kotxig

If the outcome of all of this is that Altman ends up at Microsoft and hiring the vast majority of the team from OpenAI, it's probably wise to assume that this was the intended outcome all along. I don't know how else you get the talent at a company like OpenAI to willingly move to Microsoft, but this approach could end up working.

"should probably be reconsidered" isn't exactly outrage is it? We can have sensible discussions about appropriate naming without being extreme one way or the other, as much as the internet seems to hate moderate discussion.

I think brainf*k is a great example of a potentially offensive name that actually conveys meaning and doesn't harm adoption by its intended audience.

Let's just put it this way, I'm not advertising in anything associated with my professional credibility that I use "lunatic", for the very obvious reason that it's possibly offensive to some people and that the word offers nothing to convey meaning. I don't have to find it personally offensive to not want to associate with it.

definition of "lunatic" - "a person who is mentally ill (not in technical use)."

I didn't say it was offensive. If it was called "autistic", the word is not offensive but... why? It's just a really strange choice.

I mean, I had to think about it. Whether it's hugely offensive or not isn't necessarily the right question here. With the whole English language to pick from there are probably better choices that are less ambiguous.

I wish they had called it something else. I hate to be that guy but you know, it's not that hard to be maybe just a little bit more thoughtful.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17997413

If people in science really do understand that correlation is not causation, why are they publishing papers in journals that show meaningless correlations without doing the actual work of uncovering patterns of causation? If you really understood this point you would be embarrassed to publish a paper on it. These results should be confined to a searchable database in the same way data sets in lab experiments are.

It's good for climate change because it will gross enough of us out to stop eating meat all together.

You can compute an autocorrelation with FFT's by applying the convolution theorem which IIRC the audio api can do the FFTs for you. I also found the the YIN estimator is a lot better as a time domain estimator http://audition.ens.fr/adc/pdf/2002_JASA_YIN.pdf and some years ago I worked out how to compute that estimator with FFTs also.

I am surprised to find in these comments that using the debugger routinely and by default isn't a popular idea. I couldn't do my job as well as I do without having the reflex to use the debugger. I shouldn't be surprised though, the last time I watched a coworker roll his face on the keyboard trying to debug something the conversation went something like:

  - Me: Just use the debugger...
  - Him: But it's hard and annoying to use the debugger
  - Me: It's hard and annoying not having the skills or reflex to use the debugger by default
  - Him: ... ok I agree ... continues rolling face on the keyboard and add print statements everywhere

I think much of the sentiment in these comments is sounding like "that's not how I work so I will defend myself". Just learn how to use your debugger and integrate it into your work flow. You don't need a special IDE to use a debugger in most languages if that's the perceived problem.

The reason debuggers are often hard to use in these environments is because people who don't routinely use debuggers to do their job do not see the value of them, and so organizations do not prioritize your ability to do this. The tone of the comments here in general is sceptical of the use of debuggers and this is exactly why you can't use them in some FAANG's - it's not a popular belief even though to anyone who does use them routinely this is such a fundamental thing. I feel like I am so much more capable with the ability to use a debugger and to routinely use it by default during development. This is how vim users must feel explaining to all the sublime text and vscode users what they are missing out on. When you have it, it's a productivity superpower.

It's easier that the US blocks it for diplomatic reasons than the UK. The UK will almost certainly block it if the US doesn't. It could be interpreted as a snub if the UK interferes with the deal, so the US has first dibs on blocking the merger.

I refuse to ever work for facebook or have a facebook account. I regret having a whatsapp account, created before it was acquired. Still migrating friends+family onto signal. I get it, Facebook has scale and some cool hard problems to solve, and comp packages that are hard to ignore. I'm sure slavery looked pretty attractive too (don't get me wrong, I'm not equating the severity of these things). I just can't imagine having to explain to people in 20 years time how or why I put profit and personal gain ahead of legitimate social issues. How is it defensible? I probably clocked the issues a bit earlier than some, which is why I never created an account. Please just leave facebook and delete your accounts.

