1penny42cents (u/1penny42cents)

1penny42cents commented on Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome colton.dev/blog/curing-yo... · Posted by u/coltonv

Glyptodon · 24 days ago

I don't consider myself a 10x engineer. The number one thing that I've realized makes me more productive than other engineers at my company is thinking through system design and business needs with patterns that don't take badly written product tickets literally.

What I've seen with AI is that it does not save my coworkers from the pain of overcomplicating simple things that they don't really think through clearly. AI does not seem to solve this.

1penny42cents · 23 days ago

> What I've seen with AI is that it does not save my coworkers from the pain of overcomplicating simple things that they don't really think through clearly. AI does not seem to solve this.

100%. The biggest challenge with software is not that it’s too hard to write, but that it’s too easy to write.

1penny42cents commented on Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria science.org/content/blog-... · Posted by u/A_D_E_P_T

soulofmischief · a month ago

Maybe some people just enjoy working.

1penny42cents · a month ago

An addiction is when our dependency an activity outweighs the net-negative effect of it.

If there’s no net-negative, there’s no addiction.

So yes, some people just enjoy working. Others are workaholics. It’s not all-or-nothing and the evaluation depends on how you calculate the net impact of work on the person’s life.

What OP was calling out is that chronically sacrificing sleep seems to consistently take its toll down the road. So chronically enjoying work at the expense of sleep can be a form of workaholism.

1penny42cents commented on The Gentle Singularity blog.samaltman.com/the-ge... · Posted by u/firloop

muglug · 3 months ago

I’ve heard a joke that under Steve Jobs, the number of big initiatives at Apple was limited to the number of execs Steve could shout at in a given day.

I see a similar thing at work — the number of projects a developer can get through isn’t bounded by the lines of code they can churn out in a day. Instead it’s bounded by their appetite for getting shouted at when something goes wrong.

Until you can shout at an LLM, I don’t think they’re going to replace humans in the workplace.

1penny42cents · 3 months ago

everyone talks about the alignment problem, not nearly enough about the accountability problem

1penny42cents commented on My 16-month theanine self-experiment dynomight.net/theanine/... · Posted by u/dynm

jaggederest · 6 months ago

This is actually a thing I wish existed, but I don't have time and energy to make it right now. I'd pay $25 a month or more.

Basically it's an application that lets you do self-experiments like this, properly blinded and with good statistics. A challenge-dechallenge-rechallenge study is one of the ones I like, but if you want to do one you essentially have to design the study anew each time, and it would be convenient to run multiple at once if that's possible.

I'm not interested in generalizing, I just want to know if (for example) taking Vitamin D every day at 1000 iu is enough, or whether I should be taking more or less. I can get labs done on this, of course, but again I'm more interested in subjective wellbeing than blood levels beyond avoiding deficiency or hypervitaminosis.

Maybe such an app exists and I simply don't know about it.

1penny42cents · 6 months ago

I’m actually working on this now, starting with sleep quality and cognitive performance (memory/attention/fluency) as dependent variables.

The vision is to have an index of protocols that people can try for themselves and see whether and how broader claims apply to their own minds and bodies.

If you or anyone else is interested, please send me an email at camhashemi (at) gmail.com. I’m looking for early adopters!

1penny42cents commented on How I ship projects at big tech companies seangoedecke.com/how-to-s... · Posted by u/gfysfm

1penny42cents · 10 months ago

Regarding the “realism” proposed here, that leadership defines what shipping means: there’s a good faith and bad faith interpretation.

The bad faith interpretation is that this is corrupt and misaligned.

The good faith interpretation is that each leader has context and motivations that are important.

The right interpretation depends on the exact circumstance.

Getting leaders aligned on the right definition of “shipped” is a separate problem to the one described here, and it’s not the project lead’s direct responsibility. It’s the responsibility of the leadership team, the CEO, and the board.

But the realism proposed in the post is useful for project leads. Meeting leadership’s expectation is not necessarily corrupt, and if it is corrupt, it can be improved by directly discussing and negotiating what it means to ship a project.

1penny42cents commented on US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case ft.com/content/f6e84608-e... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

1penny42cents · a year ago

crazy double whammy:

1. US gov trying to break up your search monopoly

2. ChatGPT disrupting your search monopoly

1penny42cents commented on Ask HN: Is Free Will an Illusion? · Posted by u/1penny42cents

yawpitch · a year ago

Most people taking determinism seriously is exactly the same as most people taking God seriously, when neither determinism or God is provably known to be present or absent from the situation. Any attempt to decide the question of free will on either flimsy foundation is, really, just navel-gazing seriously.

