tech_ken

> The only way it will result in less work and the same or better quality of life is if you’re self-employed or are employed by a compassionate human

Or you have a good union

Arc was a beautiful browser to use, but they lost a lot of my trust after that massive security vuln that they shipped as a silly customization feature

> Car debt is terrible. But many people can’t get car debt, because many banks won’t write a $3,000 car loan, much less to someone with unsteady income. The bottom quintile often can’t even reach the $1,000 car - it’s hard to get out of the cycle where you can’t get a job because you don’t have a car. When people wave off Waymo or bus lanes or bike lanes because car culture is fine, they mean it works fine for them.

Banger post. My first car was a $1200 Geo Prism that I bought through the mechanic shop at the gas station up the street. It was older than my (younger) brother; got a good 5 years out of it before the transmission literally fell apart on Rt 2.

> I would burn my stake to the ground if it meant 1% higher chance of not dying to an LLM

Then why aren't you? If you genuinely believe this then industrial sabotage seems both ethical and achievable (to me anyways).

It’s wild to me that the US tries to resolve labor issues with immigration control rather than just having good unions. Back in the 80s we decided we wanted free commerce at the expense of all else. Well guess what, that means you’re competing with the global labor pool. This shit is like trying to have your cake and eat it to; we want only the upside of the global neoliberal order, and try our damndest to outsource all its downsides.

I like having both :)

Idk I think it's kind of neat

I think there's a very interesting history to be written/read about the emergence of the persona of 'founder'. I'm seeing it all over the place these days (alt. 'entrepeneur' or 'changemaker', the second of which really grates on me). It feels (to me) very much like 'small business owner' or 'the kids' or something: an idea or prototype of a person who is to be managed and possibly even produced by society. Not saying this in a critical way, I think every era has it's various typologies of 'person in society', but this one seems kind of unique in some interesting ways; very much a product of the last ~50 years of US history.

edit: I'll say that in my personal opinion the critical thing a founder needs is a strong internal locus of control. I feel that this is also an important product of a liberal arts education, so I see some natural alignment. I worry about the degree to which the 'total university' strips 18-22 year olds of important rites of development: learning to feed for yourself, find housing, meet friends organically (as opposed to because you share a dorm), etc. I could see a more pared down, "education-mostly" school in a large city being an interesting avenue for new models of university.

Oh yeah I absolutely agree that there's lots of greenfield for relative newcomers to find some big improvements! I'm just saying that reasoning about 'best practices' in terms of what works for something like a CPU is missing some important and relevant differences.

But in the case of CPU architecture there are SOME people who understand how things work 100%, and they've built and vetted abstractions/mental models that enable other engineers and scientists to have that kind of mixed shallow/deep understanding in a way that works. On the side of LLMs we're still lacking an expertise which could flawlessly explain how these things operate; the abstractions that we're using are instead derived inductively and are totally unvetted.

Developing an intuition about high dimensional systems is pretty different from understanding the character of some specific point on a 1e9+ dimensional manifold of parameters, in my professional opinion (setting aside all the degrees of freedom that come from the structure of the thing). Sure one can understand generic principles like the curse of dimensionality, but truly groking how an LLM works is basically an open problem as far as I'm aware. I'm not saying there's no benefit for amateurs to study how LLMs work, but let's be realistic about how far mere intuition can truly take anyone in this space.

> it makes me wonder what more democratic, free market companies would be like.

I was wondering the same after PRW lol. Recently I had the chance to ask a friend of mine who worked in Google Infra (years ago) if they had ever tried to 'liberalize' their infrastructure planning; something like having internal business units bid on space, power, and compute instead of distributing it top-down. He said that yes, this was actually something like their original operating model, and the outcome was that YouTube basically bought up every piece of hardware in the company and then leased them out to other verticals at a profit.

I'd honestly recommend checking out the People's Republic of Walmart; it's a super short read and anything I say would be basically a warmed up rehash of whatever I remember from it.

Basic point is just that operations research/supply chain management was heavily developed by the USSR to support the central economy and now it's used by every major retailer (among others) to manage supply chains that are massively larger than anything the USSR ever got close to.