chis

Such suspicious phrasing lol. So you’re saying Paul Graham and his wife Jessica have 800 MILLION dollars worth of OpenAI stock, and that’s not so significant?

Price targeting can help the poor in some cases and hurt them in others. For essentials where the need to purchase is high and the provider has a semi-monopoly, dynamic pricing leaves everyone worse off. For instance, think of groceries where there is only one store nearby or medicines with only one producer.

On the other hand, for something like a Netflix subscription, price discrimination DOES tend to help the poor users out. Netflix is 10x cheaper in third world countries for the exact same product. If they were forced to charge the same price everywhere, they would just charge everyone the US price and foreign users would be left out.

Yeah I just don't buy that it would somehow help AI companies for everyone to be existentially afraid of their technology. It seems much more reasonable to think that they really believe the things they're saying, than that it's some kind of 4d chess.

Additionally Dario has just been really accurate with his predictions so far. For instance in early 2025 he predicted that nearly 100% of code would be written with AI in 2026.

I disagree. While their core products have stayed similar, they keep getting better at ads after Apple's privacy changes in 2021 hurt their efficiency. And Instagram has changed quite a bit, with reels growing to half of total IG usage. (Of course these are dystopian products but I'm just trying to be objective here).

To me a company at FB's scale is inevitably going to be optimizing around the margins. I mean you could argue any of Google, Amazon, FB, have had basically the same cash cows for 10+ years now.

What is your point exactly lol. You'd prefer longer interviews? More, less?

It's surprisingly simple to switch. I mean both products offer basically identical coding CLI experiences. Personally I've been paying for Claude max $100, and ChatGPT $20, and then just using ChatGPT to fill in the gaps. Specifically I like it for code review and when Claude is down.

I'd guess AI has made the average SWE around twice as productive at this point. This is a sort of efficiency shock, where companies suddenly need to find twice as much productive work to do or start firing employees. FB probably had a bunch of slack to absorb this but ultimately it's just hard to find that much work all at once.

I predict that tech companies will hire back a lot of this lost headcount over time. Although AI will keep getting better, so there's more downward pressure coming. Facebook, Amazon, and Google have had flat headcount since 2022, and this layoff will reduce FB's size back to 2021 levels.

Are you guys thinking about pushing to improve the linux software experience at all? To me that could almost be another selling point, if Framework 13 came with some downstream patches that improved sleep, power management, multi-display and hi-dpi monitor handling, etc.

And secondly how healthy is framework as a company, and to what extent do you make money from consumers vs sales to big companies?

They could have done a much more minimal version and called it a day. Being able to swap individual components of the chassis into a 5 year old model is, to me, going way above and beyond.

It's so cool that every individual upgrade they did here can be hot-swapped back to the older designs. That's a huge extra lift that they didn't have to do.

To be specific: There's a new lower chassis, and a new chassis top with haptic touchpad. On my older framework I could buy just the chassis top to get the new touchpad. Crazy that they could make that work.

I also just really admire the CEO for doing these semi-scripted public presentations nerding out over the new devices and shouting out specific team members who did the designs. Really hope the company is doing well.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSxgCEpkiKM

Yeah completely agree. Even out of my own pocket I'd be willing to spend ~1k a month for the current AI, as compared to not having any AI at all. And I bet I could convince an employer to drop 5k a month on it for me. The consumer surplus atm is insane.

Yeah my take is the exact opposite. It's such a page turner that the book has become one of my default recommendations for people looking to get back into reading. Of course you have to be a certain type of nerd to appreciate it.

Just to make one obvious critique your costs per token are probably about 1000x higher than the ones they provide.

I'm pretty sympathetic to Anthropic/OpenAI just because they are scaling a pretty new technology by 10x every year. It is too bad Google isn't trying to compete on coding models though, I feel like they'd do way better on the infra and stability side.

Hackernews needs to nominate an elite crew of individuals who can tell when an article is AI slop and flag it.

We’ve had the ability to make water/wind-proof garments long before Gore-Tex. The crucial thing is that Gore-Tex is water vapor permeable. So it has a way better ability to shed excess heat without needing to take off a layer.

Traditional materials still have a place though. Material science has not beaten down feathers or wool yet, for the most part.

My hope would be that this eventually pushes pip to adopt a similar feature-set and performance improvements. It's always a better story when the built-in tool is adequate instead of having to pick something. And yes UV is rust but it's pretty clear that Python could provide something within 2-5x the speed.

E2E encryption lets Meta turn down government subpoenas because they can say they truly don't have access to the unencrypted data.

