casualscience (u/casualscience)

casualscience commented on You have to know how to drive the car seangoedecke.com/knowing-... · Posted by u/alexwennerberg

ytoawwhra92 · 13 days ago

> FAANG

And yet those five companies are among the most valuable in the world.

There's a cognitive dissonance that arises when you join a company that is performing extraordinarily well only to perceive dysfunction and incompetence everywhere you look.

It's so hard to reconcile the reality that companies can be embarrassingly wasteful, political, and arbitrary in how they run and yet can still dominate markets and print money hand-over-fist.

casualscience · 13 days ago

People succeed in spite of these systems. They have resources, tremendous network advantages, and the people at the very top crust of engineers are indeed quite good at their job.

casualscience commented on You have to know how to drive the car seangoedecke.com/knowing-... · Posted by u/alexwennerberg

alexjplant · 13 days ago

> You ought to know that crushing JIRA tickets is rarely a path to promotion (at least above mid-level), that glue work can be a trap, that you will be judged on the results of your projects, and therefore getting good at shipping projects is the path to career success.

Notice that the author didn't write "getting good at delivering value." They wrote "getting good at shipping projects" because

> Shipping is a social construct within a company.

Delivering solid software that helps people get work done is a platonic ideal. Unfortunately there are many companies that value whipping stuff out the door more highly. As corny as this sounds the iron triangle ("good, fast, cheap - pick two") is a thing for a reason. Crapping something out as quickly as possible and leaving others to deal with the fallout of a bad data model and chaotic on-call isn't something to be rewarded but it's how many companies seem to work.

casualscience · 13 days ago

> Crapping something out as quickly as possible and leaving somebody else to deal with the fallout of a bad data model and violent on-call isn't something to be rewarded IMO.

Sadly you've described precisely the optimal engineering strategy for promotion at my FAANG

casualscience commented on AI hallucinate. Do you ever double check the output? · Posted by u/jackota

varshith17 · 16 days ago

Build validation layers, not trust. For structured outputs (invoices, emails), use JSON schemas + fact-checking prompts where a second AI call verifies critical fields against source data before you see it. Real pattern: AI generates → automated validation catches type/format errors → second LLM does adversarial review ("check for hallucinated numbers/dates") → you review only flagged items + random samples. Turns "check everything" into "check exceptions," cuts review time 80%.

casualscience · 16 days ago

Also lets 50% of errors through

casualscience commented on Giving university exams in the age of chatbots ploum.net/2026-01-19-exam... · Posted by u/ploum

quacked · 20 days ago

Something that I think many students, indeed many people, struggle with is the question "why should I know anything?"

For most of us--myself included--once you graduate from college, the answer is: "enough to not get fired". This is far less than most curriculums ask you to know, and every year, "enough to not get fired" is a lower and lower bar. With LLMs, it's practically on the floor for 90% of full-time jobs.

That is why I propose exactly the opposite regimen from this course, although I admire the writer's free thinking. Return to tradition, with a twist. Closed-book exams, no note sheets, all handwritten. Add a verbal examination, even though it massively increases examination time. No homework assignments, which encourage "completionist mindset", where the turning-in of the assignment feels more real than understanding the assignment. Publish problem sets thousands of problems large with worked-out-solutions to remove the incentive to cheat.

"Memorization is a prerequisite for creativity" -- paraphrase of an HN comment about a fondly remembered physics professor who made the students memorize every equation in the class. In the age of the LLM, I suspect this is triply true.

casualscience · 20 days ago

Honestly, I feel like I have to know more and more these days, as the ais have unlocked significantly more domains that I can impact. Everyone is contributing to every part of the stack in the tech world all of a sudden, and "I am not an expert on that piece of the system" no longer is a reasonable position.

This is in tech now, were the first adopters, but soon it will come to other fields.

To your broader question

> Something that I think many students, indeed many people, struggle with is the question "why should I know anything?"

You should know things because these AIs are wrong all the time, because if you want any control in your life you need to be able to make an educated guess at what is true and what isn't.

As to how to teach students. I think we're in an age of experimentation here. I like the idea of letting students use all tools available for the job. But I also agree that if you do give exams and hw, you better make them hand written/oral only.

Overall, I think education needs to focus more on building portfolios for students, and focus less giving them grades.

casualscience commented on Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere indieweb.org/POSSE#... · Posted by u/47thpresident

theshrike79 · a month ago

Making a living on "content" is really hard, subscribers or views don't turn directly into income.

At some point you're getting sponsors to pay for it and then it get complicated.

casualscience · a month ago

Yeah I hear you. My understanding is that on youtube you can make ~2k per 1M views with the default ads. I'm hoping that I can be funded by some combination of that and something like patreon/membership/merch. But we will see, it's something I've wanted to do for years and I am getting too old to put off longer.

casualscience commented on Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere indieweb.org/POSSE#... · Posted by u/47thpresident

foxfired · a month ago

I've restarted blogging last year, going from a handful of blog post to, publishing consistently. All content gets published on my blog first. I've seen an ~8x increase of traffic. I was affected by zero-clicks from Google's AI overview, but the bulk of my traffic now comes from RSS readers.

I published a write up just this morning: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-its-like-blogging-in-2025

casualscience · a month ago

These are impressive metrics, are you able to make a living off of your 10M views?

