oddthink

> Although it turned out in the end that C++ developers actually wanted to use C++.

Oof, I don't think so. It's just ridiculous how many things Google uses C++ for where something like Go or Java would be a better fit, and everyone I talked to agreed. No one liked C++ for search-like things.

I think they just underestimated how powerful the network effects were. People wanted to use Go, but then it didn't have Flume support forever, so what can you actually do with it? And all the NLP libraries were in C++. And the vector-search library was C++, and graph clustering, and so on. One of the basic data formats was super-clunky for ages as well, but I forget if it was SSTable / RecordIO / Capacitor or what.

Or perhaps the Go creators were just writing very different code in very different domains from what I saw as the bread-and-butter C++/flume data-crunching pipelines of Search and Maps.

> E.g. If I ever see a monetary value stored in something else than integers I'm going to run away screaming (thank you Rust decimals represented as JSON floats). It's always integers unless you have a VERY good reason to do otherwise (though exported view can be in anything, even in weird bitcoded formats).

That really overstates the issue. Whole domains of finance run just fine on doubles.

If you're doing Monte Carlo options pricing over interest rate paths, and you're interested in the risk metrics, like durations, convexity, vega, and so on, no one cares what your rounding convention is. doubles are just fine, thank you. How are you going to force `exp(-rt)cashflow` to be an integer? Or the normal CDF?

Yes, there are domains where ints make sense. But it's certainly not universal, you just need to make the right engineering choice.

I've found differential forms to be more useful than GA, but that might just be that I was brought up in the MTW tradition and don't quite get GA.

Whenever I look at GA, I try to figure out where the metric comes in, and I just don't see it.

For context, way back when I did astro theory and wanted to do things like figure out things like the magnetic field structure in the curved spacetime near highly-magnetized rotating conducting spheres, and then do some basic plasma physics in that environment.

The differential geometry approach at least gives the structure to think about that, then you can go down to the index-style notation to actually get the differential equations you need to solve. The GA approach, I'm not even sure how to frame the problem.

VSCode binds a lot of basic commands to function keys, so I'm always doing Fn-F12. That seems like a weird choice, and if it really bothered me, I could remap it, but so far I haven't.

I loved that thing. I don't know how many hours I spent on that. I wish I could my kids interested in anything half as creative.

I'm sorry, it's a really inefficient format. I don't want to sit and listen for two hours to what's most likely half an hour of content by reading. Just write down what you have to say already!

I guess you could do double-speed, but I find that somehow stressful.

Edit: I just read the paper. It took me 21 minutes. It's not long, only 11 pages.

Does the "standard office" even exist? I have never seen one in my working years. I don't even know what to imagine. The closest I got was a shared office in grad school in the late 90s, but after that it's been cubes at best, long slabs of desk in an open room at worst.

I tried fountain pens for a bit back in grad school, but they honestly weren't great. They were imprecise, blobby, scritchy on the paper. Subscripts and superscripts would smear out. The best experience, IMHO, was a 0.5 mm mechanical pencil, but those smeared, so I eventually switched to pilot v5 or muji pens.

But that sounds like math, not cursive, you say? Well, yes, but there are paragraphs of thinking and doodling and argument in there with the math. My point is that fountain pens seem optimized for some kinds of writing, but certainly don't have a monopoly on all sorts of putting pen on paper.

Yes. For like a simple naive Bayes, you can say we start at 0, a user vote is worth +3, a merchant vote is +5, we decay by 0.1 every month, publish if we hit +13 (95%), un-publish at +10 (90%), etc. etc.

It's the same math as logits, but the scale's a bit nicer.

I've been using decibels as a scale for log-odds for a while when reporting results. It works pretty well, since the relevant part of the scale is wide, unlike using nepers, which I had never heard of until I started noodling around with this.

It's internal. But it's basically hooking up SQL code generation to the docs and schema of most of the tables in the data warehouse. I don't know the details, but probably also some extra stuff in the prompt to give a bit of context. It started as a few-days hack that then got momentum.

There was a 1-5 Likert scale self-rating on "leveraging AI" and a free-text box. I rambled about using claude code to help summarize my daily notes, cursor for implementation, using the chatgpt ui for broad questions (what happened to internal project X, how do I configure airflow again, etc.), then experiments with the find-the-right-table-for-you SQL generator. That seemed like about the level folks were going for.

There are some people who are really into it. The sql-generator's great for PMs; ops are experimenting with moderation triage. I personally have mixed feelings, but I'll futz with it on company time (and api $) to see if I can get it to do something useful. It'll mess up tensor alignment, but I can fix that.

So, yes, it was in the performance review. No, it wasn't a big deal. Yes, it seems to me like a reasonable nudge to get over the activation energy of learning to use the thing.

Yes, but the message from Shopify leadership is "it's part of your job to mess around with this stuff and see what works". Not "use AI at all costs".

The general feeling I'm getting is that using this AI stuff is important, but it's a learned skill, and we want as many people as possible to get familiar enough with it to have actual opinions.

I find that pretty unobjectionable.

I mean, I could walk down to a bar at 10pm, if I wanted to. I live in a city. But if I'm getting up at 6:30, I don't think I want a pint let alone three that late.

Plus, I'd still have two kids up, asking me to extend the wifi because they're not done with English yet or to help scan a page for math. I'm not going to just leave that to my partner.

Even the more traditional pint-after-work would leave me coming home tipsy at 7pm, having slacked off on all of dinner prep and child-wrangling. If I made a habit of that, it would get me my ass handed to me, and rightfully so.

I do wonder if the whole "pub-culture" thing was entirely predicated on the unpaid and unacknowledged work of women. And how much of that extended to other traditional extracurriculars like bowling leagues and clubs and such.