I think the primary drivers of war come from the top--powerful people motivated by greed and ego. Those are the spark that starts wars.
Boredom works from the bottom, providing fuel for wars in the form of soldiers. More specifically, young men in particular are easily appealed to by offering them a part in some great heroic endeavor, and a promise to mold them into someone whose manhood and courage may never again be questioned.
Of course, as many former soldiers have found out, you usually receive none of those things. The endeavor was bullshit, you were only a cog, and there is no badge of honor in the world that exempts you from the human experience of being made to feel small.
> In order to keep prices low and quality high, we don't offer any customization to the box or ordering process. If you aren't capable of ordering through the website, I'm sorry but we won't be able to help.
Has this guy never worked on a B2B product before? Nobody is going to order a $10 million piece of infrastructure through your website's order form. And they are definitely going to want to negotiate something, even if it's just a warranty. And you'll do it because they're waving a $10 million check in your face.
The tone of this website is arrogant to the point of being almost hostile. The guy behind this seems to think that his name carries enough weight to dictate terms like this, among other things like requiring candidates to have already contributed to his product to even be considered for a job. I would be extremely surprised if anyone except him thinks he's that important.
I haven’t seen tinygrad used for any mainstream production project or thing of value, yet.
Besides a lot of self congratulatory pats on the back for how elegant it is. Honestly, when I read it, it looked confusing as all the other ML libraries. Not actually simple like Karpathy’s stuff.
All that to say, I do really want it to succeed. They should probably hire some practical engineers and not just guys and gals congratulating themselves how elegant and awesome they are.
Filling out an onboarding form is an example of what he's not willing to do, not the only thing he isn't willing to do.
> we don't offer any customization to the box or ordering process
Every B2B deal of that size that I've ever seen requires at least weeks of meetings between the customer and vendor, in which every detail is at least discussed if not negotiated. That would certainly constitute a "customization" to this guy's prescribed ordering process, which is to "Buy it now" [1] through the website at the stated price like you're ordering a jar of peanuts on Amazon. This is not "framing", it's what the guy said. If it isn't what he meant then he needs to fix his copy.
[1] Yes, there is an actual "Buy it now" button for a $65,000 business purchase that takes you to a page that looks just like a Stripe form. There isn't even a textbox for delivery instructions. Wild.
> Then if they succeed, I guess you're going to see a different process for the first time in your life.
Sure, I guess. Far more likely that they won't succeed, and it will be because of their pointless refusal to cooperate with others. I'm curious why you think we should "disrupt" companies putting a little due diligence into massive purchases.
> On a website where we frequently talk about disruptive business models, this whole attitude kinda stinks.
I could say the same thing about making a comment like this on a website where groupthink is rightfully mocked.
> you're going to see a different process for the first time in your life
That sounds very neutral, but wouldn't this, by removing the human element and flexibility from business transactions, be a further step along a general enshittification trend?
It's a shipping container. Look at the dimensions. They say concrete slab probably half as a joke, half because building code would require it to consider it a non-temporary structure.
Are you referring to the images of branded shipping containers on their Twitter page that have visible Gemini watermarks … and jokes in the comments about AI trailer parks?
20x8x8.5 ft is the dimensions of a half shipping container. You think that render is a joke but it's not. They don't have photos yet because it's a 2027 product (if it actually comes out which I would bet against).
It's also funny that they explicitly list driver quality as "good" for the base option and "great" for the intermediate one. You're really going to deliberately provide worse drivers for the machine I paid you for, just because I didn't buy the more expensive one?
I mean I'm sure lots of companies do this in practice because tickets for higher-paying customers naturally get prioritized, but directly stating your intention to do it on your home page is hilarious.
Nvidia drivers are better than AMD. It's not really something they have control over. Geohot is definitely obsessed with bitching about driver bugs though.
It doesn't matter if it's a joke. The non-technical manager or VP making this purchase will not understand it and will expect poor treatment from this vendor, an expectation that will be reinforced by numerous other things on this page. There is no reason to include it at all.
To me it signals honesty. But this is a subjective judgement. It really sounds like you subjectively disliked the page, and you're trying to present that dislike as objective fact. It really annoyed me the way you kept changing your argument to justify that. Why not just say "I dislike their marketing copy, it rubbed me the wrong way" and leave it at that?
I'm confused by this comment. Is it not obvious that everything I've said is my opinion?
Not everyone feels the need to hedge everything they say with "to me..." and "it really sounds like...".
> It really annoyed me ...
I have no idea what you expect me to do with that information.