I can't say I really mind this change by Meta that much overall though. Anyone who's serious about privacy probably knew better than to pick "Instagram chat" as their secure channel. And on the other hand having the chats available helps protect minors.

These AI written articles carry all the features and appearance of a well reasoned, logical article. But if you actually pause to think through what they're saying the conclusions make no sense.

In this case no, it's not the case that go can't add a "try" keyword because its errors are unstructured and contain arbitrary strings. That's how Python works already. Go hasn't added try because they want to force errors to be handled explicitly and locally.

Those are not marginal costs.

It's quite clear that these companies do make money on each marginal token. They've said this directly and analysts agree [1]. It's less clear that the margins are high enough to pay off the up-front cost of training each model.

[1] https://epochai.substack.com/p/can-ai-companies-become-profi...

Football is so unique in that the way it’s presented makes it almost impossible to understand what’s going on. There are a million rules, which even die-hard fans don’t understand. And the broadcast doesn’t even make an attempt to explain or even show the offensive or defensive formations and plays being chosen.

It feels like what we’re shown on tv is a very narrow slice of what’s going on. We see the ball moving down the field but have no idea what the coach or quarterback is doing. Somehow it’s still an incredible watch though.

What would the average software engineer pay for a AI coding subscription, as compared to not having any at all? Running a survey on that question would give some interesting results.

If Kubernetes didn't in any way reduce labor, then the 95% of large corporations that adopted it must all be idiots? I find that kinda hard to believe. It seems more likely that Kubernetes has been adopted alongside increased scale, such that sysadmin jobs have just moved up to new levels of complexity.

It seems like in the early 2000s every tiny company needed a sysadmin, to manage the physical hardware, manage the DB, custom deployment scripts. That particular job is just gone now.

I wonder how universal these stages are. All I can say is when I worked at a 15 person company, it was extremely clear to me that we needed more structure than "everyone reports to the CEO". We struggled to prioritize between different projects, milestones weren't clearly defined or owned, at times there would be long debates on product direction without a clear decisionmaker, etc etc.

Not to say the article is so wrong. I think their advice to consider elevating a few engineers into informal tech leads is a great answer. We went with the path of hiring one dedicated "manager" of all engineers and that worked pretty well too.

I wonder what motivates apple to release features like RDMA which are purely useful for server clusters, while ignoring basic qol stuff like remote management or rack mount hardware. It’s difficult to see it as a cohesive strategy.

Makes one wonder what apple uses for their own servers. I guess maybe they have some internal M-series server product they just haven’t bothered to release to the public, and features like this are downstream of that?

Wish you'd show data from past years too! It's hard to know if these are seasonal trends or random variance without that.

Super interesting report though.

All facts in this post. FB management always had such a shockingly different tone than other big tech companies. It felt like a bunch of friends who’d been there from the start and were in a bit over their heads with way too much confidence.

I have a higher opinion of zuck than this though. He nailed a couple of really important big picture calls - mobile, ads, instagram - and built a really effective organization.

The metaverse always felt like the beginning of the end to me though. The whole company kinda lived or died by Zuck’s judgement and that was where it just went off the rails, I guess boz was just whispering in his ear too much.

His idea seems to be to detect the approximate timing of a flip or roll with sensors and then strap in and wait for it to happen. I have some serious concerns though lol. I mean if the ball rolled off a cliff on the iceberg and fell into the water I’m pretty sure it would be like trying to survive a crash at terminal velocity, and I doubt the racing chair would handle it.

It's really funny how much better the AI is at writing python and javascript than it is C/C++. For one thing it proves the point that those languages really are just way harder to write. And another thing, it's funny that the AI makes the exact same mistakes a human would in C++. I don't know if it's that the AI was trained on human mistakes, or just that these languages have such strong wells of footguns that even an alien intelligence gets trapped in them.

So in essense I have to disagree with the author's suggestion to vibe code in C instead of Python. I think the python usability features that were made for humans actually help the AI the exact same ways.

There are all kinds of other ways that vibe coding should change one's design though. It's way easier now to roll your own version of some UI or utility library instead of importing one to save time. It's way easier now to drop down into C++ for a critical section and have the AI handle the annoying data marshalling. Things like that are the real unlock in my opinion.

There are a lot of strong claims that the paper could, but does not make. It never says that Congressional leaders outperform index funds. It just says very specifically that leaders outperform other members of congress. The paper also does not include any clear charts on the actual returns the congressional leaders were getting.

Having done some reading on this myself I don't think it's the case that Congress as a whole outperforms SPY [1]

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...