timssopomo

Heating oil prices increasing 26% in August and September, up 74% YoY... it's going to be a horrible winter for a lot of families, mine included. Heating bills are going to be over $1k / month for a lot of the northeast. You can't budget for a 75% increase in a major expense.

Spacetime sounds like really interesting technology, but I'm not sure that the comparison between CRDB is a good one.

I used to work at Cockroach Labs. The problem it's solving is fundamentally different. CRDB as a solution makes sense when you need to _guarantee_ that transactions are serializable and durable, and that your application can survive node or region failures while maintaining consistency. In a naive deployment it's significantly slower than operating on a single core, but that's the price that you pay for the ability to survive node loss without data loss.

I don't see anything that indicates how spacetime solves the core problem CRDB does, which is guaranteeing that single node failures can be tolerated with zero data loss or loss of availability. It sounds like transactions by default are required to be written to disk before completion, which makes them durable on a single node, but you can't ensure they're consistent across nodes without accepting the network overhead and losing transaction throughput (on writes, anyway).

Also, FWIW, in the several years I worked covering basically every incident, I can't recall seeing a network-bound cluster. Like anything else, there are tradeoffs. You give throughput, you get consistency and availability, and you don't need to engineer how to avoid data loss or availability with node failures. Unless I'm misunderstanding, spacetime is solving a totally different problem.

I think this is exactly right. The thing that makes AI (imo) different than hitting the center option in text suggestions is that it's _not_ simply picking the most likely word following the last. It's attending to the entirety of the context its provided, activating a semantic vector space, and predicting a response based on _that_. I've had AI infer facts about me and attitudes I hold based on related information I provided - I don't see how that isn't theory of mind.

As biological beings, we receive and respond to input from our environment constantly, even while sleeping. LLMs only receive input from their environment when they are sent a query, but the fact that they're able to respond intelligently to input indicates (to me at least) that their processing must approximate ours in meaningful ways. They do not have an embodied experience of receiving bad news, they do not know what a sinking feeling in their stomach actually _feels_ like, but they do know enough to be sensitive to human needs. I really don't see how this could be meaningfully different than human empathy unless we want to draw an arbitrary line around "must be able to live autonomously" to be considered "intelligent".

Put another way: I think they _do_ understand the queries they receive and the answers they give, at least enough to be communicative. They couldn't do what they do otherwise. A lot of people want to make human cognition more complicated (or objective) than it actually is. We take input, predict the future based on our experience, act, and then observe our actions and think about them. AI does the same apart from (maybe) observing its own actions. But then, you could argue that the next turn is them observing their actions.

The concerning disanalogy is that we assume that they are like us because they speak like us and can understand us, and that is a really bad leap in logic. Whatever intelligence they possess, it is fundamentally different from ours and impossible for us to comprehend.

You don't tell them they're not allowed. You ask them what they need from the meeting and how so you can free up the time from their calendar, or what they need to comfortably delegate the responsibility to you.

Managers don't do this stuff for funsies they do it because they don't trust that their team won't go off track because of something they don't know.

Outside of California they're sparkling ai labs.

Metal bodied planes are adjusted with thumb screws and levers - they just aren't accurate enough for fine work.

Re: a woooden body, there are a couple reasons it's preferable despite the maintenance - the biggest is that they can be adjusted to fit a specific blade and chip breaker. Since the blade and chip breaker are made by hand, you can't mass produce a body and still have the tool perform. The other big concerns are weight and economy. Metal bodies are way heavier. And if they break or are damaged, can't be easily fixed. A wood body can be made in a few minutes with materials that are usually found on hand.

Before the industrial revolution, there wasn't a ton of difference. If you look at a plane made in the early 19th century in both Japan and the US or Europe, they'd look pretty similar. A carpenter on one continent would probably be able to orient and use tools on the other easily.

Modern metal-bodied planes do work similarly, in that both let you set a blade slightly beyond a flat sole, allowing you to remove high surfaces on wood. That's about where the similarities end.

Japanese blades are laminated steel, and quality blades are hand-made by smiths. Smiths use proprietary techniques to make blades that can maintain edges for longer than machine-forged steels. Chipbreakers are made of laminated steel as well and can keep the primary blade under tons of tension, allowing it to remain stable even when cutting against the grain. Wooden bodies allow skilled users to adjust the blade depth within microns without sacrificing stability. Wooden bodies are easily adjusted to fit the needs of the user.

