bwfan123 (u/bwfan123)

bwfan123 commented on Palantir CEO Alex Karp's Letter to Shareholders palantir.com/q2-2025-lett... · Posted by u/nalinidash

belter · 11 hours ago

With less fluff, a report on the economics of Palantir by Citron Research:

https://citronresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/OpenAI...

Read so as not to be a fool, soon parted with it's money.

Note some current PE values...

NVIDIA PE: 57,33

Apple PE: 34,62

Microsoft PE: 37,18

Palantir PE: 527,52

The rest of letter, is a kind of anti-woke stance, billionaire victim complex so frequently seen now. Just positioning to align with current US political trends and secure government contracts, especially given Palantir heavy reliance on defense spending.

bwfan123 · 8 hours ago

A letter to shareholder should assume that anyone who has some basic business sense should be able to understand it. I think Buffet says something along the lines that it should make sense to an average shareholder. To this end, the communication has to simplified to make sense.

But this letter in the last 5 paragraphs appears abstruse. What the heck is he trying to say ? It appears to me that the CEO is saying something that makes sense to the 5 friends he hangs out with at a silicon valley pub, ie witty, clever and cute. But not to the average shareholder.

bwfan123 commented on Go is still not good blog.habets.se/2025/07/Go... · Posted by u/ustad

blixt · 2 days ago

I've been using Go more or less in every full-time job I've had since pre-1.0. It's simple for people on the team to pick up the basics, it generally chugs along (I'm rarely worried about updating to latest version of Go), it has most useful things built in, it compiles fast. Concurrency is tricky but if you spend some time with it, it's nice to express data flow in Go. The type system is most of the time very convenient, if sometimes a bit verbose. Just all-around a trusty tool in the belt.

But I can't help but agree with a lot of points in this article. Go was designed by some old-school folks that maybe stuck a bit too hard to their principles, losing sight of the practical conveniences. That said, it's a _feeling_ I have, and maybe Go would be much worse if it had solved all these quirks. To be fair, I see more leniency in fixing quirks in the last few years, like at some point I didn't think we'd ever see generics, or custom iterators, etc.

The points about RAM and portability seem mostly like personal grievances though. If it was better, that would be nice, of course. But the GC in Go is very unlikely to cause issues in most programs even at very large scale, and it's not that hard to debug. And Go runs on most platforms anyone could ever wish to ship their software on.

But yeah the whole error / nil situation still bothers me. I find myself wishing for Result[Ok, Err] and Optional[T] quite often.

bwfan123 · a day ago

> Concurrency is tricky

The go language and its runtime is the only system I know that is able to handle concurrency with multicore cpus seamlessly within the language, using the CSP-like (goroutine/channel) formalism which is easy to reason with.

Python is a mess with the gil and async libraries that are hard to reason with. C,C++,Java etc need external libraries to implement threading which cant be reasoned with in the context of the language itself.

So, go is a perfect fit for the http server (or service) usecase and in my experience there is no parallel.

bwfan123 commented on Being “Confidently Wrong” is holding AI back promptql.io/blog/being-co... · Posted by u/tango12

bwfan123 · a day ago

Arguably, the biggest breakthroughs we have had came out of formalization of our world models. Math formalizes abstract worlds, and science formalizes the real world with testable actions.

The key feature of formalization is the ability to create statements, and test statements for correctness. ie, we went from fuzzy feel-good thinking to precise thinking thanks to the formalization.

Furthermore, the ingenuity of humans is to create new worlds and formalize them, ie we have some resonance with the cosmos so to speak, and the only resonance that the LLMs have is with their training datasets.

bwfan123 commented on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard' theregister.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/JustExAWS

simpaticoder · 2 days ago

In undergrad I took an abstract algebra class. It was very difficult and one of the things the teacher did was have us memorize proofs. In fact, all of his tests were the same format: reproduce a well-known proof from memory, and then complete a novel proof. At first I was aghast at this rote memorization - I maybe even found it offensive. But an amazing thing happened - I realized that it was impossible to memorize a proof without understanding it! Moreover, producing the novel proofs required the same kinds of "components" and now because they were "installed" in my brain I could use them more intuitively. (Looking back I'd say it enabled an efficient search of a tree of sequences of steps).

