Peter Hagen

Anyone can organize a walk-n-talk, and walk-n-talks can happen anywhere. We’ve done a couple in Japan, one in Spain, and one in China. We’ve found it most useful to do them where luggage forwarding is possible since it’s much nicer to walk with a simple day-pack than 10kg of gear. This also increases the breadth of folks able to participate. Kevin... See more

Google has turned into the "new IBM" for years now. I've worked with Google engineers and managers from different "generations". It's shocking how the newer engineers are just your average consultancy engineer with leet code practice. They have little abstracting capabilities and would be pissed-off if you use some tool/workflow that's not "The... See more

During this Thailand walk, our nightly conversation topics were:

• How do you stay motivated?


• What do you escape or resist?


• What does home mean to you?


• Shocking solutions to public problems.


• Tell us about a failure.


• Frameworks to make big decisions.


• What is your health regime?


• How do you use lists?


• What do you believe that your heroes do

... See more

Probably the bigger change, from what I've heard, was losing Amit Singhal who led Search until 2016. Amit fought against creeping complexity. There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at least contain it as much as possible, so that ranking stays... See more

Gaming is a hits-driven business, where the biggest productions cost hundreds of millions of dollars and need to find a way to recoup their sizable investments. As a result, the companies behind these massive games look for as many ways as possible to mitigate risk, either by copying popular trends (like the battle royale craze of the late 2010s)... See more

The collapse of the GDR has many reasons, mostly it ran out of money during the 80s. There have been several reasons for running out of money, e.G. taking on massive credit in the 70s to produce more consumer goods and build flats (the reason Honecker was very popular after his coup against Ulbricht), which it had problems to pay back in the 80s.... See more

weirdly my main reaction is gratitude to the OpenAI founders for actually creating a governance structure that committed them to sacrifice profits if the mission required it. no idea if that's what happened here, but at least we know the commitment had teeth. Show more

“There was a long period of time where the right thing for [Isaac] Newton to do was to read more math textbooks, and talk to professors and practice problems ... that’s what our current models do,” said Altman, using an example a colleague had previously used.

But he added that Newton was never going to invent calculus by simply reading about... See more