cudgy

Yeah, we gotta make sure that the Pharmaceutical companies have a great source of cheap PhD labor. /s

I wonder how all the PhD’s that spent 10 years of their life and can’t find a job feel about that?

So you don’t think that some of the money that gets sent to athletic directors to build fancy stadiums and pay for multimillion dollar coaches would’ve gone possibly to research facilities if those athletic departments didn’t exist?

Since when is it required that all the money in a budget be spent? Amounts are budgeted for a division and then it’s up to that division to operate within that budget. It doesn’t mean they have to spend every single dollar in the budget. In fact, it should be a goal to spend less than the money that’s allocated in the budget so that it can be applied to the next year. The idea that all the money has to be spent, regardless is part of the problem.

And yet everyone was arguing recently about how amazing Deepseek was because they operated on such a smaller budget and how the restriction of chips into China forced them to find an efficient solution to training an LLM model. Sudden and drastic changes don’t always result in bad outcomes; in fact, they can many times produce outcomes that were never possible without the shock to the system.

Most of the critics of the doge are arguing that the changes are too fast and that the system needs to gradually and systematically through a series of conferences and meetings come to a proposal that might be implemented sometime in the future.

Many people are more concerned about the messenger than the message. They’ll flip-flop their opinions solely based on who is doing the bidding.

A glaring recent example. If Biden had taken action like Trump has to negotiate with Russia to stop the Ukraine war, would the Democrats be screaming that Biden is a “Putin apologist”?

If Barrack Obama made statements about deporting undocumented immigrants (which he did), Democrats fall largely silent. If Trump makes similar statements, same Democrats scream fascism, racism, and Nazi/white supremacy.

Boeing and GE are inappropriate comparisons. Their cost-cutting maneuvers were primarily driven by moving existing, quality work to overseas contractors. It was simply about saving money without worrying about efficiency or long-term benefit. The overhead of managing contractors spread throughout the entire world is much more difficult than overseeing groups say within the Seattle Washington area. I really don’t see how this compares to reduction of work forces in government divisions. These government positions are not being moved overseas along with the complicated overhead of managing the groups all around the world.

“One feature of tariffs is that it's a tax on consumption, so it's ultimately paid by consumers, and it's a regressive tax; the wealthiest will pay the smallest ratio of their income and/or wealth, while the working Joe will just see stuff getting more expensive - especially in the short term.”

I don’t think it’s this simple. The wealthy fat cats that are making money producing their stuff overseas or simply operating as middlemen for overseas manufacturers are going to have a reduction of income and profits.

Furthermore, it depends on how the revenue from tariffs were used. If revenue from tariffs is used to lower taxes for lower income citizens, it would be effectively a progressive tax.

Interesting points. Totally agree with you on big tech companies simply treating fines as cost of business instead of operating in good faith within the confines of the legal requirements in the countries where they do business.

The EU is fine with tariffs as well though. It’s not a US only activity. However, the US has a history of tariffs as income tax wasn’t even in existence until early 20th century. I’m interested to see what impacts tariffs are going to play as it does seem a reasonable tool for sovereign nations to utilize. Otherwise, how else do they prevent the hollowing out of their working class in countries that do not provide the cheapest labor? Libertarian types will simply say pick up your bootstraps and compete, but that’s not realistic against labor that is a fraction of their cost. Protectionist measures may be the only logical response for the working class to be protected.

Good question

Ad at bottom of article pleads “Why you can rely on the Guardian not to bow to Trump – or anyone”

Why is Trump the only name in the sentence? Seems like they’re bowing to someone.

Sounds like maybe you’re from Europe? And have a frustration with foreign companies in the US. This further demonstrates that globalism as we’ve seen it with “free” trade is largely coming to a new era with strong headwinds, and it’s not just the US citizenry that wants that. The people that are pro H1B in the US, even given that more than half of the positions hired are foreign-born, are ignoring a stark reality that this will not likely continue. It’s gonna be a rocky road.

“why would the software industry, which has the highest prevalence of H1Bs, be the industry with the highest growth in salaries for basically the past 2 decades?”

Maybe because that’s just not true? Salaries have generally been stagnant over the last 20 years in real terms for most in the industry.

Most developers do not work at FAANG positions, and even those positions are only found in the extremely high cost of living areas like Silicon Valley.

Companies are always free to hire people from wherever they want. However, it could be foreseeable that “American” companies that are largely overseas, maybe at a disadvantage when it comes to taxes or other benefits conferred by the US government. Such companies may find that their products are subject to tariffs when trying to sell those products back in the United States or other active measures to prevent offshore positions. There is a risk as section 147 changes already has shown.

OK, but React development is one of the simplest development tasks out there. It’s probably the most popular UI framework with the most data for the LLM model to generate off existing solutions. Low hanging fruit that also provides the least value to companies since react developers are a dime a dozen.

Also, one could argue that the LLM provides less value since a simple Google search for most react questions can produce a very viable answer, since 90% of what most React developers do has already been done and shared on the Internet.

