1,730 karma · joined August 5, 2010
More details here: https://itep.org/meta-tax-breaks-trump-mark-zuckerberg/
The 10-K filed by Meta is linked to in that article, and can be found here: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001...
If you dig into the details in the Income Tax Disclosure block, Meta paid $2.8B in Federal income taxes for the year ended December 31, 2025.
Meta deferred a large chunk of Federal income taxes.
So, while the effective Federal income tax rate for 2025 was about 30%, largely due to a 3rd quarter charge of $14B against deferred taxes (Meta's effective tax rate for 2023 was 17.6% and for 2024 it was 11.8%), they paid 3.5% of their income as Federal income tax.
I guess I could see contention possibly happening as described if everybody arrived almost simultaneously and both swiping points had very high latency. But why not keep the door checkpoints armed and disable the elevator swipes? That makes me think it's a contrived example.
The impact of that transformation remains to be seen.
I have access to Claude Code at work. I integrated it with IntelliJ and let it rip on a legacy codebase that uses two different programming languages plus one of the smaller SCADA platforms plus hardware logic in a proprietary format used by a vendor tool. It was mostly right, probably 80-90%, had a couple mis-understandings. No documentation, I didn't really give it much help, it just kind of...figured it out.
It will be very helpful for refactoring the codebase in the direction we were planning on going, both from the design and maybe implementation perspectives. It's not going to replace anybody, because the product requires having a deep understanding across many disciplines and other external products, and we need technical people to work outside the team with the larger org.
My thinking changes every week. I think it's a mistake to blindly trust the output of the tool. I think it's a mistake to not at least try incorporating it ASAP, just to try it out and take advantage of the tools that everybody else will be adopting or has adopted.
I'm more curious about the impacts on the web: where is the content going to come from? We've seen the downward StackOverflow trend, will people still ask/answer questions there? If not, how will the LLMs learn? I think the adoption of LLMs will eventually drive the adoption of digital IDs. It will just take time.
Recently, it so happened that I spent an hour reverse engineering and documenting a piece of a system. A co-worker asked a LLM to do the same. It generated some really nice documentation.
The difference is, I (as a team member) now have the understanding. Generating the documentation does not increase the understanding of the team.
Some of it was accurate.
Some of it was not.
Sounds familiar.
Compare the cost of a new Apple II or Commodore 64 system with a modern Chromebook.
Let's see what the United States Secretary of Commerce has to say regarding onshore manufacturing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNUXedYX7aE&t=17s
I think the quality of the product depends on the person (or people) responsible for it understanding the details.
People in rural communities are aging more rapidly than in more densely populated areas. Wood heat is more common in rural areas, and is more labor intensive if you're splitting it yourself.
It was fixed in an update, but to me that's the canary in the coal mine that priority is wrong. Apple will be ok without Steve as long as somebody is obsessed with the UX being very good. When I see the quality of the UX experience degrading while other UX changes are made that don't improve the basic UX, then there's a problem.
I subscribe to Apple Music, and have built playlists on the service. The fact that I have to enable sync (which then wastes 70G of space on my iPhone) to use my playlists is BS. I don't see a technical reason for it. The only conclusion I can come to is they want to drive storage subscriptions by taking up space using music sync. If anybody wants to explain why sync needs to be enabled, that would be cool, but is a really concerning product management decision IMO.
Looking back, this has absolutely been the case for me personally. My first job out of school was at a startup spun off from a lab where a friend from my CS classes had been working while at school. I just referred somebody who was eventually hired that I've worked with at two other employers in the past.
Maybe chatting with a LLM with access to the codebase is equally effective as pair programming with a human. I don't have enough experience doing that yet to know. I still see it as another tool.
I've found it helps to have various levels of experience on a team. I think one reason for this is people with less experience (hopefully) ask a lot of questions to fill knowledge gaps. These conversations can lead to revisiting designs, practices, etc. and a better outcome overall.