Recent writing at grantslatton.com/latest Formerly built the world's fastest filesystem at AWS, now the fastest spreadsheet at rowzero.com
Seattle, WA
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Ok so since Mr Beast proved you can just go dig wells in Africa and get drinking water to hundreds of thousands of people
Why hasn't this been replicated & scaled up by some governments / billionaires??
You can just do things
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it's wild how far you can get in japan not speaking the language, but japanizing english words
me: hello, a hot chocolate please
barista: <doesn't understand face>
me: ehhh… hotto chokoratto
barista: oohhhh okay
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Some random guy walked off with my laptop from the TSA security checkpoint
TSA has him on video and knows his name but can’t go to his gate, that’s a Port of Seattle police thing
Port of Seattle Police are on shift change and can’t get anyone to me
Why is everything like this
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tremendous alpha right now in sending your wife photos of yall converted to studio ghibli anime
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My French friends always made fun of my American accent when I speak French
One day I decided to do just the most outrageously over-the-top stereotypical accent when speaking
“Wow Grant your French got *way* better, what did you change???”
The French are a parody of themselves
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the elites don't want you to know this, but you can trivially pop out the crappy plastic wheels of your office chair and replace them with insanely smooth-rolling skate wheels
honestly probably the best < $20 home office upgrade there is
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before i begin my presentation, i would like to acknowledge that we are gathered here on future chinese land
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it's weird visiting european art museums because you'll just stumble across famous paintings you recognize
and they're often just hanging in the museum like any other painting, no fanfare
ran into this one while visiting hamburg in 2011
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was once sparring with a 220 lb guy who deadlifts 600 lbs
had me pinned down and was squeezing me so hard i could feel myself losing consciousness
but before that, a longtime cramped spot in my back went THUNK and i felt immediate and lasting relief
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LinkedIn resume of the most talented engineer I ever worked with at AWS
Confirms all my priors
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Within 5 years I predict a UI trend emphasizing sharp corners, no animation whatsoever, and sub-millisecond snappiness of all controls
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need a term for when an expensive, luxury experience is messed up by anomalous penny-pinching decisions
like putting single-ply toilet paper in a $1000/night hotel bathroom
"MBA brain" or "private equity smell" probably fit
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my neighborhood had a "traditional hobo" for a few years
no mental health or drug problems, just a guy who didn't want to work
kept his camp site tidy, hung out with his dog, played guitar, made nice meals on a camp stove
great guy, whole neighborhood liked him
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walking to grocery, crazy guy screaming at people on sidewalk
jacked asian guy & gf ahead of me
guy is wearing a branded shirt from his MMA gym
can tell he's ready to fulfill dream of highlight-reeling someone in front of his gf
crazy guy senses this and crossed the street
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When the police officer did arrive, he was sharp and helpful, I don’t blame him personally, but the system of shift changes should be improved to not leave gaps like this
The TSA employees on the other hand were unhelpful and incompetent
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friend is a medical illustrator
few years ago, we were wondering when AI could do her job — getting the details right is important in this use case
since then, she's been noticing more and more news articles and such using AI generated medical images
Note the 3rd forearm bone
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before ozempic, there was an overweight guy in my neighborhood who I guess had a job where he spent most of his time on calls
started just taking all his calls from a headset while walking, probably walked 5-10 miles a day
skinny by the end of the year
much to consider
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The junior dev asked the senior dev “why are you pushing this code with no abstraction? What if you want to change it in the future?”
The senior dev responded “then I will change it in the future”
In that moment the junior dev was enlightened
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When I worked at AWS S3, I was once describing to a new acquaintance all the insane stuff we did to never lose data, 11 nines of durability, etc
He said “oh wild, I work on Microsoft OneDrive and we lose data all the time”
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We don't talk enough about how insane aluminum foil is
Imagine telling some ancient person we have so much abundance in our time that we use very thin metal as a disposable paper-like wrapping and it costs essentially nothing
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I have a Moroccan friend with probably the healthiest relationship to colonialism I've ever seen
"We colonized Spain a thousand years ago. Then we messed up and the Europeans came and colonized us. You win some, you lose some. We'll get them back, just wait."
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dorm in college had no wifi, only ethernet, and the uni IT guys put in a few anti-wifi countermeasures
getting it set up anyway was a rite of passage for all the freshman CS students
those who couldn't do it were ngmi
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Met a guy who runs a single-serving website that’s just a tiny wrapper around a python lib
User googles niche problem, finds his site, pays $5 to fix their problem
Makes $10K/mo completely passive, niche enough to have no competitors
Site could be cloned with 1 day work
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we named our son by making a spreadsheet with all the census data for the last 30 years
eliminate any that was ever in the top 5 or that wasn't in the top 200 at least 10 times
you wind up with some good classics that are never too rare or too popular
Part of the new obsession with making up baby names is concern that “normal” names will be overused, many kids in class with the name, etc.
