raphaelrk

    Location: NYC/Chicago
    Remote: Yes, I'm mainly looking for remote roles
    Willing to relocate: Possibly
    Technologies: Typescript (frontend / backend / react native), Python, AI/LLMs
    Resume/CV: https://raphaelrk.com/
    Email: [email protected]

I would call myself a product engineer, working throughout the stack to build things that feel great. Interested especially in remote opportunities. Open to contracting, part-time, and full-time opportunities.

Previously co-founder/cto of Summer Playbook / Swipehouse (YC W18) & studied CS at Harvard.

  Location: San Francisco
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Yes
  Technologies: Typescript (frontend / backend / react native), Python, AI/LLMs
  Résume/CV: https://linkedin.com/in/raphaelrk
  Email: [email protected]

I would call myself a product engineer, working throughout the stack to build things that feel great.

Interested especially in remote opportunities, but also open to in-person. Open to contracting, part-time, and potentially full-time opportunities.

Previously co-founder/cto of Summer Playbook / Swipehouse (YC W18) & studied CS at Harvard.

According to my App Store history, on May 30, 2010, I downloaded the app "Ian's Laces — How to tie and lace shoes (Lite)". Since then, I've very rarely had to tie my shoes :)

I’m wondering if anything in their setup is worth incorporating into the “status quo”

The most immediately relevant thing is equity-based comp that doesn’t have a tax hit.

Another thing I find interesting is whether this comp might be more “mission-aligned”:

- It’s likely this is all just to accomodate their “non-profit with limited profit subsidiary” structure

- But there's still a deeper question there: do current specifics of how startups do comp / investment / exits somehow result in societally suboptimal outcomes?

- If so, how exactly, and is it fixable, or are those inherent properties of an ecosystem of competitive, high-growth startups?

- One way that might be the case is if there’s a pressure for “growth at all costs”, which is something OpenAI would want to avoid.

- The pressure for that could come from a lot of sources — intrinsic desire for growth; financial expectations from shareholders (employees, VCs, public market investors, even customers); regulatory requirements around fiduciary duty; existential risk of going under or competition, or needing to hit a certain size to achieve whatever it is you want to achieve

- Another way this could be the case would be limited exit opportunities, or limited creativity around them / sticking to well-trodden paths, ultimately resulting in control of the company being handed over to either poor management or groups prioritizing growth at the expense of good product

- Thinking about twitter and reddit’s API shutdowns here — how much do unpopular product decisions like that come from legal specifics? Or perhaps those would have happened no matter what, to keep the companies from going under or to have enough profits to fund further innovation.

- It’s not obvious that this setup avoids a motivation for “growth at all costs” — employees’ pay is still based on increasing profit, and if it doesn’t grow as fast as competitors it may just become irrelevant. But it’s possible it affects other strings around company control. Not sure — IANAL :)

I wonder whether AT Proto, the protocol used in bluesky, might make for a good base for a decentralized reddit alternative.

- public

- extensible

- bring your own client

- domains as usernames

- federated but with escape hatches so you're never tied to a single host

- considerations for twitter-scale from the start, eg with "big graph servers"

Still under a waitlist / closed for now / under very active development, but seems very promising.

"In the province of the mind, there are no limits."

I do wonder to what degree this is true

There are claims that other animals see more colors than us. But what if that's not actually the case? Maybe conscious minds are only capable of seeing the same rainbow that we do

The mapping could be quite different, and even if you can't add more letters to "RGB" you can add more letters to "HSL", making things look neon, stereoscopic, brushed, iridescent, hyperbolic, etc. But perhaps what we see is already all the possible "base" colors?

Had a homeless guy sit behind me on the bart repeatedly saying he'd slice my neck if I turned around or moved at all. It was a mostly-empty car, and it seemed like he was serious and that nobody else was going to do anything. Wound up sitting still and bolting out at the next stop. Tried calling the cops after and they didn't care in the slightest. Just one of many incidents.

I live in Cambridge, MA now, and it's a million times better. Only thing remotely close that I've seen was one time biking past the Woods-Mullen Shelter in Boston (saw two other comments here call it "Mass and Cass"), except it's just one block and extremely tame compared to what you find all over the Mission, SOMA, and Tenderloin.

What I meant was I expected numpy to be faster than the js libraries I was testing, simply because people use it so much more, for real "scientific computing" work. And indeed it is very fast given it only uses the CPU, but that still leaves its matrix multiplication as ~100x slower than what my mac is capable of.

You're right, it's not a fair comparison -- I think it's still interesting though, since numpy is the standard people would reach for, which made me think it would be the fastest / use the GPU. I expect a python library that uses the GPU would be just as fast as the others.