Woodrow Kiang

Building something. Posting unhinged sh*t to save my sanity. Ex-phd-mathematician, ex-handbag seller, ex-bar owner, ex-corporate, ex-startup 996, ex-hacker.

[Woodrow Kiang @WoodrowKiang]

@Arikalabs It’s always true of consumer hardware but considering how the lady in the hospital has got my son’s important medical records done so wrong and every public service employee spitting out utterly false information nowadays I’m not worried…

[Woodrow Kiang @WoodrowKiang]

@SamuelGWalters Lebesgue integral, Radon Nykodim and push forward measures etc can do this if you want less weird…

[Woodrow Kiang @WoodrowKiang]

The problem isn’t AI competence. It is, to be blunt, that even if mega corps have miracle machines that build perfect systems for free, it still won’t make much difference unless the C-suite themselves select who not to sack one by one and type prompts themselves word by word.

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

"Layoffs driven by AI automation are largely failing to generate expected financial returns," per FORTUNE

[Woodrow Kiang @WoodrowKiang]

Amazon Linux is such a maximally frustrating experience. My 20000 lines of Common Lisp works on SBCL, AllegroCL, and ClozureCL, never crash on FreeBSD and OpenSUSE. Put it on Amazon Linux, all three implementations crash with corrupted memory error. I mean, I’ve seen my fair share of nasty OS/platform problems these few years, like CentOS’s OpenBLAS being compiled in non-thread-safe mode, or Intel compilers spitting out wrong assembly, but I’d rank Amazon Linux at the top in terms of frustration…

[Woodrow Kiang @WoodrowKiang]

@XH_Lee23 It’s not that they’re not innovating but the talent pool situation in Europe is hopeless. They probably don’t need some assaults from China to die on their own.

[Woodrow Kiang @WoodrowKiang]

@brockpierson Infinitely easier to use UI than Teams.

[Woodrow Kiang @WoodrowKiang]

@schteppe Then purpose of Rust is to re-vibe-code the best software humanity have ever built and abandon the ‘safe’ half functioning crap.

[Woodrow Kiang @WoodrowKiang]

@Chinaview0022 佩服。我在歐洲待了這麼多年，也未能把他們這麼扭曲的話掌握得這麼神似

[Woodrow Kiang @WoodrowKiang]

@danpdc I thought this is a parody before seeing the comments…

[Woodrow Kiang @WoodrowKiang]

@eclps3aura What other methods are there??

[Woodrow Kiang @WoodrowKiang]

@RyanEls4 It’s called outsourcing.

[Woodrow Kiang @WoodrowKiang]

@kerckhove_ts Hegel said it long ago. Even Buddha said similar things in ancient texts. Uneducated people and children often think like this too. It takes 20 years of schooling to learn the opposite, and then another 20 years of research to rediscover it and coin yet another pretentious name.

[Woodrow Kiang @WoodrowKiang]

@Ekaeoq IMHO y’all have got it upside down. I believe the best predictor for a software business’ size is how *slow* and *buggy* the software is. Apple is an outlier like many Berkshire companies. This applies to even elite firms like Intel: their C compiler bugs grow with market size.

[Woodrow Kiang @WoodrowKiang]

@HiKikisundal It’s hard to say it’s because of the education. That kind of schooling sucks for sure, but fertility is also well below replacement rate in some European countries where kids play with sand more than studying and BSc freshmen can’t even multiply 2x2 matrices.

[Woodrow Kiang @WoodrowKiang]

You only realise how powerful BSc knowledge is when you trade your own money on it. A simple Cholesky decomposition with skin in the game feels so much more powerful than typing chol(M) as a corporate data scientist. Our generation’s mindset about knowledge is so wrong.

[Woodrow Kiang @WoodrowKiang]

@Illithidek God. I don’t even know when will Windows start rendering OTF fonts on CPU correctly except for the browser, let alone GPUs. Then there’s the diabolical TTF byte code…

[Woodrow Kiang @WoodrowKiang]

@scottastevenson Not defending these people but often there’re no other ways to convince people. The idealistic youngsters will buy whatever narratives sold to them. Some of the experienced ones know bullshitting is a competence, and some gets their understanding from PowerPoints and news.

[Woodrow Kiang @WoodrowKiang]

@Porkchop_EXP Then why not plot a line for EU and one for Paris on the same chart to make the same point to see how people react? To put it into perspective, Shanghai alone has almost half of France’s population so the analogy isn’t really that far off.

[Woodrow Kiang @WoodrowKiang]

@Porkchop_EXP Perhaps. Everything’s made in China and government less woke. But still that chart’s choice of scale has an bad intention.