paulz_

Quite Close!

As you implied it would be expensive to experience the cutting edge right now but here is what it would look like:

You would want a really high end headset, a haptic suit, haptic gloves, graphics cards and a pc to run it, and game to actually experience it.

-Pimax 8k $1500

-Research grade haptic gloves[0] $5000-$10000?

-Tesla Suit $2750

-Gaming pc and Scalped 3090s to run in SLI $10000

You could do a treadmill too but I actually don't think that tech is quite there yet and question just how much more immersed you would be at that point.

Now once your discount iron man suit is fully equipped what game do you actually play? You mentioned skyrimVR it actually has ok haptic support via mods.

However, what you really would want to play for the full Oasis experience is VRChat where with your haptic suit you could high five someone or feel them tap on your shoulder. It's also a thriving community full of bizarre worlds and avatars. Most of the hardware isn't directly supported in VRChat but you can find guides online of people getting it to work.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK2y4Z5IkZ0

Hey if the worst thing the HN comments have to say is "Well, he's no Bertrand Russell." I'd call that a pretty positive reception!

Version 0.5: https://youtu.be/suHOLFhbwsM

One thing that helped was acknowledging in my own mind that the worst could happen. I could fail completely. I could burn through all my money. I could let everyone down. I could embarrass myself. Whatever the worst was, I considered that could happen. Frankly it's likely to happen. Startups are hard as hell.

Then I considered I could just go back to working a normal job. Pays well, I get all my social status back. All these icky feelings go away. And I genuinely considered this. There is nothing wrong with that life. I loved those jobs!

What I found though, was that even in the face of all that risk it seemed a lot more interesting to try to do my own project.

But with those considerations I approached it a lot different. The daily risks feel like the activity more than whatever this may or may not look like in 10 years. I think this is better for the company too because it's possible to constrain yourself if you're convinced you already know what the end is like. Better to follow your own curiosity.

That's the theory anyway. Again, this is advice coming from someone who feels extremely unqualified to give it haha.

There is also a book by Carrol Dweck called 'Mindset' that speaks pretty directly to what you're asking about. You can get a pretty good idea of the concepts by googling fixed mindset vs growth mindset. The book itself has a couple slow parts but is pretty good overall.

Boy I really hesitate to offer advice on this. Just know it's coming from someone who is in the midst of starting a not yet successful startup. So maybe this is terrible advice, or I may be the wrong person to give it. Seems like enough of a disclaimer.

I found myself experiencing feelings similar to what you're describing. Something that helped was not focusing on the future end state so much.

I remember one time seeing this interview with Bezos where they were congratulating him on Amazon's stock price at that time. And he was talking about how he tries to encourage Amazon employees to think in terms of inputs to Amazon, not outputs (like stock price).

I really like that idea of focusing on doing the hard work at hand and not worrying too much about what comes out on the other side.

Obviously this can go too far, you still need some vision to aim at. But I find that not only with this experience, but with learning other things too there can be sort of a stall where it feels like nothing is happening. You keep showing up every day but it feels like there are no results.

There is value in having a sort of stubbornness in the face of that. Focusing in on doing the work of the day and finding joy in it, rather than worrying about a payoff that may or may not ever come.

I think this is one of the reasons that startups work better when it's a topic you're sort of obsessed with. It helps to be able to work on something that you don't even care all that much if it leads to anything. Just a weird and interesting thread you keep pulling on.

I'm not super familiar with this space but at first glance this seems great!

I've been meaning to goof around with discord bots. When I do, I'll be sure to check it out.

I've listened to a few things lately that could benefit from that. You wouldn't happen to know any good models available for that would you?

With digital goods users can buy. Reddit has already blazed the trail here with awards and reactions you can pay to add to a post or a comment.

You can make it completely optional and for the most part not upset users who don't buy them.

There is basically no upper threshold on how much you can charge. You want to have really cheap stuff too obviously. Something for everybody.