This is a reasonable take on the nonsense. “Look at the awful burden of spending $10 more a month on eggs is doing to the average family!” … meanwhile huge landlord conglomerates are colluding on rent prices (via third party apps of course), raising rents, and gobbling up housing in the hottest growth areas.

Surely it holds more merit than “young dude with no experience who read about it in latest reddit group / social media app said so”.

How many eggs do most people even buy? Almost every story is talking about eggs and how much of a burden it is on the public, but what are we talking about here? I can buy 18 fancy Vital Farms pasture raised eggs for $12. How is such a small purchase so important in the financial press?

The whole thing is just completely silly. The focus should be on the true cost drivers like healthcare, insurance, child care, and housing.

Yet, if I recall, they accepted the code into their source tree, but later judged that the style was so foreign to them that they were unable or at least unwilling to refactor or use the code in anyway. Seems if the code was flat out bad it would’ve been rejected initially.

“why would anyone in the world be subjected to these whimsical nationalistic banana republic renaming stunts?”

Maybe because everyone in the world is subjected to these whimsical nationalistic banana republic renaming stunts.

How do you think the names of geographical areas came about in the first place? Did everyone in the world get a vote on the official Geographical Naming Commission? Oh wait. What should we call this official commission? What language should be the official language for the naming commission?

The overblown outrage over this issue is absolutely silly.

There are explanations to the Flynn effect that go beyond isolated intelligence. How does one isolate intelligence test when society, nutrition, religions, educational systems, and the very IQ standard itself has changed?

“… found it extremely difficult dealing with bug fixes and feature requests relating to the other developer's code, who used a substantially different coding style. In the end we had to rewrite all our plugins for Construct 3, and so we ended up rewriting all the code anyway, which was particularly challenging given we hadn't written it ourselves in the first place and didn't have a deep understanding of how it worked. It's far easier now it's all our own code.”

I love this article and agree with almost all of it. However, this portion I find to be guilty of elitist programming mantra.

The bottom line is when you’re dealing with large code bases, there will be different coding styles present and the likelihood of everyone agreeing on a single coding style is virtually nil. Insistence on coding purity is an issue that can erode camaraderie in a team and develop into petty political in-fighting. Handling this problem in a tactful way is one of the keys to success in large code bases, as developers have their own styles and draconian insistence upon a single style can limit the talent that’s willing to work with you and your team.

And they’re usually right.

MS/PHD to do what? Almost all of those jobs are just basic programming positions updating websites, writing crud apps, internal tools, devops, cloud deployment, and other run of the mill typical programming tasks.

We all know the reality of these jobs requires very little (if any) of a masters or PhD level education.

Furthermore, FAANG is laying people off not hiring.

This has been going on for decades and everyone in the industry knows it. Articles like these are simply propaganda to make it seem like something‘s being done about the issue.

The system is and has been completely broken and, like most of the immigration policy in the US, it is a façade with the sole purpose of providing cheap labor for US corporations. There are plentiful capable US engineers available to be hired without the need for any of these programs other than the most exclusive programs for the top 0.1% of talent in the world.

The same tired old argument is made in the unskilled immigration space as well. Companies scream that there’s no availability of workers to build houses, operate restaurants, tend farms, clean facilities, drive trucks, or virtually any other job.

Does anyone wonder why the current administration is targeting the immigrants themselves and not the employers that hire them? They know that by targeting the immigrants it looks like they’re doing something, when really they are doing little to stem the problem. This whole problem largely goes away if employers are targeted directly for abusing the system, but it will never happen because cheap labor for corporations is the true driver.

There is more than just “dead” virus in the vaccine. Byproducts like formaldehyde, antibiotics, aluminum, salts, soaps, and other adjuvants are present.

Your simplistic and dismissive look at this issue is the one that’s arrogant. Hand-wavy comments such as yours deserve to be challenged.

Says “Because of science” and fires off a single article from the government of Canada that has nothing to do with the issue of whether the vaccination itself causes problems in humans with consumption of animals vaccinated.

Apparently, we have a different idea what science is. I’d like to leave it at that. Any other takers?

How do you know there’s been no health impact on Canadians?

Got it. Thank you. They don’t like other people (some or many of whom are bots) steering their narrative.

So the solution is to move to another platform, where the narrative is more easily steered?

So do you also expect the bank to back you up if you get hacked, given your exposure of the password to plaid or other services?

Not sure banks are the best example for this discussion, though, since banks have legitimate reasons to secure and promote security of their accounts that is beyond simple IT resource usage.

A good programmer husband would’ve asked “a dozen of what?”. A poor programmer assumes they understand the statement much like an LLM would do.

“Just like when pocket calculators became popular and we all got worse at mental arithmetic but much better at applied mathematics overall. High level programming languages have made software engineers worse at comp-sci, but much better at applying it; commodification of cars made the average driver much less capable of understanding car mechanics, but much better at driving; and so on.”

I don’t agree with any of these conclusions. I guess it’s debatable of course.