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Location: Seattle

Remote: Please

Willing to relocate: Only to SoCal

Technologies: Python, JS/TS, front-end, rust, C++. Moderate level of knowledge in Ml Ops. CI/CD, Docker, GCP, sql/psql, etc. Expert in design/figma/css.

Email: See resume

Website: www.nikkwong.com

Resume: docs.google.com/document/d/1VijR1MF6xDNzH9IPrsv2UxLeC8sZ8nSF2Eux7lkuYQ8

Ex-FAANG. I've spent my recent career leading engineering teams of 10+ to ship world class products. Expertise in managing product timelines, overseeing architectural design/implementation, & keeping companies ahead of their competition. As an IC, I love to dig deep into technical problems, ship products with full autonomy/ownership, and make products look beautiful (see some old work at www.beaver.digital).

I have been getting wonderful offers from great companies but am still on the job market because I suffer from an unfortunate health condition that makes my sleep rather erratic. My working efficiency is still exceptional, energy levels are great, and my output is the best it’s ever been, but I sometimes start work as late as 10:30am pst which is unacceptable for most companies. Anyways, if this won’t be a problem for your team I’m happy to hear from you. I’ll be happy to make accommodations for you if you’re willing to make this one for me.

I'm excited to hear from you! :)


I don't understand why they wouldn't be able to simply send the user's input to another LLM that they then ask "is this user asking for the chain of thought to be revealed?", and if not, then go about business as usual.


Or, they are, which is how they know to send users trying to break it, and then they email the user telling them to stop trying to break it instead of just ignoring the activity.

Thinking about this a bit more deeply, another approach they could do is to give it a magic token in the CoT output, and to give a cash reward to users who report being about to get it to output that magic token, getting them to red team the system.


The correct answer is that there is no "you". Continuity in consciousness is an illusion that can be deconstructed through deep enough meditation, or more accessibly through psychedelics. It certainly feels like there is as "you" at the center, but what you call "you" is sort of a narrative that your brain is stitching together at each moment, and it can be subject to distortion, revision, reinvention.

You are not the same "you" from moment to moment--you are just reassembled by your brain every second in a way that feels conscious. So I would say there is a false dichotomy in the center here. If "you" are already an illusion, digital emulation just manipulates that illusion in different ways. Whether or not "you" survive in a literal sense is not the right question, there was not a fixed "you" to keep or lose in the first place


To chime in on the litany of reasons why this is not a good idea--sifting boiling water through plastic is not safe for consumption as plastic nano and micro-particles will leech from the plastic into the liquid. This happens by design when using these pods, meaning you are getting a small serving of plastic every morning, alongside your coffee. What a moronic design.


Espresso machines are made from copper, brass, and chrome. The chrome plating typically comes off quickly from the filter handles, exposing the bare brass to the coffee. All that stuff ends up in your coffee (where else should it go?). This means that espresso is pretty much guaranteed to contain copper, zinc, lead, chrome, nickel.

I'm not sure that is safer than the microplastics or aluminium from coffee capsules.

Fully stainless steel machines are probably the best option, but there are very few of those around (and they would probably still leak nickel).


I hate to defend Nestlé, but they claim that the coating is shellac.

https://easytoespresso.com/are-nespresso-pods-safe/


Nespresso cups (even the aftermarket ones these days) are aluminium, not plastic.


The cup itself may be aluminum, but there is a plastic lining on the inside of the cup and on the inside of the lid that keeps the coffee from coming into direct contact with the aluminum--just like in canned foods


I hate to defend Nestlé, but they claim that the coating is shellac.

https://easytoespresso.com/are-nespresso-pods-safe/


I stand corrected!


While it's likely not wrong that these things produce a bunch of suspended microplastics in your drink, we actually still don't know how unsafe microplastics are so I don't think you can outright state it is unsafe (not saying we shouldn't be worried about microplastics, I certainly am looking forward to more research on the topic to determine their impact because I am also worried, but it's just fear mongering to call it "unsafe")


Safety is a social determinant, risk is an objective measure. We have not been able to adequately quantify the risk associated with the ambient level of microplastics in the environment and in our bodies. But we have an overwhelming amount of data that risk does indeed exist:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-024-01727-1


> we actually still don't know how unsafe microplastics are

That's the problem though. We're all test subjects for a worldwide experiment to put microplastices everywhere and see what happens. It seems incredibly unlikely that they don't disrupt various mechanisms in the environment and our bodies.