Is there a list of companies that fall into category 3 that offer fully remote positions? I worked at a tier 3 company in the bay area and have since settled into what's probably a tier 2 company in Europe. I am considering moving back to the US after covid and doing another 4 years at a tier 3 company, but I would much rather find a job that pays $300k fully remote from Europe (even if that means working on an east coast timezone) than relocating back to the cesspit of San Francisco for $500k.

> Providing customer value is a business model, and it's rather independent of the license underneath.

Yes, my argument and tl;dr is that flooding the market with free software has created an environment where superior for-profit alternatives (open or not) have no value to the majority, so software developers have got to go much much further to create a sense of value. There is of course intrinsic value to the software being used and it took skill and expertise to produce, it's just the perception of value is near zero due to the abundance of free alternatives and the culture of expectation that it should be free.

===

To support yourself financially when building a new library of some sort, you either require a commercial sponsor (someone who values this as part of a broader intent, thinks they will get kudos, free maintenance and hiring opportunities, but doesn't devalue their own business by open sourcing it), a derivative business from the software (support contracts, saas, book sales, bs enterprise features that should really have been there to begin with), or is run as a charity (donors or you simply just have to make $0 and lap up the praise for doing it out of the kindness of your heart).

The bottom line here is charity. People routinely work on software for no personal gain and people routinely expect all generic software to be free, to the point where a one off $5 per head charge is considered excessive and will never be considered.

If we imagined a world where people did place value on generic software, that is to say people expected to pay $1-$5 for a compiler or a library, that opens a lot of opportunity to individuals to compete and produce higher quality software and would give me the opportunity to work on things that I find interesting and care about.

Yes they have been successful and continue to be. I still think they have made a mistake, I don't see why success would invalidate that. If amazon are eating into their profits their mistake was to not protect their business against that threat from the beginning. The mistake cost them whichever rewards amazon are reaping. That doesn't mean they have failed entirely, and clearly far from it.

> Like it doesn't make sense to code a complete OS from scratch every five years

No but it does make sense for us to pay for using an OS given that it's fundamental to what we do. The free as in free beer model means that the entities that produce operating systems do not extract any significant fraction of the value they are responsible for generating. It also perpetuates this idea that we shouldn't pay for software at all, not even $5 for a compiler.

So with that in mind, I'm saying that we should be careful about what software we opensource, and ideally we should at least be commercially sponsored to produce the software that we do open source if we want careers in building these high quality components or if we want to breed a culture whereby employers do invest engineering hours building these things.

> And I'd argue it makes technology a lot more valuable

Yes it means that businesses are able to produce a lot more for a lot less, but it also means that my skills are valued less. Companies value engineers by their hours of input not by the commercial value of the code. For example, I think Electron is terrible for desktop app development. It's great for prototyping but it's bloated and inefficient, I think we can do a lot better. There is no real market for an alternative because we have QT on the high perf C++ side and we have the trash web code on the other. If we had a culture of expecting to pay small amounts for software it would be more likely that I could write a high quality middle ground based on Golang or something, which is less approachable than web dev but more approachable than C++, and we would have higher quality and better performing code produced by it. For us to have this thing I either have to build this thing for free also or I have to come up with some fairly contrived business model, hope that kind people donate etc. The backdrop of opensource culture has devalued this implementation beyond the point of viability, so we will not see it unless a commercial sponsor has a specific need for it or I'm feeling particularly charitable.

Elastic made the mistake of building a whole business on open source software by relying on the poor experience and artificial overhead to launching that software independently and in a production ready fashion. It's no surprise then that people in the community identify that this value is somewhat artificial. If you bridge that gap (either cloud providers providing it or someone contributes containerized/terraformed single deployment scripts), the value of having someone navigate the artificial complexity for you vanishes, and thus the value to the customer.

You have to question what value Elastic is offering its customers on top of the opensource project. Why is it that people complain about AWS devaluing the commercial services of Elastic but none of you complain about opensource devaluing the development of code in general. I can't for the life of me find a job that pays to write a new framework or some piece of interesting software because opensource completely devalues code. I think the proliferation of opensource is probably worse than some of you imagine. I'm not writing any opensource that isn't sponsored because I refuse to spend my time devaluing software development. The vast majority of the profits from opensource all end up in the hands of massive tech companies anyway. If we could skew the commercial advantages to the developer our industry would be a lot more pleasant.

