maxFlow

Coding in the flow state has always been appreciated, it's just been surpassed by a new technology.

Your brain can still "just click" with agentic coding. But it will have to be at a higher level of abstraction. Perhaps the "click" feels different, and will take some adjusting to.

Getting Lovecraftian vibes.

Anthropic Investors:

Amazon.com – $4B

Google – $2B

Menlo Ventures – $750M

Wisdom Ventures

Ripple Impact Investments

Factorial Funds

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic#Investors

CS already is the super-degree.

Thanks for sharing, I'm reviewing the curriculum for the program [0] and it looks great.

Do you know if any of these courses has been opened sourced? It would be great to have access to part of the material.

[0]: https://www.ece.cmu.edu/academics/ms-se/index.html.

Hi Peter. Thanks for your AMAs, always a source of great value.

A couple of questions from me:

1. Which would you say are the top spececializations within tech that employers are most willing to sponsor visas for nowadays?

2. Would you say the willingness to sponsor tech professionals has lessened somewhat as of late? Given the economic climate, opportunities to hire remote globally, etc.

3. Are there any impactful immigration reforms we should keep a watchful eye for, vis a vis the 2024 US presidential election?

Thanks & all the best.

As a side note, Godot's Development Fund [0] is currently sitting at 51.1k euros/month. Does anybody know where it was at before the Unity pricing revamp announcement?

[0] https://fund.godotengine.org/

GeeksForGeeks is the bane of my existence and IMO a symptom that the entire system has perverse incentives. Fortunately, I've moved 90% of my code inquiries to LLMs, to great success.

Currently listening to the LOTR audiobooks narrated by Andy Serkis. Highly recommended. His characters are heavily influenced by Peter Jackson's movies; it put me off a bit at first, but I've really come to like it now.

> It would be useful to give more clarity around your thoughts on the "Data Engineer" role. Is it also in decline? Is the market as a whole in a relative decline?

My thoughts: the tech job market as a whole has been in decline, as unanimously observed. There may be some signs that the slowdown is abating though. Next 6-12 months will be key to see how DS and DE rebound (or not).

> Most businesses' data engineering needs have been solved or will shortly be solved by managed services that 10 years ago would require endless and extensive self-built ETL pipelines, databases and tools. For the exceeding majority of businesses, this means they can and should focus on building capacity for business logic, analysis and predictions instead of data engineering.

Could not disagree more with your take of "DE demand will decline due to DE needs being already solved for most businesses". Apologies, but have you ever worked as a data engineer or even close to one? Pipelines break, requirements change, businesses expand, and infrastructure needs to be managed and optimized, etc. ETL processes, in the wild, are decidedly not one-off affairs.

Thanks for mentioning this. I don't get to do much writing in my time off work, since that time is devoted to (more) coding to try and make my side project into a business. So what I do to compensate is I make an effort and write all commit messages, descriptions, code review comments and documentation as if I were writing for an audience of top engineers auditing my work. I find this approach makes me enjoy the process more, be more deliberate about my actions, and how I communicate them. Even a dull runbook can be beautifully written.

Pick two books at random and start building as you read them.

Do you want to build a profitable business or do you want to theorize how to build one?

I'm in a similar situation to yours, and I've kind of settled on a similar approach: put out the most pressing fires and reassess 3-6 months down the line. At first I had thoughts to refactor but now I just don't want to deal with the complexity, not to mention I have end-users pressing me. I'll have to tolerate the spaghetti, but at least make it produce correct output.

Best of luck with the migration to DO :)

What's the plan, full (parallel) rewrite or refactor?

I've found that Statistics is one of those topics that changes your world view about everything. You can consider pretty much any issue statistically, and that will enrich your perspective significantly. In that sense, Statistical Rethinking will help. However, it's a book on Bayesian stats, it's quite dense, and examples are coded in R. It may be overkill for web app metrics interpretation. For that you may be better served with basic stats & inference, frequencies, descriptive statistics, percentiles, basic distributions, data visualization (e.g., trend lines, scatter plots, boxplots, histograms), etc.

