Robert Yi

one of my favorite ways to read slowly as of late has been to read only until I find something to think about

it takes a lot less time to get something out of what you read. higher utility density per word, and you can make sure you don't miss anything

the real problem with lack of sleep for me is not that my intelligence or energy are suboptimal.

it's that my ability to stay mindful plummets. I'm generally mindful for less of the day, and even when I am, I'm not able to muster as much awareness as I am when well-rested.

GitHub - oxy-hq/oxy: The framework for agentic analytics. The framework for agentic analytics. Contribute to oxy-hq/oxy development by creating an account on GitHub.

Hello everyone! Excited to share what we've been working on for the last few months: an open source framework for prompting LLMs for analytics.

Repo: github.com/oxy-hq/oxy
Read more here: www.oxy.tech/blog/introdu...

so much sass from 4o

Without introspection, everything is a waste of time.
With introspection, nothing is a waste of time.

Oh the places you'll go [as a startup founder] The five stages of startup delusion: denial, denial, denial, denial, denial

I've had a lot of folks coming to me lately asking me about my journey, but have struggled to distill the eigenvectors into something compelling. So I spent some time writing a post where I try to illustrate this through allegory. I hope this helps for some of you.
https://buff.ly/3CCLD0R

It's easy to make decisions when there are no consequences, but pretty hard when it means you're going to make a bunch of people angry.

And a militant commitment to honesty is the only thing that will help you scrutinize whether you've bad the right decisions, esp bc the action required to *correct* such decisions is often excruciating.

Your outcome is largely bound by a few decisions: eg your choice of space, who you choose to work with, and to a lesser but still significant extent, your initial architectural decisions. No amount of grind will save you if you hire narcissists to build a PHP app that tracks pogo stick competitions.

Most people who want to start a company know how to work hard. But in general, you don't end up with 100x outcomes by working 5% more than your peers.

People will often tell you that building a company is about grit, about execution, about long hours and sacrifice. But I've been reflecting on this lately, and I think it's generally incorrect.

hell yeah thanks Joe, exactly what I was looking for

yeah makes sense. odd though, you would've thought someone would've tried to figure it out at this point, and I imagine it's possible to test out and at least constrain the possible machines they're using

seems like snowflake is on there now!

but I have no idea how to read these results though. do either of you know if there's any way to know what EC2 instances snowflake is actually running behind the scenes?

seems like cost is the only way to make a real comparison here

sweet, this is exactly what I was looking for. thanks nico!

does anyone know of any speed benchmark comparisons between duckdb and standard warehouses (e.g. bigquery / snowflake) execution times?

remember some floating around last year, but can't find them for the life of me

I nearly switched to iphone this year, but the one thing keeping me: Gemini + Kindle is an exceptional user experience. It has fundamentally changed how I read, particularly for esoterica

Tap hold bottom bar -> select confusing section -> get answer from Gemini

holy crap that is a nightmare

absolutely. entropy and misdirection are so dangerous and data people are so well-positioned to increase both

I laughed, I cried. Great read, and honestly some of these tactics seem similar to what I've actually seen happen...

yeah good point. I suppose the scariest then are those that delegate responsibility to the analyst, in terms of potential negative impact

Me: the worst analysts are zero value-add
Friend: no, the worst analysts are negative value-add

Anyone have any horror stories? Trying to figure out how bad a bad data team can actually be

ah makes sense. maybe I should pick up a beater just so I can climb with it 🙄

that's amazing. I'd honestly love to work in the climbing gym too but I worry about all the chalk getting in the crevices of my devices. I usually just work nearby

here as well! (in SF bay area)

huh I wonder how big the data + climber population is

I know @gordonhwong.bsky.social also climbs! I just started getting back into it lately too

This is really interesting. I've always wondered if I fell into this camp. I can certainly extrapolate to empathize with this.

Generally, I wonder if that's the right way to quantify ADHDness -- i.e. what do the energy/desire curves look like as you try to do things?

imagine if the real modern data stack was oracle all along

holy shit this is surprisingly generous.

this is a huge improvement over the shit show that is trying to manage free tier instances on aws/gcp/azure

A final point here on why this is worth trying: I've found that there's a notable difference between doing hard things intentionally vs letting them just happen to you:

The former can build character, but passively letting things happen to you often feels pointless, if not traumatizing.