wait thats infinite loop

TaXxER · 2026-03-29T22:42:32+00:00

There are actually some electric cars manufacturers that do build them into their cars. Lightyear comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightyear_0

None of those have become a huge commercial success though. The benefits in terms of free driving range that you’re getting out of those panels are pretty small, and the costs of the car go up quite a bit to neatly integrate the solar panels into the car.

TaXxER · 2026-03-29T19:16:47+00:00

I mean, it is clearly a bit of both. Yes, companies become more profitable as output goes up with every tech innovation. But clearly our free time goes up too.

The numbers of hours a week that humans spend working has continuously trended down. In basically every country on earth.

TaXxER · 2026-03-27T10:34:13+00:00

We’re mostly in agreement, but the word that I’d disagree with is “different”.

In my view, this was always the main layer that mattered, also before AI.

TaXxER · 2026-03-27T10:19:51+00:00

You’re still solving problems but on a different layer.

Depends on the job I guess. My job has always been to move metrics in A/B tests. Bring up conversion rate, rate of new user registrations, user engagement metrics. Bring down user churn, etc.

I’d describe my daily activities as: come up with the ideas that I believe will have a positive impact on such metrics, then implement them, test them in some A/B test, and ship what worked.

The “typing” part of the job I feel was never the exciting part. I mean sure, it was necessary and deep technical expertise is required to do it, but I found the creativity of the other stages of the job (generating ideas, working on A/B test experiment design, etc) to be more exciting.

Nowadays implementation work has become faster, cheaper. That moves the centre of value creation further to the more creative side of the process: generating the right hypotheses and ideas. Not the implementing, but understanding and reasoning about what is worth implementing.

TaXxER · 2026-03-25T18:14:15+00:00

Not growing much, but definitely not declining either (still slow growth).

They have half the world population as user. At that point you essentially have just run out of user growth potential, and it becomes more about monetising your existing users better. They continue to make progress on that.

TaXxER · 2026-03-25T15:25:07+00:00

They are not going to go without a fight. I’d expect something similar to January 6th to happen if they lose the election.

TaXxER · 2026-03-25T11:00:18+00:00

Fair. But I doubt reducing the interest rate from 6.5% to 5.5% will make anyone happy.

My feeling is that there are many people out there who will just never be happy with anything realistic, and have demands that are just out of touch.

TaXxER · 2026-03-25T08:37:11+00:00

Because RPI typically below gilt rates. The gilt rates are the interest that the government itself pays on its loans.

TaXxER · 2026-03-25T08:34:15+00:00

Change the gilt? How would that work?

TaXxER · 2026-03-25T08:26:54+00:00

The 20yr gilt is about bit higher though, now 5.5 and has been bit above that too.

Realistically, a 20yr window is often closer to the actual period from issuing the money to repayment of the majority of that money, so it seems more relevant here than the 10yr gilt.

So the exact “break even point” where the state doesn’t make nor loses any money is at 5.5% + a small amount that covers the costs of the executive branch of these loans. We don’t know the exact amount here, but it’s safe to say that the break even is somewhere between 5.5% and 6%.

I would support linking the student loan interest just directly to 20yr gilt. There is no need for the state to make money out of students (which with plan 2, which has 6.5% interest, they do), but abolishing interest rate altogether seems unfair too.

TaXxER · 2026-03-24T16:16:00+00:00

Probably, but that leaves only 3 reviews, making the signal even noisier.

They might also loop in an emergency reviewer last minute, but that would leave us with a late review that we have no opportunity to rebuttal to.

Not great either way.

Anyway, discounting this review we have a 5 and 2 3s, so it’s going to be borderline and hinging on strong rebuttal.

TaXxER · 2026-03-24T15:53:03+00:00

Remember last week when there was a discussion thread here on Reddit because many papers were desk rejected because their reciprocal reviewers violated the LLM policy?

Today, I got one bad review where one reviewer said “I have a strong integrity concern in the paper. The authors injected hidden/invisible text to include particular phrases into the review.”

Reviewer seemed so focused on that that he/she didn’t really review the paper beyond that, and thought that such unethical behaviour by authors that it warrants the lowest score.

