2
points
Fede_V
Joined 4,422 karma
Researcher. Systems biology, open science, data analysis, machine learning and effective altruism. E-mail: 5a308f7e 'at' opayq.com
- Fede_V parentIsn't this a stochastic variant of Barnes-Hut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes%E2%80%93Hut_simulation
- The fast.ai courses are exceptionally good for getting started and learning the concepts, but, once you've mastered an intuitive understanding of the techniques, I highly encourage people to dig deeper into the concepts - specifically, reverse SDEs, stochastic calculus, optimization, score matching.
Jeremy does an excellent job making the content approachable, but, if you want to go beyond being an excellent practicioner, you cannot skip the theory bits.
- I completely agree re: Potemkin village tour of recruiting, but, those townhalls are not a window into company culture at all exactly because they get leaked.
The only way to get a candid view into company culture is to have insider friends that can tell you what it's really like to work there.
- It's a vicious cycle, but, every time one of these internal town halls gets leaked to the internet, the execs lose the ability to speak candidly, and the workers feel like execs are completely aloof and detached from the reality on the ground.
Unfortunately, it's incredibly difficult to maintain a certain level of trust once an org gets over a certain size.
- Joe Weisenthal (who is always worth listening too in matters of finance) put it well here: https://twitter.com/thestalwart/status/1634985524007157760?s...
Some VCs were definitely better than others: the very worse was probably the All In Crew who were trying to spread a bank run to tie the government's hand. Truly despicable.
- I absolutely think that depositors should be made whole - and - they will.
At the same time, I think a lot of the VCs who systematically talked shit about government regulations while trying to shill crypto as a solution should very publicly eat crow. I won't lie: it will give me a great deal of personal satisfaction, but, it will also make any "bailout" (or, whatever you want to call it ) a much easier lift politically.
- Beyond the criticism of the format, I found the explicit clout chasing to be completely offputting, and I think I used Clubhouse a grand total of 3x before never turning it on.
I would genuinely love to read an anthropologist dive into what causes social networks to take that turn. At its best, Twitter is full of smart nerdy people talking about science, mathematics, history, etc..
Clubhouse feels like LinkedIn, completely detached from resumes, so everyone wanted to post thinkpieces without being in any way tethered to their concrete achievements.
- I know that Apple is incredibly secretive about their launches, and I'm not surprised that carries over to their internal culture, but, I'm incredibly skeptical of stories told from the point of view of an HR person that has every single incentive to hype up their revolutionary new process that unleashed productivity and improved morale.
Every single time I read a similar story and I had first or second hand knowledge of how things actually played out, the role of the person telling the story was massively stretched out.
- I agree with your first point: 24 out of 394 is too many for my taste, but, given how hyped the sector is, it’s not a huge amount.
Per the second point, I actually completely disagree. I think there’s huge social dynamics in play that make it harder to move away from proof of work because miners have massive amounts invested into mining equipment. We might see Ethereum move to PoS eventually (maybe) - but - that will be in spite of social dynamics and because some of the leaders are stubbornly trying to do the right thing.
- What a disappointment, so many NFT/crypto companies. Given current blockchain technology, this is something that straight up makes the world a worse place by making existing processes significantly more carbon intensive.
I would consider working in crypto to be the equivalent of working for Juul or a tobacco company. Not quite as evil as working for a company that provides spyware that's used against human rights activists, but, the rung above that.
- I'm a bit torn: I see the potential for civil liberties abuse, but, one of the things I loathe the most about American culture is how entitled 'consumers' feel towards treating workers that are serving them. I feel that the mistreatment of airport staff is that kind of behaviour taken to extremes- and it's something I'd like to see utterly crushed.
- I think the complaints about SEO spam are valid - but - I think msweibel and pg misdiagnose the challenge. The challenge is that you are dealing with an adversarial system, and, the better your search engine is, the more widely used it becomes, the more valuable it is for your adversaries to find ways to game your rankings.
Any new niche search engine will go through a small window of time where they have the luxury that none of the sites they are indexing are spending all their effort trying to reverse engineer your signals, and optimize against them. I'm incredibly skeptical that they can remain useful once people all the SEO efforts of various marketers start to be turned against them.
- Reading that story, I wonder where hustle culture went wrong. Paul Graham famously celebrated "breaking the rules" (http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html) - but - this is a crazy ratchet.
I really hope that this behaviour doesn't become any more normalized than it already has. Success is not worth anything, and, while some rules may be pointless, not every rule (and norm) is an obstacle you have to hack around on your way to success.
- 4 points
- That's exactly right. I've seen zero products where the blockchain is a compelling value ad, with the exception of:
- it makes it easier to raise capital by claiming that what you are doing involves crypto, because then you get crypto-type valuations
- you can get money from people who want to speculate
- I've been reading a few of the white papers about this, but I'd absolutely love to go deeper in this. Do you have any suggestions?
I am especially interested in assessment about CO2 emissions from credible sources (please, no VCs with zero training in physical sciences posting thought leadership pieces, I beg you).
- We should do a much better job of building energy efficient devices, but, the amount of energy that's "wasted" by things like TVs that never turned off is really tiny compared to the energy footprint of the crypto ecosystem.
Further, I worry that crypto will grow massively. If that happens, all bets are off. In its current state, crypto consumes more energy than several large countries - imagine a world where that's 10x or 100x and we've still not moved off of proof of work. What's global warming going to look like?
- I'm horrendously worried about crypto gaining more marketshare as long as proof of work crypto remains mainstream. It has significantly worse externalities than just about any company I can think of (including defense contractors/vaping companies), and, if it grows larger before we have clean energy, then we virtually guarantee we won't be able to tackle global warming. We are going to bestow a world that will be significantly worse than the one we inherited to our children, and, it's not like the carbon emissions that crypto is creating are used in the service of creating valuable technology - it's literally useless proof of work.
I've worked in tech for a long time now, and I believe the stereotype about amoral techies is completely untrue - yet seeing the adoption of crypto among my peers is really depressing. I'm not sure how so many of my peers who would never ever work for a defense contractor or a vaping company are willing to work in crypto at this point. My objections are not ideological - if someone invented a cryptocurrency that was completely green and it would take over the market, I'd be totally in favor of it.
I would genuinely like someone to explain it to me, because, the kinds of essays I've read that try to argue that crypto is actually good for global warming are so shoddy that I can't believe people would take them seriously absent a huge dose of motivated reasoning.
- I had a chance to speak to Marino when he came to give a talk about bioethics at my PhD institution. He was a very smart man - but he made several mistakes.
For example - he made up a ridiculous story about being invited by the pope to attend a march in Philadelphia, which quickly got exposed as a lie. He was also completely unable to handle the local Roman political players / senior civil servants (who, granted, are hideously corrupt and have been running things for their own self dealings with left governments, center governments, far right governments, and 5 star governments (whatever they are)).
- A couple of years later - Thatcher had a similar confrontation with the miners striking against the government in the UK. Note that miner strikes had taken down the previous government and obtained a lot of concessions - so the Thatcher government was actually prepared and had stockpiled coal / prepared a PR campaign for when the strike would actually take place.