thechao (u/thechao) - Readit News

thechao commented on The Waymo World Model waymo.com/blog/2026/02/th... · Posted by u/xnx

coffeemug · 2 days ago

I've recently switched to Claude for chat. GPT 5.2 feels very engagement-maxxed for me, like I'm reading a bad LinkedIn post. Claude does a tiny bit of this too, but an order of magnitude less in my experience. I never thought I'd switch from ChatGPT, but there is only so much "here's the brutal truth, it's not x it's y" I can take.

thechao · 2 days ago

GPT likes to argue, and most of its arguments are straw man arguments, usually conflating priors. It's ... exhausting; akin to arguing on the internet. (What am I even saying, here!?) Claude's a lot less of that. I don't know if tracks discussion/conversation better; but, for damn sure, it's got way less verbal diarrhea than GPT.

thechao commented on TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe nytimes.com/2026/02/06/bu... · Posted by u/thm

glimshe · 3 days ago

Maybe I don't get addicted easily, but after 30 minutes of forcing myself to watch tiktok, I just uninstalled it. Friends told me I didn't give it enough time to learn my tastes but... How could it, given that literally 100% of the videos in my interest areas were trash?

thechao · 3 days ago

It's a constant stream of makeup & dogs. I just stick to Michael Penn on YT.

thechao commented on 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found nytimes.com/2026/01/26/sc... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

drakythe · 13 days ago

430,000 years? Am I reading this headline correctly? (since the site seems to have fallen victim to the HN-hug-of-death). That seems wildly further back than I understood humans to have tools, or even homo sapiens to have existed.

ETA: Today I learned I had a much much larger gap in knowledge than I thought I did. Thanks to everyone for the information and links!

thechao · 12 days ago

Then ... you find out that smoking was introduced to the new world in the 16th c, and indigenous North Americans didn't start using the bow & arrow ubiquitously until after the year 1000. But! Native North Americans were using copper contemporaneously with the old world.

thechao commented on What “The Best” Looks Like kuril.in/blog/what-the-be... · Posted by u/akurilin

alphazard · 13 days ago

This completely misses the reason why you need to hire the best initially. It has nothing to do with the hardness of your own company's problems. It has everything to do with the distribution of productivity among any kind of engineer.

Engineers follow a pareto distribution. In a normal sized team, with a typical hiring funnel, you will have a few high performers, who are responsible for most of the team's productivity. If you can only hire one person from that team, then it is more likely than not that you will hire someone with productivity below the team's mean. At an early startup, this could be a death sentence. Especially since we typically reason and plan in terms of means, so it may come as a surprise that your single engineer is less productive than the mean of most teams that you have worked with.

The other reason (also not mentioned) is that you eventually want to scale hiring. That means that you need to have people, that you have hired yourself, hire more people on your behalf. The best people (A players in the metaphor) don't have imposter syndrome, they know how good they are, and how good they aren't. They want to work with other talent, that makes their lives easier, more interesting, and less stressful than covering for/babysitting other people. It's also the only way they can grow from where they are at. So they can be trusted to hire more A players, out of self interest.

The median engineer (let's call them a B player) often knows about where they stand as well, and often they will have started to diversify their skillset into organizational politics. They intuit: hiring people more competent than them gives them less leverage, and they are pretty good at zero-sum status games, that's their edge. They don't want competition, so they hire C players.

So the reason you want to start with the best is because it's the only way to ensure you can move fast when you need to, and the best way to keep the organization effective long enough to exit. All organizations decay into incompetence, but hopefully you can get yours and get out before that happens.

thechao · 13 days ago

So... every company only hires the best!? I jest, I jest!

In general, I've found that the younger engineers (20s, up to 30s) have a lot of vim & vigor; but, even the very best ones generally do a lot of spinning-in-place, when they think they're making progress. Almost anyone above a certain level -- call it the 30–40% mark (it's low!) -- can be raised up to be a competent engineer. Probably what'd be called an "an A- or B+" player? That's just part of a good training & onboarding regime; although, it can take 1-3 years, depending on the person. Very good "natural" talent can definitely boost top performance to an A+, but it won't substitute for literal time-under-stress of delivering high quality product-ready code to clients.

thechao commented on UN declares that the world has entered an era of 'global water bankruptcy' smithsonianmag.com/smart-... · Posted by u/pseudolus

Simboo · 15 days ago

Down with lawns!

thechao · 15 days ago

Our least tasty crop!

thechao commented on Memory layout in Zig with formulas raymondtana.github.io/mat... · Posted by u/raymondtana

titzer · 15 days ago

You might want to have a look at the unboxing and packing annotations that are proposed for Virgil. The unboxing mechanism is implemented and there was a prototype of the packing mechanism implemented by Bradley for his thesis. I am working on making a more robust implementation that I can land.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.11094

I'm not sure I understand your example; if I am looking at it right, it has overlapping bitfields.

But supposing you didn't want overlapping fields, you could write:

    type Dang(tom: u11, baz: u16, bar: u5, foo: u5) #packed;

And the compiler would smash the bits together (highest order bits first).

If you wanted more control, you can specify where every bit of every field goes using a bit pattern:

    type Dang(tom: u11, baz: u16, bar: u5, foo: u5) #packed 0bTTTTTTTT_TTTbbbbb_bbbbbbbb_bbbzzzzz_????fffff

Where each of T, b, z, and r represent a bit of each respective field.

thechao · 15 days ago

Overlapping. I have my needs.

thechao commented on Memory layout in Zig with formulas raymondtana.github.io/mat... · Posted by u/raymondtana

thechao · 15 days ago

I know this is a bit cursed; but, I always wanted a bitfield-on-steroids construct:

    struct Dang : bits 64    // 64 bits wide, int total
    {
        foo : bits 5 @ 0;    // 5 bits wide at bit offset 0
        bar : bits 5 @ 0;
        baz : bits 16 @ 4;   // 16 bits wide at bit offset 4
        tom : bits 11 @ 32;
    };

thechao commented on Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee arstechnica.com/cars/2026... · Posted by u/CharlesW

testing22321 · 16 days ago

Somewhat related, there are now robotaxis giving rides to customers in Austin with no driver, and no safety monitor inside at all.

Progress, for sure.

thechao · 16 days ago

Waymo's been in Austin for a while! Seeing them on MOPAC, when I don't think they're supposed to be on the highway, is always charming.

thechao commented on Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate (2020) leidenmedievalistsblog.nl... · Posted by u/benbreen

Cthulhu_ · 17 days ago

> You can't wall all the fields but you can wall the village.

An interesting take on this is depicted in Attack on Titan, where they do in fact wall all the fields - the city (I don't remember if it's like the last vestige of humanity or whatever) is surrounded in concentric ring walls, the outer one which contains villages and farmland having a circumference of about 3000 kilometers for an internal area of 723,822 km², making its area just a bit smaller than Zambia and Chile.

Of course, a 3000 kilometer, 50 meter tall wall is ridiculous. But then again the great wall of China is 21.000 kilometers long. I believe there's more info about the walls and their construction in the source.

thechao · 17 days ago

Ballpark figures based on the ram earth construction for TGE vs AOT would have the AOT wall be 5-10x the volume & mass of the TGW. The issue is labor — the Great Wall probably represents 20–100 million ma years of labor. The AoT wall probably has at most 100k man years of labor it could've pulled from. That'd mean it's labor-mass ratio is off by 1000–10000x.