I'm planning to leave my job this year and focus on content, mostly have been considering YouTube, but if blogging can work too, might consider that as well

casualscience commented on Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind” twitter.com/karpathy/stat... · Posted by u/rishabhaiover

simonw · a month ago

I think AI-assisted programming may be having the opposite effect, at least for me.

I'm now incentivized to use less abstractions.

Why do we code with React? It's because synchronizing state between a UI and a data model is difficult and it's easy to make mistakes, so it's worth paying the React complexity/page-weight tax in order for a "better developer experience" that allows us to build working, reliable software with less typing of code into a text editor.

If an LLM is typing that code - and it can maintain a test suite that shows everything works correctly - maybe we don't need that abstraction after all.

How often have you dropped in a big complex library like Moment.js just because you needed to convert a time from one format to another, and it would take too long to hand-write that one feature (and add tests for it to make sure it's robust)? With an LLM that's a single prompt and a couple of minutes of wait.

Using LLMs to build black box abstraction layers is a choice. We can choose to have them build LESS abstraction layers for us instead.

casualscience · a month ago

If you work at a megacorp right now, you know whats happening isn't people deciding to use less libraries. It's developers being measured by their lines of code, and the more AI you use the more lines of code and 'features' you can ship.

However, the quality of this code is fucking terrible, no one is reading what they push deeply, and these models don't have enough 'sense' to make really robust and effective test suites. Even if they did, a comprehensive test suite is not the solution to poorly designed code, it's a band aid -- and an expensive one at scale.

Most likely we will see some disasters happening in the next few years due to this mode of software development, and only then will people understand to use these agents as tools and not replacements.

...Or maybe we'll get AGI and it will fix/maintain the trash going out there today.

casualscience commented on Leaving Meta and PyTorch soumith.ch/blog/2025-11-0... · Posted by u/saikatsg

jeffreysmith · 3 months ago

I'm one of the many people who Soumith hired to Meta and PyTorch. I had the privilege of working on PyTorch with him and lots of the folks on this post.

As his longtime colleague, the one thing I would want people to know about him and this decision is that Soumith has always viewed PyTorch as a community project. He consistently celebrated the contributions of his co-creators Adam and Sam, and he extended the same view towards the Yangqing and the Caffe2 crew that we merged into PyTorch. At the very beginning, by Soumith's highly intentional design, PyTorch was aimed at being truly developed by and for the AI research community and for many years that was the key way in which we grew the framework, FB PT team, and the wider community. At every single stage of PT's lifecycle, he always ensured that our conception of PT and its community grew to include and celebrate the new people and organizations growing what was possible with PT. He's an incredible talent magnet, and thus more and more smart people kept dedicating their blood, sweat, and tears to making PT bigger and better for more people.

I've worked with some very well known and highly compensated leaders in tech, but *no one* has done the job he has done with ameliorating a bus factor problem with his baby. PT has a unique level of broad support that few other open source technology can reach. In a world of unbounded AI salaries, people who want to move AI research methods forward still freely give their time and attention to PyTorch and its ecosystem. It's the great lever of this era of AI that is moving the world, *due in large part* to the strength of the community he fostered and can now let continue without his direct involvement.

His departure is the end of an era, but it's also operationally a true non-event. PyTorch is going strong and can afford to let one of its creators retire from stewardship. This is precisely what success looks like in open source software.

He deserves our congratulations and our thanks. Enjoy your PT retirement, man.

casualscience · 3 months ago

Also worked with Soumith. The man is a legend, moves mountains and completely changed the course of my career because he liked something I wrote. No arrogance, no politics, just an extremely down to earth and chill guy who elevates everyone around him.

Hope him the best!

casualscience commented on Apple will phase out Rosetta 2 in macOS 28 developer.apple.com/docum... · Posted by u/summarity

cwzwarich · 3 months ago

My reasons for leaving Apple had nothing to do with this decision. I was already no longer working on Rosetta 2 in a day-to-day capacity, although I would still frequently chat with the team and give input on future directions.

casualscience · 3 months ago

Just went through that thread, I can't believe this wasn't a team of like 20 people.

It's crazy to me that apple would put one guy on a project this important. At my company (another faang), I would have the ceo asking me for updates and roadmaps and everything. I know that stuff slows me down, but even without that, I don't think I could ever do something like this... I feel like I do when I watch guitar youtubers, just terrible

I hope you were at least compensated like a team of 20 engineers :P

casualscience commented on GPT-5 openai.com/gpt-5/... · Posted by u/rd

rcxdude · 6 months ago

It's both that simple and not. Because it's also true that the wing's shape creates a pressure differential and that's what produce lift. And the pressure differential causes the momentum transfer to the wing, the opposing force to the wing's lift creates the momentum transfer, and pressure difference also causes the change in speed and vice-versa. You can create many correct (and many more incorrect) straightforward stories about the path to lift but in reality cause and effect are not so straightforward and I think it's misleading to go "well this story is the one true simple story".

casualscience · 6 months ago

How can you create a 'pressure differential' without deflecting some of the air away? At the end of the day, if the aircraft is moving up, it needs to be throwing something down to counteract gravity. If there is some pressure differential that you can observe, that's nice, but you can't get away from momentum conservation.