To use an analogy: using a western hand plane is a lot like trying to race a Camry rather than a Porsche. It's not that the Camry is wrong - it's just built differently. The Porsche is really easy to drive into a ditch if you're not careful. It'll break down a lot, but it'll also perform much better for a skilled driver. The Camry, conversely, will be easier for anyone to drive and probably go a lot longer without maintenance. It works fine as a daily driver, and you can tune it so that it'll perform like a Porsche would, but a very well-tuned Camry is probably not going to outperform a well-tuned Porsche and a person used to driving a Porsche is probably going to complain about the Camry's handling.

No, it's the failure to do anything about it.

Americans got robbed of something between 20-40% of the purchasing power of their dollar depending on what they're buying. People aren't stupid, they know they're getting hoodwinked when someone focuses on the fact that the rate of robbery is slowing down rather then the fact that they didn't stop the robbery in the first place.

I totally agree with everything you said about information asymmetry and responsibility to provide context. Maybe I didn't explain clearly: it's not an operational failing if someone just decides to "take initiative" to solve an irrelevant problem without telling their boss. It's not the managers job to monitor everything their employees do. It is their job to state goals, assign work, and monitor progress.

I managed reviews like this as a team lead, manager, and director at three startups. There are a lot of misconceptions from employees about the process.

It's true that managers have a lot of latitude to read self summaries and either amplify or disregard them. The #1 thing you can do to avoid problems with your own reviews is to actually understand what your manager's and the company's priorities are and align your work to them. I have given poor reviews to people who invested lots of time and energy in projects and probably even did good work on them, because they were _completely_ off strategy and completed before anyone who knew better could tell them they were a waste of time and energy.

This isn't malevolent. It's because every manager is tasked with supporting the company's overall goals, frequently with very limited resources. Work that veers off into left field, even when perceived as valuable from the employee's or peer's perspective, is basically lost opportunity to do something more valuable. And that gets very expensive when trying to grow quickly.

If you want to get ahead, you and your manager need to work together to make sure the work delivers results, is aligned with strategy, is timely, and is visible to other managers and execs. Hit all four, and the need for recognition is obvious. I've seen execs argue against managers that individuals deserve promotion. Miss one, and you're probably relying on your manager's good will and clout to make the case.

If the work is not aligned with strategy or didn't deliver results but took a lot of time, your manager will look like a fool arguing that you deserve recognition for it.

Also, re: exceeding expectations, this comes up in every org and with every team. Everyone is always graded on a curve, both within your individual team and across each exec's organization. This is because the budget for compensation is fixed ahead of time based on assumptions about the percentage of employees that will exceed expectations. As long as each exec gets roughly the expected number of employees exceeding and meeting expectations, their recommendations for promotions, bonuses, and comp adjustments will likely be approved.

If the ratio for a given exec is out of whack, the only options are: 1) Get it back in line, 2) Take budget from someone else, or 3) Increase the compensation budget.

(3) frequently can't be done without board approval, so is not really an option. (2) is going to start a knife fight between execs over whose employees deserve it more, which nobody wants. This leaves (1). This is why alignment and upward and outward visibility is so important - it banks you social capital with the people who have to allocate limited resources.

Having lived in Brooklyn and Jersey City for a combined 12 years, starting when an office worker could still buy a literal house in Prospect Heights, I'm fully convinced that "gentrification" is a meaningless phrase and we need a completely different way of studying this issue that looks at the role of finance and government in displacing the poor.

Wealthy individuals moved into "gentrifying" neighborhoods _after_ massive movements of capital, not before. In 2007, no professional was leaving the upper east side to move to Williamsburg or Prospect / Crown Heights. After Bloomberg rezoned the waterfront and rammed Atlantic Yards through, boatloads of money moved in. Vacant lots and abandoned buildings were torn down, new ones were built, "luxury" housing stock was created and _then_ rich people moved in.

It's not all that different than VC money in startups - investors are sheep. Once it becomes clear a big fish has made an investment in an area, money floods in and drives up prices. To justify the increase in land values, investors have to raise rents. To raise rents, they need to improve the housing stock. This creates the inventory that the wealthy purchase.