Unless you don’t have any other options, don’t do it. Your future self will thank you. I wasted so much time being a founding engineer, it’s the worst tradeoff. Don’t do it. Don’t do it.
It’s entirely possible that people who are praising this CEO might have to come up with incredibly convoluted mental gymnastics to defend their position soon: “Anthropic chief back in talks with Pentagon about AI deal”.
I genuinely get bothered when someone talks to me. I am typically rushing through my day to do stuff, whether it is hiking, grocery shopping, working out, or going to the restroom at work, and getting interrupted feels to me like getting an unwanted push notification on your phone.
When someone occasionally engages, I extremely quickly dismiss them in the most polite, but firm, way possible. I also intentionally keep a demeanor that generally signals I’m not open to random conversations (I avoid eye contact etc.), but that often doesn’t work. At the gym it is particularly problematic, I’m focusing on gathering strength for my next set and sometimes people bother you even if I am wearing headphones.
I truly do not have a problem with who I am, I’m comfortable in my shoes.
As such, never in a million years I would approach a stranger to strike up a conversation, it would seem an incredibly rude thing to do towards them, on top of clearly not having any desire to engage from my side.
I’ll talk for hours straight to my wife, close family and the very few friends I have though!
Really hard for me to understand why the average HN commenter has an almost cultish behavior towards Anthropic, they are somehow excused for all their sins whereas everything OpenAI does is taken in the most uncharitable way. It’s a very consistent pattern.
Just wanted to thank you for the Sutro Tower work (https://vincentwoo.com/3d/sutro_tower/), it was truly beautiful and I’ve been looking at it so many times, very nostalgic for me. This one is great too!
I always see a large amount of pessimism about this company on HN, and I accept it might be for rational reasons. What do people think is going to be the most likely outcome for the company, since everything seems to be going so bad for them product/moat/financial-wise? Do people think it will literally go bust and close business due to bankruptcy within a couple years? If not, what else?
But who exactly is going to catch those errors, especially when the outcome of such mistake would be an adjustment in your favor? Not the tax authorities, not the CPA. You’re left to advocate for yourself.
This is a story that really happened, I’m not making things up. A few years ago, myself and other colleagues exercised some ISO in a startup we were working for. The exercise left us exposed to a steep AMT tax, it was a 6 figure tax bill (this was expected and we knew that going in, it was offset by some liquidity opportunity on the side).
Now, if you know what you are doing, it’s possible to get back all that extra AMT tax you paid as credit in future years, you just really need to be aware of the mechanics that enable that via form 8801, it requires variable carryovers for N years until the credit is extinguished. But it’s no big deal, even the TurboTax wizard is fully capable of the functionality! A colleague of mine, with his fancy CPA, completely missed this.
It wasn’t until several years later, when I casually mentioned that I was happy to have finally used up all the AMT tax credit, recouping my full 6 figure bill, that he literally said “what are you talking about?!”, and just there we learned that his CPA completely missed the situation (my coworker being clueless also certainly didn’t help). He called me later that evening to get the name of the form 8801, and confirmed it wasn’t there in his previous tax returns. I don’t know how the situation ended, but it’s possible I saved my colleague 6 figures that day, if he acted fast and painfully amended N years of prior tax returns, and hopefully fired the CPA.
There are more modest variations of this, for example your averagely talented CPA is most likely not going to go beyond the 1099 and, say, go look up what percentage of your money market fund interest was state tax exempt and ensure you get a credit.
For these reasons, I just don’t use CPAs and consider the time I spent to learn my taxes well spent and I’m fairly confident I’m doing a better job than any CPA for my specific personal circumstances, aided by tax filing software and some reconciliatory spreadsheets. I just wish I had a software for the expat situation, since the EU/US taxation is such a nightmare and it’s what I’ll find myself in when I early retire soon.
A TurboTax-quality tax filing service for American expats with American investments who live abroad (particularly interested in a few European countries) and have to file in their country of residence and declare the income from such investments. I would pay $1-2k a year for a service like that, as I prefer to do things myself than relying on a CPA who will inevitably mess things up.
