I recently rented a new car, and just wanted to sit with the windows open while waiting.
After I shut the engine off, the interior lights and dash display would remain on for 5+ minutes. If I locked the doors, the interior lights would shut off, but it would automatically roll up all of the windows. Examples of "features" that are infuriating.
I'm not sure how feasible this is, but I love the thought experiment of limiting a training set to a certain time period, then seeing how much hinting it takes for the model to discover things we already know.
E.g. training on physics knowledge prior to 1915, then attempting to get from classical mechanics to general relativity.
Feudal Japan had a measurement called the "koku", which is roughly the amount of rice needed to feed a person for a year: about 330 lb. You can now buy 50 lb. of rice at Costco for $30, which is a few hours of work at minimum wage.
To me, that is a modern marvel. I don't want people to buy things that they don't need, and I also don't like the crowds, but I can't help but feel grateful for a stocked grocery store that is accessible to basically everyone—isn't that the dream?
It's possible to lock pages in Notion (from the ... menu on the page), which prevents editing without unlocking. Most org-level pages in our workspace are locked. People also typically lock project pages after they ship, for example.
This is also likely a performance nightmare. Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices.
At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque.
"Be careful… about this reading you refer to, this reading of many different authors and books of every description. You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind."
- Seneca, Letters
I was surprised to learn that the temptation to read too many things was also a problem 2,000 years ago. This inspired me to work on a short list of books that I know deeply.
During COVID, the block I live on in San Francisco started doing outdoor happy hours every Saturday afternoon. People weren't traveling much then, so we had near 100% attendance of every person on the block for almost a year. I went from knowing none of my neighbors to knowing all of them quite well, and it has surprised me how much it has improved my day-to-day happiness.
Since then, we've hosted a "progressive" Thanksgiving dinner, which moves from house-to-house on the block for different courses. We shut down the street one day each year and set up bounce houses for the kids. I've made pint glasses with the name our street engraved in them, and given them to my neighbors. It's shown me that there really can be something valuable outside of your immediate family and circle of friends.
One thing that struck me when visiting Tokyo (as an American living in San Francisco), was that it was not uncommon to go to a restaurant or bar on, say the 3rd or 4th floor of a building.
In America and Europe, restaurants and shops are basically all zoned to be on the ground floor, with residential or office units above. This gives the density a different feeling, because commercial/dining space extends upward.
I'm curious about the main use-cases for physical notebooks from folks on HN. I love the idea of physical notebooks, but also have years of digital notes that are searchable and that I can access on any device. I feel like I'm in too deep with digital, and like the ability to access it anywhere.
Has anyone made the switch from digital to physical and loved it? What kind of notes are you taking, how did you get it to stick?
Banks' work assumes that AI exceeding human capabilities is inevitable, and the series explores how people might find meaning in life when ultimately everything can be done better by machines. For example, the protagonist in Player of Games gets enjoyment from playing board games, despite knowing that AI can win in every circumstance.
For all of the apocalyptic AI sci-fi that's out there , Banks' work stands out as a positive outcome for humanity (if you accept that AI acceleration is inevitable).
But I also think Banks is sympathetic to your viewpoint. For example, Horza, the protagonist in the first novel, Consider Phlebas, is notably anti-Culture. Horza sees the Culture as hedonists who are unable to take anything seriously, whose actions are ultimately meaningless without spiritual motivation. I think these were the questions that Banks was trying to raise.
Their sailing videos are very inspiring—from what I remember, they sailed from Vancouver to Japan, then down to New Zealand and back to Vancouver over the course of a few years.
Among other things, it compares the Idirans—who have what we consider a more traditional, modern-day culture—with the Culture. For example:
"The war between the Idirans and the Culture is peculiarly asymmetrical, since the Culture is not an empire, or even a “polity” in any traditional sense of the term, it is simply a culture. It has no capital city, or even any “territory” in the conventional sense."
I also love Heath's criticism of Dune (I appreciate the series, but now can't help but notice how often sci-fi series use regressive social structures).
"In fact, modern science fiction writers have had so little to say about the evolution of culture and society that it has become a standard trope of the genre to imagine a technologically advanced future that contains archaic social structures. The most influential example of this is undoubtedly Frank Herbert’s Dune, which imagines an advanced galactic civilization, but where society is dominated by warring “houses,” organized as extended clans, all under the nominal authority of an “emperor.”"
The Foreign Service Institute training is also full-time, 8+ hours a day, working with dedicated tutors in small groups. Basically, it's your job to learn the language.
I've honestly found German to be easier than French, specifically in terms of listening comprehension. It can take a while to get used to word order in German, but I've found it much easier to pick out discrete words compared to French.
Maybe it's because elision is so common in French? e.g. "j’aime l’hiver". I find it hard to decouple those things quickly enough in my head. Most words in German, on the other hand, are spelled exactly as they are pronounced.
Curious if folks have had other experiences with these two languages.
I think the sweet spot of company size for an IC software engineer is between 50 and 500. It's small enough to have autonomy, learn, and build good relationships with the people around you, while not getting overwhelmed by bureaucratic processes.
50-500 is also large enough to where you, ideally, don't have to worry about the company's runway, have work-life balance, get decent compensation and benefits. There's typically opportunities for upward mobility as the company scales if you want it.
I think I've finally come to peace with idea that's it's okay to be in tech and never work for FAANG.
There was a popular submission to HN a few years ago that really opened my eyes to how having a low income can cause problems to compound, making things exponentially worse.
An example the author gives of this is car problems: people with low incomes often have older cars that are more likely to have issues. If their car breaks down, there's a chance they can't afford repairs, which means they're unable to commute to work. Perhaps because of this, they choose to stop making water bill payments or buying as much food while saving for repairs. Everything is very precarious—you're essentially one or two unlucky incidents away from ruin. That, to me, is what it means to "be poor" in the US.
Github was the first thing I thought of when reading this. My only use case for the commit date is to quickly check if a certain commit merged before a branch was automatically cut, so I need the day of the week and time, not "11 days ago."
Fortunately, if you hover over the relative date, it will expand to show the exact date time, but it would be nice if this were swapped.
There's been a general trend of grade inflation in U.S. universities, accelerating in the 1960s (during the Vietnam war), and then again in the 1990s [0]. In some sense, this might be because the role of the student shifted more towards that of a consumer purchasing a product.
Harvard average GPA was a 3.0 in 1967, now it's a 3.45 [1].
There are some universities that have tried to actively prevent inflation (e.g. Purdue with a 2.73 average in 1986 to 3.09 in 2012 [2]).
Spam teams at social networks typically shadow-ban spammers. The goal of this is to make it as difficult as possible for the spammer to determine that they've been caught (which is why I think the frustration techniques, or simply account suspension aren't widely used).
The field of spam-prevention is fascinating because it's essentially an arms race between companies deploying tactics to detect spam and sophisticated spammers using increasingly complex methods to avoid detection.
So there's an advantage gained by companies if spammers believe they don't need to evolve their methods.
Reminds me that SpaceX has now landed rocket boosters successfully over 200 times. Landing just a single rocket was huge news a few years ago.
The US is launching things into space about 20 times as frequently compared to 10 years ago [1]. Now, most rocket launches don't make mainstream news—I only keep up with things by subscribing to a niche newsletter [2].
After I shut the engine off, the interior lights and dash display would remain on for 5+ minutes. If I locked the doors, the interior lights would shut off, but it would automatically roll up all of the windows. Examples of "features" that are infuriating.