I know we (Westerners) are often fascinated by Eastern philosophies and all these "sounds of clap of one hand".
However, this article crossed a line... by a mile.
"turning a steering wheel.... all need exactly the amount of energy that they need"
In theory, it's true. In practice, there are activities like "holding a cup". if you do not have enough grip, you may unfortunately spill the coffee on the floor. If you don't have enough grip while doing a sharp turn, it could be literally fatal. As a result, it is wise for the absolute majority of people in high-risk situations to exert more power than necessary. The energy investments are small, but changes in probabilities are significant.
And the rest of the article pretty much prophesies a flow slate. Yeah, in this state, things feel effortless. However, it misses two things. To learn how to get to this flow state, like a lot of people pointed out, you need TONS and TONS and TONS of practice where you exert WAY more than you minimally need. Oh... And on top of that, in the flow state, you perceive that things are effortless. And this is mostly about a perception rather than reality. Yes, if you are extremely experienced and get to flow state, you are spending less energy than an absolute beginner, but not zero... again, by a mile.
> if you do not have enough grip, you may unfortunately spill the coffee on the floor. If you don't have enough grip while doing a sharp turn, it could be literally fatal. As a result, it is wise for the absolute majority of people in high-risk situations to exert more power than necessary. The energy investments are small, but changes in probabilities are significant.
Yes but there's still a sweet spot to find, you're not gripping your cup or your wheel as hard as you can. Over-gripping in uncertain conditions can be good but only to a certain extent.
I still agree with you though, a good example of this is climbing stairs — if you have strong legs it's much less effort to go 2 by 2 but I'd never tell someone struggling to do that, it would make no sense.
People also mistake the appearance of effortlessness with the reality. I used to play the trumpet and there was always this drumbeat of “don’t press the mouthpiece into your mouth so hard”. I think every instructor I ever had told me some variant of that. Supposedly new learners press way too hard trying to hit the high notes, while professionals hit those notes without that level of force.
Turns out nope. Someone did a study and measured the force and it was basically the same across skill levels. The professionals just make it look easy because they are used to it and more skilled.
Which makes sense, right? Highly skilled people often make things look effortless even when they objectively are extremely difficult tasks.
> If you don't have enough grip while doing a sharp turn, it could be literally fatal.
Not only that but while driving you might have to react very fast if something happens and you need to divert to avoid a crash, if you need to grip harder in the middle that are precious milliseconds that you could have saved. At least if you at high speed.
First of all, 30 is a very arbitrary deadline. I heard rumors that there is life even after age 30 :) ([cough]I am in my mid-40s[cough]).
Also, you are absolutely right; it's up to you to carve your own path. That being said, the path doesn't have to be glorious by somebody else's standard heck... it doesn't even have to be glorious by yours. However, as long as you are fine with it, who cares?
One thought, though. "I don't see any reason to take someone's best guess over mine.".
I think using black-and-white logic is detrimental. Even if people use "best guesses," the quality of these guesses (including yours) could be very different.
It's up to you to decide whether you want to climb the corporate ladder, build a business, or become a Tibetan monk. That being said, there are a lot of people who did it before you. Their advice will be imperfect, but the quality/probability of their advice will be better than that of a person who has never done it before.
Ugh... This touched a nerve. Surely, if you have a semi-unlimited amount of money (way-way more than will ever be asked from you), it's easy just to loan and forget.
I think it's a much harder game for the rest of us.
Also, it has a built-in assumption that people will self-limit what they are asking. I learned the unpleasant way that people don't. At some point in my life, I had a friend who was constantly asking for smallish amounts and conveniently forgetting to return them. Each ask for definitely in the category that I didn't care whether it was returned or not, but if you accumulate all of them, it was an amount big enough to care. After numerous unpleasant interactions with the money subject, I just decided to stop this practice.
That being said, I feel like it's critical to not become too thick-skinned. Sometimes people do need help and they are truly in a bad place and dismissing their ask just based on some other problematic person is not good.
Yeah certainly a lot of privileged/tone-deaf attitudes in here. I feel like I'm at a conference for Effective Altruism or something.
They're insecure about being successful when others are less fortunate. Rather than admit they got where they are due to a combination of skill _and_ luck, it's decided that it was all skill and that it is the duty of the skilled elites to take care of the rest of us.
