arthurjj
Born on December 31, 2013•722 Karma
As someone who lived through multiple rounds of layoffs at big tech companies this seemed quite generous.
I got laid off 3 years ago and got a mere 2 weeks + 1 month of COBRA. It was a tech company, but not a big one.
However, I don't think this is that unusual in SV layoff packages.
Either way, I'd still be shitting my pants. 16 weeks is not a lot of time to find another job in today's environment. I know devs who have been out of work for years and had to resort to stocking shelves at Home Depot to tread water.
Everyone should do their damndest to get 6 months worth of bills into savings. This should be easy for well-paid tech workers.
I've been making tech money ($200-250K) for about 5 years now, and my savings is enough that I could ride out a job loss for at least a full year with no change in lifestyle. With some minor belt tightening (I eat out WAYYYY too much), I could go 2 years before I had to start worrying.
If we are not employed, then we have N months until we are broke. This is true for what, 99.9% of us? Whether that N is a high or low number, the slope of the line is still downward and that makes it an emergency. Unless you are retired, and are hoping for N to be greater than your life expectancy.
I've done my share - after buying one smaller apartment some 12 years ago, paying all legal fees, taxes and full reconstruction I was, overall, -1500 euro worth and now with 2 parallel mortgages on my shoulders. Had to take short term employer's loan to get back into positive numbers (that loan, if fired/let go, would be conveniently ignored so that has been be my main motivation for taking it otherwise its a dumb move on its own).
Getting fired during that period and maybe next 6-12 months afterwards would be still devastating for me, I don't have rich parent/family to fall back on, smart moral hard working folks didn't get paid well during socialism/communism. This is where rich kids have massive non-obvious advantage - like ie Gates, they can go and take big risks that are not that big for them, and come crying to rich daddy if they screw up, or be a hero if lucky. Folks like me, they have to risk everything to even get the chance to play the game (which has its own risks which luckily didn't materialize).
I see it even now with my colleagues - nobody would take any big risk, all very risk-averse because they can. My risks though took me further than they managed to get with a massively better starting position. Sometimes, austerity is a great motivator.
But it was a temporary dip, and I had a bit of luck through it. To be in software engineering and having long term no savings, thats... bad life strategy in most cases.
> COBRA is the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. It gives workers and their families who lose their health benefits the right to choose to continue group health benefits provided by their group health plan for limited periods of time under certain circumstances such as voluntary or involuntary job loss, reduction in the hours worked, transition between jobs, death, divorce, and other life events. [0]
Americans are not remotely free.
I think it's sometimes hard to debate these issues in tech circles. In my experience something like 5-10% of techies are vocally critical of these companies or anything National Security related. This article headline is a great example, a serious debate is difficult when you compare people who disagree with you to Nazis
I was discussing resume screening with a jr engineer and unprompted he mentioned he would filter out anyone who worked at a defense contractor, not knowing I had worked at one. I tried to make sure he was removed from interviewing as he obviously wasn't mature enough for it.
You know that the Nazi comparison isn't because of the disagreement, but because of what that disagreement is based on?
It's really not hard to compare ICE to the Gestapo or SA, core Nazi institutions. They're kidnapping people off the streets in brutal manners, targeting them based on immutable visual characteristics, sending them to camps from where many are never heard of again. Including people who are citizens and thus not even "guilty" of the crime which is supposedly being targeted.
Palantir as a company enables that. In the same way we legitimately call out Dehomag (IBM's German subsidiary) for them enabling all Nazi atrocities, we can call out Palantir for enabling the current atrocities.
It's not "disagreement", it's "if it quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it's a fucking Nazi duck".
That's not counting injuries or property damage, but it is still an already low number
[1] https://www.kidsandcars.org/news/backup-camera-mandate-linke...
[2] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2014/04/07/2014-07...
e.g. Right now when using agents after I'm "done" with the feature and I commit I usually prompt "Check for any bugs or refactorings we should do" I could see a CICD step that says "Look at the last N commits and check if the code in them could be simplified or refactored to have a better abstraction"
There are other scenarios you would want to check for but you get the idea.
When a good programmer writes a new feature, they are looking for both existing and new abstractions that can be applied. They are considering their mental model of the whole system and examining whether it can be leveraged or needs to be updated. That's how they avoid compounding complications.
In order to take a big picture view like that, the LLM needs the right context. It would need to focus on what its system model is and decide when to update that system model. For now, just telling it what to write isn't enough to get good code. You have to tell it what to pay attention to.
This is actually a pretty good argument that it's a permanent issue. I haven't tried with writing, or having an LLM write, a summary of the coding style of any of my code bases but my hunch is it wouldn't do a good job either writing it or taking it into account when coding a new feature
If you just tell these things to add, they'll absolutely do that indiscriminately. You end up with these huge piles of slop.
But if I tell an LLM backed harness to reduce LOC and DRY during the review phase, it will do that too.
I think you're more likely to get the huge piles if you delegate a large task and don't review it (either yourself or with an agent).
What will it take to get this before you die? What are physical limitations to shrink things more and more and to speed things up more and more? He talks about solar, but what are the physical limits and how can we get there?
I think there's interesting physics here, but this sounds like just a rich guy craving more power.
Comma does some cool stuff, if relatively entry-level, and this post is good napkin-maths and was a fun read, but there is so much more depth and a hundred ways in which this post is wrong or over-simplified to the point of near irrelevance.
That someone isn't as intelligent as they think they are doesn't place an upper bound on their intelligence.
The GTA fix shows humility, literally the first sentence of the "recon" section is "First I wanted to check if someone had already solved this problem". Geohot wasn't interested in if anyone had tried and failed to "solve search", or why it might be a difficult problem. He assumed that Twitter were a bunch of idiots.
The whole approach of the GTA fix author is curious and humble. Very low ego.
I'm broadly sympathetic to the point in this article but it's trying to slip in literature and philosophy with honest first hand reports of introspection is underhanded. There's no reason to expect them to be any less guilty of motivated reasoning than Marc Andreesen
That would be circular. The author was trying to show how much smaller hollywood media companies are than big tech.
> I do my best to boycott bad things. And I fail pretty often. I still use Amazon on occasion and I can’t get off Spotify. I use Uber and DoorDash a lot more than I’d like. And I have too many Apple products/services.
> Individual actions probably will not save the world, but big tech is bad
It's weird to see this without any context or justification or comparison to other industries. As if it's so self evidently true that the author never considered the reader might dismiss his wider point when coming across it with no explanation
It's a poorly written article, and the writer comes across as unpleasant to talk to. Saying "big tech is bad" with no extra context has to be one of the dumbest things I've seen on a post with this many upvotes.