> you kept changing your argument
I'm not sure what you're referring to. Are you talking about the joke/not-a-joke thing? I didn't change my argument, I dismissed a shallow objection to an irrelevant detail. My point is that regardless of why the driver quality was included on the page, customers are going to take it the wrong way. Yes, that is my opinion, because apparently that needs to be explicitly stated.
Everyone else who disagreed with me seems to have understood all this so I don't know what the source of your confusion is.
> It seems that you work a lot with managers who have no clue what they are buying and why.
There are certain quirks of this platform's user base that always make me laugh. For example, HNers absolutely love to imply something condescending about the other guy's workplace in order to make their point.
Watch this, I can do it too: Working with managers who make $65,000 (or $10 million) purchases with no more due diligence than reading a marketing page and clicking "Buy it now" is not the flex you think it is.
I was involved in it-related deals on both purchasing and selling sides. Sums involved were larger than both numbers you mentioned.
And I honestly see almost no correlation between the amount of negotiation involved, and value received.
Some of the most useful things we've integrated were either free or meant that only the "buy it now" button had to be clicked.
Some of the absolutely worst systems I had to work with were purchased after making a call to that "let us know" number.
This tiny guy is mostly saying that he doesnt have the time for enterprise bla-bla. I am not sure he can organise enterprise sales with this attitude but can definitely relate to it!
There isn't a $10MM device right now, just $64M and under. I doubt the order process will remain the same in 12 months when the $10MM device becomes available
Yeah it’s a little odd. Maybe they are meant to be really really cool toys? People regularly spend more than $65k on things like cars to show off, so it could be like that.
I have no use for these but I might buy one anyway if I won the lottery. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They MIGHT pay you IF you're a fit. They're bounties, i.e. spec work. They also pay a max of $1000, most of them significantly less. You can see more info at the link in that line:
> All bounties paid out at my (geohot) discretion. Code must be clean and maintainable without serious hacks.
No thanks. If you want to try before you buy, have your candidates do a paid test project. Founders need to stop acting like it's a privilege to work for them. Any talent worth hiring has plenty of other options that will treat them with respect.
Take a gander at the OpenWorm project. It's a great example of how simple neuronal activity is (given details like the connections, number of receptors, and transmitter infrastructure). SOTA models of neuronal activity are simple enough for problem sets in undergraduate biomedical engineering programs.
Sure, to your point, we don't know. But the worm above (nematode) swims and seeks food when dropped into a physics engine.
My main point is that the scale of the human brain is well beyond the capabilities of modern imaging modalities, and it will likely remain so indefinitely. Fascicles we can image, individual axons we cannot. I guess, theoretically, we'll eventually be able to (but it's not relevant to us or any of our remote descendants).
> But the worm above (nematode) swims and seeks food when dropped into a physics engine.
Nematode worms have an oxytocin analogue called nematocin that is known to influence learning and social behaviors like mating. As far as I can find, the project doesn't account for this, or only minimally, but aims to in the future.
It's not surprising that immediate short-term behaviors like movement depend mostly on the faster signaling of the connectome. But since we know of other mechanisms that most definitely influence the connectome's behavior, and we know we don't account for those at the moment, it is not accurate to say that the connectome is "all the information you need".
I agree that mapping the connectome of the human brain is impractical to the point of impossibility. But even if we could, the resulting "circuit diagram" would not capture all the details needed to fully replicate human cognition. Aspects of it, sure. Maybe even enough to make it do useful tasks for EvilCorp LLC while being prodded with virtual sticks and carrots. But it would be incomplete.
I saw a putative 3D animation of a fly whose brain had been digitized and then run in a simulation. It buzzed around, sipped food it had found on the ground, even rubbed its forelegs together as flies do. A true Dixie Flyline. We live in strange times...
There's research on the translation process where cells are basically flash-frozen (to avoid water crystals), then imaged with cryoelectronmicroscopy / AFM etc. where they image the translation process (RNA to protein) in order to get snapshots and get a better understanding of how the folding proceeds and is aided.
If we can image sub-cellular features, what makes you believe we can't trace all the axons, dendrites and the synapses?
It seems more like a question of how to do it cost effectively at scale, not so much a question of "can we or not?".
> It's like "A study found that parachutes were no more effective than empty backpacks at protecting jumpers from aircraft."
Are you under the impression that we don't bother to empirically prove things that seem obvious, like the safety benefits of parachutes? You don't think parachute manufacturers test their designs and quantify their performance?
There are no randomized controlled trials that parachutes save lives.
This is repeatedly used as an example in the medical community about the limits of randomized controlled trials. This isn't some impression - your impression that such evidence exists is wrong.
There might be some parachute company tests about effective of velocity, etc., but there are no human trials.
> There are no randomized controlled trials that parachutes save lives.
