33MHz-i486

vor 7 Tagendiscuss

with all the new taxes the city and the state have piled on, compensation above $1m is going to be taxed (federal + state) at a marginal rate of 56% by 2030, which I believe will be the highest in the country. Not to mention the state is in budgetary deficit, the county is losing population, and the city has extremely business hostile politics. No C-level exec has any economic incentive whatsoever to contract for a large presence there over other places.

33MHz-i486

vor 7 Tagendiscuss

closed source harness + RL fine tuning on customer prompts on said harness is becoming a kind of economic moat (?)

33MHz-i486

vor 8 Tagendiscuss

The startup I started working for has a fake health plan,(no network, prior authz and reimbursement issues for everything serious). So I just priced our family of 4 for rudimentary PPOs on the BCBS in our state. Our COBRA offer was 2400, ACA Individual market was 2200-3300, Small group plan thru my wifes LLC was 1700-3000. These plans mostly have 6-8k deductibles and out of max out of pocket $17k.

So I guess if you have a serious condition its post tax $40k/year until bankruptcy or death. How are you supposed to earn an extra 40k if youre not healthy enough to work. This is actually an insane system!

33MHz-i486

vor 17 Tagendiscuss

the business people took over tech and somehow convinced us Jack Welch’s management philosophy (targeted attrition, layoffs for financial engineering) was a best practice even though he and his proteges drove numerous old guard tech companies into the ground

33MHz-i486

vor 28 Tagendiscuss

I would speculate this is about the costs that (a weakly safeguarded) Mythos imposes on them. Amazon is, among other things, a net guarantor of cyber security for AWS customers (large enterprises and government entities). Taking a ~10e7 server hardware fleet from a patch SLA of weeks/months to 1 day is (1) very costly for them (2) may not be feasible in short time frames due to the amount of additional capacity needed for larger, more frequent reboot waves

33MHz-i486

letzten Monatdiscuss

they’re crap on a lot dimensions of how they treat customers but data privacy/security is one thats taken pretty seriously at AWS, perhaps owing to the massive reputational damage that would result if they played loose with it.

33MHz-i486

letzten Monatdiscuss

if you dig into whats actual safe to distribute after inflation and taxes, or conservative FIRE mid-life recommendations, its around 1-2% of principal per year . From 14m, 10-20k/month, about the budget of the white collar household in a major metro. Which is nice but hardly opulent. Rent, healthcare, and kids (or some expensive hobbies) eat that up in hurry.

33MHz-i486

letzten Monatdiscuss

that is incorrect, the 0.1% (>50m) live purely off capital. the 1% are still mostly highly paid specialized labor and despite high savings their capital would not sustain their lifestyle outside a brief retirement.

33MHz-i486

letzten Monatdiscuss

i think the narrative of “all white collar employment replacement in the near future” can sustain their public market valuation for many years, regardless of how profitable they are in the medium term.

33MHz-i486

letzten Monatdiscuss

seems like a rube-goldberg esque way to consume 10x tokens. is this really where the industry is heading?

33MHz-i486

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

well … batteries take up a lot of volume within the chassis and they need ultra low drag to compete on range. all the EV designs converge to blob

33MHz-i486

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

I think it’s simplest to view these companies 2020s layoffs cycles through the lens of a political battle between executives and middle managers. Middle managers always want to grow ICs because it’s their main stake to higher title and more pay. Executives are the intermitten contra to this, with their incentive being tied to the stock (high growth at high margins). AI gave executives more leverage, productivity had gone up so they could fire more without compromising operations.

Its also notable that over the last few decades the business community has normalized layoffs and layoffs while highly profitable as net positive for the company (stock). While all the engineering driven companies, GE, Boeing, etc that pioneered this management philosophy end up in strategic decline.

33MHz-i486

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

the problems with the meth epidemic are 3 fold. two problems are intrinsic to meth and one is a matter of public policy.

1) meth is highly addictive and there is no pharmacological intervention for that addiction. there is no clinically effective therapeutic treatment for it either

2) meth is neurodegenerative. heavy users end up with a permanent disability

3) at some point around 2010 a bunch of cities decided it was totally cool if dealing and public use were normalized/decriminalized in areas their most vulnerable populations hang out.

(3) is an incredibly stupid and expensive policy given (1) and (2)

33MHz-i486

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

its sickening that these companies making 10s of Billions in profit annually at 60% gross margins are going to throw their employees that got them there under the bus.

layoffs are for at risk companies undergoing restructuring not semi-annual financial engineering of your earnings release

I’m not a big collective action proponent historically but in the face of this bs, it might be time.

33MHz-i486

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

middle management is hired to delegate but persists mostly grow itself and its influence

33MHz-i486

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

opus 4.7 caliber models are trillions of params, and a single instance would likely run on multiple h200s. $100k of hardware. not coming to your laptop anytime soon.

33MHz-i486

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

college educated “thoughtleaders” charged $300/hour by the plumbing company, HVAC, car service department and thinks the trade jobs make that much. yeah no they more often start at $30/hour

33MHz-i486

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

I remember Travis Kalanik spouting the talking points about self-driving in 2017, that after Waymo, Tesla had the advantage because they had the best data, that they were going to crack self-driving soon. Then I remember Dara scuttling Uber’s entire self driving division in 2019.

Self-driving is possible but it requires a massive sustained investment in custom hardware on the car, in real and simulation testing, in painstaking software developlment covering tens of thousands of scenarios, realtime remote control failsafes, fleet management capabilities in every city. Waymo is the only company that comes close to the right approach. All these other Elons, GM, Uber CEOs are just jangling shiny objects in front of investors. A moonshot on the financial model for what are otherwise mature stagnant businesses.

33MHz-i486

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

I recall a lot of the original funding (Billions of dollars) was spent on 3rd party consultants to run various multi-year long review processes (environmental, legal compliance, eminent domain, community agreements etc.)

33MHz-i486

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

probably the main thing is just having low-level engineers competent enough to run operations on the dozens of poorly maintained 50k LoC codebases per team, hundreds of bespoke internal dependencies, processes, and custom tooling. build ecosystems of 5+ languages.

secondarily its an industrialization of software development. the hiring process is where they try define the labor as a replaceable component. grab the best cogs you can annually for the lowest price, run them in the machine for 2-4 years and swap most of them out before they get too expensive, or specialized or uppity.

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