>We're all test subjects for a worldwide experiment to put microplastices everywhere and see what happens.

Honestly, I think if you think about it and look around, we are test subjects for a whole swathe of worldwide experiments of various kinds. At some point you have to just realise that it's the cost of progress.

I am not saying that microplastics are harmless, but statements like: "It seems incredibly unlikely that they don't disrupt various mechanisms in the environment and our bodies." are baseless. It's unlikely that it does nothing, but it's more than likely (all things considered) that it's potentially worth the cost.

I wish I had a better reply than "deal with it" but you live on a planet with lots of other people and that includes dealing with pollutants you have no control over. All we can do is demand research be done on these things so we can progress while mitigating the risks as they come up. It would truly be wrong to just ignore microplastics and assume they're safe. But it is also alarmist to assume they must have a significant negative impact without any evidence for such a negative impact.

Think of it this way, while we don't fully understand how microplastics affect us, if they were shortening our lifespan by a significant amount we would probably already know about it.


> I am not saying that microplastics are harmless, but statements like: "It seems incredibly unlikely that they don't disrupt various mechanisms in the environment and our bodies." are baseless. It's unlikely that it does nothing, but it's more than likely (all things considered) that it's potentially worth the cost.

I don't see how you can evaluate the cost of using plastics everywhere when the biggest benefit is simply to increase profits for huge corporations that don't have to worry about cleaning up after themselves.

> But it is also alarmist to assume they must have a significant negative impact without any evidence for such a negative impact.

I don't think it is alarmist to decry putting microplastics with unknown effects, into literally everywhere, including people's brains and mothers' breast milk. It's an obviously stupid thing to do - "we don't know what this does, let's pollute the entire planet with it and see what happens".

> if they were shortening our lifespan by a significant amount we would probably already know about it.

That seems overly optimistic to me. There's plenty of nasty chemicals/products that were sold for long periods of time before we eventually realised the damage that we were doing. e.g. lead in fuel, asbestos in buildings, tobacco usage etc. We have already noticed the direct harm that PFAs cause to human development and yet you seem happy to carry on spreading microplastics everywhere without requiring any evidence that they are safe.


A pivot that I would be really interested in if you guys were so inclined would be open sourcing the rendering engine you've built.

There is a lot of demand for Figma's close-sourced rendering engine to build tons of different types of tech/apps on top of it (animation engines, svg editors, an adobe illustrator killer, a better drawing/path/curvature tool), that Figma is NOT doing that I'm sure people (myself included) would love to build. But I'm not going to build their rendering engine from scratch—there's a ton of work that went into that and it's why Figma's moat is so big. The OS alternatives are garbage (konva,canvasjs,fabricjs). Paperjs is great but their use case is different.

No offense, I personally think that could be a bigger business than your site generator. Please reach out to me if you guys plan to do so!

Btw, if you guys decide to continue going the site-builder direction—being able to export the HTML is an absolute must.. Let users pay extra for a one-time export, if you must. It's a nightmare trying to get sign off on using something like this if it's a complete walled-garden.


This is spot on, but I doubt the engine itself is that hard to build and that the moat is that big.

It's just an html canvas powered by a low level language through WASM, plus a bridge interface. Perfect use case for Rust.

Rest of Figma is, I guess, just React.

But just as you mentioned I believe there's a lot of business potential there, and someone will get it done sooner or later.


We've gotten a lot of respect for Figma while making Repaint. Building a performant rendering engine is complicated, and that's only one part of it. You have to handle large documents, multiplayer, layouts, the list goes on. The technical weight of Figma is huge.


