boulos

Joined 13 years ago

Karma
13,570
Submissions
2,337
Member since
May 15
If you're trying to reach me about GCE (or Google Cloud generally) my username at Google is the same as this one.
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Recent submissions

Comment · 11 days ago
Yes. Google is famously selling TPUs on prem to big customers (e.g., Anthropic) and Crux AI is now a venture to do just that.
Comment · 11 days ago
Only in marketing name. They're not related otherwise.
Comment · 29 days ago
Having a non-trivial cost advantage is part of business-model math.
Comment · 1 month ago
I think you misread the post. He's saying that his ignorance was great, and maybe we should go back towards that.

I don't think Tumblr was particularly influential on the neighbors aspect. It never reached that kind of broad base. Twitter did though. Unless you just mean social media broadly?

Comment · 2 months ago
Like you, I dislike the "talker" role for people on IC ladders. I often encourage those people to switch to Director+ roles.

The flip side is people who get and stay too far into the weeds. Solving little problems here and there is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of what's actually going on.

But if you get totally bogged down in details, you are probably avoiding your leadership responsibilities. You should be observing the structural or strategic opportunities, and then dragging the org(s) in that direction.

Sometimes you do that by writing some code to prove a point, other times you do it by getting the nearest VP to take something on as a commitment. For me, personally, I find that the style of work waxes and wanes. Sometimes I get almost no code committed in a month :(. Other times, I get to go off and do some work that nobody else would have done.

I prefer the latter, but I respect that my job requires the former. Many of the people who you see spending all their time talking believe that's the most responsible use of their time. They might not personally prefer it!

Comment · 2 months ago
This is one of the meandering arguments in the post. The whole executive team, in fact. But it doesn't compare how much other executives are making, etc.
Comment · 2 months ago
I feel there's something in this article, but the meandering really ruins it. Either way, it's obvious that no earnings call would explain the metrics or decisions behind a layoff. But at 7% this is well within "Eh, we want to try a performance layoff and hope we get a better 7% of new hires".

It is too bad that people aren't more direct about this. But if folks remember Meta/FB's attempt at saying they did performance-based cuts, people ripped into them for labeling all the fired personnel as un-hireable. Earnings calls are heavy lawyered and regulated, so there's no reason to say anything.

Comment · 3 months ago
As aek and dahart said, updating a BVH (refitting) is not expensive. If anything, it's bandwidth limited.

The challenge is minimizing the cost of (selectively) rebuilding.

Comment · 3 months ago
I get that he's maybe a bit into LLMs, but your take is pretty unfair. He's said repeatedly that as a non-native English speaker, his writing will come across a bit strangely.

If he'd said: "We all need to learn to be like Linus", would that have changed your take?

It's clear he's very respectful not only of Linus, but of all the people involved as well. He's instead using Linus's transition from full-time writing software to full-time "leading" as the point of his write up. Don't get hung up on the verbiage.

Comment · 3 months ago
0 x inf is also NaN. It's not just division.

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