1. The culture around equity should be changed. There are too many companies where employees are only offered equity if they ask for it, and people don't understand it. We can educate the SWE community about matters of financial literacy and normalise equity for all full time employees. I personally will not accept a job at any company without equity.

2. Focusing on salary. We need a european alternative to glassdoor and it needs to become popular. People need to know what they are worth. We are quite shy when it comes to discussing salary. TC info is more readily accessible in the US.

3. Europe needs to grow tech giants that demand top tier talent. That's the main problem with Europe, there isn't a huge amount of ambition to home grow 100bn+ companies that attract the best talent globally. Europe is at a disadvantage because it takes fewer risks and it's also more likely to sell out before reaching tech giant status. We are all using Google, Facebook (or some product of) and Amazon (in countries where amazon can effectively avoid taxes). And the UK sold off ARM, though there is ongoing discussion about that.

If you look at industries that are world leading (i.e banking in London for example), you'll find opportunities to double or triple your salary. Turns out that enough of us are turned off by the idea of working in the banking sector that it doesn't appear to translate into pressure for talent. We are also very well educated so it's not as hard to find people

Moved to signal today, plenty of people in my contacts are following suit (was way easier than I thought). I've never had a facebook account, had WhatsApp before facebook bought them. I will also have to jailbreak or dump my oculus quest if they force me to sign up.

Pretty sure the UK reduced cooperation with the US after it refused to extradite Anne Sacoolas to face fair trial in the UK after accidentally killing Harry Dunn.

"Take the 3% otherwise you'll own 40% of nothing"

I would call the bluff. It doesn't look like you have many options to exit with a cash settlement unless you're allowed to sell your own equity. I wouldn't take 3%, 15% minimum.

Have you talked to your investors? They might be able to provide some guidance. It's possible that they know nothing or they are responsible for the move, so you need to figure out where they stand. I would personally be looking to kick the CEO out with support from the investors. See how the CEO behaves when the shoe is on the other foot.

I understand what you're saying. What I was trying to illustrate was that by virtue of knowing the ins and outs of the codebase, it's easy for them to make changes (hence the quotes around "super effective"). It would be impossible to conceive or design a non-trivial feature without their input. For me it feels absolutely necessary to get to the point where I could effectively design end to end features without their input.

I'm not convinced that leaving right now is the only solution, hence the question. If your answer to the question is "you don't, just leave" then that's fine, but I am hoping there are other strategies that I can personally bring to the table to make this team more effective.

This is only a problem because we live in a world where political issues are strongly affiliated with political ideologies in a binary fashion - i.e. identity politics. Even so much as people interpret a company's intention to remain politically neutral and avoid making any political statements as "a lurch to the right". Why can't we think of it more as a "return to the centerground"?

I think the inclusive apolitical approach will win out in the long term. I don't believe for a second that "not saying something is a statement in and of itself", and by subscribing to this idea you're bringing forward a style of authoritarianism the world is better off without.

Given that identity politics is so rife in 2020, don't you think it's a wise move to divorce company decision making from the clutches of any specific political ideology? The people that say no are almost certainly the authoritarians.

So much of this conversation seems stuck on the binary opposites (zero politics vs 100% politics), just like the way our politics is functioning in a binary fashion today. Obviously a company cannot be truly apolitical unless it hires no one and does absolutely nothing in the world, but we can at least minimize the surface area and allow topics less relevant to company objectives to the individuals outside of the workplace.

It's a popular idea that institutions with power have a duty to wield it, which is a completely ridiculous and dangerous idea. Simply put, we shouldn't be co-opting the influence of our companies to satisfy our personal political agendas or resort to cancel-culture tactics in order to force them into speaking. In a landscape where this is regularly happening, the neutral position is better and safer for all of us and healthy political discourse.

> If you're OK with locking up your money for 30+ years, sure.

55 isn't 30+ years away for me.

