matteotom

I find it difficult to believe the inference only providers (Baseten, Fireworks, Digitalocean, etc) are all selling tokens at a loss.

Asking Claude for a rough estimate based on publicly available throughput and cost data for open weight models on modern GPUs suggests serverless, pay-as-you-go inference is profitable on owned GPUs with reasonable utilization (30-50%).

It seems the assumption you're making without justifying is LLMs will significantly reduce the cost of software development. Even if LLMs can reliably write new features (or even just fix bugs), the maintainer still needs to spend time (which is not free) verifying and code-reviewing the LLM-produced code.

I did. Your argument seems to be that LLMs allow users who want specific features to direct a donation specifically towards the (token) costs of developing that feature. But I don't see how that's any different from just offering to pay someone to implement the feature you want. In fact, this does happen, eg in the case of companies hiring Linux devs; but it hasn't worked as a general purpose OSS-funding mechanism.

Funding for open source projects has been a problem for about as long as open source projects have existed. I'm not sure I follow why you think specifying donations will go towards LLM tokens will suddenly open the floodgates.

I've personally run Gentoo with OpenRC+glibc and OpenRC+musl on my laptop. I assure you ditching systemd was easier than ditching glibc. The OpenRC system mostly just works (tbh thanks to a lot of great work by Gentoo devs). The musl system required probably a couple dozen patches to various packages to get a basic fully working desktop (most of which were relatively straightforward, but still needed manual intervention).

idk, the two finger "rolling" pixel-by-pixel scroll seems to work for me - Firefox (also foot terminal, Slack (xwayland), and Signal) on Scroll (a Sway fork) on Debian (testing) on a ~year old Thinkpad X11. I don't think I've done anything to configure or customize it either.

I got a Thinkpad (after a few years on a Macbook) largely because in the past the track point was a lot better than trackpads. But in those years, it seems hardware and/or software have improved enough that I barely use it.

At least for Python (since I'm more familiar with Python code and the Python ecosystem): progressive typing lets you incrementally add typing to an existing Python codebase. So you can have at least some of the benefits of typing for new or updated code without needing to re-write in a new language.

Were the mappings only a subset of the obfuscated classes/methods/etc? Basically making the mapping a sort of public API

My previous employer was about 1k engineers and elements of the interview process were research-backed, but it was mostly procedural (order of rounds, length of interviews, etc) and based on internal data. But I now work at a startup where we make a best effort based on everyone's previous experiences.

I ask this out of genuine curiosity and not to try to start an argument: could you help point us towards this research? This point frequently comes up when discussing interviews, but I've never seen references to specific research and I don't know where to even start looking.

What metric are you looking at when you say "the size of government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector" - AFAICT, excluding 2020 and 2021 (which I think is reasonable), the federal budget has been between 17% and 25% of GDP for the past 50 years (where the fluctuations are more a function of variable GDP).

The number of federal government employees has also remained mostly flat for the past 50 years (and IIRC most growth in overall public sector employment comes from schools).

I can't remember where I heard this but it stuck with me: Teslas are the new American muscle car - fast in a straight line, but otherwise poor build quality and lacking the attention to drivers' experience you get from European brands.

Kickback: usually refers to a company (or sales rep) giving a large "gift" to the individual at a company responsible for making a purchase decision (influencing that person to make a decision not in their company's best interest).

The Sopranos was a HBO show about a mob family. Historically, waste management in some cities has been controlled by the mob.

to be fair, I replied that I live in the US and asked for more info and it gave a lot more detail

Can you provide more details about said "significant evidence"? This seems to be a pretty popular belief, despite being contrary to generally accepted economics, and I've yet to see good evidence for it.

This (continuing Francis' school of thought) should be rather predictable - Pope Francis appointed the majority of voting cardinals, so it's not a stretch to think this is generally his intended outcome.

Yeah republicans claim to want to run the government like a business, but the first thing a business should do when they have a deficit is raise revenue! And especially in the case of the US government, the the only barriers to doing that are self-imposed.

The next test of this will be the WI Supreme Court election - if the Musk-backed candidate loses (after Musk spends millions of dollars on the campaign, possibly illegally), it might start to break the hold Musk+Trump have over Republican elected officials.

I thought about a cell modem, but I carry my phone 100% of the time and can just tether

I switched my personal laptop to a M1 Macbook Pro (from a Thinkpad running Linux, also after almost 10 years) in 2020, mostly because I had switched to an iPhone a few months prior and was using a Macbook for work.

It was certainly convenient most of the time - most features I wanted worked out of the box, and most dev tools could be managed by homebrew (at least well enough).

But annoyances slowly stacked up over time. Things like so much software being closed source (and often paid), or updates taking too long, or not being able to debug why something didn't work how I expected (eg, sometimes when plugging into my dock w/ monitors, it would decide to put all the windows on different screens than when I unplugged).

I finally broke down last year and bought a new Thinkpad and immediately installed Gentoo. While I've spent a lot more time configuring everything, at least it works exactly as I expect and I can easily debug when something goes wrong.

You also need to consider Fica (social security and medicare) and state and local taxes. Personally, my partner and I made about $470k last year and (filing MFJ) our combined rate will end up being about 28% ($80k federal tax, $30k CA state tax, $20k fica).

Which IMO should be higher! But also I'd want that to include universal healthcare (my employer and I pay combined about $20k/year or another 4% between premiums and deductible+copays) and generally a better social safety net.

Were your Lenovo experiences with Thinkpads or something else? I've heard that their non-Thinkpad laptops are not up to the same quality as Thinkpads - personally except for a couple years using a MacBook Pro, I've had great experiences with top of the line Thinkpads (x-series mostly) over the past 15 years. My current x13 (gen 5) w/ 32GB of memory can handle local LLMs (not terribly quickly, but it works).

$300k income, MFJ, $46k 401k contribution, $8k HSA contribution

After standard deduction ($29k), AGI is about $217k. That's the 24% bracket (barely), which adds up to $34,337 + 0.24*$16000 ~= $38,200 federal income tax

$38,200/$300k = 12.7%

You can get even lower with itemized deductions: mortgage interest (might be over $40k) plus SALT ($10k) plus a few donations ($5k) => AGI of $191k => federal tax rate of under 11%

Of course, this is just federal income tax. Most people also pay FICA (medicare+social security) and state and local tax.

It was a few years ago, but I ran OpenBSD for about a year in college (on a Thinkpad). It worked because I rarely needed anything more than Firefox, code editors, and a shell with ssh. Most of my time was spent reading, writing papers, writing emails, and writing code.

One of USAID’s first projects involved fighting apartheid in South Africa [1]. Musk is from a wealthy white South African family.

[1] https://2012-2017.usaid.gov/news-information/frontlines/50-y...

> being a white male also makes you statistically more likely to be qualified for the job in question

Source?

No, it is obvious that there are not any qualified 14 year olds, and it is also obvious that there are qualified minorities - if you can't find qualified minorities, you should look more closely at your recruitment pipelines.

sure, replace building software with leading large teams. The general point still stands

well if a 14 year old has 10 years of (real) experience building software in an enterprise setting, of course they should be considered for a senior role

I’d read that as saying the data are insufficient to prove either way. Likely because there are so many fewer deaths and only 10% of the children used booster seats, so the error bars are too big.