Memorization is not a panacea. I never found memorizing l33t code problems to be edifying. I think it's because those kinds of tight, self-referential, clever programs are far removed from the activity of writing applications. Most working programmers do not run into a novel algorithm problem but once or twice a career. Application programming has more the flavor of a human-mediated graph-traversal, where the human has access to a node's local state and they improvise movement and mutation using only that local state plus some rapidly decaying stack. That is, there is no well-defined sequence for any given real-world problem, only heuristics.

bwfan123 · 2 days ago

My abstract algebra class had it exactly backwards. It started with a lot of needless formalism culminating in galois theory. This was boring to most students as they had no clue why the formalism was invented in the first place.

Instead, I wished it showed how the sausage was actually made in the original writings of galois [1]. This would have been far more interesting to students, as it showed the struggles that went into making the product - not to mention the colorful personality of the founder.

The history of how concepts were invented for the problems faced is far more motivating to students to build a mental model than canned capsules of knowledge.

[1] https://www.ams.org/notices/201207/rtx120700912p.pdf

bwfan123 commented on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard' theregister.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/JustExAWS

lukeschlather · 2 days ago

He didn't actually say that. He said it's possible that within 2 years developers won't be writing much code, but he goes on to say:

"It just means that each of us has to get more in tune with what our customers need and what the actual end thing is that we're going to try to go build, because that's going to be more and more of what the work is as opposed to sitting down and actually writing code...."

https://www.businessinsider.com/aws-ceo-developers-stop-codi...

If you read the full remarks they're consistent with what he says here. He says "writing code" may be a skill that's less useful, which is why it's important to hire junior devs and teach them how to learn so they learn the skills that are useful.

bwfan123 · 2 days ago

He is talking his book. Management thinks it adds value in the non-coding aspects of the product - such as figuring out what customers need etc. I suggest management stays in their lanes, and not make claims on how coding needs to be done, leave that to the craftsmen actually coding.

bwfan123 commented on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard' theregister.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/JustExAWS

bwfan123 · 2 days ago

Looks like the AWS CEO has changed religion. A year back, he was aboard the ai-train - saying AI will do all coding in 2 years [1]

Finally, the c-suite is getting it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41462545

bwfan123 commented on Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation databricks.com/company/ne... · Posted by u/djhu9

hiyer · 3 days ago

Databricks on azure is huge. I've heard that in some Azure regions, over 70% of the compute usage is just Databricks. So there is definitely an incentive for MS to acquire them.

bwfan123 · 3 days ago

so, azure growth is circular. VC funding for openai and databricks funeled into azure for growth. What happens when things get into reverse gear ?

bwfan123 commented on AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery playtechnique.io/blog/ai-... · Posted by u/gwynforthewyn

bwfan123 · 6 days ago

> Claude wrote me Go tests that passed. They were beautiful, and they were worthless

Their ability to look correct exceeds their ability to be correct. Optimized for form more than function. Like politicians and management at large companies. Like the rote student who can be correct, but wont know why. Being fair though, it is a useful tool among many others in our toolbox.

bwfan123 commented on Model intelligence is no longer the constraint for automation latentintent.substack.com... · Posted by u/drivian

HappMacDonald · 8 days ago

.. and you can "program" a neural network — so simple it can be implemented by boxes full of marbles and simple rules about how to interact with the boxes — to learn by playing tictactoe until it always plays perfect games. This is frequently chosen as a lesson in how neural network training even works.

But I have a different challenge for you: train a human to play tictactoe, but never allow them to see the game visually, even in examples. You have to train them to play only by spoken words.

Point being that tictactoe is a visual game and when you're only teaching a model to learn from the vast sea of stream-of-tokens (similar to stream-of-phonemes) language, visual games like this aren't going to be well covered in the training set, nor is it going to be easy to generalize to playing them.

bwfan123 · 7 days ago

llm maximalists' apologies:

- but tokens are not letters - but humans fail too - just wait, we are on an S curve to AGI - but your prompt was incorrect - but I tried and here it works

Meanwhile, their claims:

- LLMs are performing at PhD levels. - AGI is around the corner - humanity will be wiped out - situational awareness report