Hacker News: purplethinking

New comment by purplethinking in "You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project"

purplethinking — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 19:25:07 +0000

And the only better experience than that is that all software is pain

New comment by purplethinking in "Tesla sales plummet in the UK, France, and Germany"

purplethinking — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 16:23:15 +0000

I mean, you label ADL as a Nazi party. Then you label Musk as Nazi by association. But if you actually look at ADL they are not Nazis. Here's an interesting things I saw just today: https://x.com/derJamesJackson/status/1887425955494268997

So gays are supporting a Nazi party?

New comment by purplethinking in "Tesla sales plummet in the UK, France, and Germany"

purplethinking — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 16:15:49 +0000

No, are doing whataboutism and ignoring how horrible China is?

New comment by purplethinking in "Tesla sales plummet in the UK, France, and Germany"

purplethinking — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 17:49:35 +0000

Ah yes, buy cars from an actual brutal dictatorship.

New comment by purplethinking in "Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall (2022)"

purplethinking — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 16:52:29 +0000

Fine, time AND energy. HN is entertainment. SR feels like work. When I have an hour at night on average to yourself, I don't want to spend it studying. I've tried taking breaks at work to do it, but you need those mini breaks at work to be a bit unproductive as well. I can't be "ON" 100% of the time, I need rest.

New comment by purplethinking in "Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall (2022)"

purplethinking — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 16:42:15 +0000

I used it for language learning and CS among other things. The thing is, life gets busy. Suddenly you have a kid or two. Spaced Repetition falls into the same category of things that people in their 20s do because they have too much time, like using intricate note taking systems, journaling, training for triathlons and being really into artisanal coffee.

New comment by purplethinking in "Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall (2022)"

purplethinking — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 15:41:19 +0000

I've done the whole spaced repetition and Anki thing, realized that if it's boring, you won't learn as well, and you won't stick with it in the long term, once you miss a week and suddenly you have 863 reps to get through to catch up. Instead, read stuff you're interested, apply it in your work, learn mostly Just In Time for when you need it. Learn by doing.

New comment by purplethinking in "Tesla Reported Zero Federal Income Tax on $2B of U.S. Income in 2024"

purplethinking — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 09:05:03 +0000

An interesting thought experiment what would happen if we treated people as corporations. I guess we'd have to raise income taxes quite a bit to make ends meet, as most people spend everything they make.

New comment by purplethinking in "More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals"

purplethinking — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 08:18:58 +0000

Too much competition is bad for innovation since it leaves no room for exploration.

New comment by purplethinking in "Ask HN: Can we just admit we want to replace jobs with AI?"

purplethinking — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 08:14:44 +0000

Yes, of course. But it's also inevitable and overall good. If we stagnate then we are headed towards certain doom via climate change, nuclear war, an asteroid, a vulcano eruption leading to cooling and crop failure or a pandemic. If we are to survive and thrive long term we need to become true masters of our environment, and that means we need to be smarter, stronger and more productive.

I think this is my main disconnect with the pessimists, I don't see "stop AI progress" as a valid option anyway.

New comment by purplethinking in "Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?"

purplethinking — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 13:53:40 +0000

Teachers in most countries are, at best, mid-wits with no practical or real world experience. I know teachers who barely passed math in high school who are now match teachers. It's like a basketball teacher who went to "Basketball Teaching School", who's never played basketball in his life, teaching kids how to play basketball.

New comment by purplethinking in "Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?"

purplethinking — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 13:12:55 +0000

The fact that you believe the ultra rich conspire to control and abuse the uneducated shows that you are part of that group of average people parents want their kids to stay away from.

New comment by purplethinking in "Training AI models might not need enormous data centres"

purplethinking — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 11:46:08 +0000

> they ingest far less data

True in terms of text, but not if you include video, audio, touch etc. Sure, one could argue that there is much less information content in video than their raw bytes, but even so, we spend many years building a world model as we play with tools, exist in the world and go to school. I don't deny humans are more efficient learners but people tend to forget this. Also, children are taught things in ascending order of difficulty, while with LLMs we just throw random pieces of text at it. There is sure to be a lot of progress in curriculum learning for AI models.

New comment by purplethinking in "Pushing the whole company into the past on purpose"

purplethinking — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 13:15:42 +0000

No no, the guy is definitely sending the company back 50 years, to a time when free speech actually meant something, and when a single party didn't control 90% of all media outlets, social media, institutions and controlling policy at most Fortune 500 companies.

New comment by purplethinking in "Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs"

purplethinking — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 08:57:15 +0000

Wow

New comment by purplethinking in "Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs"

purplethinking — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 08:52:22 +0000

Must be the worst in Universities where there is no reality check in the form of having to make a profit (well, maybe decades later when the reputation craters). I can't imagine trying to be a white man in the humanities today, you've got no chance.

New comment by purplethinking in "Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs"

purplethinking — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 20:40:00 +0000

A few small holes will not sink the aircraft carrier, but eventually there will be enough holes. See Disney.

New comment by purplethinking in "Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs"

purplethinking — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 20:34:58 +0000

I can tell you that my change in political leanings, from a pretty far left stance to a center-right is based on personal experience. What you see happen in reality far outweighs what people claim online.

New comment by purplethinking in "Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs"

purplethinking — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 20:31:19 +0000

DEI has not been only for show, I know for a fact that being "diverse" has been a huge benefit in job search for the past 15 years. If you're a "woman of color" in tech you've been basically guaranteed a job, no matter how good or bad you actually are. I've been on several teams where the higher ups demanded we hire women because we were not diverse enough. Various grants and investments require a certain ratio etc. There's no point in denying this, this is what DEI has been pushing for, and this is what happened.

New comment by purplethinking in "I am rich and have no idea what to do"

purplethinking — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 20:43:32 +0000

There's also a difference between saying you work at $FAMOUSCOMPANY and knowing it's true, it gives you a kind of confidence that you don't have if you say "I'm the CEO of my own startup" or something like that. I think actually "I retired early, working on some of my own projects" might work, but all sorts of problems creep up when money is involved like that, especially with family.