dpk

Linux, Performance, road cycling. Mathematical notation fan.

[Math Cafe @Riazi_Cafe_en]

Today we celebrate the birthday of Maryam Mirzakhani.

While the world knows her as the first woman to win the Fields Medal, her brilliance was legendary in Iran long before that. Even before her global accolades, she was famous among students and scholars for her exceptional book on Number Theory, which remains a staple for Olympiad aspirants.

A genius who proved that the most complex surfaces still hold beautiful, hidden symmetries.

[Mathematica @mathemetica]

Today, May 12, we celebrate the birthday of Maryam Mirzakhani (1977–2017) - the first woman and first Iranian to win the Fields Medal.

Her groundbreaking work on Riemann surfaces and moduli spaces continues to inspire mathematicians worldwide.

May 12 is now International Women in Mathematics Day.

[Aaron Bastani @AaronBastani]

So grateful my grandmother died in 2023. Having to live through carpet bombing, and Tehran turning into Gaza, would have terrified her.

[0xmer @0xmer_]

AI hackathons should be more like gpu mode kernel competitions and not "who can put together agentslop the quickest"

[dpk @fseekme]

@pitdesi RIP Turner's Kitchen

[dpk @fseekme]

The web UI won’t matter soon enough

[*tess @ptr]

this problem solves itself, just not how you think, give it time

[Dane Knecht 🦭 @dok2001]

Everything we're doing to make codebases "agent-ready" (better docs, less dead code, smaller surfaces) engineers always needed too. Agents just have zero tolerance for the entropy humans learned to work around. They can't "just know" a file is outdated or a code path is dead. They take your codebase at face value, which means it finally has to be worth taking at face value.

[dpk @fseekme]

Agent skills are going to finally force devs to write docs and keep them up to date

[The Times and Sunday Times @thetimes]

Iran report says 16,500 dead in ‘genocide under digital darkness’ https://t.co/1mLk8hm57d

[Euthenos ♉︎ @Euthenos_]

I literally think about California’s geography permanently. You don’t know how privileged you are. It’s a perfect Olympia with a giant bay, a massive agricultural valley, diverse climates, southern niches for cities, a Mediterranean climate, and a wine region. Absolutely goated.

[dpk @fseekme]

@ellie_huxtable Congrats !!

[dpk @fseekme]

The existence of so many AI note taking apps implies too many meetings on everyone's calendars.

[dpk @fseekme]

@onehappyfellow People don't think about latency when they code.

[dpk @fseekme]

No one is saying it yet .. but there's a great opportunity for a new kind of tech leadership to arise.

[Mushtaq Bilal, PhD @MushtaqBilalPhD]

Meta illegaly downloaded 80+ terabytes of books from LibGen, Anna's Archive, and Z-library to train their AI models.

In 2010, Aaron Swartz downloaded only 70 GBs of articles from JSTOR (0.0875% of Meta). Faced $1 million in fine and 35 years in jail. Took his own life in 2013.

[dpk @fseekme]

They have always been the most important .. AI or not. Even at the peak adoption of serverless and public cloud they still were the most important builders.

[Timothy Chen @tnachen]

Infra / system people will become one of the most important builders in this AI era.

[dpk @fseekme]

@strava should have metrics for how many cars are on a particular road. It'd be helpful to know for route planning a more cyclist friendly route.

[dpk @fseekme]

@AgileJebrim @charles_print Always surprised of how popular python is in leading AI companies. If all day is spent on writing Python you'll end up so far away from hardware performance and interactions.

[ハセン حسن @hasen_95dx]

If you an aspiring programmer who actually loves programming and is not in it just for the money, I have a piece of sincere advice.

This is what I wish I had groked in my early 20s.

The first piece of advice is a simple truth:

(1) Power in this world comes from the ability to make sales and close deals.

If you can close deals, you will get far ahead in life than where you would get with any other particular skill; even than engineering.

In an ideal world, this would not matter: you would just work for a good company as a software engineer, get better over the years, and get a steady income while doing things you love.

Alas, that's not the world we exist in.

(2) Good programming jobs are so rare, it's best to assume they don't exist.

I don't know how to put this, but almost no one knows how to build software. Managers who don't know how to manage are working as managers managing software projects led by "programmers" who don't know how to program. Yet everyone is certain that they know what they are doing, because they are following what they have read in blogs and seminars and books.

You will have no power to fix it, and you will be stuck doing everything in a stupid way. It will be very demoralizing. You are not spending your time doing what you love. Instead you are spending it doing what you hate. You will not get better, you will not be proud of what you produce, and you will not be happy.

-------

So, what to do?

Learn to sell, and use that knowledge to sell something.

I can't tell you know to sale. I'm not selling a course on sales. I'm just trying to point you in the right direction.

Ideally, sell something related to what you know and love. Something related to your programming knowledge and skills. Some kind of programming service, or a consumer application, or a SaaS, or whatever. Could be something that I have never thought of. Don't look to me for ideas.

The biggest hurdle facing you is not your lack of sales skills. It's your belief that "sales is not for me". Get rid of that belief. It will hinder you for the rest of your life.

[dpk @fseekme]

For a machine to become an independent thinker like a human .. it must arrive to concepts like the allegory of the cave by itself, no?

[dpk @fseekme]

Many years ago, I used to think of AI as something that was very much intertwined with philosophy. Surprised that there's almost no philosophy talk with recent developments.