Unfortunately, these days you don't even need skill, just a splash of narcissism and good self-marketing.
Our company (https://aembit.io/) solves auth problems (specifically identity and authentication between workloads).
I have been doing security and auth for the last 20 years in different shape and form. It's a minefield. Grabbing and using some SDK for auth is simple. Making sure that you account for the whole lifecycle (identity, authentication, authorization, secrets management, secrets rotation, addressing vulnerabilities as they pop up) is incredibly complex.
- As people pointed out, it's advanced FizzBuzz (really advanced)
- I can easily see a lot of people being unable to solve it, not because they can't do it, but because of a "performance anxiety". The bar here is quite high, and the result is binary (does it work or not).
- I like that it is quite close to real life (that people have to read code, figure it out, write code). On another hand, again, what is not real, that you are parachuted into a unknown (quite big) codebase and expect to add a small feature in 3 hours.
The result is not binary - you can have it fully working, or forget binary protocol, or syntax accepted but multiplication not happening; or correct code changes done, but code does not build...
That is one of advantages of longer questions (compared to 5 minute one): even if task is not fully done, there are plenty of other signals.
Given that they're specifically hiring for high-performance database work in C++, I think it's a appropriate to have a pretty dang high bar. For less-intense work, I would definitely want to formulate a less intense version of this style of problem.
I am torn. On one hand, this is great idea (exactly for such cases). I feel unbelievably bad for users.
On another hand. Lifetime support of technology (say 50 years) is damn expensive. Let say you need a dozen of engineers (hardware + software) + doctors to keep it going. It's 12 people * 200k salary (if you don't like this number, pick your own) * 50 years = $120M.
I think you can potentially argue that you don't need a dozen people to support this. However, I think it's a fair number to support aging hardware + software.
Unfortunately, such things work only with a scale. You need 10 people to support 100 customers, 20 people to support 1000 customers and 40 people to support 10000.
If they got to 10000 customers, I could see them getting enough money to fund such trust. Having just 300 customers won't be enough.
Perhaps this could be accomplished by making them front or insure the cost of the expected liability — being at least the cost of removing unsupported devices.
On one hand, yeah, may be nuanced message doesn't work at scale. However, when saying literally two things (vs one) became nuanced. I wound understand if it was a speech talking about a dozen of different things and their interplay... These were literally two things - create a solid product and let's move forward fast. That's it.
Also, why the hell whole hierarchy of middle management exist in such case? The only reason for it to exist is exactly ability to execute at scale (when things which are coming from the top are propagated properly).
But if those two things (velocity and reliability) are at opposing ends of an engineering spectrum, then different teams will make different decisions about how best to trade one off for the other, and then the org as a whole is unfocused.
The problem is the thinking that there is some fixed bucket of speed and a fixed bucket of robustness ingredients and a fixed bucket of product output. That the only way to get any reliability is to displace some speed, or that if you want to move ahead at all you have to throw reliability out entirely.
When in fact these things, and 100 other goals and considerations like being green or hiring fairly or paying interns better etc... merely influence each other a little and don't preclude each other except at absurd hyperbolic extremes.
The different goals DO influence each other. But the output product can in fact have a whole bunch of both speed and reliability, probably at the expense of yet another dimension like cost, but actually the same applies there too, you can possibly have all 3, at least to some degree, if the leadership is insightful enough to figure out a way like employing underutilized people or geography, or gamification or crowdsourcing or alternative incentives, whatever.
Pay more or sacrifice in one dimension to get more in another is merely the obvious and easy way, not the only way dictated by some zero sum law of conservation.
I switched about half a year ago from a MacBook Pro with an Intel processor to MacBook Pro with an M1 processor. My overall impression was "when the hell will it run out of power"? I spent the whole working day (without a charger) and it was still at 60%, while I was constantly stressed before when I had to do something without a charger for more than 3-4 hours.
I don't care what any test, but tripling battery life with no visible performance degradation is a huge win in my book.
It ran circles around the old machine despite being the lowest spec. Battery is light years ahead. And it doesn’t even have a fan. So it’s dead silent. Never gets hot unlike the old Intel. There isn’t any mechanical component to fail except the hinge and the keyboard.
I was worried I might regret not waiting for the higher spec M1s. Now that just seems totally unnecessary for me.