In gaming this trend of being able to buy cosmetic items has also been developing. In some games users pay hundreds of dollars for one cosmetic item.

Rather than counting on your own creativity to create the digital goods you can also create a marketplace for user created goods and then take a fee off the top.

You could do all this with crypto, or NFTs. There would be nothing wrong with doing it that way. But you could also just store that stuff in databases and it would work about as well for these purposes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmRl0D-RkPU&t=1205s

I think there is still a bit of a perception that IC levels higher than Senior are about "Senior but with more interesting technical problems". This is largely false.

Anyone know of a career path where this is actually the case? Lately it seems like everywhere I turn it's meetings and PowerPoint. Ideally I'd like to keep working on harder and harder engineering problems until I die of old age.

There is actually an app that I used to setup for people years and years ago that did this. Recently they went fully open source. Pretty neat little piece of software.

https://github.com/sandboxie/sandboxie

A few months ago Tyler Cowen had Jimmy Wales on the Conversations with Tyler podcast[0].

He spends some time talking about why he thinks Wikipedia turned out the way it did and avoid some of the potential traps you pointed out.

Really enjoyed listening to it and made me think a lot of about structure of organizations.

[0] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jimmy-wales/

I've actually been on the lookout for model hubs lately. Any that you've seen or reccomend?

I've found https://modelzoo.co/ but it seems more like a currated list of models (some incomplete) rather than a community where users share trained models.

ultimately received over $500,000 and stock options from these outside companies.

$500,000 seems like probably a little less than one year salary for a Netflix VP. But then again people have been known to engage in fraud for much less.

This is really what reddit is built for. After I read a book I can't get enough of I'll usually go check on youtube to see if the author has done any interviews or podcast and then I'll look around for the subreddit for either the author or the book and sort by top all time. Occasionally I'll also make a post.

I've also always loved the idea of a book club but I've never joined or started one.

Wow that's really cool. Any plans to share the model?

I have considered doing this exact thing. Any tips?

One thing I've wondered about is if there is even any pager network coverage where I live. I suspect yes but I don't know of any coverage maps or that sort of thing.

Firefox on android has support for ad blocking extensions. I removed reddit's app and blocked it in the browser (having an adblocker on mobile is glorious by the way). You could do the same with hacker news and youtube. Then, when you want to use them you can still open it up but it's one extra annoying step to select "temporarily allow" when trying to visit it.

I found it was really effective for cutting back on reddit but still being able to use it occasionally as needed.

Just finished the talk. Plan on reading the book. This is one of the most interesting concepts I've come across in recent memory. Really appreciate you sharing.

I like to read.

I also find that trying as hard as you can at something you find interesting in a new domain can be good for this. You hone your learning skills but I also find that other domains usually have general tricks and principals worked out that can be cross applied to other domains that haven't figured them out just yet.

In the short term you can get used to it. I used to get vr sickness instantly when moving with a joystick but eventually you get used to it. I now have zero vr sickness even when doing crazy physics defying spinning or something.

As for the long term - my hope is that it gets better as the headsets get better. It seems to so far.

One sort of interesting thing along these lines - I remember in the book "Masters of Doom" they're describing the early days of FPS development and how people would frequently get very nautious and grab the trash can by their desk to vomit.

You never hear about that anymore. What is that? Better screens? Playing games when you're a kid? Whatever is at work there, seems like it might apply to vr too.

Well this is fascinating. Thanks for making it. The SEC probably already does this kind of analysis but it makes me wonder if you could look at historical data to see which trades represented the highest gains or most relevant timing.

From there you could to try to identify which congresspeople engage in the most insider trading.

I have no knowledge of this field. Certainly not enough to know if the article is accurate (haven't ever heard of this blog till now). But many of the claims seem well cited.

If this is true...how maddening. How can you spend more than the next 10 countries combined and still mismanage your way into this predicament? Is there anything lumbering bureaucracy cannot destroy?

