Jim Keller: Most People Don't Think Simple Enough | AI Podcast Clips

2:19 - "If you constantly unpack everything for deeper understanding you never get anything done. If you don't unpack and understand it when you need to, you'll do the wrong thing." Loved this, well said.

"An idiot loves complexity, a genius loves simplicity" - Terry Davis. God I wish he were alive to be interviewed!

loving Jim's Logical mind, he is so exact and to the point .

00:00 start 00:38 difference from being able to follow a recipe and seeing the layers of complexity behind the recipe 01:28 When you get to be an expert at something you're hoping to achieve deeper understanding not just memorize a large set of recipes to go execute 02:15 if you constantly unpacked everything for deeper understanding you never get anything done , if you don't do deep understanding when needed, you will do the wrong thing. 03:30 the need of refactor and redesign to achieve a new local maximum since the previous one has plateaued. (every 3-5 years in a non-trivial project) 06:00 a project starts, improves and then improves through diminishing returns. Then refactor/redesign. The starting point will be lower than the past peak, but the peak will be higher. 06:30 Short term oriented business is not going to like redesign.

The fun stops when you're about to rebuild an AI from scratch and it says: "no, don't worry, I got it"

Lex, I admire your tenacity and strong mindset! The community is growing, keep it up with the amazing work! I'm not kidding, I consider you as a mentor, even tho we never met. I guess this is the real magic of social media.

This guy looks like a cross between Mark Hamill and Dax Shepard.

4:52 Lex: "So... where does the x86_64 standard come in? Or, how often do you..." Jim: "I was the co-author of that spec back in '98." Completely badass.

"If you really want to make a lot of progress in computer architecture, you should write one from scratch every 5 years" I'll keep it in my frontal lobe cortex in my next SW job, sir.

I've always expressed this as "Architecture beats optimization"

No beating around the bush, the practical objective reality, pure and "simple." (literally simple). Einstein once said, everything should be as simple as possible but not simpler. Jim Keller's thinking style is just that. Thanks to Lex and Jim Keller for the video.

My wife makes this point about surgery frequently...she performs surgical procedures that didn’t exist when she was a resident.

This whole conversation about starting new project at lower level than your optimization point reminds me principle of deload and progression in strength training. One step back, two steps forward.

Thank you for hosting this discussion and sharing it with us. I hope you can keep finding such wonderful guests.

I love how Jim is refering to human beings as "them"

because they're praised for seeming smart, and we equate complexity with intelligence

Lex, you and your guests have an undefinable knack of explaining something in a way that the average person can understand what is being explained- without actually understanding the entire topic. That is truly amazing. Thank you

The "Understanding vs Recipes" is so incredibly brilliant.

Thank you for taking the time to do this.

3:45 the rewrite is half as complicated and takes half the time. Rewrite more often! Great tips.