Ben

Microarchitecture researcher working on autonomous systems (and other things). I used to talk a lot about WoW Rogues.

He/him. All opinions my own.

[Supergiant Games @SupergiantGames]

Tune in NOW!! ⤵️

[Ben @PlainSimpleBen]

@GenePark To be clear, I'm not new to the series, I loved Hollow Knight, put ~70 hours into it including 3/5 pantheons, etc. I was expecting hard, but it took me ~13 hours to get to Greymoore.

I want to see this game through and I'm happy to struggle, but its really discouraging.

[Ben @PlainSimpleBen]

@GenePark The hard part for me is, I want the game to be for me. I'm really enjoying it to the point of laughing at some of the cruelty. And also, the game is making it very clear that I'm simply not good enough for it.

I haven't given up yet, but I'm close despite really enjoying it.

[Ben @PlainSimpleBen]

@stuartbuck1 @littmath Not particular helpful for the paper's impact metrics, but it probably saved 6-9 researcher months because there was just a useful result just sitting on the shelf so to speak.

[Ben @PlainSimpleBen]

@stuartbuck1 @littmath One note from someone way on the applied side is that math (and adjacent fields like OR or theoretical CS) have a really long tail of effectiveness.

A couple years ago we found this lovely ~20 year old OR paper with ~10 cities that helped us rapidly conclude an idea didn't work.

[Ben @PlainSimpleBen]

@constans @ReubenR80027912 If I was advising a smart younger guy right now it would be develop the skill to present in a way that is "spicy" without coming across as an asshole. Huge career benefit if you can do it well.

[Ben @PlainSimpleBen]

@MKVRiscy Reviewers are very rarely paid.

[Ben @PlainSimpleBen]

@duns_sc0tus One might even call being close to friends pronatalist. The fact that it is relatively low effort to visit and otherwise support friends with young kids helps keep new parents from becoming isolated.

[Ben @PlainSimpleBen]

@SheriefFYI Setting aside talking your book, this also just misses an essential aspect of why the Wii in general was so successful with less traditional gaming audiences. The social interaction. Its notable that the Wii example shows a group of people and XR examples are mostly solo or 1v1.

[Ben @PlainSimpleBen]

@KevinWGlass And three hours later the community note is gone. One consequence of the exodus is the decline in notes.

The system has always been balanced on a knife's edge and the major population shifts have made that system start to collapse as well.

[Ben @PlainSimpleBen]

@SashaGusevPosts I became pretty convinced in grad school that lottery systems are the obvious solution here. Just take all the proposals above some review threshold and randomly fund N of them.

The system is already random so lets acknowledge that and reduce wasted time on repeated refinement.

[Ben @PlainSimpleBen]

@perrymetzger @gak_pdx @octal In a sense the aggressive simplification and cost cutting actually leads to parts like this.

It is hard to get much simpler than two bolts per engine, but the only way you can do that with confidence is by elevating those specific parts to really high standards.

[Ben @PlainSimpleBen]

@constans Another aspect to the vet preference is many already come with clearances. Now that some of the backlog has cleared this is less of a problem but when it was 12-18 months a few years ago thats a long time for a new hire to wait around.

[Ben @PlainSimpleBen]

@timhwang Certain academic postdocs might fall in that category. The "ideological style" may not easily map onto political ideology as we have with clerks but it can map onto a certain within-field ideology.

[Ben @PlainSimpleBen]

@HPC_Guru @glennklockwood @science_is_hard @FelixCLC_ @ifndef_define @Supercomputing @ogawa_tter I've grown to appreciate the threads. When I see something new I can just scroll up to see what I may have missed.

[Ben @PlainSimpleBen]

I keep seeing people saying this and I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong.

I try ChatGPT a few times a week for coding help at work and it never seems actually better than just figuring things out myself.

[Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart]

There’s a number of people out there convinced that LLMs are all hype or “the next crypto”

And it’s like… the last four software engineers I’ve talked to (none directly in AI) have all they’re using the tech to code more productively

[Ben @PlainSimpleBen]

@hikari_no_yume This "choose two" point was also made almost exactly by Tom Friedman in From Beirut to Jerusalem 35 years ago.

[Ben @PlainSimpleBen]

@dilanesper Also hard to convince people of the related fact, in a statewide race decided by a few hundred votes we're probably no better than a coin flip to determine the true winner.

[Ben @PlainSimpleBen]

@sasuke___420 @titlecharacter @patio11 I've noticed the margin between AliExpress and Amazon tightening significantly over the past couple years to the point where it's often not worth it.

[Ben @PlainSimpleBen]

@BretDevereaux @IRHotTakes Found it: https://t.co/St4tAnkXdf

(Linking this if only so I'll know where to find it in the future)

[Ben @PlainSimpleBen]

@BretDevereaux @IRHotTakes I can't find it now but there is a great talk by Avellone about this exact thing for KOTOR 2 and Alpha Protocol (at the time still in development).

I also appreciate that the video is a series of those old youtube 10 minute chunks w/ sharp breaks.