To be clear though, Statistical Rethinking is a beautiful piece of work. You can check out the author's lectures[0] and see how much they suit your needs.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDcUM9US4XdPz-KxHM4XH...

> I speak four languages out of necessity, not by choice.

I also speak four languages and mostly agree with your take. I'm native in Spanish; English I learned gaming, and reading Tolkien as a kid. The other two, German and French due to a combination of self interest, education and travel. While I often fantasize about picking up a couple more (namely Norwegian and Japanese), I quickly become disappointed as I go through the motions all over again. It's a huge mental effort for a seemingly low _tangible_ ROI.

Sure, listening to music or reading in the target language and understanding most of it is quite the magical experience, probably similar to what cracking a secret code feels like; but there is no practical gain to it afterwards. It's a bit like reading/writing poetry: an intense but ephemeral enjoyment. More of an art form than anything else really. Unless, of course, you find yourself immersed in the language by way of relocation, then it truly does make sense to learn it. I do get your point with Dutch though: now you've got to figure out a fifth system for conveying an idea you're perfectly capable of saying in four other systems; it gets tiring.

I've been comparing it with programming languages lately. The question often pops up in HN: "what's the best programming language to build a backend in?" -- imagine you already can build a great backend in Python/Go/TS but you start picking up Rust only for the purposes of building said backend, what's the point? Just use whichever language you know best and build the damn thing already. Simple enough right? As is often the case though, this type of analysis is superficial; you may build a fantastic backend in say, Clojure, but then miss out on the opportunities a more popular language with a larger community may have to offer (e.g. Python). Writing Python may not necessarily provide general cognitive advantages over writing Clojure, but it will give you easier _access_ to the entire ML ecosystem, for instance. Does being capable of using more powerful tools help develop cognitive advantages?

I only read the abstract, but even if _Bilingualism Affords No General Cognitive Advantages_, learning a second language, English specifically, has unquestionably changed my life.

> We are already looking to move to other places and created a university-wide google sheet where we compare different countries and cities around the world for those kinds of categories.

Could you share a few places at the top of your list? As you yourself pointed out, it looks like the same story is playing out everywhere one looks, especially in the West.

Given the current situation, the more I think about it, the more I conclude that going fully remote from a low-COL location may be the better answer. Unfortunately I think this complicates things for founders to raise.

Also, this makes me think how utterly unprepared Germany is to receive all those immigrants needed to keep the economy working.

Best of luck with your plans.

> These days I do 20 minutes a day of mind control which involves nothing more than counting down from 9 to 1 repeatedly.

If it works for you that's great. However, I would say approaching meditation from a "mind control" exercise such as "counting down from 9 to 1 repeatedly" goes counter to its purpose and will hinder its full potential. If you're willing to experiment with other methods, try letting your mind wander and don't let it stick; just experience the ebb and flow. Twenty-minute sessions sound about right for me as well.

Would you mind sharing your thought process to get from `daily_users` to `reqs_per_sec`? I'm playing with some estimations of `concurrent_users` for a basic website, and I'd be quite interested in the breakdown.

And also the monster investor happens to be a university. Why does a university need to manage such a huge endowment ($150bn of assets)? Further, why does a university end up investing in the rental market? Seems to me these are both standalone loop holes of our current economic system that will eventually need to be dealt with if we want to fix both education and housing. Until then we'll keep witnessing all sorts of distorsions and crashes.

Brilliant, I'll be playing with these once I reach the more advanced material in The Book. Ty.

I'm a Python dev, learning Rust out of interest, but also considering its viability for Data Engineering. It would be helpful to know the equivalents of the following libraries: Pandas (Polars), Prefect/Airflow/Orchestration, Flask, SqlAlchemy, psycopg2, requests, BeautifulSoup.

Thanks!

1. Could you share a bit about your stack? I'd be specially interested about the data engineering side of things if possible.

2. As a SWE, how deep into biology/genetics concepts have you had to go during your tenure?