solarmist

Bullshit. We built a world that constantly exploits human limits, then act surprised when people hit them. No one has infinite willpower.

I'm an American and I've really never related to Charlie Brown myself, but I've heard Peanuts is huge in Japan and other asian countries.

There was also a discussion somewhere where they switched off the OSS subtitling software they were using onto a commercial product that doesn't implement many of the features (mostly typesetting features) of the previous software.

Relevant discussion from a previous post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45497900

I get it and it does make sense. Humans always consider the unfamiliar dangerous by default, but I believe it's deeper and simpler than the arguments you present.

This is not a strictly human trait. Anthropologists are pretty sure we received this trait from our primate ancestors. It evolved out of family groups/tribalism.

Also, a large part of our brains are safety mechanisms. Many features are directed at keeping us alive which is why so many of our what if scenarios are about the worst happening.

In very tribal environments anyone not in your in-group is considered unsafe even if they look exactly like you (i.e. a tribe from 10 km away).

But the thing that has made humans the most successful species on Earth is our ability to override this behavior to cooperate at larger and larger scales.

Do these get posted publicly?

I’m not sure you really can, at least not in the way it’s often portrayed. Founders usually need a high level of skill or a clearly transferable capability in something already valuable. That phrase gets repeated a lot, but the more I think about it, the more it feels like an oversimplification. Maybe there’s a version of it that works, but it’s probably more about reframing or uncovering hidden leverage than starting from zero.

This is such a good point. People tend to focus on money as the main form of privilege, but that internalized sense of “I belong here” might matter even more. It’s not just confidence—it’s a kind of default assumption that you’ll be taken seriously, that you’ll have options, that failure won’t wreck your life.

I’ve seen it in startups too. Some founders take bold risks because they know, consciously or not, that if it doesn’t work out, they’ll be fine. Others carry the weight of “I can’t afford to screw this up,” and that changes how they operate. Even if they’re equally capable, the emotional cost of risk is just higher when you don’t have that built-in safety net.

And from the outside, those differences are invisible. Both people might succeed, but one was playing on easy mode and didn’t know it. The other had to brute-force their way through every step. That gap is real, and we don’t talk about it enough.

What are you skeptical of? I believe the problem this is solving is a framework that's not CUDA that allows low level access to the hardware, makes it easy to write kernels, and is not Nvidia only. If you watch the video you can write directly in asm if you need to. You have full control if you want it. But it provides primitives and higher level objects that handle common cases.

I'm a novice in the area, but Chris is well respected in this area and cares a lot of about performance.

Yeah, the mic quality was terrible.

Not sure I fully understand your comment, but I'm pretty sure the talk addresses exactly that.

The primitives and pre-coded kernels provided by CUDA (it solves for the most common scenarios first and foremost) is what's holding things back and in order to get those algorithms and data structures down to the hardware level you need something flexible that can talk directly to the hardware.

I'm really hoping Modular.ai takes off. GPU programming seems like a nightmare, I'm not surprised they felt the need to build an entire new language to tackle that bog.

Anyone know anything about this or can evaluate this claim?

Seems like a major thing if it’s true that would inspire an entire new area research.

No, where'd you get that impression?

I definitely used to. The work culture and attitudes, particularly of management, passed the breaking point for me a few years ago. I realized work was not my whole life nor did I aspire to that.

As I mentioned here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121594)

I find this attitude baffling.

In my time at tier one companies I have worked with the best engineers I have come across in my entire career (even the worst engineers were more than competent) who were working on deep issues that could affect the revenue of the entire company because they’re laser focused on providing value to the business, instead of doing engineering for engineering’s sake. I have grown by far more in these kinds of roles than I have anywhere else because the kind of problems you encounter at such a high scale just don’t exist elsewhere. And most of them have been there for at least five years if not longer you don’t make those kind of contributions to accompany without a long tenure.

I felt like I was doing that with what I described.

What changes to expectations are you talking about?

It has turned into something similar to what people in trading companies on Wall Street deal with. Constant grind, unrealistic expectations, and projects done in order to get a promotion instead of because it provides value to the customers or the business.

That said the amount that you make is insane some of the smartest engineers I’ve ever worked with have been at these companies and a lot of them have really strong engineering cultures, and standards.

The current work environment seems designed to use up bright young engineers, and burn them out within a few years. This is a significant shift from 15 years ago, where it was a much more sustainable place to be.

Honestly, it was also a red flag for me that they don’t actually know what they want and have bad communication between leadership and engineering. Prior to this interview I was already on the fence about them.

They don’t work mostly in Go. Even the interviewer said that he’s vaguely familiar with this area of the code, but he doesn’t work and Go. They work mostly in Kotlin and they explicitly are advertising for solid generalists.

That doesn’t answer the question.

For me as a job applicant even in the best case I would need to do 3 to 5 interview interviews. The same is true for companies in the best case it will take at least 3 to 5 interviews to find somebody. Are they supposed to have 3 to 5 temporary staff for weeks at a time?

How much time should that take per interview? How would somebody that currently has a job manage that kind of time commitment?

I’m speaking as a human looking at the historical context of eating animals. Predators taste terrible because they are high effort, low reward in terms of nutritional value.

I am absolutely not advocating that we start eating pets. I would feel terrible about it too. And if I have an option, besides starving to death, I would take it.

The other reason why predators have become pets is because they had a strong additive value in terms of hunting or protection. Dogs in term protection, and hunting and cats in terms of pest control. Groups with these kind of pets tended to fair better.

Sure, that would be even better. But how would that even look?

In the best case applicants needs to apply multiple companies. Companies need to interview multiple applicants and have a way to compare those applicants.

Those are the most basic constraints I can think of. How do you make that cost tens of hours for each round?

It is obvious, but it’s also very time-consuming. You can’t solve ambiguous open ended problems in a set amount of time while being watched closely.

And I’ve heard just as many horror stories about companies hiring from small companies that the engineers haven’t kept up with engineering, culture and practices and are coding like it’s 2004.

Also, those types of stories tend to pop up with any engineer who’s only worked at a single place.

My point isn’t that there’s not bad engineers at Facebook it’s that there’s bad engineers everywhere and filtering based on random signals like this is not useful.

Fair

That definitely massively accelerated it but you’re looking way too short term that’s only been in the last 10 to 15 years.

I agree that other industries are not YET at the point where software is , but you’re not looking hard enough if you don’t see the short tenures compared to the 25-30 years they used to have.

And yeah, it might be in an equilibrium now, but how long can it stay in an equilibrium? I’d guess at max 10 to 15 years.

So you’re saying that none of those roles could be cross hired in the early 2000s between any of the other roles?

That’s the point I was trying to make. Not that the software didn’t exist or people weren’t doing specialized applications.

Which was caused by cost cutting measures, MBA disease, in companies to begin with.

We’re just seeing the end of the cat and mouse struggle that’s been going on since the 60s. And massively accelerated in the 80s.

It’s unfortunate for companies though because they’re the ones that will lose out in the end when all the experienced people start retiring and they have no one to hire.

It’s an untenable position to not train people, period. There is no schooling you could go through that would educated junior dev to the level of a senior dev. And it’s the same for any other role. Experience is not optional.

My understanding is even in the early 2000s it was pretty much just firmware versus desktop software with a small niche for Mac developers.

Edit: my point was not that specialized software applications didn’t exist. It was that people were expected to be able to jump from stack to stack when they change roles in a way that has disappeared from modern job applications.

This has been knowledge for the top orthopedic surgeons for decades (at least 20 years). But for your local orthopedic surgeon, it depends on when they graduated whether they know this or not.