Does that mean that you hope the next generation of iOS will do away with liquid glass so that you can update, or that you’ll never update again (also implying you’ll never buy an Apple device again)?
I always understood the sentiment of waiting until the first dot release for bug fixes, but refusing to update while still being in the ecosystem seems clearly a losing battle not even worth fighting for.
It’s going to take me a lot more to switch to Android, but yeah iOS 26 is not good. Some new UX paradigms are actually useful, like the ability to swipe over controls instead of having to press buttons, or the control bars shrinking during scrolling, but all could have been achieved without the major styling change.
I’m old enough to remember the Windows 98 -> XP -> Vista regressions and inconsistencies in UX, and I expect Apple to be headed that way.
You’ll get downvoted but in my experience, which may not be representative of the entire population, this is true.
A mid-size US tech company I know well went fully remote after a lot of insistence from the workforce, prior to the pandemic they were fully in office.
Soon enough they started hiring remotely from EU, and now the vast majority of their technical folks are from there. The only US workers remaining are mostly GTM/sales. I personally heard the founder saying “why should we pay US comp when we can get extremely good talent in EU for less than half the cost”. EU workers, on average, also tend to not switch job as frequently, so that’s a further advantage for the company.
Once you adapt to remote-only, you can scoop some amazing talent in Poland/Ukraine/Serbia/etc for $50k a year.
Apple MacBook Air 2020, intel edition. Such a piece of junk and shame on Apple for releasing it knowing that they’d have launched the M1 in just a few months. Maximum corporate greed.
> but is it possible that you are the one doing the comparing, and not them?
> Do you feel that you are doing how you want in life, or that you aren't successful enough, and feel triggered or self conscious about other people doing well in general?
I have asked myself these questions many times, and I do think I have been fairly exhaustive in my introspection.
I genuinely think that a good number of people who reach out to me do so purely to lift themselves up, by comparing themselves with me on certain dimensions.
I am never the person initiating extremely violating questions such as: “How much do you make? How big is your house? Which neighborhood do you live in? Do you own or rent? How much can you squat? Based on your years of experience, your net worth should be in this ballpark, am I correct?” Etc etc.
No, I do not compare myself to others, I genuinely wouldn’t want what they have, in the dimensions that they are comparing themselves with me.
Could I be a person of extreme virtue and continue interacting with these people? Of course I could, but why should I, if it makes me unhappy? I am happy not to interact with them, there is nothing I need to change.
I have several relationships that work exactly like what you described (especially family, significant other, childhood friends), and I cherish those.
I’m on the receiving end of this behavior, and even if I’m probably not representative of what’s happening to you, I will bring my data point anyway.
There are quite a non-trivial number of people who reach out to me (mostly old friends/coworkers), with whom I wouldn’t want to engage. There are multiple reasons, but it fundamentally always boils down to any social interaction with them being an opportunity for them to compare themselves with me, and making me feel inferior, by explicit comments or by some sort of virtue signaling. I’m not even sure they realize it, and it’s also possible it’s just in my head. Regardless, that’s how I feel.
I am not a complete sociopath, so just declaring upfront that I do not desire to meet with them is bad taste in my morals, so I simply ruthlessly decline every single invitation, until they get the point and stop reaching out. It’s puzzling to me how sometimes a person might reach out for YEARS before giving up (on a perhaps 2-3 month basis for 2-3 years), asking for a call or to meet up, and me every time shutting them down with “I’m busy”, “I’m traveling”, etc.
Make no mistake, if I were to “cave in” and meet them up, it would immediately be an opportunity for them to flaunt their financial/marital/career/athletic success in front of me, by comparing themselves to me, so no, no pity. Example: a “friend” who made $20M from an extremely lucky IPO had the nerve to tell me “why don’t you just pick a good company that’s going to IPO soon and make a lot of money like me? A couple years and then you’re done, it’s easy”. No shit lol. This is a person who insisted for YEARS to meet up, after I started the process of declining any invitation. Fortunately he seems to have moved on now, but never say never.