I wouldn’t want kids to grow up chasing a number. It’s just too reductionist. If you want them to be financially secure, teach them skills and the money will follow. TC obsession is a blight.
Readit Newstictacttoe commented on Show HN: In a single HTML file, an app to encourage my children to invest roberdam.com/en/dinversio... · Posted by u/roberdam
tictacttoe commented on Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP simonwillison.net/2025/Oc... · Posted by u/weinzierl
You don’t need skills to build progressively detailed context. You can do this with MCP.
tictacttoe commented on Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high worksinprogress.news/p/wh... · Posted by u/bensouthwood
When Tesla demoed (via video) self-driving in 2016 with a claim "The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself" and then when they unveiled Semi in 2017 - I tweeted out and honestly thought that trucking industry is changed forever and it doesn't make sense to be starting in trucking industry. It's almost end of 2025 and either nothing out of it or just a small part of it panned out.
I think we all have become hyper-optimistic on technology. We want this tech to work and we want it to change the world in some fundamental way, but either things are moving very slowly or not at all.
Meanwhile, it’s my feeling that technology is moving insanely fast but people are just impatient. You move the bar and the expectations move with it. I think part of the problem is that the market rewards execs who set expectations beyond reality. If the market was better at rewarding outcomes not promises, you’d see more reasonable product pitches.
First, the author is right. This is the way the world works, and if you want to get ahead, play the game. But I have strong contempt for management throwing up their hands and saying “it’s your promotion, own it”.
Usually the subtext is that they’ve created a promotion process which is onerous, they are under paying you market rate, and/or management doesn’t want to make hard decisions or uphold their side of the bargain. The last thing I want to do as an IC after I’ve crawled through glass for several years to accomplish something Herculean is draft documents that defend my accomplishments from bureaucrats.
When I hear comments like that, I raise my eyebrows because it’s almost tempting me to apply elsewhere. I don’t know why, when presented with mountains of evidence, managers can’t just make a reasoned judgment call and grant promotions when appropriate, unassisted.
tictacttoe commented on OpenStreetMap Is Turning 20 stevecoast.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/gemanor
First, happy customer of OSM and it’s impressive what they’ve built! That said, I’ve noticed their company website field is sparsely populated.
Any recommendations for acquiring the place website URL through an API or ethically scraping it at scale? I’m specifically wondering about options that wouldn’t involve Google Places.
tictacttoe commented on Attribution is dying, clicks are dying sparktoro.com/blog/attrib... · Posted by u/dotcoma
This is a topic near and dear to my heart.
First, didn't realize this was Rand Fishkin writing it. He knows his stuff. He also has another linked article in there that is more prescriptive on incrementality measurement being all that matters and how to think about it at a high level and I completely agree it is all the matters.
https://sparktoro.com/blog/how-to-measure-hard-to-measure-ma...
That in turn links to another respected analytics leader, Avinash Kaushik:
https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/marketing-analytics-attribut...
That is also a must read.
The bottom line is what used to work no longer does, and marketers (and finance and leadership) need to get used to having less fidelity and availability than they were used to. It also means marketing teams who are thrashy trying a new low impact tactic every week instead of constructing experiments likely to deliver statistically significant results on incremental lift are going to be spinning their wheels and wasting dollars. And that's something to watch out for.
Unfortunately, setting up proper experiments, controlling for bias, getting clean data, etc. are material challenges that require skills, scale (to get a read on bottom of funnel especially), and resources/budget.
There aren't great options out there for that now if you're a smaller or mid size company that I'm aware of, though if anyone is aware of them I'd love to have them on my radar.
For low-funnel sponsored advertising, the effects are largely instantaneous, and you can measure your net profit lift simply by turning it on and off every hour (or day).
tictacttoe commented on What are the threats to the AI boom? economist.com/business/20... · Posted by u/viewtransform
I’m using AI in my daily life. ChatGPT has largely replaced Google. My programming output and ability is greatly enhanced. I’m working on projects that were impossible a few years ago. How can people say this is another hype bubble?
tictacttoe commented on How Does GPT-4o Encode Images? oranlooney.com/post/gpt-c... · Posted by u/olooney
Llava1.6, IntenVL, CogVLM2 can all do OCR with nothing but tiled image embeddings and an LLM. Feeding in OCR results from tesseract improves the reliability of the transcript, especially for long strings of random characters, but it’s not strictly necessary for the model to read the text out of the image.
Clip embeddings can absolutely “read” text if the text is large enough. Tiling enables the model to read small text.
I found llava to be disappointing, but Claude Haiku is quite good
Learning that some folks can produce so much value with crappy code.
I've seen entire teams burn so much money by overcomplicating projects. Bikesheding about how to implement DDD, Hexagonal Architecture, design patterns, complex queues that would maybe one day be required if the company scaled 1000x, unnecessary eventual consistency that required so much machinery and man hours to keep data integrity under control. Some of these projects were so late in their deadlines that had to be cancelled.
And then I've seen one man projects copy pasting spaghetti code around like there's no tomorrow that had a working system within 1/10th of the budget.
Now I admire those who can just produce value without worrying too much about what's under the hood. Very important mindset for most startups. And a very humbling realization.
Having heard a variation of this comment many times, I keep waiting for an “aha” moment, where I see the light and abandon my obsession with minimalism and clean code.
But at least in science roles it hasn’t happened yet. Rather, I keep seeing instances of bogus scientific conclusions which waste money for years before they are corrected.
Being systematic, reproducible, and thorough is difficult, but it’s the only way to do science.
"only AI Model with Vision-to-Language Capabilities"
What do they mean by this? Isn't this roughly what GPT-4 Vision and LLaVA do?
And all Claude models…