bart_spoon (u/bart_spoon)

NeutralCrane commented on IT tycoon Mike Lynch, daughter Hannah found dead theregister.com/2024/08/2... · Posted by u/croes

bdjsiqoocwk · a year ago

> Looking at the extreme weather, if it was a water spout, which it appears to be, it’s what I would class as a black swan event,”

Bayesian methods don't deal well with black swans.

NeutralCrane · a year ago

No statistical methods do, Bayesian or frequentist. That’s the definition of a black swan, it’s something completely out of the data set and therefore can’t be forecasted.

bart_spoon commented on Transformers in music recommendation research.google/blog/tran... · Posted by u/panarky

afro88 · a year ago

> Using transformers to incorporate different user actions based on the current user context helps steer music recommendations directly towards the user’s current need

What if the user's current need is to not play music? To not consume yet more content? To not make them addicted to the content application?

How can we optimize for user wellbeing, and still make money? That's the question we should be pouring resources into

bart_spoon · a year ago

What might that look like in this situation? A user goes to play Spotify and it responds with “No” and shuts itself down? I generally agree with you that endless content consumption is a bad thing, but I also can’t envision a system where this is possible. It requires enough friction for the user to decide against continuing, which either comes in the form of a service providing less appealing content, making content more costly to consume, such as literally paying per song played, or services simply refusing to serve more content after a certain point. All of which are complete non-starters.

bart_spoon commented on CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/petethomas

alooPotato · a year ago

What exactly?

bart_spoon · a year ago

Their job is to manage their teams and initiatives. If they are unable to determine why an initiative fails or how their teams are performing, it means they are incapable of doing their job.

NeutralCrane commented on CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/petethomas

nox101 · a year ago

I see the opposite. Conversations that used to happen in ear reach so I'd know what was going on with various team members and be able to contribute when I knew a solution are now conversation that happen in private chat or private VC.

Productivity is way down.

Even more interesting, a team lead lives in another country 6 times zones away. Some times they visit the main office for 1-2 weeks. Productivity shoots through the roof those weeks.

NeutralCrane · a year ago

That doesn’t seem like a sustainable alternative. In the case you are describing, the productivity boost is highly dependent on actually having the right people within ear reach. You are relying on the right people happening to hear other conversations. What if your team is large, so that even if you are all in office, the chances of stumbling into the right conversation is lower? What if you are grabbing lunch, or in the bathroom, or meeting with someone else when that conversation is happening?

The most effective solution in my experience has been when working remote, and having a culture where a team has open discussions on their own Slack channel, with threads for particular conversations. That way, everyone can contribute to the conversation, it’s asynchronous so you don’t have to be in exactly the right place and right time to participate, and people can go back and review details very easily if needed.

You are right that that doesn’t apply if the conversations are happening in private DMs, but that’s a matter of team culture. You have to be intentional in a remote setting, just the same as you do in an office setting. But if you are it can work very well in my experience, perhaps even better than in person.

bart_spoon commented on How I won $2,750 using JavaScript, AI, and a can of WD-40 davekiss.com/blog/how-i-w... · Posted by u/davekiss

pcthrowaway · a year ago

I can simultaneously appreciate the write-up for gaming a competition while also dreading how it basically describes the incentives for contributing to the AI-enshittification of the internet.

bart_spoon · a year ago

If the AI is being judged as a winner, than by definition isn’t it superior to the typical human produced content, at least in this case? Seems like the opposite of enshittification.

bart_spoon commented on How I won $2,750 using JavaScript, AI, and a can of WD-40 davekiss.com/blog/how-i-w... · Posted by u/davekiss

0cf8612b2e1e · a year ago

  Did you spend more time working on this blog post than on the contest?
  Yes.

Kind of feels line author spent more time researching their odds than working on the submission as well.

bart_spoon · a year ago

Measure twice, cut once

bart_spoon commented on How I won $2,750 using JavaScript, AI, and a can of WD-40 davekiss.com/blog/how-i-w... · Posted by u/davekiss

julianeon · a year ago

I'm somewhat skeptical of this amount of validation.

There's a solid educational consensus on how to become the best at something: do it a lot.

If your goal is to winning contests, you should really prioritize cranking through them: getting practice at getting better. Don't try to make a masterpiece. Instead focus on becoming fast at creating entries, doing them according to the rules, and sending them off. Like those studies where people who made 1,000 good-enough vases were better at the average one than people who tried to make 100 beautiful ones - even when the goal was 'create a beautiful vase'.

But then, if you're a professional contest-enterer, that's got do a lot to boost your chances - especially over time, right? At the 1 year mark, I would expect you could raise your chances to 10% of a win of some type per contest (being conservative here). You've specialized in this. You'll always be a contender.

And that number's high enough that, if you enter 10 a day, that seems closer to the optimum. You are playing a numbers game on the strength of your numbers.

By analogy, this is like picking an index fund and continuously investing, rather than trying to pick that one stock that's going to the moon.

bart_spoon · a year ago

They aren’t trying to become the best at something, they are trying to maximize the ROI of their time.

NeutralCrane commented on Betting on DSPy for Systems of LLMs blog.isaacmiller.dev/post... · Posted by u/wavelander

NeutralCrane · a year ago

The more I’ve looked at DSPy, the less impressed I am. The design of the project is very confusing with non-sensical, convoluted abstractions. And for all the discussion surrounding it, I’ve yet to see someone actually using for something other than a toy example. I’m not sure I’ve even seen someone prove it can do what it claims to in terms of prompt optimization.

It reminds me very much of Langchain in that it feels like a rushed, unnecessary set of abstractions that add more friction than actual benefit, and ultimately boils down to an attempt to stake a claim as a major framework in the still very young stages of LLMs, as opposed to solving an actual problem.

bart_spoon commented on Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay sfstandard.com/2024/08/05... · Posted by u/crhulls

yodsanklai · a year ago

Not only Elon Musk. Lots of companies are backtracking on full remote work. Statu quo seems to be hybrid work for many big companies.

bart_spoon · a year ago

And yet just today I read an article about how more than half of tech CEOs now are allowing workers to work fully remote if the choose, which is up from closer to 35% a year ago. It’s possible some of the RTO push was to get people to leave, or that management, underestimated how unpopular it would be with employees, or perhaps the simplest explanation: management is mostly a cargo cult just throwing spaghetti at the wall, with no real rhyme or reason behind their decision making.

bart_spoon commented on 10% of Cubans left Cuba between 2022 and 2023 miamiherald.com/news/nati... · Posted by u/apsec112

harimau777 · a year ago

My observation was just the opposite. Unlike Texas, the Democratic cities did what they could to help the immigrants.

bart_spoon · a year ago

The public sentiment in those cities regarding immigration has completely flipped from the moment the buses started arriving. They were loudly in favor of refusing to enforce immigration laws when El Paso, Texas was dealing with hundreds of thousands of illegal border crossings over decades, but the second a few thousand start showing up in buses in Chicago and New York City, they declare a state of emergency and start demanding the stop of the immigrants being transported to their cities because they have no room. And now it’s probably the single strongest issue the Republicans are going to win on in the election.

I’m not conservative, but sending illegal migrants directly to sanctuary cities might be the single most effective strategic political move in my lifetime. It flipped a decades old stalemate on its head practically overnight.