It's a good thing "randomized controlled trials" aren't the only kind of empirical evidence, then.
We know the limits of how fast a human can safely land. Parachute manufactures have to prove that their designs meet the minimum performance specifications to achieve a safe speed. This proof is not invalidated by the fact that it doesn't include throwing some poor bastard with a placebo parachute out of an airplane to demonstrate that he dies on impact.
Also, the answer to your original question is yes. There are numerous studies showing that multiple monitors improve productivity.
> We just packed the kid along and went traveling anyway. He had eleven stamps in his passport by his first birthday.
How do you keep a baby happy and quiet on long international flights? I currently have no kids but I may find myself in this situation in the next couple years. I'm dreading being the guy with a screaming infant on a 13-hour trans-Pacific flight that keeps everyone from sleeping.
Babies want nothing more than to sit on your lap snoozing and feeding. It's more or less what you do at home anyway. The hardest part about flying with a baby is dealing with the added luggage (stroller, carseat, overpacked diaper bag, etc).
It's only once they're old enough to have more sophisticated feelings (like boredom) but not old enough to communicate them (except by screaming) you get in trouble.
First two years they can fly for free, but they have to ride in an adult’s lap and that gets tiring. Don’t believe the bassinet offerings - as soon as a plane gets turbulence, you have to get the sleeping baby out of the wall bassinet and good luck appeasing them. Age 1-2 is hardest for travel, so you can skip it. The only thing that worked was getting their own seat with the cosco scenera next car seat (or their own if they like it, but that one is $50 and light to carry). They would sleep nicely for large chunks and you get to enjoy travel again. After age 3 it’s much easier (they can ipad if that’s the only ipad time they ever get).
Don't go straight to screens in this situation. You can introduce novelty by purchasing a number of cheap toys, even from the dollar store, which they have never seen before. Keep them hidden until the flight.
I'd say that's pretty much the definition of standard, yeah. And it's why you can't make a profit selling a simple ToDo app. If you expect people to pay for what you build, you have to build something that doesn't have a thousand free clones on the app store.
> LLM use in litigation drafting is thus akin to insurgent/guerilla warfare: it take little time, energy, or thinking to create, yet orders of magnitude more to analyze and refute.
The same goes for coding. I have coworkers who use it to generate entire PRs. They can crank out two thousand lines of code that includes tests "proving" that it works, but may or may not actually be nonsense, in minutes. And then some poor bastard like me has to spend half a day reviewing it.
When code is written by a human that I know and trust, I can assume that they at least made reasonable, if not always correct, decisions. I can't assume that with AI, so I have to scrutinize every single line. And when it inevitably turns out that the AI has come up with some ass-backwards architecture, the burden is on me to understand it and explain why it's wrong and how to fix it to the "developer" who hasn't bothered to even read his own PR.
I'm seriously considering proposing that if you use AI to generate a PR at my company, the story points get credited to the reviewer.
We don't really track individual features to people in a way I could call "crediting" - as in nobody really checks afterwards who did how many story points in a sprint.
As long as the team as a whole gets stuff done, everything is good.
Because story points is a tool for the business to know when optimistically a thing could be done. Or more realistically get a decent "no sooner than" estimation of the task.
Using them for anything else, or by anyone else, like scoring the team or like here, individual contributors, is idiotic.
Banking Company LLC presents: Quantum Loans™
"Your money is simultaneously yours and ours until you check your balance."
Superposition Financing:
Your loan exists in all possible amounts until observed. Checking your balance collapses the wavefunction — so we recommend you simply... don't. Ignorance isn't just bliss, it's financially optimal.
Multiverse Co-signing:
Split the debt across all versions of yourself in the multiverse. Sure, some of you will default — but statistically, infinite yous means infinite revenue for us.
Entangled Interest Rates:
Your rate is entangled with a partner borrower chosen at random. If they pay on time, your rate drops.
Payment Clusters:
Forget monthly installments. Payments arrive in probabilistic clusters — sometimes three in a week, sometimes none for a year. We can't predict when, and neither can you. It's not a bug, it's quantum mechanics.
The real joke here is how close these quips are to the reality of modern day financial markets. Specifically, lending and hedging, are time entangled and value within the markets exist in superposition.
Boredom works from the bottom, providing fuel for wars in the form of soldiers. More specifically, young men in particular are easily appealed to by offering them a part in some great heroic endeavor, and a promise to mold them into someone whose manhood and courage may never again be questioned.
Of course, as many former soldiers have found out, you usually receive none of those things. The endeavor was bullshit, you were only a cog, and there is no badge of honor in the world that exempts you from the human experience of being made to feel small.
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