iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Robert Yi @ryi.me · 05/03/2025

so much sass from 4o

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Robert Yi @ryi.me · 14/02/2025

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]

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. buff.ly/3CCLD0R

open.substack.com

The five stages of startup delusion: denial, denial, denial, denial, denial

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Robert Yi @ryi.me · 06/12/2024

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.

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hell yeah thanks Joe, exactly what I was looking for

Robert Yi @ryi.me · 06/12/2024

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

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Robert Yi @ryi.me · 05/12/2024

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

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Robert Yi @ryi.me · 05/12/2024

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

Robert Yi @ryi.me · 05/12/2024

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

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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

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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...

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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

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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

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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?

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imagine if the real modern data stack was oracle all along

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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

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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.

The other singularly useful application is when I'm about to do something unappetizing, eg having a hard conversation, doing mundane chores, etc Noticing my feeling state can act as a sort of brief inoculum against the feeling

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One of the more tautological applications is the act of being mindful/meditating itself. Ie being mindful of not wanting to be mindful Before I sit down to practice, noticing how much I don't want to do it makes the feeling dissipate, and this is a strong virtuous cycle to kick off.

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Over the last few years, I've found that my greatest obstacle to doing anything is that I don't feel like doing it Being mindful of that feeling has been a huge unlock in doing hard things for me.

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yes yes yes, that is the clearest signal of dysfunction! when measurement becomes attribution

great skim, thanks for sharing!

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I like the comparison to a high-level dag, nice read

I like this. We definitely shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, having some skin in the game likely leads to better decisions

yes, absolutely. even at the best orgs it seemed like this dynamic played out all the time, esp in some leaders. you generally have to be opinionated to get promoted, but in my exp, being dogmatic about data as it pertains to decision making is usually net negative

yes, this is spot on. It's odd - it makes sense to set some sort of objective for a company/team, but it strongly deincentivizes taking any sort of risk, which is imo how global optima are found

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I'm starting to think that the data-driven movement of the late 2010s/early 2020s was a mistake #databs, esp where A/B tests became the principal measure of success. It's a surefire way to make teams focus on shots on goal, not finding asymmetric value great for optimization, dangerous for culture

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for some things, yeah, but I'm thinking more for running general scripts

oh very cool, will take a look

right? exactly what I'm thinking too may be a fun side project, lmk if you do it. I'll be your first user lol

this is true (though it feels a little janky haha). though I wonder if it could be accommodated with a small crontab expression adjustment

Jenkins is absolutely the right analogy I've heard good things about Argo workflows, but still want something local!

Robert Yi @ryi.me · 23/11/2024

the jump from cron to airflow always baffled me. why isn't there something lightweight that improves on cron, but isn't so heavy as an orchestrator? I just want retries tbh cron is walking and orchestration is piloting a helicopter

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maybe we should try to emulate something like this virtually, would be super fun

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Robert Yi @ryi.me · 23/11/2024

yeah seems like it. just found Jeffrey liker's book on it in a coffee shop and it's astonishing how different it is from the formulaic representation of lean I've seen running around also lol "scrum industrial complex"