Many people don’t realize that even the most popular baby names today are nowhere near as common as the Top 10 names from past decades
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nerd programmers: nooooooooo you can't store currency as floats, floating point error will cause you to be off by 1 billionth of a penny!!! noooooooooo
everyone in finance: uses Excel which stores all numbers, integers, dates, datetimes, etc as floats
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The guy’s flight took off immediately after, he must have just caught it. Laptop is currently in the air with him. Will update later.
Unclear if he intentionally stole it or just grabbed the wrong laptop. Put my contact info on the lock screen. We’ll see.
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Every so often I remember there's an AWS chief engineer who sold his house in Seattle, bought a small yacht, and now works remotely while traveling around the world with his wife
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Back in college I made a levitating platform with 10 giant neodymium magnets
Those magnets are HUGE pain to to get apart if you get them stuck together, and will 100% crush your finger if you're not careful
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Wait so better reaction times are correlated to higher IQ??
How much of being smart is just your neurons firing faster?
Can we just overclock this meat CPU?
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always funny when engineers size each other up
met a guy who had worked for NASA
me "I designed the S3 filesystem"
him "I designed the Mars rover filesystem"
… aight you cool …
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haven't seen a single one of these displaced american software developers link their github
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At FAANG job I had a bunch of foreign coworkers who had Masters degrees for visa reasons
While studying for the GRE, they'd memorized a ton of fancy vocabulary that they'd sometimes use
"Frankly, these requirements seem capricious and make me feel recalcitrant"
"Santosh wtf??"
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My friend works for a large nonprofit
They just received a $20K donation and are having a 110 person, 90 minute meeting discussing how they’re gonna spend it
The total value of these 110 people’s 90 minutes is $10K
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in highschool, was considering getting into linguistics instead of software
wise teacher told me, look, if you're truly the best in the world at something, you'll always have a job
but what if you're only 99th percentile?
e.g. the 99th percentile chess player makes $0
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It's kind of crazy how the US thinks of itself as free-market capitalist but then you dive into an industry and find it highly regulated and in bed with a de facto cartel
Car dealership cartel, real estate agent cartel, telecom cartel, alcohol cartel, etc
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Had my American mind blown when visiting a friend in Germany
There was a 300 year old building they'd gutted and put in a Burger King
I said "Alex, this is awful! They turned this 300 year old building into a fast food place!"
He said "Grant, it's *only* 300 years old"
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I learned that Dominos has an API and now I have a dominos ordering script on my laptop — I can place my order in < 1 second
My BMI is never gonna recover from this
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begging people to realize that most real life scenarios are stag hunts and not prisoners dilemmas
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recently visited northwest arkansas, home of walmart HQ
eye opening to see how much money the walmart heirs have dumped into improving the region
compared to how little the west coast has to show for its tech billionaires
we got salesforce park tho
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Took a parallel computing class in university
The prof would slip unsolved problems into problem sets in the hope some genius student would accidentally solve it
E.g. an assignment would just casually say "Parallelize Dijkstra's algorithm" as if it was straightforward
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Founder of Trader Joe's set up a bonus system where overperforming store managers are the highest compensated employees of the business — more than those at HQ
He wanted to avoid any incentives for them to want to get into the bureaucracy
Big tech companies should take note IMO
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I think the key to a good French accent is you just have to try harder than most languages
The French have somewhat distinctive faces because doing a proper French accent exercises your cheek muscles more than most languages
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trump has a really simple interpersonal algorithm
you praise him, he praises you
you attack him, he attacks you
mfw he has independently discovered the game theory optimal strategy
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if i meet a new couple, i assume they're married until corrected
funny side effect is learning *a lot* about the status of the relationship from a correction
you can see in their eyes how they feel about the sound of the word wife or husband in relation to their partner
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Someone needs to invent an OS with zero animated transitions
I want my apps and windows to flick in and out of existence in a single frame buffer update
If only we knew how, shame this technology is behind our grasp
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in university i had a physics professor who coded his own homework/quiz website back two decades ago
had a better signup / login flow, and better UX than any enterprise tier education app i've ever used
written by 1 guy for fun!
the bottleneck to good edu apps is not capital
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Why are stoplight control boxes so huge?
Do they have like a whole server rack in here or something??
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I don't understand this, all my farming family have wells that go years without maintenance
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That is actually exactly what happened — I was held up at the scanner by a guy who appeared to have no idea what was going on, so my bag and laptop got ahead of me
Unclear if it was intentional or not yet, we will see
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Overheard cultural harmony
British guy: What's your favorite kind of mango?