Occam’s Razor, used properly, looks for the explanation with the least number of constituent assumptions; if the fact is the Universe operates in a manner in which quantum indeterminacy holds, the so do our nerves, thus so does everything we perceive at a human (read as “extremely ignorant”) scale. In such a world the ground state of Occam’s is one in which non-determinacy is a fact and any and all thoughts of determinism are a pointless diversion… this makes it really important to reach a conclusion on the question of whether or not the smallest scale is stochastic or not before building a philosophical or political platform atop any assumption of the contrary.

1penny42cents · a year ago

The original post is a question about people’s beliefs, not a proof or a case for any one belief.

Many believe in determinism, or at least the functional equivalent, and it poses a challenge to the popular belief that we can choose what we do. That’s the problem I’m interested in understanding.

Indeterminism, which includes that base layer of randomness, still presents a dilemma with regards to free will, doesn’t it? From the perspective of free will, and absent a more explanatory theory, they are functionally equivalent theories. Whether my brain is randomly producing actions or from an infinite chain of determined causes or a mix, free will is nowhere to be found without a more precise explanation.

The question is about free will given different assumptions of reality. My main challenge with your angle is that it’s firmly missing the point.

I am not arguing for determinism, nor the existence of God, but since I’m asking what people believe, I’m including both answers as options.

1penny42cents commented on Ask HN: Is Free Will an Illusion? · Posted by u/1penny42cents

xtrapol8 · a year ago

I would like to drive a nail in the coffin of “deterministic causality” by at least two mechanisms.

- In every scope there is a super scope which may influence in incalculable ways (however well their rules maybe understood.) Even in a model of the whole Universe, the base potential of cosmic background radiation (non-zero vacuum of void) is a non deterministic influence.

- ultimately radiological decay may not be predicted (a feedback mechanism of unpredictable external scopes)

There is more to consider yet these alone are enough for all physicists to agree that universal determinism is not actually possible.

Decay and the exogenous scope.

Everything in the universe fails eventually, only we may not know which part or when. Everything has an outside influence that cannot be predicted, even if that is how external decay will be involved.

These are NOT the basis of free will, merely an example of how determinism is a dead horse.

Free will is the “determination of resolve in the moment of now.” A different kind of determination than determinism. It is not that will cannot be coerced or manipulated or even anticipated (we are creatures of habit.) it is that the feedback loop in the mind is made of constructive and destructive interference and that may self reflect in unbound scalar ways.

What we think of as determinism is a blessing not a curse. Who wants the Earth to spontaneously turn to jelly? Or marshmallows to suddenly fall from the sky? We cannot function without mostly predictable outcomes.

1penny42cents · a year ago

Thanks for this!

I suppose for our purposes, both determinism and indeterminism create the same paradox of free will. Determinism gives every event a determined prior cause, and indeterminism opens the door for random or otherwise undetermined prior causes, but both are incompatible with the notion of free will.

Would you agree with that reframing, or am I missing something?

1penny42cents commented on Ask HN: Is Free Will an Illusion? · Posted by u/1penny42cents

yawpitch · a year ago

You can explain much of reality using Newtonian physics too, especially the portion humans operate in. Of course you run into enormous problems at high energies and velocities, so you need something more, and then you run into really interesting problems at extremely small scales, where suddenly you start to realize that it’s maybe not deterministic at all.

The problem starts in assuming “the portion humans operate in” is relevant or reasonable; if we assume determinism we have to assume that every interaction in quantum physics is also entirely deterministic. Anything else is just not assuming determinism.

1penny42cents · a year ago

> The problem starts in assuming “the portion humans operate in” is relevant or reasonable

the question is whether humans have control over their actions. human operations are definitionally relevant.

you seem to suggest throwing away determinism because there are open questions at extreme scales. but determinism does explain reality at the scale we're interested in, and you haven't offered a comparable explanation.

occam's razor would suggest we take determinism seriously until we have another theory which more clearly explains the phenomena of interest while also addressing the challenges you've raised. and it seems that most people do take determinism seriously, which is why free will is such a debated question.

1penny42cents commented on Ask HN: Is Free Will an Illusion? · Posted by u/1penny42cents

yawpitch · a year ago

> Given deterministic causality

Assumption of facts not in evidence, given open questions in quantum mechanics.

1penny42cents · a year ago

It’s a reasonable challenge to determinism, but quantum decoherence seems to make that opening smaller, no? It seems you can explain much of reality using determinism, especially the portion humans operate in.

Also, in case it’s not clear: I am not assuming determinism or claiming that free will is an illusion, just explaining the challenge if one does assume determinism, which many do.