ary (u/ary) - Readit News

ary commented on Steve Jobs' cabinet perfectdays23.substack.co... · Posted by u/padraigf

ary · a month ago

This quote comes up often in SJ biographies or anecdotes and they universally attribute it purely to aesthetic concerns. Admittedly the man cared quite a lot about "beauty", but I've always thought this was more about the caring and less about the beauty.

To spend time making something most people never see look just as good as the things they do see you have to care quite a lot. This care begets a wide range of (usually) desirable secondary effects brought about by diligence. In my view it's similar to the effect of spending the time to make many iterations of a thing versus one perfect thing, with the former usually resulting in an end product much closer to "perfect".

ary commented on Burrito Now, Pay Later enterprisevalue.substack.... · Posted by u/gwintrob

ary · 4 months ago

> Despite skepticism from Volcker and Buffet, financial innovation has been and will continue to be a massive net positive for humanity.

Juxtaposing yourself with Warren Buffet and then hand-waving away his wisdom is probably the reddest of flags when discussing finance (not that Buffet is always right). "Innovation" in payday loans is akin to inventing new ways to feed living, breathing things into a meat grinder. In this case it's the poorest among us. The author goes on to say:

> Is financing your lunch a sign of societal decay? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s definitely an evolution in Market Completion.

This is undiagnosed sociopathy.

There is a point when making a thing that you must ask "what affect will this have on the world?" or you risk destroying far more than you create. Finance types have learned absolutely nothing since Buffet laid down his "newspaper test":

"I want them to not only do what’s legal obviously, but I want them to judge every action by how it would appear on the front page of their local paper written by a smart but semi-unfriendly reporter who really understood it to be read by their family, their neighbors, their friends."

ary commented on Getting things “done” in large tech companies seangoedecke.com/getting-... · Posted by u/swah

ary · 4 months ago

> … it means delivering the kind of things that are legible to the decision-makers at the company: i.e. visible to your manager, plus 1-3 skip levels, depending on your title. The easiest way to do this is to deliver things that they already know about, such as projects that they’ve asked you to do, or incidents that are serious enough that they’re involved in them. It’s possible to make other work legible to them as well. If your work produces or saves money, that will make it immediately legible, for instance (or you could just be really convincing). By default, work you do isn’t legible: to the decision-makers, it’s generic technical nonsense. They don’t know whether it’s crucial high-impact work or pointless code reshuffling, and will tend to assume the latter.

This person understands the “business” side of the tech business. I couldn’t agree more. Where many struggle is that they can’t communicate legibly about the indirect benefits their work has for the business. The classic “refactoring” (which he mentions) is a great example.

Refactoring code has a context dependent benefit to a business. When you’re searching for product/market fit is has essentially no benefit, and then you’re Microsoft and the code is deep within Windows and affects the performance of every Win32 app it can have extreme benefits. In the end it’s all about how you relate your work to either making or saving the organization money, and doing so indirectly can be legible if you take the time to figure out how to best communicate it to the target audience (and how it can be conveyed to customers).

ary commented on Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now · Posted by u/sepidy

ary · 4 months ago

“Hackathons are how marketing guys wish software were made.” - http://scripting.com/stories/2012/02/19/hackathonsAreNonsens...

As discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3609912

ary commented on How LWN is faring in 2025 lwn.net/Articles/1019217/... · Posted by u/leephillips

ary · 4 months ago

Subscribed. All this money I’m saving boycotting spineless American companies is coming in handy.

If LWN is worth $16 a month, and it is, then so is The Atlantic, ProPublica, etc. We collectively need to make a habit of financially supporting actual journalism and doing so loudly.

ary commented on Oxide’s compensation model: how is it going? oxide.computer/blog/oxide... · Posted by u/steveklabnik

abxyz · 4 months ago

I like it a lot and their thoughtfulness about it but it's a little hollow when they're spending investor money. I'd like to see how this model evolves once they're off the vc teat: when there's a bottom line to answer to, does the dynamic shift? Everyone has an on-site chef when the money vc hose is on. Valve's flat structure was exciting because it wasn't 3 vc's in a coat larping as a business, it was an actual profitable business.

Support is typically low paid because it's a lot of effort for little reward, no matter how much you pay someone in support, there's only so much impact they can have on the bottom line. The organization as an organism where every organ is as equally important as the other is a beautiful sentiment but the appendix is getting jettisoned at the first sign of trouble. Support, no matter how valued and important to the organisation it is, is never worth $200k/year on the output of 1 person.

