Didn't the COVID lockdowns lead to a small baby boom for first-time parents?
My neighborhood is a positive data point.
Readit Newskridsdale3 commented on How Silicon Valley can prove it is pro-family thenewatlantis.com/public... · Posted by u/jger15
kridsdale3 commented on How Silicon Valley can prove it is pro-family thenewatlantis.com/public... · Posted by u/jger15
That's a lot of assumptions for someone supposedly not wanting to hand out psychological diagnoses based on a single comment on a online forum. I can online imagine the theses that would come out if you _were_ trying!
You can ad hominem all you want, but my central point remains: everyone has the same allotment of time. If you are spending it on something, that necessarily means you are not spending it on other things. That's just a fact and doesn't have moral judgements attached.
We do all have the same amount of time. But where there's inequality is in the productive (business and social/family) integral during that time.
Most people are likely at best using 25% of their 24h towards something high value. Say, 4 of their 8-9 working hours, and 1 in the morning and 3 after work are "good family time". The rest, their body and mind are in a low power state for efficiency or recovery.
Where the super-performers likely have an advantage is in a biological superiority that results in them needing less recovery time (perhaps life damages them on a cellular level less) and they have more energy-efficient or high-throughput caloric systems to be able to do more hours of high-impact work in the day.
We are learning more and more about mitochondrial differences between people. If you could do 8 hours of high-focus work every day, be super in-tune with people for 4 hours afterwards, and only need 4 hours of sleep to be completely recovered, you'd acheive a lot more over a year, or 10 years, than your peers.
This is completely un-controversial when talking about something like Pro Basketball: it's self-evident. But people don't want to acknowledge it may be a factor in programming or business leadership.
kridsdale3 commented on Why are there so many rationalist cults? asteriskmag.com/issues/11... · Posted by u/glenstein
I call this “diarrhea of the mind”. It’s what happens when you hear a steady stream of bullshit from someone’s mouth. It definitely tracks with substance abuse of “uppers”, aka meth, blow, hell even caffeine!
kridsdale3 commented on Why are there so many rationalist cults? asteriskmag.com/issues/11... · Posted by u/glenstein
Yeah it's pretty obvious and not surprising. What do people expect when a bunch of socially inept nerds with weird unchallenged world views start doing uppers? lol
I like to characterize the culture of each (roughly) decade with the most popular drugs of the time. It really gives you a new lens for media and culture generation.
kridsdale3 commented on Claude vs. Gemini: Testing on 1M Tokens of Context every.to/vibe-check/vibe-... · Posted by u/dshipper
Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix alone is 400K tokens.
And takes up a proportional width of everyone's bookshelves along side the others.
kridsdale3 commented on Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context anthropic.com/news/1m-con... · Posted by u/adocomplete
Here's a paper from MIT that covers how this could be resolved in an interesting fashion:
https://hanlab.mit.edu/blog/streamingllm
The AI field is reusing existing CS concepts for AI that we never had hardware for, and now these people are learning how applied Software Engineering can make their theoretical models more efficient. It's kind of funny, I've seen this in tech over and over. People discover new thing, then optimize using known thing.
The fact that this is happening is where the tremendous opportunity to make money as an experienced Software Engineer currently lies.
For instance, a year or two ago, the AI people discovered "cache". Imagine how many millions the people who implemented it earned for that one.
kridsdale3 commented on OpenAI's new open-source model is basically Phi-5 seangoedecke.com/gpt-oss-... · Posted by u/emschwartz
oh it's wildly different. About 15 years ago I worked on a porn recommendation system. The idea is that you'd follow a number of sites based on likes and recommendations and you'd get an aggregated feed with interstitial ads.
So I started with scraping and cross-reference, foaf, doing analysis. People's preferences are ... really complex.
Without getting too lewd, let's say there's about 30-80 categories with non-marginal demand depending on how you want to slice it and some of them can stack so you get a combinatoric.
In early user testing people wanted the niche and found the adventurous (of their particular kind) to be more compelling. And that was the unpredictable part. The majoritarian categories didn't have stickiness.
Nor did these niches have high correlation. Someone could be into say, specific topic A (let's say feet), and correlating that with topic B (let's say leather) was a dice roll. The probabilities were almost universally < 10% unless you went into majoritarian categories (eg. fit people in their 20s).
People want adventure on a reservation with a very well defined perimeter - one that is hard to map and different for every person.
So the value-add proposition went away since it's now just a collection of niche sites again.
Also, these days people have Reddit accounts reserved for porn where they do exactly this. So it was built after all.
You may be interested in the data surfaced by this large-scale survey[1]
[1] https://aella.substack.com/p/fetish-tabooness-and-popularity...
In one of their Claude Code talks they said it didn’t seem worth it, given their expectation that all IDEs will become obsolete by next year.
Xcode pretty much hung up their hat this year, and threw in with Claude.
They let the AI make the bars.
Vibegraphing.
There's no way any of these people can sanely start and maintain a family without a spouse at home full time. Which maybe you can afford on those salaries, maybe. Being on single income in the Bay with kids can get tricky.