I can see what your getting at but I think this applies beyond programming languages. If you're interviewing someone who is into a niche programming language it can be a sign they are more interested in programming than say, someone who only knows Java etc. Obviously this won't always be the case and can lead to a weird sort of credentialing where people pretend to be into obscure languages.

It would be like if you were interviewing a chef who was saying "yeah yeah pan frying is fine but let me tell you about sous vide."

Then you go on to interview another guy who is into working the grill at chain restaurants.

Is the Sous Vide guy better? Certainly not always. But it can be an indicator this guy is a real nerd about cooking in a way that results in a better meal at the end.

Lately I've been learning / playing poker. It feels like the perfect vehicle for what you're describing. I'm still quite new to poker so don't expect any deep insights here. You learn a little bit of the math behind when to expect what card, and what card your opponent is or isn't likely to have. Then you do battle using rationality, mostly against your own emotions.

You get into these situations where you know what the "right" move is but your emotions are firing on all cylinders. All the logical fallacies you've read about over the years (loss aversion, hot hand fallacy, etc) are suddenly extremely compelling. Even knowing that they are fallacies intellectually, it can still be difficult to make the rational decision.

And so you practice. You make the rational choice over and over in order to build an edge over you opponents. You become the house.

Doing this sort of "practice" I've noticed it paying off in places in my daily life. I sometimes find myself thinking of hard ambiguous decisions in poker terms now.

One thing that makes poker, or other games different from real life is knowing if you actually made the right call or not.

In the old poker days you used to have to guess, or talk it over with your poker friends to try to figure out if you bet too much or too little on that hand you can't stop thinking about.

The most modern poker theories and practices are around game theory. Through statistical analysis, simulations, and some ML tooling you're now effectively able to ask what the right move was for any given situation and get an objectively right answer. So if you're willing to use / pay for that software you have objective answers to those questions now.

At the highest levels online players spend many hours practicing with gto trainers to cement the "right" moves for given situations.

A problem I've noticed about trying to apply some of the lessons from poker to real life is that you don't usually get that objective feedback.

In poker sometimes you make a bet and you win, but it turns out it was a very bad bet and you got lucky.

Other times you might make a very good bet 3 times in a row, and get unlucky all 3 times.

In poker you can go back and look to find that they were all the right decision using a GTO (Game Theory Optimized) training software. Real life, not so much.

That said, these types of avenues still feel valuable to me. I really do think poker has improved my rationality and decision making skills. But like poker itself, those improvements are at the edges.

Any books or writings of his you would reccomend in paticular?

I've thought about that before. You get the call. "It's 30 minutes away. I'll be there in 10"

If anyone happens to know of a career path or company that does that sort of work I would be interested to hear about it. Bonus points if the pay is half decent.

These types of situations always wind up being the most fun I have at work and leave me feeling most fulfilled. I wish I could do that all day instead of going to standups.

It sounds like you're trying to improve you're ability to focus as much as anything. Consider mindfulness meditation.

Essentially you sit in a quiet room and focus on your breath. You'll find this very difficult and your mind will wander. When you notice that your mind has wandered return your attention to the breath. Do your best not to be frustrated by this experience. You'll find even after much practice your mind still wanders away from the breath constantly. This is normal and happens to everyone.

Don't beat yourself up for your thoughts drifting while practicing. You almost want to be smiling at noticing how much the human mind does that. Think more on those terms.

You may find as you practice you'll get better at noticing your mind wandering in every day life and returning your focus to what you were doing. I also find that when practicing daily focus in general comes more easily.

Age discrimination in software does happen but it's not as prevelant as it can seem reading about it online.

There are still plenty of jobs for people in software at basically all ages. For now at least the problem tends to be too many jobs and not enough supply of people to hire.

At the end of the day what you want? A certain salary? If you define what it is people here can tell you if it's reachable in software (it probably is) and how. A certain type of work? Just tired of working in software?

It might help if you defined the end goal in a little more detail.