The exception to the rule for sales is the canary in the coal mine: sales measures itself, but every role can (and will) be measured when the pressure is on, there will be competition for budget, and the support team will get squeezed until they're empty while the engineers coast. I would be more convinced that this model could survive outside of the vc bubble if sales had bought in to too. Sales as a competitive sport is cultural, not fundamental.

Anyway, not criticism, just musing, love that they're trying it, even if this doesn't work out, everyone had a few good years, it's worth a shot.

ary · 4 months ago

Loading up this thread I knew this kind of response would be here. Like, I was willing to bet money on it.

Examples of support people worth $200k+ are abundant, and the business case is the same every time. When you do the work to place a monetary value on customers and their retention your support personnel costs relative to that are easy to justify. When a support person is preventing churn of X number of customers worth $Y dollars a year the math becomes trivial.

The (American) tech industry is so accustomed to massive scale and lack of competition that the notion of giving a damn about customer retention has risen to the level of a cultural, not economic, problem.

ary commented on We Have Made No Progress Toward AGI mindprison.cc/p/no-progre... · Posted by u/13years

benlivengood · 4 months ago

> o3 is also a significant hallucinator. I spent quite a bit of time with it last weekend and found it to be probably far worse than any of the other top models. The catch is that it its hallucinations are quite sophisticated. Unless you are using it on material for which you are extremely knowledgeable, you won't know.

At least 3/4 of humans identify with a religion which at best can be considered a confabulation or hallucination in the rigorous terms you're using to judge LLMs. Dogma is almost identical to the doubling-down on hallucinations that LLMs produce.

I think what this shows about intelligence in general is that without grounding in physical reality it tends to hallucinate from some statistical model of reality and confabulate further ungrounded statements without strong and active efforts to ground each statement in reality. LLMs have the disadvantage of having no real-time grounding in most instantiations; Gato and related robotics projects exempted. This is not so much a problem with transformers as it is with the lack of feedback tokens in most LLMs. Pretraining on ground truth texts can give an excellent prior probability of next tokens and I think feedback either in the weights (continuous fine-tuning) or real-world feedback as tokens in response to outputs can get transformers to hallucinate less in the long run (e.g. after responding to feedback when OOD)

ary · 4 months ago

Arguing that many humans are stupid or ignorant does not support the idea that an LLM is intelligent. This argument is reductive in that it ignores the many, many diverse signals influencing the part of the brain that controls speech. Comparing a statistical word predictor and the human brain isn’t useful.

ary commented on Nobody cares grantslatton.com/nobody-c... · Posted by u/fzliu

ary · 8 months ago

> You might think "something something incentive systems". No. At my big tech job I had the pleasure of interviewing a few programmers who worked for a large healthcare company that engages in regulatory capture. Let me assure you: They. Do. Not Care.

Regarding programmers specifically I can concur, but with a caveat. Devs often care quite a lot about many things, but often one of those things is not doing the job they were hired for. The tedium of building software for businesses, even what we now call "big tech", is universally unappealing and definitely not the reason most devs started tinkering with computers. So they care very little, and it shows in the tech taking over the clerical aspects of every day life.

ary commented on The correct amount of ads is zero manuelmoreale.com/the-cor... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

shortformblog · 9 months ago

Stances like this probably feel good to write out, but they miss the reality that when running a media business, relying on one revenue stream is dangerous. That’s why newspapers had classified ads, even though they charged a nominal fee to subscribe. People won’t pay $5 a day to subscribe to a newspaper, but the ads subsidize enough of it to make it so that a paid subscription is accessible to more people.

On the internet, the fact is this: Most companies do not offer a reduced ad load in exchange for your subscription money. In fact, they will be happy to take money from every source they can. The fact that The Verge is doing so reflects that they understand their audience and are trying to meet them halfway. It also reduces the cost of the subscription for you, the end user.

This feels like a situation where an organization tries doing something laudable, but still gets criticized for it.

ary · 9 months ago

The realities of the news business are fine, but the realities of the adtech business are not. As a consumer I very much want profiling and targeting to die off.

Were the ads run on the web not built on a separate business that attempts to violate the reasonable sense of privacy the average person expects, and didn’t attempt to warp consumer’s expectations of privacy, I think there would be less objections.

ary commented on Regex character "$" doesn't mean "end-of-string" sethmlarson.dev/regex-$-m... · Posted by u/BerislavLopac

ary · a year ago

Was any regex documentation unclear on this? Some libraries have modes that change the semantics of ^ and $ but I’ve always found their use to be rather clear. It’s the grouping and look ahead/behind modifiers that I’ve always found hard to understand (at times).