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loire280 commented on This is not the future   blog.mathieui.net/this-is... · Posted by u/ericdanielski
xvector · 14 days ago
One thing I've noticed - artists view their own job as more valuable, more sacred, more important than virtually any other person's job.

They canonize themselves, and then act all shocked and offended when the rest of the world doesn't share their belief.

Obviously the existence of AI is valuable enough to pay the cost of offsetting a few artists' jobs, it's not even a question to us, but to artists it's shocking and offensive.

loire280 · 14 days ago
I read this comment as implying a similar kind of exceptionalism for technology, but expressing a different set of values. It reminds me of the frustration I’ve heard for years from software engineers who work at companies where the product isn’t software and they’re not given the time and resources to do their best work because their bosses and nontechnical peers don’t understand the value of their work.
loire280 commented on Kafka is Fast – I'll use Postgres   topicpartition.io/blog/po... · Posted by u/enether
altcognito · 2 months ago
This doesn't even make sense. How do you know what the network links or the other bottlenecks are like? There are a grandiose number of assumptions being made here.
loire280 · 2 months ago
There is a finite and relatively narrow range of ratios of CPU, memory, and network throughput in both modern cloud offerings and bare hardware configurations.

Obviously it's possible to build, for example, a machine with 2 cores, a 10Gbps network link, and a single HDD that would falsify my statement.

loire280 commented on Kafka is Fast – I'll use Postgres   topicpartition.io/blog/po... · Posted by u/enether
uberduper · 2 months ago
Has this person actually benchmarked kafka? The results they get with their 96 vcpu setup could be achieved with kafka on the 4 vcpu setup. Their results with PG are absurdly slow.

If you don't need what kafka offers, don't use it. But don't pretend you're on to something with your custom 5k msg/s PG setup.

loire280 · 2 months ago
In fact, a properly-configured Kafka cluster on minimal hardware will saturate its network link before it hits CPU or disk bottlenecks.
loire280 commented on America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom   washingtonpost.com/busine... · Posted by u/voxleone
tracker1 · 3 months ago
Considering the US has far fewer people far more spread out, with two major sets of mountain ranges just in the continental US probably not. It might be possible to have high speed rail on either coast with a single rail line following along a route near I-10 east=west. Even then it's a lot of nature to overcome.
loire280 · 3 months ago
There's a lot of population centers in the US that could be better connected without crossing the Rockies.

Beijing to Shanghai is roughly the same distance as Chicago to New York City. Travel time via train is 4.5 hours vs 22 hours.

Boston to New York is almost 4 hours on the Acela!

loire280 commented on America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom   washingtonpost.com/busine... · Posted by u/voxleone
yxhuvud · 3 months ago
I rather think of the maintenance nightmare. You can't change anything - not cause the existing system is good but because there are no people left that understand the whole thing.

But then I've got a few years to reach 50. Perhaps my views will change.

loire280 · 3 months ago
Every software company I've worked at that is more than 5 years old had major features that nobody understood anymore, even features that were core to the product.
loire280 commented on The collapse of the econ PhD job market   chrisbrunet.com/p/the-col... · Posted by u/Ozarkian
ActorNightly · 3 months ago
Its C. the market doesn't follow traditional models anymore.

The whole profession was basically centered around putting a dollar amount on risk.

For example, lets say I give you a chance of either taking $1k now, or playing a game where you have 1 in 10 chance to win $200k. What would you do? The right answer is "sell" the risk to someone. For example, on the average, if I "buy" the game from 10 people, at a price of $10k each, I can realistically win twice what I spend.

Repeat that over x number of steps and more complex games, and that is what the PhDs worked on in terms of pricing.

For most of the time it worked ok. In a few instances (most notably the Gaussian Copula that was a large reason for the subprime house market crisis in 2007) it didn't.

The problem is that now, its impossible to predict whether orange man is going to throw a hissy fit and cause the market to go up or down, or if large investors are going to artificially prop up stock like they did with Tesla.

loire280 · 3 months ago
You're right that the orange man has been a big factor, but not because of his effect on the stock market. The stock market isn't the economy, and most Econ PhDs are not working on modeling stock prices.

As the article indicates, a huge portion of the market for hiring PhDs is directly or indirectly dependent on federal funding. Universities are freezing hiring and reducing PhD cohort sizes, institutions like the IMF and World Bank are in crisis, and US government agencies have been reducing staff sizes. There was hope that the tech industry would provide another big source of jobs for PhD economists, but that hasn't panned out.

Source: the article, and my wife works in the UChicago economics department.

loire280 commented on A computer upgrade shut down BART   bart.gov/news/articles/20... · Posted by u/ksajadi
RcouF1uZ4gsC · 4 months ago
Public transportation is inherently centralized.

Cars are anti-fragile and decentralized.

Cars fail open in the short term.

loire280 · 4 months ago
Buses are the resilient backup for trains, especially if road infrastructure has been designed to prioritize transit (e.g. Chicago highways with shoulders designed to let Pace buses bypass traffic jams).
loire280 commented on Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth   twitter.com/premqnair/sta... · Posted by u/rfurmani
bagels · 5 months ago
1m isn't enough to really retire in in silicon valley
loire280 · 5 months ago
Sure, but if you're 10+ years into your career and have been financially conservative (i.e. have a positive net worth), a lump sum of $1m could be enough to retire to a lower-cost location.
loire280 commented on The Rise of Whatever   eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/th... · Posted by u/cratermoon
tptacek · 6 months ago
LLM calls make stuff up. Your compiler can't make things up. An agent iterates LLM calls. When your LLM call makes an API up, your compiler will generate errors. The errors get fed back into the iterative loop. In pretty much ever real case, the LLM corrects, but either way: the result is clear. The code may be wrong, but it shouldn't hallucinate entire APIs.
loire280 · 6 months ago
A great solution to this problem, but it doesn't seem like this approach will generalize to problems in other fields, or even to more suble coding confabulations that can't be detected by the compiler or static analysis.
loire280 commented on Hydra: Vehicles on the island – 'After the works they abandon them here'   en.protothema.gr/2025/05/... · Posted by u/gnabgib
dylan604 · 7 months ago
The type powered by meat motors
loire280 · 7 months ago
I've started calling them "acoustic" bikes, like non-electric guitars. Not technically accurate, but folks almost always get it and smile.

u/loire280

KarmaCake day658December 10, 2008View Original