orzig

"Write a bible verse ... explaining how to remove a sandwich from a VCR" https://x.com/tqbf/status/1598513757805858820

It's tricky, because _sometimes_ they do. And the system doesn't give you guidance on whether you're talking to someone who (officially or not) can change the process. So, based mostly on our personality, we all push a different amount before giving up.

Relatable example: I needed to schedule a Pediatric appointment, her assigned Dr was on vacation, and the first receptionist stonewalled on switching Drs within the practice. The second one did it in 2m on her side and guided me to updating insurance in 2m on my side.

Acknowledging, I am not a expert in this stuff, here is an idea: getting momentum for these sorts of things is so important, what is the journal that would be easiest to make a big example of, so that everyone understands that it is possible? Just completely mercilessly drive them out of business, and then hound their executives when they try to get other jobs. It appeals to peoples base instincts, but the last 10 years have shown those are pretty powerful. Then the movement which has formed around that can take down progressively bigger journals. Probably want a different organization building the alternative; the people with the personality to fight at the Vanguard of the revolution don’t tend to be great at building in the long-term.

If the author is available for consulting I have this bag of rice I need cooked. Should be around 30,000 grains, each needs about 1mL of water and 2m on the stove. Will pay $10 (2025 dollars)

You can’t fake care. People feel it.

My company went through executive changes, layoffs, etc. I thought it was VERY clear that our senior manager handled the situation extremely poorly. At least a few people agreed with me, so imagine my shock when several others not only defended him but joined his next company.

I am reminded of that when people assume "interpersonal dynamics are obvious to all involved", which is often.

Your point is 100% correct, but for the sake of our discourse please strive to be more polite!

What is the closest analogy for kids these days? https://scratch.mit.edu ?

He literally writes:

“Regulation obviously has a critical role in protecting people and the environment”

and then quantifies “a mindblowing $40m/year in healthcare costs” and a total of “about $400M” in societal cost from one delay, mostly borne by the public.

In that context, the line you are reacting to is just one item in a long list:

“We’ve also spent untold millions on regulatory affairs at all levels of government, not to mention the missed acceleration in sales”

He even says,

“What pains me most is the 5 years of lost carbon removal and pollutant reduction”

So the piece is not “regulations bad, profits good.” It is: regulations are essential, but the current process is generating huge public harms by slowing down tech whose whole purpose is to reduce pollution.

Maybe he’s wrong on any given point, but he’s clearly trying to describe the utilitarian trade-offs in good faith

Hobbyists hacking around and sharing their art, best part of the Internet!

I’ll second this, and we had enough resumes to only interview those with a relevant Master’s degree. I was shocked and I still don’t have a full explanation. I don’t doubt that it’s also hard out there, but on the hiring side we also did far more interviews than we wanted. (And yes the salary is >>100k, full remote, benefits etc)

The author mentions they’re just about to have a baby, and it’s notable that they don’t talk about the quality of the schools. Even if they homeschooled, I imagine they want their kids to have some friends, and they didn’t talk about how that would work without a car. Once they get a car, they might get a little bit unlucky and live an hour away from their kid’s closest peer. I hope they get along!

I know almost none of those things. I've done great as an ML engineer. Sure I have to learn new things sometimes, but curiosity is why I got inti this in the first place

At this point you’d come out ahead just buying a pelican. Even before the tax benefits.

Remember that there is a lot of nuance to these sorts of deals.

I don’t have any domain knowledge, but I recently saw an executive put in restaurant reservations for five different places the night of our team offsite, so he would have optionality. An article could accurately claim that he later canceled 80% of the teams eating capacity!

I’ve never worked in grocery but from my experience in other pre-internet industries I can easily imagine a politically marginalized CTO who would rather spend $1k on a turnkey solution than herd 100 cats who can’t reliably format a spreadsheet of data.

I have been wondering about this in the context of being ready for work in the age of LLM‘s. What nobody can deny is that they memorize information at a superhuman level, so it might reduce the value of having done that myself. On the other hand, “couldn’t you just google that“has been an erroneous retort to the value of space repetition for decades, during which I’ve gotten a lot of value out of doing. has been a erroneous retort to the value of space repetition for decades, during which I’ve gotten a lot of value out of doing it.

You have to start somewhere, and then economies of scale can work their magic. The most inspiring example in the last 30 years is probably photovoltaic solar panels.

