If you are a manager, would you accept that from a subordinate who failed to do their job successfully?
The nature of work is that it's not a cleanroom lab or a business school case study; lots of difficult and unfair obstacles exist, and your job is to overcome them. To me, that defines 'job' like the sea defines 'sailor'. You're very lucky when that isn't the case.
Realistically, there is some judgment involved and matters of degree, and there are limitations, but the best people find a way using the resources they have.
>The question, though, is what will be the analogy to mobile (and the cloud), which exploded demand and led to one of the most profitable decades tech has ever seen? The answer may be an already discarded fad: the metaverse.
People haven't really noticed that building a general-purpose (humanoid) robot has become 1000x more feasible now even compared to 1.5 years ago.
Fivetran has been diligent the three years I was tucked away in FAANG analytics. When I emerged earlier this year back into the world of normal companies, I realized there was a sort of holy trinity of companies that has completely dominated the analytics SaaS market: Fivetran, Snowflake, and dbt. I had only heard of Snowflake before.
LLM are definitely not sentient. As someone with a PhD in this domain, I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models - and reproduction to prompts which closely match the inputs' sentence embedding.
GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers gave garbled output; more likely that GPT3 had seen similar training data.)
The belief of sentience isn't new. When ELIZA came out few decades ago, a lot of people were also astounded & thought this "probably was more than met the eyes".
It's a fad. Once people understand that sentience also means self-awareness, empathy & extrapolation of logic to assess unseen task (to name a few), this myth will taper off.
>> Totally agree with this article. It's not just about funding methods, but also playbooks for these types of businesses, and best practices.
I think the word you are looking for is called "business". There are tons of books for these types of businesses.
On the shelf behind me is E-Myth Mastery, 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, Traction by Gino Wickman. You just have to look outside of tech. All of these books and practices apply to software businesses.
If a bomb goes off, don't look at the blast, go to an area in your house without windows and little air access, close the doors and wait there for 24 hours.
Ideally, it's a closed basement surrounded by ground and concrete. If not, maybe a bathroom wine cellar, etc. the idea is to isolate yourself from the surrounding radiation in the air.
Hopefully, you have a shortwave radio with fresh batteries or one you can hand crank. Because cellphones and access to information will be limited, the shortwave radio is important because ideally, city officials will be broadcasting where to avoid going outside and safety instructions.
Don't go outside within the first 24 hours, as small radiation particles will fall on you and cause serious health issues.
If you do go outside get rid of all your clothes and take a shower, don't use conditioner which binds radioactive material to your body.
They say that after 24 hours, radiation levels should drop off significantly, since the winds will hopefully blow them away. But that's why a shortwave radio is important to have, so you know which directions of the city are getting the radiation.
If you know single variable calculus and basic linear algebra, then you can often muddle through by just remembering that the derivative of,
(1) f: R^n -> R is a vector
(2) f: R -> R^n is a vector
(3) f: R^m -> R^n is an n x m matrix (the Jacobian)
(*) f(x)=x^tAx is f'(x)=(A + A^t)x (this is an example of (1))
(**) and that the derivative (gradient) of (1) gives you (3) with m=n, and in this case the derivative of (3) will be symmetric (the Hessian).
then just do your best to apply the single variable rules of differentiation (product rule, chain rule, etc.), and then mess around a bit with the result until all the dimensions match up and such that your result matches the appropriate case (1)-(3).
For any more complicated functions you encounter such as the determinant, you can just look up its derivative when needed.
>That's not true. The American Universities don't choose to admit foreign students just because. The good schools always try to balance the mix of students admitted into the program.
Then why do Indians make up more than 30% of my school's CS program, despite them making up less than 1% of the US population?
I've had similar self-doubt in the past, I considered myself fast but sloppy.
I changed my opinion after a workshop on different team roles at my previous job. A lot of it was boring workshop fluff, but I loved the core message: that many personality traits aren't purely positive or negative. Perfectionists are nitpickers. Fast developers are sloppy. Experienced ones overthink stuff. Bleeding-edge evangelists ruin long-term stability etc. There are two sides to every coin. We tend to value traits we have (or desire) and judge people based on that, but it really depends on the team and the task.
Need a quick-and-dirty prototype ASAP? Give it to the framework hipster. Planning architecture for a complex long-term project? Ask the boring slow guy with 20 years experience. Build teams with enough variety and try to solve problems through process. Don't scold the fast guy for being sloppy, give him tasks that require speed and solve bugs with better QA and tests.
TL;DR: A damage dealer will beat a healer one on one, but that doesn't mean he's better. You need them both (plus a tank) to run a dungeon successfully.
Here's the process that works (with some persistence) even if you don't have a revolutionary product:
1. Go to Google, toggle to news and enter the name of similar startups
2. Go through each recent article and add the journalist to a spreadsheet
3. Go on Email Hunter or Email Format to find how the publication formats their email addresses to guess the journalist's. Journalists also tend to use firstnamelastname@gmail.com for their personal emails.
4. Email your pitch in 3-5 sentences max. Don't just describe what your startup you does, use an interesting angle or story to show its impact.
Instead of: "We do delivery logistic optimization."
Story:
"Why the heck is your technician always 5hrs late? Cause it took forever to fix the issues of the guy before you.
We're helping our customers like Comcast and Oracle smart schedule all their appointments based on data like a) how long issue x typically takes to fix and b) real-time traffic conditions.
In high school, I worked taxi dispatcher, seeing firsthand the inefficiencies in coordinating drivers."
Journalists don't want to advertise your startup for free, they care about writing a story that entertains and educates their readers. Feed one to them.
It's certainly not a family, but a "team" probably isn't right, either.
If you company wants to use a sports team metaphor, that's fine, but just remember that many professional sports have players unions and guaranteed contracts.
Oh, what's that? Not such a big fan of the sports team metaphor now?
The nature of work is that it's not a cleanroom lab or a business school case study; lots of difficult and unfair obstacles exist, and your job is to overcome them. To me, that defines 'job' like the sea defines 'sailor'. You're very lucky when that isn't the case.
Realistically, there is some judgment involved and matters of degree, and there are limitations, but the best people find a way using the resources they have.