tejohnso (u/tejohnso)

tejohnso commented on John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack... · Posted by u/OlympicMarmoto

labrador · a day ago

> my old internal posts... got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad

That jives with my sense that META is a mediocre company

tejohnso · a day ago

I'm sure that kind of crap helped nudge JC out of there. He mentions (accurate and relevant) reasons why something is probably a bad idea, and the person in charge of doing it complains that JC brought up the critiques, rather than addressing the critiques themselves. What a pathetic, whiny thing to do.

tejohnso commented on Mark Zuckerberg Shakes Up Meta's A.I. Efforts, Again nytimes.com/2025/08/19/te... · Posted by u/voxadam

SamvitJ · 11 days ago

"I don't think there is a single founder/CEO in the 21st century that is performing better than Zuckerberg. I understand he's not a likable guy, and neither are are his products."

Spot on.

tejohnso · 11 days ago

The best performing founder / ceo in the 21st century is someone who is unlikable and promotes / develops unlikable products.

That seems impossible. What does that say about us?

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that most of the products being promoted are actually highly treasured by a large number of people.

tejohnso commented on Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room nytimes.com/2025/08/18/ar... · Posted by u/asnyder

somenameforme · 12 days ago

Yeah, exactly this. No idea exactly what happened but people at some point seem to have stopped accepting other people having different views or perspectives. With basically every community there was invariably some sort of oddballs.

I remember a BBS with this guy called 'Nihilist' who was a total insufferable asshole that'd make glory days Linus look like the world's most gentle man. But as is the nature with community, you learned more about him over time - and he was a guy in his 20s dying of some sort of a muscular deterioration issue, and him acting that way was just how he coped. Everybody loved him, hated him, mourned when he passed, and the community was somehow genuinely a worse place without him.

For another example I'm sure some here are familiar with, Flipcode had this one dude, extremely knowledgeable, who'd basically snipe into conversations, give amazing advice in a rather curt borderline hostile fashion (was it all caps? I think it was, but that was a long time ago), and then disappear. But he was such an important part of that already large community that I'm certain somebody else can fill in the blanks I'm leaving here.

But now when anybody does something as mild as saying the quite part out loud on dumb things, of which there are many in modern times (probably owing to this exact issue), it's like 'zomg burn the witch'! Basically a prerequisite of community requires accepting people for who they are. In modern times today that statement is basically a euphemism for sexual/LGB stuff, but obviously that's a negligibly small part of the diversity and richness of personalities, even if those personalities, or their opinions, may not always be the most pleasant or politically correct.

tejohnso · 11 days ago

> 'zomg burn the witch'

And that often comes from groups who loudly claim to promote, and obnoxiously demand diversity and tolerance.

tejohnso commented on It's the Housing, Stupid ofdollarsanddata.com/its-... · Posted by u/throw0101c

mothballed · 12 days ago

Buy land. Save.

Put RV on it. Save.

Build utilities. Save.

Build tiny house. Save.

Expand house.

This is what poor people do in latin america, sans the RV. They just buy blocks as they can and add on to it.

This is also exactly what our family did, minus the 'expand' part. We could never afford to buy a house nor get access to credit but we could afford to build a tiny one on shithole land one brick at a time. The great thing is it also more or less works no matter how poor you are, if you die before it is complete your children can continue. Eventually after enough generations enough money is saved to have a house.

tejohnso · 12 days ago

Are you talking about buying remote, difficult to access land? For most people who want to live within reasonable distance to grocery or hospital, putting an RV or tiny house on a lot is not going to be permitted.

tejohnso commented on 500 days of math gmays.com/500-days-of-mat... · Posted by u/gmays

tejohnso · 16 days ago

I'm also on foundations 3 at this point and love the system. I combine it with Anki to reinforce the retention of older material, and I find the price very reasonable for something that helps me learn math consistently.

As for the price, I see people mentioning text books as a cheaper alternative, but Math Academy includes review work, tests, and retakes when necessary. It takes care of the organizing and evaluating that is related to but not the same as the learning. You can focus on being a student, without having to also be the teacher.

I would love a full depth, accredited system that didn't cost thousands of dollars.

tejohnso commented on Illinois limits the use of AI in therapy and psychotherapy washingtonpost.com/nation... · Posted by u/reaperducer

delecti · 17 days ago

LLMs would be just as terrible at that usecase as any other kind of therapy. They don't have logic, and can't determine a logical thought from an illogical one. They tend to be overly agreeable, so they might just reinforce existing negative thoughts.

It would still need a therapist to set you on the right track for independent work, and has huge disadvantages compared to the current state-of-the-art, a paper worksheet that you fill out with a pen.

tejohnso · 17 days ago

They don't "have" logic just like they don't "have" charisma? I'm not sure what you mean. LLMs can simulate having both. ChatGPT can tell me that my assertion is a non sequitur - my conclusion doesn't logically follow from the premise.

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

highfrequency · 23 days ago

It is frequently suggested that once one of the AI companies reaches an AGI threshold, they will take off ahead of the rest. It's interesting to note that at least so far, the trend has been the opposite: as time goes on and the models get better, the performance of the different company's gets clustered closer together. Right now GPT-5, Claude Opus, Grok 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro all seem quite good across the board (ie they can all basically solve moderately challenging math and coding problems).

As a user, it feels like the race has never been as close as it is now. Perhaps dumb to extrapolate, but it makes me lean more skeptical about the hard take-off / winner-take-all mental model that has been pushed.

Would be curious to hear the take of a researcher at one of these firms - do you expect the AI offerings across competitors to become more competitive and clustered over the next few years, or less so?

tejohnso · 23 days ago

I think the expectation is that it will be very close until one team reaches beyond the threshold. Then even if that team is only one month ahead, they will always be one month ahead in terms of time to catch up, but in terms of performance at a particular time their lead will continue to extend. So users will use the winner's tools, or use tools that are inferior by many orders of magnitude.

This assumes an infinite potential for improvement though. It's also possible that the winner maxes out after threshold day plus one week, and then everyone hits the same limit within a relatively short time.

tejohnso commented on Wild pigs' flesh turning neon blue in California phys.org/news/2025-08-wil... · Posted by u/bikenaga

tejohnso · 24 days ago

>Blue tissue and flesh can be a sign of rodenticide ingestion, which can occur by eating bait – which often contain dye to identify them as poison

tejohnso commented on Modern Node.js Patterns kashw1n.com/blog/nodejs-2... · Posted by u/eustoria

hungryhobbit · a month ago

Eh, the Node test stuff is pretty crappy, and the Node people aren't interested in improving it. Try it for a few weeks before diving headfirst into it, and you'll see what I mean (and then if you go to file about those issues, you'll see the Node team not care).

tejohnso · a month ago

I just looked at the documentation and it seems there's some pretty robust mocking and even custom test reporters. Definitely sounds like a great addition. As you suggest, I'll temper my enthusiasm until I actually try it out.