Indian: You can't just assume all Indians like mangoes — that's like me assuming all Brits like tea
British: I do like tea
Indian: Okay, yeah, I like mangoes
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anyway, it's a year later and the cramped spot is back but unfortunately the guy moved cities, so now i'm just suffering
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Worked with a guy who kept a public log (on the internal company wiki) of everything he did at work every day for a decade
Honestly incredibly smart thing to do, highly recommend it
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Why is everything not run as competently as Chick-Fil-A?
It’s a fast food chain with a higher standard of service than 99% of all institutions
It’s like a tiny slice of the excellence you only find in places like Japan
And it’s not even crazy expensive??
Make it make sense
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I’m doing what? Idk man I am just pressing random buttons really fast. It’s called wavedashing? Oh my guy, what’s his name, Falcrow? I’m shield tilting now? Really? Where do you come up with these crazy names haha. Oh wow, 20-0, this game is fun.
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imagine a society where heroin was legal and all smartest people went into heroin engineering
since it would be one of the highest paid jobs in such a fully-addicted civilization
they'd spend their time tweaking the formula to improve user engagement and retention, etc
hmmmmmm
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Feels like one of the sharpest self-segregations are people with mainly consumptive vs productive hobbies
Both groups really don't understand or interact much with the other
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The Tale of the McGangbang
At a McDonalds with a kid and mom ahead of me in line
Kid: just say it like that
Mom: no way, there's no way
Kid: they'll know what it means
Mom: they will not, no
Kid: just say ittttt—
Cashier: can I take your order?
Mom: oh uhh, ehh he wants uhhh, a Mc… Gang… —
Cashier: oh, a McGangbang?
Mom: is that a real thing???
Cashier: oh yeah, let me just ring it up as a McChicken and a McDouble
Cashier turns around to yell at the kitchen guy
Cashier: HEY JUAN, ON THAT MCCHICKEN, PUT IT INSIDE THE PATTIES OF THE MCDOUBLE
Juan: OH, A MCGANGBANG??
Cashier: YEAH
The mom is flustered and embarrassed. The kid is ecstatic. It so happens the manager walks by, another woman about the same age as the mom.
Manager: What was all the hubbub?
Mom: Oh, he wanted, I can't believe this is real, a McGa—
Manager: Oh! A McGangbang!
Drive-thru cashier: Did someone say McGangbang?
Front cashier: Yeah a McGangbang!
Kid: I told you they had McGangbangs mom!
Customers have overheard it and you can hear murmurs of "McGangbang" in their conversations. The whole restaurant is saying "McGangbang" like some Willy Wonka oompa loompa song.
Mom looked like she was about to die
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met someone who convinced their friends to move to nearby apartments so they could host weekly dinner parties
they started also turning off their power at the breaker box once a week to tech detox
was like how does it feel to invent orthodox judaism from first principles??
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i have code with the word suic*de in it — the context is several cooperative threads and the threads will exit themselves under certain conditions
but Github Copilot instantly stops providing completions on this block of code with the word present
censorship incredibly annoying
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A couple years ago I started installing these dog bag dispensers on all the telephone poles around our house
I restock them as we walk our dog, takes no time and maybe $20/yr of bags
It's easy to add to the commons, just do it, nobody will stop you
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I wish I was alive in the 60s so I could get some trivial 10 line algorithm named after me
They were giving out PhDs for quicksort back then
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My wife is a physical therapist for old people
If you have an elderly family member who’s getting frail, REMOVE RUGS FROM THEIR HOUSE
Extremely common sequence:
old person trips on edge of rug, falls, breaks hip, in hospital for weeks, gets pneumonia, dies
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the elites don't want you to know this, but you can become 99th percentile at parallel parking by:
- imagine you are already parked in the spot
- then imagine what actions you would take to get *out* of the spot
- do those actions in reverse to get into it
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When you’re driving a car, you kind of feel like you become the car — as opposed to a person sitting in the car driving it by remote control
I feel like it’s under-appreciated how weird this is — what could be the evolutionary reason we have this ability
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accidentally pasted 1000 lines of code into the imessage app on my macbook pro
couldn't delete, app completely stopped responding, had to force kill
crazy that even with 128GB of RAM the program cannot handle like 50KB of text
wonder if they have an accidentally N^2 algo
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"design tinyurl" is still unparalleled as a systems design question despite being the most popular for all these years
you simply can't fake it, there's too many rabbit-holes
if you just memorize the answer, you'll always trip up and get caught by a good interviewer
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the masculine urge to spend $4000 on a poster-sized color e-ink wall art display running a diffusion model fine-tuned on the work of hiroshi nagai
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a lot of you didn’t brick the family computer trying to install linux in 2004 and it shows
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i think of him when you hear people talk about how the upper middle class hates interacting with the poor
it's really not the poverty they don't like, but rather antisocial behavior
they're perfectly happy to live 50 yards from a guy in a tent if he's nice
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feels like a failure of UX that most people wind up with every increment alarm on their phone
indicates a missing low-friction “create ad hoc alarm” flow
