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Halvar Flake Profile picture
@halvarflake
Feb 19, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
@gamozolabs @gynvael @AdemoyeJohn Now, initially the goal is to get oil out of the ground, but over time an entire village, then a city, and finally a society emerge around the oil well.

While initially the goal was oil production, the structure of society shifts - very soon, the actual thing that keeps that ...
@gamozolabs @gynvael @AdemoyeJohn ... society busy is not the production of oil but really the politics of distributing the rewards of the oil well, the entertainment & culture of the surrounding society etc.
@gamozolabs @gynvael @AdemoyeJohn People that challenge the inefficiency of that place are tolerated at best as their presence reduces the odds of the oil well collapsing, but they aren't welcome really. In some sense, these people have not understood that the actual purpose has shifted.
@gamozolabs @gynvael @AdemoyeJohn Some might go into the desert in search for another well to drill, and either perish or found a new society for the cycle to repeat. Some stay because they like the comforts of a city and accept being tolerated but not welcomed.

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More from @halvarflake

Halvar Flake Profile picture
May 4
Waiting for a delayed flight, some idle thoughts on what Google needs to fix itself:

1) Find a replacement for Sundar. This person needs to be both able if articulating a coherent vision for Google as a company, *and* inspire great engineers to want to work on great problems.
2) Google is a strange dysfunctional conglomerate. Search/Ads is/was one of the best businesses ever: Extremely high margin, network effects etc. - at the price of requiring heavy R&D for scale, search quality etc. -- a lot of early Google culture was built for such a business.
Many other businesses at Google (devices, cloud, enterprise docs) are very different: lower margins, more sales effort, tight qualitative customer feedback needed etc.

Neither early Googles culture nor pay scales are well-adapted.
Read 15 tweets
Halvar Flake Profile picture
Dec 10, 2023
@bgurley @martin_casado Ok. Warning, this will be long, and interrupted by a flight.
@bgurley @martin_casado 1) Cultural factors: When I was growing up in the 90s, there was significant uncertainty in the labor market, and one way to achieve economic security was seeking a government job. In many European countries, running a limited liability construct into insolvency effectively...
@bgurley @martin_casado ...bans you from running another one in the foreseeable future. The mentality of "start a company in your 20s, and if you fail, you can either try again or get a job" wasn't a thing. So we are operating from a risk-averse base, due to a labor market with then-sluggish...
Read 29 tweets
Halvar Flake Profile picture
Nov 2, 2023
I wish I had more time to chime into the AI doom debate, but here a very quick thread:

1) The one thing all AI doomers seem to assume is that almost all engineering problems can be solved by thinking, vs. experimentation.
2) Humanity has seen multiple individuals of ...
... vastly higher IQ than other humans. We're 8bn people, IQ stddev is 15, there's bound to be a few people of IQ 175-190. None of them have proven to be particularly dangerous. Superhuman AI does not mean infinite AI.
3) There's no reason to believe the "intelligence explosion" they seem to believe in can actually happen. Pretty much all processes are self-limiting; it's hard to make deliberate exponential chain reactions happen.
4) For all we know, Orcas may be vastly superhuman, ...
Read 11 tweets
Halvar Flake Profile picture
Sep 13, 2023
One thing I have learnt over the last years is that - while I am technically pretty solid - I am surprisingly good at *product*. It's a strange thing to realize as a pretty technical mathematician.

This thread describes what I consider "common-sense product design", because ...
... it turns out that common sense is not all that common.

Ok, so you want to design a good product. Here are the steps:

1. Create a target demographic / user and buyer persona. This comes absolutely first.
2. Identify a few people that match this description. Get to know them.
3. Listen to them, and try to elicit things that make their lives bad, and their incentive structures. Let. Them. Talk.
4. Think about what they complained about, and how you could make their lives better. Come up with a hypothesis.
5. Talk with them about your hypothesis.
Read 10 tweets
Halvar Flake Profile picture
May 5, 2023
There's a lot of microservices hate, but there are also terrible balls of yarn. It reminds me that many orgs are not good at engineering.

A few rules that have served me well:

1) architect your software, have a diagram.
...
2) centralize responsibilities in the diagram.
3) not every box in that diagram needs to be a service, some boxes should be shared libraries
4) conversely, not every box should be a shared library
...
5) There are two primary reasons to make a box a service: you need parallelism for a box that one machine cannot do, or the box is used by many other boxes and manages state. (Plz reply if you know other good reasons, my list is incomplete).
Read 6 tweets
Halvar Flake Profile picture
Feb 5, 2023
A thread about family culture and how value systems survive and get transmitted implicitly:

My parents were deeply pacifist, through personal experience of WW2. They were involved in the creation of the German Green party, which had roots in the peace movement.

...
At the same time, there was a deep undercurrent of duty, self-sacrifice, serving the state/the greater good, "critical obedience" (kritischer Gehorsam), and holding oneself to extremely (perhaps inhumanely) high standards of personal integrity.

...
As a child, you are immersed in these things, and they are never actively spoken about, so you absorb without noticing.

As a teenager, casting around for value systems for myself, I read the Hagakure, and it resonated deeply with me. I adopted many parts from it as ...
Read 8 tweets

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