sbilstein

Personally I think LLM benchmarks make agents worse. All these companies chase the benchmarks, overfit, and think being able to cheat at the math olympiad is gonna get us to AGI. Instead researchers should peer in and get me an agent that can reliably count the number of "i"'s in mississippi.

The man lived at the same time my great grandfather did, a ww1 Jewish German veteran.

Everyone’s views on their integration into German / Gentiles society were completely upended throughout those years. Einstein wasn’t always an ardent Zionist, he wasn’t always a pacifist, his lived experiences caused changes. Your question compresses 30 years of life, say 1925-1955, into a simple binary to try and drive some nasty conclusion.

You can definitely go to a mall and get ray bans with solid barrel hinges

As a kid I ate this stuff up. In the eighth grade, I defaced my middle school website.

The IT person easily figured out it was me and then tricked me into thinking I would be expelled within days. She pulled me out of class, told me such in the hallway, let me return to class where I held in tears until the end of the day.

Nothing happened and the school year ended a few weeks later. Towards the end of the summer I realized it had been a bluff and I wouldn’t be punished. Took me a few years later to realize how much of a favor that all was! The county school of conduct clearly said cybercrime was punishable by expulsion so she could have absolutely put me in some kind of hell. The fear set me straight hah.

Not in an urban area. E-bikes fly through sidewalks, bike lanes, crosswalks in NYC. Threatening pets and people at all times. Bikes were already bad, now it’s just more and faster.

Therapy, meds, support groups on Reddit, and exercise are the best thing you can do to deal with childhood trauma. It actually seems to get worse if you don’t manage it, I probably only really started attacking my trauma at 28/29. Made a big difference in personal and professional success.

Yep. I’m personally skeptical of so many other use cases for LLMs but CoPilot is fantastic and basically just autocomplete on rocket fuel. If you can use autocomplete, you can use CoPilot super effectively.

Be nice but remember you have objective skills and you need to suss out the CEOs objective skills.

1) Can they raise money? Proof is good here. Sometimes someone will say "I want you as my co-founder to go and raise my seed round" and you can condition leaving your current job on getting at least some checks in. Remember, this founder _knows_ you can deliver the goods, you are an employed software engineer. Can they?

2) Can they recruit? The process might be a mess but are they treating your time and concerns with respect?

3) Do they view you as an equal partner? Make sure you nail down exactly what they want. If they want a true co-founder, ask for 50%. If they don't, make sure you understand what it means to be an employee to a non-technical founding team.

Well, in this scenario, you are actually the 'former' colleague getting recruited to be a co-founder while the other folks stay stable. You just admitted you would and I wouldn't be surprised if there is a PM or even another engineer who would want to join forces. That's different than a complete stranger recruiting you -- I would be very wary.

Oh absolutely. Twice I made the mistake of coming onto a startup to fix the “mess” the previous dev shop had made.

Both times the founders had developed an incredibly negative relationship with their dev shop. Hell, the company with the Series A was withholding payments, the preseed company at least paid their bills.

I naively thought “of course they hate working with a dev shop, the incentives are wrong. I’m FTE with percentage points equity. I’ll fix it.”

Of course, things got better, but growth stalled or never happened, blame gets shifted, suddenly that founder who was excited to hire top tier talent is very disappointed in the very equity and salary expensive engineer you are. You end up being the new target of their animosity. You start to empathize with the folks in India, China, Ukraine or Argentina whose history lingers in the git blame. They’re not stupid, the incentives were just wrong!

The thing is…the CEO who failed to find a technical co-founder, retain them, or replace them with the same equity agreement has already demonstrated their inability to work with technical people. If they are coming from tech, the fact that they couldn’t convince a former colleague to work with them means they’ll be a terrible manager. If they come from finance, as many founders do, you are a line item.

At the end of this, hopefully sooner than later, you’ll quit, you’ll get fired, or you’ll collect paychecks while looking for the next better thing.

As an engineer, stay away from mediocre CEOs.

The MAGA deadhead crossover vibe is so weird. At least the actual cultural icons they worship seem to have kept their heads on at old age.

Oh yes! Extend that to fish and you get Tokyo where you have to work your ass off to get mediocre sushi.

common app is over 20 years old.

everyone, except Reason, knows that scammers descend on disaster areas. who knows if this guy is gonna repair roofs to code? or just rip off desperate families. i lived in florida for 20 years, beware the post-hurricane “helpers”