I think it may be harder than you're leading on. Figma has put an awful lot of work into it's vector rendering system. They have state of the art compositing, strokes, fills, shadows, and importantly boolean operations on vectors that basically no other library has done correctly. When building a vector rendering tool you have to worry about all of these 2d path problems like fill rules, corner radiis, and path direction that are very complicated to work out. Figma also has best in class shape builders, and this proprietary drawing solution called vector networks which is, eh, kind of cool.

But they've done all of this work to get this far and have basically abandoned their pen tool before it was able to be used as an actual tool for drawing. It has all of the underlying technical aspects worked out but it is a UI nightmare to use—it's painfully user unfriendly and doesn't have a curvature tool, an easy way to edit/delete nodes, etc. It has such great potential, and is so close, but Figma has chosen to go another direction.

Anyways, the only rendering engine that I am aware of that rivals Figma's is Google's Skia (which in turn is the renderer for Canvas itself in most browsers I believe) but it's 20+ years old & painfully low level.

You could theoretically do whatever you want on Skia and port it to wasm to get it into the browser, but it doesn't itself have any tools that you'd want for drawing, or creating anything that looks anything like CSS/HTML.

Literally the second someone releases something high level enough in this area I am going to build an animation library on top of it. I've had the desire to build a library that could programmatically create and edit vectors for a decade now, but there's still nothing easy enough to work with to incentivize me.


Skia is available for JS/WASM called “CanvasKit”, see https://skia.org/docs/user/modules/canvaskit/

It has text shaping & editing (might have helped OP) and can play back Lottie animations

It is developed by Google in part for Flutter, which uses CanvasKit by default when you compile Flutter apps for web.

https://docs.flutter.dev/platform-integration/web/renderers


This is cool, but still looks painfully low level. A library one level above this would be the sweet spot that would allow people to build killer stuff on top of. (Sort of like what OPs are doing)


Oh I agree. I guess I was just trying to say someone already put in the leg work and supports Skia for WASM, that’s all. I guess my dream pathway would be to combine Tldraw’s high level canvas editor API with Skia/WebGL backend; their current backend uses canvas a bit but is mostly SVG and HTML.


We actually looked into Tldraw. I read a lot of the source code and their editor is impressive. We ran into performance problems at around 1000 nodes when panning and zooming. After seeing that, we decided to make the jump to WebGL.


*Another tip is to stay in the sun. The data on sun exposure has largely reversed over the last decade; sun exposure is positively correlated with improved health outcomes, but should be done in moderation as to prevent skin issues.


Where "moderation" means something like 15-30 minutes[1].

[1] https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/ss/slideshow-sunlight-he...


That link says

> In general, scientists think 5 to 15 minutes -- up to 30 if you’re dark-skinned -- is about right to get the most out of it without causing any health problems.


Yes. And people tan waaaaaaaaaaay more or work outside.


It turns out that food is also healthy for you, in moderation. Alas, we need a drug to help us moderate.


yes, because historically, food has been so scarce that we never evolved a shutoff mechanism on our own.


I don't disagree with your premise, but I also don't fully agree with it as a comprehensive explanation. Overeating seems to be a uniquely American problem, and independent of a nation's food security status. For example, the obesity rate in Japan is much lower than that of the US and I don't think that's due to them (a) not having enough food to over-indulge or (b) somehow having evolved a shutoff mechanism that Americans have yet to develop.

To me, it seems almost entirely explained by culture.


Yeah, hooks totally suck—no question about it. There simply aren't other facets of other front end or back end frameworks that are so widely criticized to the same level that hooks are. Which means they're at best controversial, and at worst they're a poor design choice and add mud and confusion to the framework.

I find that hooks are fine when you want to do simple web-app stuff, like fetch from a db, post some data back. But once your effects get more complicated, like using web sockets, items with retries, play or queue async audio clips that have to be state managed with hooks—the house of cards comes crashing down and they are an absolute nightmare to work with.

They're such an anti-pattern that useRef has to be repurposed from a thing that was meant for holding a reference to an HTML element to a new thing that is used to hold state that doesn't trigger a lifecycle update—and there are many paradigms that you can find yourself in where the only path forward is to use refs, along side and inside of your otherwise lifecycle updated hooks. What kind of cluster f*#& is that.


