bustling-noose

Sounds like my next read. Thinking fast and slow was something I just started but it seems like something I want to read when I’m functioning better.

I agree. While depression and negativity leads you to see things practically rather than in an optimistic and hopeful way, the quality of life and satisfaction in a little optimistic world is much better. I am yet to read Daniel Kahneman but he talks about optimism a lot.

I would like to add to this. I have been depressed since I was a teenager. Anxiety Panic attacks, poor sleep, s*ci*l tendencies. I was able to finally get a job at 29 and first 3 months into it, I realized this is not a right fit and the company and its management is chaotic at best. It was a red flag right from the start but I ignored it because I was desperate for a WFH job. After 3 years of therapy, my views had changed that it's not so bad (something that I think the optimistic view changed). I was also looking to move to North America so I kept stalling to find a new job but that was a different thing. After I slipped back into depression a while ago, I again started seriously considering quitting because now in 3 years the company has grown somehow and some of the employees are really toxic. In 3-5 months I seriously want to quit this time whether I switch or no as I will complete 4 years at a company I never planned on working beyond 6 months. So there might be some truth to this. When I am depressed I see all the realistic things going on. When I am doing well I tend to ignore lot of the red flags.

I want to know if I can use an LLM during problem solving at an interview for SDE jobs at Amazon, Google and Microsoft who have boldly claimed lot of their work is done by LLMs. I will be able to point out the algorithm and explain how it works including the time complexity, but I will need the LLM first to solve it.

Will SDE interviews change ? Are these companies gearing up to let AI engineers in ? I highly doubt this is ever going to happen.

There is a quote by buffet that I think applies to a lot of scenarios not just investing : 'to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.'

ML IoT 5G blockchain etc. so many technologies are great that had their gaussian curve moment during greed. But these things take a back seat after that.

Definitely poor branding. It needs much better 2025 branding and it’ll probably take off in this AI search era where results are really poor tbh and very inaccurate at times.

Protectli makes great hardware. But unfortunately intel runs plenty of code with things like management engine that requires Coreboot to disable during boot. It may also be possible that the cpu refuses to boot with ME disabled so maybe coreboot doesn’t always mean doesn’t run proprietary code. True opensource will maybe happen with RISC-V when it comes to routers fast enough to be installed at home or small offices.

That being said, home routers are the least supported devices when it comes to security and privacy. People are running age old firmwares that are known to have exploits. These things are literally so cheap and poorly maintained anything with openwrt is going to be better.

For offices I would not shy away from recommending protectli with openwrt or opnsense as long as there are people with enough expertise to maintain these things long term.

I’ve been working with a team of so called ‘junior’ devs and coding is the least of the problems. Design and architecture is by far the most difficult thing for people to understand and get a hang of. A staff engineer won’t replace 2-4 junior devs with LLM. He will focus on the design and architecture and then get 2-4 engineers to execute it with LLMs. The two might sound the same but it’s not. And that’s the difference between understanding software engineering and coding. LLMs make coding easier, not software engineering.

In India Amazon makes little sense. Neither does kindle nor does local book store.

The reason for this is that both paper and printing here is cheap along with labor. The original author also licenses for cheap. The publishing houses however take a large cut increasing the cost of the book.

People get a hold of the epub and print them and sell them for 1/4th of the price sometimes 1/10th for new and even less for used.

The only way I see around this is digital libraries. Let people rent unlimited books (but like Netflix limited at a time) and take a monthly cut.

Music on iPod or a Walkman or a radio is great.

But have you ever attended live music shows ? Have you ever ‘felt’ the music ? Even someone at a local bar singing feels and hits different.

AI can never bring feelings. That will never change. Even science fiction agrees with that.

So bring all the AI you want everywhere, some things are irreplaceable by electronic world.

With the kind of funds raised by AI companies there should be 10 different ones sitting next to me competing with each other.

My theory : Engineers rented servers and maintained them with software and packages and infrastructure scripts / code etc. Then this moved to cloud VMs cause it became easier for higher availability and sometimes cheaper too. Then VM costs started rising and cloud providers started offering tempting prices to use some of their services instead that integrated well with their VM infrastructure. Simultaneously engineers started to cost more money to maintain these systems and more people trained in 'cloud' became available for relatively cheap. So people moved their infrastructure to cloud offerings. Now both engineers and cloud services cost a lot of money. But now engineers who can maintain such infrastructure are far and few in between and also cost a lot of money while cloud offerings became turnkey literally.

So costs went from $80k an engineer a year maybe a decade ago with a few thousand to servers to $200k an engineer which you would struggle to find or $100k for a 'cloud engineer / architect' plus $100k to a cloud provider.

This sounds great in theory. Except that cloud providers are messy and once vendor locked in, you are in a big spiral. Secondly the costs can be hidden and climb exponentially if you don't know exactly what you are doing. You might also get into weird bugs that could be solved by a patch over a Monday to some package you could just update which might take months or never happen on a cloud provider. The reality of moving to cloud is not as rosy as it sounds.

Universities used to be the birth place of big projects that were created to solve problems they ran into hosting / running their own infrastructure. I hope that is still true.

While the majority of revenue of Microsoft is not Windows anymore, I think Windows defines the brand much like how iPhone and Mac define Apple even though that might be part of the revenue not all of it.

What I am curious about is what happens when the original product that makes the company popular starts to experience poor quality. Take Google for example, its search has been on a decline in the last decade or so and needless to say the company is experiencing problems as well in the last few years. While GCP and GSuite are significant, people have lost faith in Google which probably started with search.

Windows 11 and the iPhone seem to be heading towards same fate as Google search imo.