PS: Work later gave me a high spec 2019 Intel MBP. It’s slower, louder, and much hotter than my Air. And at least 2.5x the price. Amazing.
I had a 2019 Intel MBP. I hated that machine with a vengeance. It was always hot, and because of that always throttled. I live in a hot place (Israel) and during the summer of 2021 the heat caused a massive expansion of the battery which destroyed the laptop.
I went for an M1 in late 2021 after using a Windows machine for a few months and hating every moment of it.
The M1 is simply incomparable. Fast. Silent. It feels futuristic.
Part of it might be new battery effect too. I just popped a new battery in my 2012 and just doing light dev work I could stretch it to 8 hours or so. This thing was doing like 3 hours on a good day before.
Certainly that plays a part. But my M1 Air is now over a year old and I can still easily edit 4K video in iMovie for a few hours and see the battery only drop from 100% to 70%.
Pretty huge! Don't expect miracles long term though. Batteries are still batteries M1 or not and if you do 4k video editing every day, you will notice wear over time. What sucks about the new macs is you need to take it in to replace a battery, where as you used to be able to do it yourself in like 2 mins or less.
Yeah, both Chrome and Firefox will easily reduce the battery life of my M1 Pro mac by ~30% compared to Safari. I've "solved" this by sticking to Safari when battery life matters (ex, when I'm not at home) and using FF when I'm docked or close enough to one. With Safari, even my 14" gets ridiculous battery life: I spent almost two continuous days with ~6-8h of SoT each day without charging it once throughout.
I got an 8GB Mac mini. I was broke at the time but needed a replacement in a hurry, and even though my two previous machines had 16GB, 8GB should be fine for web dev work, right?
Yeah, I regret it. I like to have YouTube videos on in the background, and usually it's fine, but for some reason live streams in particular just gobble up RAM until there's sometimes skipping audio and noticeable waits when switching apps.
Interestingly hiding the chat seems to help; I wonder if the YouTube "app" isn't flushing those DOM nodes corresponding to chat messages off the page after a certain amount of time or something. When worse comes to worse, Streamlink comes to the rescue: https://streamlink.github.io
Oh well. Making do for now. And as others have said, the performance (when not RAM-constrained) and noise (or lack thereof) have been blissful.
I don't have a MacBook (but have been considering getting one), but I can't imagine that you need more that 16 GB of RAM to run a browser, no matter how memory-hungry Chrome might be.
Is this really an issue? Maybe you're trolling?
I don't understand how adding more memory is going to fix your performance. It's not like you're spinning up a HDD to swap.
The system really starts to bog down with 15 ~ 20 tabs open for things like jira, roam, email, etc. CPU usage will be very low but when swapping is in effect system slowdown is really noticeable. I don't see the same issue with Safari but of course Safari does not have the extensions I rely on.
I love the Air but excited for my 64gb macbook pro arriving in a month.
On my macbook M1 Pro I was able to work for ~11 hours without charging and on Thinkpad P14S GEN 2 AMD (5850U CPU) with a 4K display I can work for ~ 7 hours. So the difference is not that big TBH.
If we are talking about AI singularity then to achieve a superintelligence, it should at first achieve human-level intelligence (and just to be very specific, it should achieve human-level intelligence for a wide variety of unstructured situations).
I think two tell-tale things will be:
- AI passing Turing test
- AI started to improve itself (after passing Turing test)
However, this article crossed a line... by a mile.
"turning a steering wheel.... all need exactly the amount of energy that they need"
In theory, it's true. In practice, there are activities like "holding a cup". if you do not have enough grip, you may unfortunately spill the coffee on the floor. If you don't have enough grip while doing a sharp turn, it could be literally fatal. As a result, it is wise for the absolute majority of people in high-risk situations to exert more power than necessary. The energy investments are small, but changes in probabilities are significant.
And the rest of the article pretty much prophesies a flow slate. Yeah, in this state, things feel effortless. However, it misses two things. To learn how to get to this flow state, like a lot of people pointed out, you need TONS and TONS and TONS of practice where you exert WAY more than you minimally need. Oh... And on top of that, in the flow state, you perceive that things are effortless. And this is mostly about a perception rather than reality. Yes, if you are extremely experienced and get to flow state, you are spending less energy than an absolute beginner, but not zero... again, by a mile.