> this leads to higher property prices, which negatively impacts you as a first-time buyer.

And yet it still looks more affordable than SF.

> You don't have to retire in the Bay Area.

In which case, I have to account for housing expenses when looking at the salary in real terms, and deal with all of the problems related to rent i.e. rising costs, being kicked out, not worth investing in improving the property (from a quality of life perspective, not ROI).

> Most startups in the UK pay poorly, so I'm not sure this is a good point.

The one I am working at currently doesn't pay poorly. It's not my top SF salary but it's better than what I started on in SF. It's not FAANG.

> You can top that.

I just meant for an average person with a typical diversified investment portfolio and private pension, and in a way that you can actually plan for (private residence relief is not something that you could have reasonably planned for at the time of buying the house).

> The marginal tax on a £100-125k London salary is 62%

This is why you should reduce a 100 - 125k salary by 40k through salary sacrifice, paying into a self directed pension. Taxable income is reduced to £60 - 85k.

> Also, VAT there is much higher than sales tax in CA.

Yes but there are no property taxes in the UK, which I'm sure far outweighs the difference in sales tax on a yearly basis. Also VAT isn't applied to everything, it is reduced to 5% for fuel and 0% for food. I'm making the assumption I can cash purchase a home I actually want to live in in the UK. Purchasing a house isn't really optimizing net worth either, but it is a stability factor I would rather have. I'm looking at $1.8m-2m minimum in SF for a property I would actually want to purchase and live in. I'm sure there are plenty of massive homes in the middle of nowhere I could purchase but am I going to have a job I want and live near interesting like-minded people? Probably not.

> an acquaintance of mine had to pay ~75% marginal tax on AMZN RSUs

RSUs are not a qualifying option in the UK. Most startups in the UK are offering EMI share options, which are more tax efficient than any offering in the US unless you look at early exercising with an 83b election, which is obviously significantly riskier.

> The savings from your ISA accounts will be negligible until your portfolio grows

Yes that's the point, if you grow an ISA to 1mil in value over 25 years, drawing down that ISA at a 3% rate is a significant tax-free lump sum contribution to your yearly income.

I won't go into the full detail but I reckon that with the combination of an ISA, pension allowances, and dividend/capital gains allowances on private investments, you can draw nearly 97.5k in income and pay only 3750 in tax, and there is no AMT in the UK.

My tax concerns are essentially being unable to leverage the tax efficiency vehicles while working in the UK. i.e. having to pay tax in the US on income that attracts zero tax in the UK.

My actual concern is about going through the immigration system in future if I choose to rescind my green card. I understand that it isn't a pleasant experience I just wondered if it becomes any more challenging from having held an immigrant visa in the past.

> If you abandon your green card you'll have to pay capital gains on all your assets as if you sold them, I believe.

This is only true for certain holders with wealth over a certain amount, I wouldn't attract the exit tax.

It's more about being able to make good financial decisions if I am to stay in the UK as I'm uncertain at the moment. My plan was to study in the UK but given the situation (no access to the campus makes zero sense to me) I have a job in the UK now.

Engineers are paid what seems to be a significant amount less but there are many vehicles that optimize the taxes on that income. For example, tax free pension contributions are up to 40k/year (about $50k). You can also invest 20k per year of post-tax money in an ISA and pay zero tax on the earnings through interest and dividend. There are also tax allowances for interest on saving, captial gains allowance, entrepreneur's relief in addition to the personal income tax allowance. Stock options for employees are often very tax efficient too (10% tax). I think I worked out my total personal tax liability as about 19%.

So to be efficient with your money in the UK you need to leverage these vehicles. A 100k GBP London salary can be as efficient as a $170k Salary in SF, and that's before considering cost of living, co-pay on healthcare etc. If you have to pay tax on worldwide income in the US, it completely erases the savings these vehicles offer, so you end up with a tax bill equal to the difference between what you have paid in the UK and what you would have paid on the same income in the US.

Not to mention, companies that offer investment platforms for ISAs and SIPPs (do it yourself pension investment) will offer accounts to US residents due to the FACTA reporting overhead.