Random_ernest

I recall a story where a friend was unable to publish a paper in which he wrote an alternative to a very commonly used commercial tool (that virtually everybody used) with roughly 10 times better performance. He open sourced it and all, it was extremely useful, but there was no new methodology, it was simply very well implemented.

At a talk of his it lead to a very heated discussion where an older professor accused him of wasting government money on such nonsense.

Cold calling businesses is definitely not illegal in Germany if you got the contact info from their website.

The huge difference between spiritualism and religion is that religion is dogmatic and systemically organised. In my opinion freeing spirituality from the clutch of religion is the final step, not the other way around. So being spiritual but not religious is in my opinion not something that inevitably leads to religion, but if we do it right there is no need for oppressive religion anymore.

Bayes Theorem is one of the most fundamental theorems in the history of mathematics. I have yet to work in a field where it doesn't have deeply fundamental applications. In many cases expert knowledge or heuristic rules serve as prior.

Saying it is overrated is like saying sun or air is overrated.

> by automating consumption

It's called the subscription economy for a reason. Automated consumption exists and is constantly growing. The money spent on subscriptions grew in the US by >50% from 2010 to 2015.

Testing out the demo:

SELECT * FROM trips WHERE tip_amount > 500 ORDER BY tip_amount DESC

Very interesting :-)

From my very limited understanding the Graphcore machines outperform CUDA only significantly in inference, in training the improvements might not be sufficient to switch technology.

With likely very dire results, yes I think you should. If your mothers insurance rate goes up, since you got one of these dna tests for Christmas, she should be involved in the decision to publish this data in the first place.

But the problems where we apply human labour are vastly different from the ones where we apply machine labour. In (most) tasks where we apply human labour a few errors are tolerated.

Having worked extensively on synthetic data, what's your "verdict" on the topic? People seem to be very divided about it.

To me it's not about input being the bottleneck, but about Vim having a modular grammar, such that my brain can stay in "problem space" instead of "how do I edit the file space".

It allows me to have a deeper level of focus.

Very interesting. I feel like I have written this exact sentence somewhere online only with the languages reversed. Tried to get into FP multiple times with Haskell, never clicked, then tried Clojure and felt productive after 2 days.

For some years I was the developer you talk about, who always knew everything better, now I am a manager at a startup. So I was able to see both sides of the discussion.

I feel like it always comes down to a communication issue. Team members need to feel heard, and feel acknowledged that you fully understood what they are suggesting. On the other hand they need to understand that there are constraints that force a decision that might not technically be the best, but is pareto optimal. When this discussion occurs I sometimes bring up the analogy of these space movies where they put everything on a table that the astronauts have up there and try to make something out of it that mostly consists of duct-tape. Sure there are better tools, but the stuff on the table is all we have. Another thing that took me very long to understand as a developer is that innovation is a risk that might not always make sense economically. A thing that took me long to understand as a manager is that the happiness of your devs is one of your most precious resources that you have to manage well.

> Even the example of hosting complexity being replaced by cloud companies seems kind of silly to me. Maybe that’s saving very small companies a sizable fraction of their engineering resources, but I really doubt it for medium or larger companies.

This might even lead to an _increase_ in demand for software engineering, since now small companies can write their own custom software cheaper and more reliable. It's called Jevons paradox.