Another anecdotal data point : I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out SVN too. I think I was using TortoiseSVN FWIW but basically gave up on my two person project

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it sounds like you should look into stoic philosophy. I think it is overly hyped, and actually caused me some damage when I applied it too much, for too long, but definitely one of several worthwhile perspectives to have deeply internalized.

This seems on brand for an old tech company like AT&T. But Amazon is a puzzle to me. it’s been a decade since people started talking about how terrible it is to work there, and how all of the squeeze they put on employees is for short term gain, but they have clearly had immense growth since then, and (while every company has failures) considerable innovation. How are they “getting away with it“? Shouldn’t all of the high performers have left by now?

There are ways to throw money at the stress you are feeling, which will still be cheaper than divorce. Children can get much easier as they mature, which might give you space to work through your marriage even if it feels impossible now.

I was deeply burned out at the 14 mark with my first child. I did lots of things since then and am much better even after more children.

I’ll throw in another anecdata point (more than one as I have multiple children): I found them to be mostly logistical burden for the first few months he is writing about, but my love fully developed over the years. Don’t give up hope if you’re not feeling it instantly!

They seem to really prioritize “just works”. I am currently reviewing a PR that assembles some code as a string, using a CSV with carefully named columns. It does, in fact , work on the example CSV. I would invite this team to approve and support that for me over the next 5 years.

I've been on both sides of the table for both full-time and consultants. The first rule of humans is that they vary widely within categories (even if there are statistically significant differences in population average), so I urge people to take all of the anecdotes on this page with many grains of salt.

That said, here are some of my own, condensed across experiences:

- An executive wanted to use ML, couldn't get enough political capital to build a full-time team (and didn't have the knowledge to interview candidates anyway). A very small consulting firm, sourced from high personal trust networks, got an MVP going. That led to a FT team getting built. Code was a mess but started the flywheel and after several years everyone agrees it was a great ROI

- A large company had a tiny team using a technology that would be standard for FAANG but they had no support or training. Zero progress for about a year. Not important enough to throw huge money at but that link in the chain was becoming a bottleneck for the core product. A consultant came in explicitly as a multi-week trainer, and but the team just never got up to speed. Consultant's code examples grew until they were just direct bugfixes, and though nobody was happy, at least the crisis was resolved.

- A product finally reaches product market fit. Executives decide to hire only after the team is drowning in tech debt. But it has to be full time, and it has to be junior. It takes months, then requires training. Tech debt is twice as bad as the original crisis level when the new hire becomes value positive. For some bizarre reason he leaves after exactly 2 years.

Many consultants have a branding problem: Their biggest victories are fixing a disaster that their clients would rather not talk about publicly. Hard to put on a billboard, if you ever want work from that client again!

Three, though not slam dunks:

1. What other course of study are you confident would be better given an AI future? If there's a service sector job that you feel really called to, I guess you could shadow someone for a few days to see if you'd really like it?

2. Having spent a few years managing business dashboards for users, less than 25% ever routinely used the "user friendly" functionality we built to do semi-custom analysis. We needed 4 full time analytics engineers to spend at least half their time answering ad hoc questions that could have been self-served, despite an explicit goal of democratizing data. All that is to say; don't over estimate how quickly this will be taken up, even if it could technically do XYZ task (eventually, best-of-10) if prompted properly.

3. I don't know where you live, but I've spent most of my career 'competing' with developers in India who are paid 33-50% as much. They're literally teammates, it's not a hypothetical thing. And they've never stopped hiring in the US. I haven't been in the room for those decisions and don't want to open that can of worms here, but suffice to say it's not so simple as "cheaper per LoC wins"

I suspect all the aid and help over the decades has really just prolonged things

Can you be more specific about the counterfactual? I’m assuming you’re not imagining that the country’s population would have just fallen to 0 absent aid, but I can’t figure out how you’re so sure things would have been better run

I think that’s correct – even at a “high” cost (relative to what? A random SaaS app or an hour of a moderately competent Full Stack Dev?) the ROI will already be there for some projects, and as prices naturally improve a larger and larger portion of projects will make sense while we also build economies of scale with inference infrastructure.

One of the best uses of Perplexity.ai! Pasted your text

https://www.bicycling.com/news/a26081001/cyclist-turned-bank...

I am so impressed with the work of these bloggers. The lawsuit from Francesca Gino they’re dealing with in the Harvard Business School case, and death threats in this one. It takes courage like this to make a systemic change.

People are having this conversation and “actual harm” keeps winning: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jonathan-haidt-a...