catgary

It’s like someone had Claude binge on Galton, Murray and Yarvin then let it loose on Hacker News.

Dropping slurs after being compared to a eugenicist is an interesting choice. Maybe you would be more comfortable in the comments of Curtis Yarvin’s blog. You’d certainly get less pushback there.

Whereas “abstraction ceiling” is hard science backed by ample literature, not a loose metaphor directly contradicted by several prominent mathematicians who didn’t quit when the going got tough.

I think the fact the Feynman took an IQ test and scored 127 is damning of the entire concept. I think what turns mathematicians off is the thought that psychologists who couldn’t tell you the difference between a scheme and a metric space think they can actually measure who has the capacity to be a mathematician and who doesn’t.

Like, why fucking bother doing anything? Why run the 100 meters at the Olympics, let’s just do some genetic testing and measurements to pick the fastest man in the world. Why teach kids music, let’s just measure hand size and do some sight singing exercises and teach the talented kids piano. This whole nonsense reeks of Gattaca-style quasi-eugenics where people get sorted into profession by people who don’t actually have expertise in any of them. You’re not in the guild, you don’t get to appoint to the guild, and you certainly don’t get to gatekeep who can apply for the guild.

Edit: Dropping slurs when someone compares your views to eugenics is an interesting strategy. Shouldn’t you be at a meetup discussing Curtis Yarvin’s work or something?

That stuff always gives me such a eugenics 2.0 vibe — no, no, the hierarchy is based on innate cognitive ability now. Gives me the creeps that they're actually in academia pushing that stuff.

Well you're just a generally rude person, aren't you.

That's far different than telling a math PhD whom you've never met that they hit their "abstraction ceiling" based on a 2/3 paragraph comment on hacker news. I'm sure you'd have said a similar thing to a young Grothendieck if he were describing his early struggles in graduate school. You're getting pushback because you were being rude and presumptuous.

> Since then I've had the chance, in the world of mathematics that bid me welcome, to meet quite a number of people, both among my "elders" and among young people in my general age group, who were much more brilliant, much more "gifted" than I was. I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas, juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle - while for myself I felt clumsy. even oafish, wandering painfully up a arduous track, like a dumb ox faced with an amorphous mountain of things that I had to learn ( so I was assured), things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to the end.

(Alexander Grothendieck, Recoltes et Semailles)

Amazing that he managed to keep going after hitting his abstract ceiling in graduate school.

Spector is 70 years old, that’s a pretty reasonable age for retirement?

This plus the zoom firing anecdote is basically confirming that Garg operates at a Cousin Greg level.

> Garg acknowledges he’s “hard-nosed” and the famous Zoom layoffs severely damaged the company’s reputation — a mistake he knows will continue to haunt him.

I really hope Garg is here reading this. It’s not just a mistake that will continue to haunt him, it’s all he’s ever going to be. It’s how he was introduced in this headline. It’s how he’ll be referred to when he starts his next venture. If newspapers publish his obituary someday, it’ll be in the first few sentences explaining why anyone knows his name.

I think, generally speaking, the decision to enforce a linter in CI/CD pipelines is well within a project lead’s or technical director’s purview, and there seems to be a pretty broad consensus that they add value, so they’ll almost always be in CI/CD pipelines. So just use the same linter locally and format on save so you catch any issues like your comment getting folded example.

I think you should just focus on the road because most of us are just trying to get home safely to our families. Some of us are even biking beside the road on a lightly-protected bike lane.

Yeah, because they aren’t in need of a social safety net.

I think you need to give some concrete examples, considering the US happily let its companies offshore a lot of work to China over the years, and Chinese funds own large chunks of American companies.

I’ve found they’re quite good when you’re higher in the compiler stack, where it’s essentially a game of translating MLIR dialects.