Excuse me for making some pretty sharp statements. Twitter is objectively a worse product now. Musk is a deeply uncreative person who doesn't seem to actually like people and attracts people to him that are the same way. This shows in his truly uninspired products. Tesla is way behind the Chinese now. xAI is a copy cat. SpaceX seems to be taking old Soviet ideas. Musk I go on?
I have no professional, personal, or parasocial ties to Musk, so you can safely continue without this having any effect on me beyond a normal conversation, even if contentious.
I would limit the conversation to X, as it is the company that started the famous “you can do the same with 5% (or something like that) of the workforce” movement.
I don't think X is objectively a worse product now, in terms of its technical and technological aspects. This is different from saying that users were better/worse before, and the same goes for the algorithm or the type of information that is “pushed” on the platform.
Let's be honest: people and advertisers left X not because their product was unusable, had a bad UX/UI, etc., but for other non-technical reasons.
If it's true that AI is creating productivity gains (and I think it is), then a company has two options. If every employee is X more productive, then you can either cut people and increase profitability, but sacrifice growth. Or you can be creative and see this as an opportunity to develop new features, new lines of business and new products. The choice depends on the creativity of the business leaders. Judging from Jack's post here, he chose option one. Which suggests to me he is deeply an un-creative business leader taking the easy path.
memory safety isn't really much of a problem with modern C++. We have the range library now for instance. What's nice about modern C++ is you can almost avoid most manual loops and talk at the algorithm level.
Are we talking about the same range library? The one that showed up in C++20 and is basically just iterator pairs dressed up nicely? The one where somehow the standard thought all memory safety issues with iterations could be summed up with a single “borrowed” bit? The one where instead of having a nice loop you can also build a little loop body pipeline and pass it as a parameter and have exactly the same iterator invalidation and borrowing problems that C++ has had since day 1?
Having a checklist of "things not to do" is historically a pretty in effectiveway to ensure memory safety, which is why the parent comment was asking for details. The fact that this type of thing gets dismissed as a non-issue is honestly a huge part of the problem in my opinion; it's time to move on from pretending this is a skill issue.
I'm pretty sure global warming isn't debunked. Yes, we should worry about all the other pollution too. But global warming is happening and we are causing it. What's different than nature doing it is the rate of change. Yes the earth was warmer in the past and would be in the future, but it has never warmed as fast as it is now.
I've noticed this too when dealing with people with power. If you want to be seen as a peer, you have to stop caring. It's weird but it's definitely in the culture. As someone who learned English as a second language, it's especially weird since I worked hard to speak and write good English.
It's also ironic for a self described "classic liberal" building a company which grows the power of the government instead of limiting it. Alex Karp must have deep cognitive dissonance and likely suffers for it.
Palantir itself is trading at an unjustifiable premium given their fundamentals. They P/E is north of 200x. It's forward guidance also doesn't justify their price imo.
So their beef with analysts is obvious since they have a huge risk to the downside in price. The recent pullback of around 21% is not sufficient in my opinion. Note this is not financial advice.
> It's also ironic for a self described "classic liberal" building a company which grows the power of the government instead of limiting it.
I think that he really does see himself as classic liberal in that he really does see government as "limiting" to people like him with things like regulation. Say what you will about the current administration, they're absolutely not going to regulate people who create wealth.
There's a divine right of kings element mixed in here. Thiel, Karp, Trump and the rest really do think that the order of the universe, or the will of a higher power, is putting them in a place to operate without limits. They see any sort of regulation of their behavior as an affront to the order of nature. That's why they consider themselves classically liberal. Ultimately, the little people - that's us - are being illiberal by electing governments that can do things like say "hey, maybe we don't put everyone under constant surveillance" that would both challenge their power and their profitability.
A huge portion of the "I'm a classical liberal" was always just a smokescreen. It was never an ideology for many of these folks. It was just a "more serious" mechanism of complaining about woke college students.
Don't forget he also had Sam Altman's phone number. Do you any of you have his number? Also before he did all this he was semi retired for 5 years because of a successful exit. So for anyone thinking they can replicate this ask...
1. Are you already rich? Do you have cash in the bank to vibecode a project fulltime for many months just for fun?
We use Apache Arrow at my company and it's fantastic. The performance is so good. We have terabytes of time-series financial data and use arrow to store it and process it.
We use Apache Arrow at my company too. It is part of a migration from an old in-house format. When it works it’s good. But there are just way too many bugs in Arrow. For example: a basic arrow computation on strings segfaults because the result does not fit in Arrow’s string type, only the large string type. Instead of casting it or asking the user to cast it, it just segfaults. Another example: a different basic operation causes an exception complaining about negative buffer sizes when using variable-length binary type.
This will obviously depend on which implementation you use. Using the rust arrow-rs crate you at least get panics when you overflow max buffer sizes. But one of my enduring annoyances with arrow is that they use signed integer types for buffer offsets and the like. I understand why it has to be that way since it's intended to be cross-language and not all languages have unsigned integer types. But it does lead to lots of very weird bugs when you are working in a native language and casting back and forth from signed to unsigned types. I spent a very frustrating day tracking down this one in particular https://github.com/apache/datafusion/issues/15967
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