Having a non-trivial cost advantage is part of business-model math.

Overvalue, not no value

Crossing the Chasm book talked about this, innovators/early adopters care more about stuff than later portions of the market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm

I think you misread the post. He's saying that his ignorance was great, and maybe we should go back towards that.

I don't think Tumblr was particularly influential on the neighbors aspect. It never reached that kind of broad base. Twitter did though. Unless you just mean social media broadly?

It wasn’t ignorance, but tolerance.

I wasn’t referring to social media or his role in it at all except as a participant.

Like you, I dislike the "talker" role for people on IC ladders. I often encourage those people to switch to Director+ roles.

The flip side is people who get and stay too far into the weeds. Solving little problems here and there is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of what's actually going on.

But if you get totally bogged down in details, you are probably avoiding your leadership responsibilities. You should be observing the structural or strategic opportunities, and then dragging the org(s) in that direction.

Sometimes you do that by writing some code to prove a point, other times you do it by getting the nearest VP to take something on as a commitment. For me, personally, I find that the style of work waxes and wanes. Sometimes I get almost no code committed in a month :(. Other times, I get to go off and do some work that nobody else would have done.

I prefer the latter, but I respect that my job requires the former. Many of the people who you see spending all their time talking believe that's the most responsible use of their time. They might not personally prefer it!

This is one of the meandering arguments in the post. The whole executive team, in fact. But it doesn't compare how much other executives are making, etc.

I made a single, coherent argument. If you're seeking cost savings, he's a 14M liability, and easily replaced at lower cost.

I feel there's something in this article, but the meandering really ruins it. Either way, it's obvious that no earnings call would explain the metrics or decisions behind a layoff. But at 7% this is well within "Eh, we want to try a performance layoff and hope we get a better 7% of new hires".

It is too bad that people aren't more direct about this. But if folks remember Meta/FB's attempt at saying they did performance-based cuts, people ripped into them for labeling all the fired personnel as un-hireable. Earnings calls are heavy lawyered and regulated, so there's no reason to say anything.

As aek and dahart said, updating a BVH (refitting) is not expensive. If anything, it's bandwidth limited.

The challenge is minimizing the cost of (selectively) rebuilding.

The method from the paper safes both, memory bandwidth and compute time. You animate and write (to memory) a way smaller number of vertices. You update a smaller (less memory bandwidth, less compute) BVH.

That’s just another way of saying “updating a BVH is expensive therefore spend effort to minimize the amount of updating it”.

The fastest code is the code that never runs.

There’s a material algorithmic difference between rebuild and refit. Not sure if that point was clearly understood.

I get that he's maybe a bit into LLMs, but your take is pretty unfair. He's said repeatedly that as a non-native English speaker, his writing will come across a bit strangely.

If he'd said: "We all need to learn to be like Linus", would that have changed your take?

It's clear he's very respectful not only of Linus, but of all the people involved as well. He's instead using Linus's transition from full-time writing software to full-time "leading" as the point of his write up. Don't get hung up on the verbiage.

0 x inf is also NaN. It's not just division.

Do you have a larger study planned for the Fall? It definitely seems promising.

I'm curious how well you feel this worked because the subject was Statistics (objective grading) versus something more subjective like Civics or Literature.

PS - I'd say this qualifies for Show HN, too!

Do you

They were using Sonnet 4.6 for some fre form responses so that could be applied to something subjective.

But it's not clear that using Sonnet or any other LLM as a "grader" would result in the same improvement. For objective grading, you could be sure that the additional adaptive support is helping. For subjective things like writing style, literature, poetry, you end up with whatever Sonnet thinks is good (and randomly so).

It still could be better for students, but it's not obvious that it would be (or maybe not as strongly?).

And it made a classic optimization: removing New Zealand :).

In its defense, it actually asked me whether I wanted to spend my 500 bytes on more resolution for the main continents or more landmasses, and I opted for the former. You can blame me for that, not Claude :)