arconis987

next time, have the LLM alternate between these two steps:

- Do some work - Critique the work

it will converge better

I live in SF, and I take it daily. It's cheaper than paying for the parking garage near the office. And it's cheaper than Uber: the base rate is similar to Uber's, but there is no need to add a tip.

Waymo sometimes does weird, unexpected things - but safely. Once it seemed to change its mind about the optimal route a few times over the course of 10 seconds, switching safely between two lanes back and forth a few times before committing. It used its turn signal fine, and the lanes were clear, so it wasn't a problem, but this isn't something humans do.

Sometimes it behaves oddly, but I have developed confidence that it will do those odd things safely.

Is it just me, or is the language in the essay strangely hard to parse?

> But insofar as it is the passing on of second-hand knowledge about being, it is itself a form of imposture that reproduces and impersonates without meaning or sense and therefore enacts imposture in the act of naming itself as well as in the manner that it imitates an act of passing on knowledge of an existing disease or syndrome.

The essay doesn’t actually have a lot to say, but that fact is hidden by convoluted language.

Maybe the author is trying to give the reader impostor syndrome?

I think this is why people believe 10x developers exist. They are just developers who actually work a full work day consistently.

The NYT vs. SSC episode reminds me of a conflict in Mormonism, the religion I was raised in. A Mormon named John Dehlin criticized the church, and Mormon apologists published a hit piece about him, taking quotations out of context and claiming he was not a true believer. The apologists ended up experiencing a lot of backlash, and their organization, FARMS, had to close down.

The NYT piece on SSC felt like a religious crusade to reveal a blasphemer, taking quotations out of context and making weird, tenuous connections to other known blasphemers.

Count me as another data point. I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts, and it has not affected my social or professional life in any noticeable way. I was worried I would lose access to my Oculus purchases, but I did not.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was reading my ads profile summary in Facebook settings. It claimed I was in “Established Adult Family Life with Children” or something similar. This was revolting. I was disturbed that Facebook seemed to know I was expecting a baby. I realized that Facebook was extracting far more value than it was giving, so I deleted my account.

This is my go-to implementation, but I make one little tweak. It’s very unlikely that you will overflow a long, but you can you guarantee that you’ll avoid overflow like this:

mid = min + (max - min) / 2;

We went through a brutal battle with Postgres bloat recently. Indexes were composed of 80% bloat, 20% useful data after years of heavy write activity. Vacuuming indexes was getting slower and slower, bringing us precariously close to transaction ID wraparound outages.

Glad that pg_repack exists, which is an extension that can be used to elegantly rebuild your indexes from scratch.

Looking forward to zheap! (Which should obviate the need for index rebuilding)

This is fantastic! Love the parallel vacuum feature, which should help my team’s sanity with a write-heavy workload.

Does anyone know when the zheap storage system will be released? This system will apparently obviate the need for vacuums all together since old row version information will be kept in an undo log instead of in the heap. This will be a game changer for us.

The 50% tax that pg dislikes for startup founders is basically what I experienced during our startup’s liquidity event. I imagine that a fairly large number liquidity events are the same.

The acquirer paid us out in cash, which meant we were taxed at the highest marginal federal income tax rate of 37%. California taxed 10%, making the total 47%.

I only kept a little more than half of the upside, but it was still life changing.

I had to pay the taxes immediately. In pg’s example, the wealth tax would require payment over 6 decades, which is easier.

The wealth tax seems fine to me.

Agreed. Seems like a bit too much self-aggrandizement. This sort of lofty rhetoric is fine if you have developed a COVID vaccine, but perhaps not if you’ve made a useful tool for system analysis. The teams that built Linux, Redis, Postgres, etc. were realistic and concrete about their value propositions and did not make any pronouncements like, “we’re changing the world.” Seems more honest.