humanity, but I would be curious to find out how much of humanity he thinks are NPCs. Are NPCs just a particular species that have taken over academia, the media, and government? Or are the majority of people NPCs and only a few high-IQ and high achievement individuals are really fully human?

I know that people like me do not belong on HN anymore, but:

Calling people "NPCs" is vile.

And, the entire ideology that makes it okay to say that one's fellow earthling is just an NPC? That is probably a major component of this person's problems.

Knex isn’t an ORM, it’s a query builder. (Though the closely related library Bookshelf.js is an ORM).

I know your pain of translating SQL back to the ORM language, but what similar difficulty do you have for Knex? You have a query, and it’s isomorphic to the Knex query usually. There are a few things Knex doesn’t do, but it has the “raw” get-out-of-jail-free card for making part of the query just a string without sacrificing anything else.

Every project I’ve ever worked on has many closely related complex queries and writing them out as strings (even with placeholders) becomes either perilous as you write complex string building logic, or tediously repetitive.

(Caveat: I am not a car guy at all, never owned one)

In the US, most trucks sold do very little hauling, towing, or off-reading or anything else that might justify the giant form factor.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/26907/you-dont-need-a-full-siz...

And yet, trucks and SUVs are the best-selling cars in the US, and have been for a long time. There is a weird loophole for fuel efficiency in mileage standards for large vehicles, but obviously that doesn’t apply to the Cybertruck. There is definitely some psychological appeal to having a very dominant-looking vehicle.

So just as a business move, the Cybertruck makes sense. But there’s more overlap with Musk’s politics than you might think.

I read a book a long time ago by this very weird product marketer Clotaire Rapaille, who, several decades ago, was trying to convince executives to put a gun mount on an SUV. His argument was his research showed that the people who loved big cars saw the world as dangerous, and had fantasies of cutting through the hordes with a powerful vehicle. Rapaille’s methods are somewhere between the usual consumer panel interviews and guided meditation, so it’s hardly scientific, maybe more like poetry, but I found it compelling.

Musk actually tried to demonstrate the Cybertruck’s resistance to guns and sledgehammers. Its actual durability is, I gather, more debatable, but he was definitely trying to reach people’s darkest fears and impulses.

That’s what 1Password means, right? If your credentials to 1Password leaks all you have to do is change that one password. Problem solved! /s