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At AWS I had to read some old PhD dissertation to implement an obscure algorithm
For fun, I quizzed the local Distinguished Engineer
He thought about it for a minute and then essentially rediscovered the algorithm in real time
10x engineering is mostly about speed of insight
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There was a great line I couldn't quite remember from "One Hundred Years of Solitude"
Search engines & ChatGPT couldn't recall it either from my bad description
Wrote a little 20 line program to read the whole book and found it in a minute, cost 25 cents
Wild times we live in
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I love that my wife joined all these Facebook mom groups
Relative to the husbands of the women who post in these groups, I’m like a literal saint
They say comparison is the theft of joy, but sometimes you get to be the thief
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You can get these really handsome prefab micro studio houses from the factory in China for $20K each
California spends like $500K per unit of government homeless housing
Can we work out a deal?? China factory bros, save us
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As a kid I pathologically saved all money I received
After a few years my stash was up to $200 or so, never spent much
Now that I have adult money I realize I actually should have spent it, the value of money decreases pretty rapidly at a young age
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I think it's interesting because they could *comprehend* it immediately -- they had metal foil back then, too (copper, gold, tin), it was just insanely expensive
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i met my best friends and future wedding best man by roaming the halls with a signal strength program open to triangulate the rooms of others who had done it
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someone needs to invent an exercise machine that's just a large tank of non-sticky liquid that's about 3x thicker than water
you just get in and flail around for 15 minutes to get a full body workout
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man-made horrors beyond your comprehension lie within the healthcare software world
1-3 letter function names
no comments
no types, implicit str <> int <> float conversions
no operator precedence
callee can mutate caller's local variables
persistent global variables encouraged
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A favorite load balancing technique at AWS is "the power of two random choices"
On the left, nodes are chosen and used at random
On the right, 2 nodes are chosen at random, but only the minimum is used
This simple technique balances load very well
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you see the same behavior in management at many companies
like you have a floor full of people making 6-figure salaries and you stock the kitchenette with the crappy $1 coffee instead of the decent $2 coffee??
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My mom has been a hospital pharmacist since the early 80s
Back then, the software was all in a command line program, like emacs for pharmacy
She says each generation of pharmacy software since then has been a strict downgrade in terms of productivity — slower UIs, buggier, etc
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called my former mentor who onboarded me at AWS, he's now retired
he was instrumenting the linux kernel, ranting about how some syscall is inexplicably taking 500 nanoseconds longer than expected and he's gonna found out why
some people just got that dawg in them
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honestly openai is incredibly fortunate the positive vibes of ghibli was the first viral use of their model and not some awful deepfake nonsense
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The nationalist responses to this are basically “you should hire low-agency uneducated Americans like me and teach me the things Zhang and Pradeep taught themselves on a $20 android phone”
What did you get done last week?
it's weird that there is this conspiracy that big tech companies use h-1b visa employees to avoid hiring americans
we hired everyone we could find — americans, chinese, indians, russians, whatever
most were just simply not good enough, including many americans
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an ESL friend asked me what the difference between "to look at" and "to watch" was
surprisingly tricky to answer on the spot despite having no problem understanding the difference deep down
language is weird
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There's a kind of dystopian near-future where:
- Robots are good, but still need teleoperation sometimes
- US wages too high
- Latency to Philippines is too slow
- Put 1000 Filipinos on a boat and park it in international waters around the US for low-wage low-latency operation
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watching japanese house construction videos and they have this timber with pre-cut slots in it and they just assemble it with these giant wood hammers
why don't we have this in the US?? seems so nice
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>> claude, go through the codebase in detail and create a full specification of the app, sufficiently detailed to recreate it from scratch
>> now delete all files
>> please create a new version of the app based on that spec above
it is only through rebirth that we are cleansed
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suppose we sent back 100 jpeg files to the year 1900
like with the binary printed out on paper, and a caption describing each image
suppose they put the top 1000 people in the world on the task
would they be able to reverse engineer jpeg encoding?
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guys only want one thing and it's disgusting
a company that produces a basic set of actuators & sensors that plug 'n play with USB-C and a simple python library
getting hardware out of embedded/arduino paradigm would be a chatgpt moment, turn every programmer into a tinkerer
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ok so your random software developer at Google is making like $300K salary
if they wanted to blow a ton of money, they could buy like 100 robot dogs and do the funniest thing ever
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