@dang something about this website triggering content blocking filters. hate to say that i don't have time to investigate but it seems worth mentioning
(do people still at dang? don't read here often anymore)
Readit Newsi_like_apis commented on Deathbed Advice/Regret hazn.com/deathbed-regret... · Posted by u/paulpauper
i_like_apis commented on Deathbed Advice/Regret hazn.com/deathbed-regret... · Posted by u/paulpauper
@dang something about this website triggering content blocking filters. hate to say that i don't have time to investigate but it seems worth mentioning
i_like_apis commented on The 'S&P 493' reveals a different U.S. economy msn.com/en-us/money/marke... · Posted by u/MilnerRoute
> propaganda. "the economy isn't actually good!"
The thing is, there are three distinct interpretations of the word "economy", and depending on which of the definitions you subscribe (or belong) to, either of "the economy is good/okay/bad" can be true!
1) being the economy for the (uber) rich, "big tech", "big seven", FAANG, however you want to call it. That economy is running hot on 'roids "thanks" to the AI ouroboros / bubble / incestuous investment relationships. Money printer go brr. You get it. The only thing you have to take care about now if you belong to that bubble is to slowly unwind enough bags onto clueless retail gamblers before the bubble pops.
2) being the economy for the pension funds, the value of all the "dumb capital", S&P 500/DAX/MSCI and the likes. That economy is doing ... okay-ish, partially thanks to the AI bubble, but when that bubble pops, it's going to have Covid/2007ff effects on the pension funds.
3) being the economy for the 99% - and that economy is in the gutter. On the income side, job losses run rampant across the board, especially "entry level" jobs but also skilled jobs like translators are getting wiped out by AI, and in other industries (advertising, "luxury" goods) the cause is people cutting back on spending because they don't have any money left or are holding their money together because they fear a serious macro-economic disaster. On the expense side, cost of living have been exploding for years without adequate salary hikes - rents, basic groceries, cable TV and its replacement of half a dozen of streaming services, gas, electricity, the impact of Trump's tariffs, whatever.
Not recognizing (or ignoring) these wildly different realities is what killed Trump 1, Biden and is now killing Trump 2. You can't go and yap on the big screen about the economy being at record highs while the actual reality on the ground is everything but that. And it's not just the US that has these problems either, it's the same across the board in Western countries. The only thing the US has "exclusively" is the tariffs.
Predictably, if you say anything sane on the internet, you get a longwinded rude nonsense reply for your effort.
The consistent message from social media in the last 10 years is: don't try to talk sense. That will be punished.
i_like_apis commented on The 'S&P 493' reveals a different U.S. economy msn.com/en-us/money/marke... · Posted by u/MilnerRoute
propaganda. "the economy isn't actually good!"
they won't even show a chart in the article. 493 is up ... look at a 2025 5y chart. not that "basically flat" (actually 2023) chart google tries to feed you as a top result.
i_like_apis commented on The Needless Bullshit of Having a 'Mission' shubhamjain.co/2024/01/27... · Posted by u/shubhamjain
“Needless bullshit” is a bad take.
What if I have a mission and I like it and it’s totally authentic? My customers like it too. Are you calling me full of it for achieving that difficult goal?
I think you’re right about a lot of inauthentic mission statements, but I think crass swearing is the real “needless bullshit”.
Cool idea and I like the format. Transformer circuits and attention would be a cool thing too.
i_like_apis commented on The Existential Risk of AGI joscha.substack.com/p/the... · Posted by u/a_wild_dandan
Speculating about existential risk is certainly important, but way too easy to overstate. It can easily become distracting and actually dangerous in itself.
Here’s a good take on it: https://www.ai-breakout.com/post/ai-alignment-and-the-messia...
I also think we would all be very wise to remember the story of Henny Penny / “Chicken Little”. https://americanliterature.com/childrens-stories/henny-penny...
Specifically, the danger brought by hysteria. In our case, Alignment is probably much more effective and achievable when the widest possible community of researchers and engineers have access to knowledge, and much more perilous if they don’t because deluded parties thought it should be contained to a much smaller elite “secure” group.
i_like_apis commented on Squeeze the hell out of the system you have blog.danslimmon.com/2023/... · Posted by u/sbmsr
I’m not sure who came up with it first but the nautical expression is, “you sail with the crew you have”
Yeah I should have left the Rumsfeld part out because the conversation naturally got distracted. It isn’t accurate to attribute it to him. His was perhaps the most prominent recent version , but he was definitely paraphrasing an existing adage.
i_like_apis commented on Squeeze the hell out of the system you have blog.danslimmon.com/2023/... · Posted by u/sbmsr
Every time I hear the name Rumsfeld, I am reminded of the time when, for over 10 minutes, he refused to deny being a lizard:
Haha. Thanks for sharing that. Rumsfeld definitely has a sense of humor.
He’s also one of the best candidates for that type of conspiracy theory. His career history is flabbergasting.
Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld#Corporate_conn...
In addition to all the Bohemian Club, RAND corp, defense and government posts, in the 70s the guy was a CEO in the pharmaceuticals and electronics industries, was a director in aerospace, media and tech.
Definitely the type of resume that lets the imagination run wild with, “… wait, was he a lizard person …?”
i_like_apis commented on Squeeze the hell out of the system you have blog.danslimmon.com/2023/... · Posted by u/sbmsr
The bit on the database performance issues leads me to my hottest, flamiest take for new projects:
- Design your application's hot path to never use joins. Storage is cheap, denormalize everything and update it all in a transaction. It's truly amazing how much faster everything is when you eliminate joins. For your ad-hoc queries you can replicate to another database for analytical purposes.
On this note, I have mixed feelings about Amazon's DynamoDB, but one things about it is to use it properly you need to plan your use first, and schema second. I think there's something you can take from this even with a RDBMS.
In fact, I'd go as far to say as joins are unnecessary for nonanalytical purposes these days. Storage is so mind booglingly cheap and the major DBs have ACID properties. Just denormalize, forreal.
- Use something more akin to UUIDs to prevent hot partitions. They're not a silver bullet and have their own downsides, but you'll already be used to the consistently "OK" performance that can be horizontally scaled rather than the great performance of say integers that will fall apart eventually.
/hottakes
my sun level take would be also to just index all columns. but that'll have to wait for another day.
Yes I like the zero joins on hot paths approach. It can be hard to sell people on it. It’s a great decision for scaling though.