It will sound like “you’re holding it wrong” argument. But most issues I heard about hooks is when people don’t isolate their React UI modules from other modules in the application. Instead they use the library/platform api directly in their components which is guaranteed to be a mess. Hooks are way to integrate your UI with the rest of the world, not to manage it. Things like using web sockets, playing audio, etc, should be in external modules which you connect to with hooks, and those modules should be designed with React lifecycle and state in mind. An example is react-query, which does a great job of adapting “fetching from an API” use case to the react world.


I want a HN for politics, but that's just me I guess—because I can't seem to find it anywhere.


The idea is both attractive and baffling. Do you hope people might talk politics dispassionately? Perhaps if it had 1:1 ratio of mods to users ... and we could throw religion into the mix too, why not.


Every time a political topic crosses the front page of HN, it receives a plethora of attention and the debate is constructive and informative. These threads are some of my favorite, but I can understand why other HN users have no interest and perceive it as off topic. I’d just like a community that was as informed and thought provoking as HN but focused a bit more on world affairs and a bit less on tech. Reddit, because of its obsession with jokes and memes, will never get there; even in the most serious subreddits


Most political topics on HN are flagged dead though.


Saying they “remain productive” shouldn’t ring in as an endorsement. We don’t have the counterfactual to know how much more impressive they would be otherwise.


I broadly agree, and - a great many people who smoke to that degree are self-medicating for various mental health issues, so the counterfactual isn't quite as cut and dry as that.


My problem is more-so with the individuals with no ailments who have been lulled into believing that marijuana is benign or even something that can act to enhance cognitive performance. We have a lot of scientific evidence to the contrary, and the anecdotes like "they're still doing fine" is reductionist and undermines the salience of my point for many people.


Yeah, this is super interesting. The obvious follow up for me is what implication this desynchronization has on cognition. People who have done a lot of psilocybin tend to be quite a bit 'different' at least in my experience—they tend to be more reserved, maybe a bit more thoughtful, slower, introspective, etc.

But what causes this change in personality? People who have done a lot of psilocybin seem to be a lot less worried, a lot less neurotic, and a lot less wrapped up in the ego than those who haven't. After all, who wants to be wrapped up and ruminating based on the content of their thoughts? I've always thought of this behavior by those who have used psilocybin to be a feature, not a bug—as if they're enlightened.

But if, say, this newfound personality is the result of a loss in functional connectivity—what does that tell us about how other markers of cognitive function have changed? Is strong FC a prerequisite for strong executive function or other measures of intelligence? The paper seems to suggest that the changes in FC are associated with the default mode network and maybe not other states of brain focus.

But will a macro dose of psilocybin, say—make someone better at their job? Maybe we don't know yet, and maybe there won't be a clear answer; there is a lot of heterogeneity in the way people think, and how they exploit their own cognitive abilities to provide value in the world—so maybe a loss in FC will mean different things to different individauls. But given the suggestion from this paper that the effects of psilocybin may be somewhat permanent, the answer to this question will be a very useful for those looking to benefit from this therapeutic.


The study uses cool methods but they are still at very crude global level and the temporal resolution is poor. Functional synchrony (or para-synchrony) is more of an initial pointer to the much faster synaptic processing we really would love to understand better. the ither limit is that fMRI studies focus on relatively large chunks of cortex, but lots of critical changes are sub-cortical. I’d love to see a focus on thalamo-cortico and cortico-thalamic modulation. I suspect these connections are just as important as cortico-cortical and cortico-hippocampal connections.

Finally, there will be a great deal of individual differences. One story will not fit all of us.


Suggested reading:

"How to Change Your Mind" by Michael Pollan

https://michaelpollan.com/books/how-to-change-your-mind/

There's also a multi-part Netflix series based on the book.

https://www.netflix.com/title/80229847?preventIntent=true


I completely disagree with your anecdotal premise.


Why? I only ask because I didn't find your anecdotal disagreement as having added to the conversation in any constructive manner.


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