andrewl-hn

Joined 18 years ago

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1,888
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332
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Comment · 24 days ago
For starters, compensation is almost entirely location-based now. Situations where a person lives in cheap city / country but paid close to US rates were never common, but in last 5 years or so they disappeared almost entirely. Moreover, every company seems to know about local rates, they all source this data from the same sources, so if you're job hunting they all give you the same offer. And, since there are so much competition for positions companies are very reluctant to bid on candidates, and most offers do not allow negotiations. Even if paying you slightly above market would still save the company quite a lot of money they don't do it. So, situations where you receive the same offer from multiple companies, and all of them are "take it or leave it", became pretty common.

I haven't been on a job market for a long time, but this is what I hear from people around me.

Comment · 1 month ago
Honestly, good luck with that. Mozilla spent past 15 years or so creating and killing new projects over and over. Right now I'd be hard-pressed to try anything they create because they would inevitably shut it down next year.
Comment · 1 month ago
One other "AI" thing that I really liked came before the LLM boom. Mozilla made a speech-to-text engine called [DeepSpeech](https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech) for running on-device when you use dictation in the browser. Apparently, it was discontinued last year, so I'm not sure what they use now.
Comment · 1 month ago
Around me people use the verb google for that, too: "I googled AI / GPT and it told me ..."
Comment · 1 month ago
I do the same thing, except I usually run a version for two-three years and skip some OS releases in-between.

My recent upgrade was from Ventura to Sequoia, and I will likely move to Golden Gate at some point next summer right before Sequoia's support period expires (this happens in July or August). Over years it meant that I avoided some of the famous bugs like the discoveryd fiasco in Yosemite (I went from Maverics to El Capitan).

The one downside is that I sometimes have a to go through a huge app redesigns or big feature changes that have been accumulating over several versions. I ignore most of them and probably don't get as much value from the OS as I could have.

Comment · 3 months ago
Meanwhile there are many masters that make these tiles today - I know one personally! - and they all struggle to find clients.
Comment · 3 months ago
I suspect they make a big model first. In this case it's Fable. Then they run the shrinker steps to make Sonnet and Opus. Sonnet is smaller, takes less time to make, so it got released first. Opus needed few more weeks to cook.

With this iteration they had a delay because when the Mythos was ready they had some sort of "Oh shit" moment and spent half a year adding safety guards to it. Then slowly rolled it out, but got another delay due to a government block. So, maybe the work on making Opus and Sonnet only started after they got a green light from the administration.

Presumably, now that they learned how to do this safety-wrapping the next iteration of Mythos / Fable / Opus / Sonnet is going to show up faster.

Something like that.

Comment · 3 months ago
Just so you know, "move to Europe" is pretty complicated inside Apple ecosystem. You can't move your App Store account from one country to another while you have any subscriptions active. You cancel them, wait for them to expire, and only then you can switch. So, for example, if you subscribed to an app yearly in January, and then cancelled your subscription in May, you still have to wait until January of next year. Very annoying in practice.
Comment · 3 months ago
It's less about platforms and more about games themselves. Games on Steam has to follow certain rules that are mostly consumer-friendly. And the fear is that some of these rules will be relaxed to increase Steam's revenue, and as a result the store will be flooded with ad-ridden gatcha-slop that is completely saturated mobile.
Comment · 4 months ago
I wish I could edit my post.

Somehow everyone wrote to me about baldes. These are not the same, though. Blade servers were mounded into units of 4u, 8u, etc, they occupied a portion of the overall cabinet and still had to do "plumbing" for power and networking behind the chassis to the rest of the cabinet or to the rest of the datacenter. A full-cabinet blade rig would have multiple 8u blade units and some off the shelf units for networking, storage, etc. Yes, you could mix and match different components based on your needs, but that also meant that there were extra wires, cables, mounting rails, and more importantly - all these different components ran a mix of software that had to integrate using common denominator protocols and speeds.

Steve rightly mentioned the integration below, and I didn't put it in my message because I kinda assumed that we include software in this discussion too.

HP in 2005 had an army of programmers writing all sorts of firmware and software and another army of hardware engineers, too. They could have made an Oxide computer back then, and it would sell really well. But they didn't, and none of their competitors did despite this being an obvious product (in hindsight), an THIS is what I find interesting.

Comment · 4 months ago
This design feels very obvious-in-hindsight. Consolidate power adapters and networking, replace cabling with pluggable slots. It's something similar to what IBM mainframes or Sun cabinets could've looked like. Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this, even at their peak in 2000s or during cloud boom in 2010s. I wonder why?

Beautiful machine, and fun to see Illumos heart still beating inside!

Comment · 4 months ago
A lot of it depends on what kind of company / industry you work in. For example, in Rust space there's big divide between LLM-heavy users and light/no-LLM users. Main rust repositories: the language, standard library, formatter, linter, LSP - all forbid LLM-generated code, and lots of third-party libraries, especially low-level and security related, follow suit. However, application code written in Rust is often LLM generated. So, if you work with Rust and you contribute to core Rust projects you have to write a large portion of the code yourself.

But when I talk to my friends who work with TypeScript it seems like they all moved to LLM-generated coding full-time.

Comment · 4 months ago
A lot of corporate speak is developed in the US and then companies all over the world spread it around. Often the adoption happens without deep understanding of the concept, and without adaptation to local realities. And thus it feels much more unnatural.
Comment · 4 months ago
> Apple very rarely admits mistakes

Excep every time they do a big redesign like this. This happened when they moved away from skeuomorphism in iOS7(?) and then backpedalled hard in the following revision because of negative user feedback. Similar thing happened when they presented the reinvented Safari (I do't think that one even survived through betas). And it is happening now.

Comment · 4 months ago
Something that not many people consider. It is almost certain that C++ "saved" C by existing. Without C++ there would be an enormous pressure to add more features to C itself. One reason why C committee could get away without adding much over the years was that they could nod towards C++ and say "that's their job, not ours". And if later didn't exist who knows what kind of language C would become. Classes? Templates? Lambdas? We can only speculate.

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