While it does seem that Ballmer doesn't have an understanding of the deepness of the problem, in his defence, he outscored BillG on the math SAT with a perfect score of 800, and graduated Harvard with a degree in applied mathematics.
Which makes me wonder if it's related to another 'simple' game theory problem that came up in Matt Levine's money stuff:
"They made me do the math on 1000 coin flips. EV(heads) (easy), standard deviation (slightly harder), then they offered me a +EV bet on the outcome. I said “let’s go.”
They said “Wrong. If we’re offering it to you, you shouldn’t take it.”
I said “We just did the math.”
They said “We have a guy on the floor of the Amex who can flip 55% heads.”"
I like that anecdote and the takeaway, especially with regards to trading: if someone's offering you what seems obviously a +EV trade, why are they offering it to you and what are you missing? Whether that was Ballmer's intended lesson is another matter..
Is the interview for an engineering position or for sales?
If you're hiring a software developer, I am going to assume all probabilities are about physical processes or data distributions or such, and there is no "if we're asking it means we have something up our sleeve". The data going to be sorted by merge sort is not going to have anything up its sleeve, or set any traps for me.
> Is the interview for an engineering position or for sales?
Either way. The coin-flip example and Ballmer's binary search game could apply with simple extensions to complicated processes like SLAs on cloud services.
> The data going to be sorted by merge sort is not going to have anything up its sleeve
That's a curious example, since one reason to use mergesort rather than quicksort is the latter's susceptibility to pessimal inputs.
You know that even smart mathematicians got tripped up by the Monty Hall problem, right?
> Even when given explanations, simulations, and formal mathematical proofs, many people still did not accept that switching is the best strategy.[5] Paul Erdős, one of the most prolific mathematicians in history, remained unconvinced until he was shown a computer simulation demonstrating Savant's predicted result.
This is great. Simple and slick makes it easy to use. I'm impressed by the URL importing feature. Is that a GPT wrapper behind the scenes or do you use another library?
I have a similar story of accessing an internal JSON API for my own benefit.
I left my airpods in a car I rented using zipcar. I spoke to support etc but nothing had been handed in. I checked to see if the car was still where I left it so that I could re-hire and claim them, but it had been moved.
The app tells you the 'name' of the car you rented which is used as an identifier. It also shows a map of where all available cars are. I sniffed the requests the app made to display this map, and was able to filter it by the car name. From this I was able to locate where the car I left my airpods in was. Was able to head there, unlock the car, and to my amazement the airpods were still there!
>they don’t seem to look at real people that live a long time in Spain, Italy, Japan, etc
I think you're referring to 'Blue zones'[0] here. I'm certainly not an expert in longevity, but was also intrigued by these areas and their apparently above-average lifespan, and how it goes against a lot of conventional longevity advice re: diet.
One explanation I've heard is that they're simply the results of poor record keeping, and that there isn't much strong evidence to suggest people in those regions do statistically live longer than average.
It doesn’t need to be strictly based on the blue zones idea, but the basic fact that in some places, people live longer than others. That Wikipedia article criticized the Okinawa narrative but doesn’t mention that Japan still has one of the longest lifespans in the first place.
My criticism is basically this: there are places where people live longer than others, and they certainly aren’t eating bowls of green goop and 200 pills every morning. If your goal is to maximize longevity, it seems logical to imitate whatever they’re doing. Or at least investigate it.
Japanese people generally don't skip breakfast and eat rice with every meal. So they aren't doing intermittent fasting and they are constantly eating one of the foods TFA says not to eat.
I am pretty sure the benefits of intermittent fasting beyond calorie restriction are not really supported by the latest science.
I am not saying it's bad; eating fewer calories has its benefits. However, the effectiveness of intermittent fasting, especially as portrayed in the media, has been quite overblown, IMHO.
I think one of the main sources of this is from a study that suggested longevity improvements in lab mice. Unfortunately, studies involving lab mice, especially those concerning metabolism, translate poorly to humans.
Twitter has 450M monthly active users. Elon bought it for $44bn. With ~$5bn in operating expenses, that gives you an absolutely insane CAC of $90 to play with.
You're assuming that the individual's labour is the only input into work completion.
I think those questions are good. One benefit is that it can reveal potential organisation-wide blockers:
*Getting design changes could be slow (and hence the design department may be understaffed, or inefficient communication channels)
*Maybe some processes can be ran in parallel. Someone can build the login form while the other does the database.
*They might require git access for another department that could take a while to come through.
Considering engineers' time is often the greatest cost for a technology startup, you can bet they'd be incentivised to maximise the efficiency of it.
Not only might they reveal potential blockers, but answering it also helps both parties understand they're on the same page regarding what the task entails. If the task is building a login form and the response is 'It will take two days to train the neural network', you can nip that in the bud.
Adding a comment as I don't think this is a fair representation of George. He livestreamed the creation of cheapETH as a technical demonstration of web3 development[0] and continually talks about it being worthless while developing it. He's also on record as being a serial 'no-coiner'.
Which makes me wonder if it's related to another 'simple' game theory problem that came up in Matt Levine's money stuff:
"They made me do the math on 1000 coin flips. EV(heads) (easy), standard deviation (slightly harder), then they offered me a +EV bet on the outcome. I said “let’s go.”
They said “Wrong. If we’re offering it to you, you shouldn’t take it.”
I said “We just did the math.”
They said “We have a guy on the floor of the Amex who can flip 55% heads.”"
I like that anecdote and the takeaway, especially with regards to trading: if someone's offering you what seems obviously a +EV trade, why are they offering it to you and what are you missing? Whether that was Ballmer's intended lesson is another matter..
[0]https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-14/amc-is...