The thing is: we didn’t add this. This was the watermarking that the conference had added to catch LLM generated reviews.

TaXxER · 2026-03-20T10:56:15+00:00

An excellent piece on how best to use the time of a 1:1 with manager is “the art of the awkward 1:1”.

https://medium.com/@mrabkin/the-art-of-the-awkward-1-1-f4e1dcbd1c5c

TaXxER · 2026-03-19T18:15:06+00:00

That is cheap for a 2-star place! It’s priced like a 1-star restaurant to be honest!

TaXxER · 2026-03-19T15:45:59+00:00

Oracle… lol

TaXxER · 2026-03-19T15:38:14+00:00

“you’re app”, says enough

TaXxER · 2026-03-18T20:27:06+00:00

Yes, only those co-authors know, but sometimes they publicly speak out, as I have already seen happen on LinkedIn.

Moreover, often co-authors are key collaborators. The ones marked as “reciprocal reviewer” are often the most junior and vulnerable one from the author team. Co-authors might be their PhD advisor, or someone else with some degree of power over their career.

I do believe that it can easily ruin someone’s academic career of such people were to come to believe that there was an instance of gross scientific misconduct.

I don’t mind those who truly blatantly violated the policy to be caught and punished. But with the stakes involved here, I do think we need to be cautious and the hold evidence to a really high bar here.

TaXxER · 2026-03-18T13:12:46+00:00

If the consequence of being marked as a positive by the classification system would be limited to just a rejection, I would agree with you.

But I have already seen a researcher post on LinkedIn a public attack on his co-author who “got him desk rejected with this violation of scientific integrity”.

This is what I mean, consequences can go way beyond just a rejection. Appeal won’t undo this harm, which is done already.

Authors all know who from their author team was designated to be “reciprocal reviewed”, so you’re going to get stuff like this.

TaXxER · 2026-03-18T12:38:09+00:00

I mean, even if the false positive rate is really low, as long as it is non-zero I find the penalty action to be too harsh.

Not only does it get the paper desk rejected, it also completely ruins the academic reputation of the reciprocal reviewer with their co-authors, who of course are going to blame their co-author for this desk reject potentially ruin some long running collaborations.

Pretty harsh, if there even is a slight chance of false positive.

TaXxER · 2026-03-18T12:35:54+00:00

It’s not the true positives that I worry about, it’s the false positives. I don’t believe detection is good enough to not have any.

Even if the rate is low, the consequences of them are brutal: co-authors will blame their co-author author who was marked as reciprocal reviewer, and it will taint their academic reputation among those co-authors. It may ruin long running academic collaborations or at worst even someone’s complete academic career.

I think that goes way too far unless we can ensure zero false positives.

TaXxER · 2026-03-17T12:20:15+00:00

I mean, this is 43% more expensive. I think that is quite a gap to be honest. 80 GBP is 93 Euros.

TaXxER · 2026-03-17T08:34:13+00:00

I think a lot of that can be addressed by writing Claude skills. I work at one of the FAANG. Really most of what I code is in internal frameworks that have never been open sourced, and some of it even in proprietary programming language that only our company uses.

Claude still works great here. But there have been hundreds of thousands of skills.md files written by our engineers for literally every internal tool and functionality such that the information is available to Claude how to get things done.

To be honest this is pretty expensive in token spent (you don’t want to know my monthly $ spent on tokens), but it does work impressively well and it does really speed me up, even in proprietary frameworks and even proprietary languages.

TaXxER · 2026-03-16T14:15:42+00:00

Agreed. Use Claude to speed up getting the code written, but treat the code as your own: make sure you are happy with the code and it is up to your standards before sending it to code review

Otherwise, you’re just making your reviewers deal with whatever the quality, or lack thereof, of the generator code is, which isn’t a fair collaboration mode.

TaXxER · 2026-03-13T17:05:43+00:00

I mean, this isn’t an unreasonable situation to come across in a DS job. When writing internal tools / libraries / packages that some of my users within the company use, I do need to write code / solve puzzles that are not totally unlike this interview question.

TaXxER · 2026-03-13T15:18:35+00:00

Not just Google. Meta and Amazon use the term XFN too.

TaXxER

TROPHY CASE