"Grandeur" is not the only criteria for nice national parks. I'm from the east coast, and while all of the breathtaking views in California were amazing, after a few years of living there I began to get frustrated that I couldn't find anywhere "cozy" to visit during the weekends. Some locations along the Russian River probably came the closest, but the jagged rocks and coniferous trees still didn't manifest the sort of "warm and snug" feeling one gets while river tubing along a mountain river in the Blue Ridge mountains. Temperature deciduous rainforests are actually quite rare across the planet, and particularly when the leaves change colors, it's a sight to behold.

The biggest improvement I've found for my focus is to force myself to close any open tabs/windows that are not absolutely necessary roughly every two hours. I used to be one of those people with 800 tabs open in the browser and 20 application windows spread across 8 desktop spaces. Was a concentration mess. Requiring myself to "clean up" periodically has really helped.

Then I started routing ethernet with PoE throughout my house and observed that other than a few large appliances, the majority of powered devices in a typical home in 2026 could be supplied via PoE DC current as well! Lighting, laptops, small/medium televisions. The current PoE spec allows up to 100 W, which covers like 80% of the powered devices in most homes. I think it would make more sense to have fewer AC outlets around the modern house and many more terminals for PoE instead (maybe with a more robust connector than RJ45). I wonder what sort of energy efficiency improvements this would yield. No more power bricks all over the place either.

Turns out it’s quite strange, because my kids bring me more joy than anything else. I’ll sit there for hours watching them play. You may think “that’s not strange—tons of parents say that”, but for my sort of personality, it’s very strange. I’ve always thought of myself as sort of overly analytical, detached, ambitious, and a bit obsessive. Not the sort of touchy-feely person who chases a two year old around with a smile on my face and likes watching videos of cute babies. Yet here I am. I enjoy it so much I’ve even tried to figure out if there’s a way I can take a sabbatical from work to spend the last two years with my youngest at home before he goes off to school (seems unlikely given how questions about a random two year gap on my resume might affect my long-term career).

It’s funny that as a kid I always wanted to work at a tech company for the interesting tech, but now as an adult my favorite thing about it has been the 4 months of parental leave I was able to have with each newborn.

I don't use it at all to program despite that being my day job for exactly the reason you mentioned. I know I'll totally forget how to program. During a tight crunch period, I might use it as a quick API reference, but certainly not to generate any code. (Absolutely not saying it's not useful for this purpose—I just know myself well enough to know how this is going to go haha)

If you asked a bunch of researchers working on the “boring” stuff to predict what the hot papers of the year will be about, do we really think they’ll be that far off base? I’m not talking about groundbreaking or truly novel ideas that seem to come out of nowhere, but rather the high impact research that’s more typical of a field.

Even in big tech companies, it’s quite obvious what the interesting stuff to work on is. But there are limited spots and many more people who want those spots than are available.

^Another one I’ve never understood. Like geez, hopefully my daughter doesn’t give up her life dreams just based on the possibility I might be in a freak accident one day...

A computational universe does not strictly imply discrete spacetime. You can most certainly still have a continuous universe—at least from the perspective of the beings that inhabit it. By way of analogy, consider the fact that ZFC proves the existence of uncomputable real numbers yet itself has a countable model (presuming it is consistent).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137596

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But I’m interested in hearing the counterarguments that Collatz likely is provable within PA and why this would be the case.

In 2016, I was trying to construct orthogonal irreducible matrix representations of various groups (“irreps”). The problem was that most of the papers describing how to construct these matrices used a recursive approach that depended on having already constructed the matrix elements of a lower dimensional irrep. Thus the irrep dimension n became quite an annoying parameter, and function calls were very slow because you had to construct the irrep for each new group element from the ground up on every single call.

I ended up using Julia’s @generated functions to dynamically create new versions of the matrix construction code for each distinct value of n for each type of group. So essentially it would generate “unrolled” code on the fly and then use LLVM to compile that a single time, after which all successive calls for a specific group and irrep dimension were extremely fast. Was really quite cool. The only downside was that you couldn’t generate very high dimensional irreps because LLVM would begin to struggle with the sheer volume of code it needed to compile, but for my project at the time that wasn’t much of a concern.

On the other hand, information silos are absolutely horrible. The most effective companies I've worked at have always had tons of information freely available to all employees. Unless there are privacy, cybersecurity, antitrust, or similar risks involved, every employee should have access to all information across all teams. It should be easily searchable as well. There are certainly exceptions—Apple seems to function well despite all the secrecy. But most companies aren't Apple, and I don't think it's generally a good strategy.