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I could see this. Patrick has a really strong brand among engineers. So if he’s willing to lend his personal credibility to Stripe, that’s a strong signal that it’s a good place to work.

I think it’s easy to get sucked into it accidentally if the only source of tech news you read is your employer’s internal newsletters.

Stratechery (& Dithering) is the only paid newsletter I subscribe to. It’s so worth it. I think that everyone working in tech should subscribe to maintain an objective view of the overall tech landscape. Otherwise, you get sucked into the gravitational well of your employer’s propaganda.

This is especially true at big tech, as Ben covers them often.

I think you’re right. I’d do stuff like that if I was a billionaire. You have the ability to shift resources to what you think is important; this probably costs a comparable amount to a single SWE.

Having said that- Stripe does have a credible claim to making a % of the GDP of the internet. Maybe they view this sort of activity as increasing that; progress studies in general does have the potential to have a non-trivial impact on the economic impact of the internet.

Have you tried JAX? How does it compare?

(I'm an engineer at DeepMind, and I work with JAX daily)

It's a somewhat fair comparison; in my experience, highly optimized JAX matches highly optimized Tensorflow. However, non-optimized (but JITted) JAX beats non-optimized Tensorflow, as Tensorflow requires a lot of architectural changes to make it perform well. JAX, on the other hand, tends to perform well as long as you just JIT it. So it's much easier to get to, say, 90% of optimal performance. In Tensorflow, it's much harder (in my experience- maybe I'm just bad at Tensorflow).

The JIT compilation that JAX does is really, really good, as it combines operations together in a highly performant way.

I like clubs. I’m an avid mountain biker, so I joined a club with group rides twice a week. I’m signing up for master’s ski racing. I chose these because they’re as far from computers as you can get, and we have something to bond over (bikes! Skis!) that isn’t anything to do with my SWE job.

I think it’s more likely that we’ll see carbon taxes make it prohibitively expensive than the cost of production itself. In Canada, we’ve got a tax going up to $170/ton by 2030. If most homes go fully electric, I bet that goes up even further.

I mountain bike and ski (backcountry + resort). I find these really fun and exciting and find it hard to _not_ do them.

This is exactly my experience. I booked a small sedan and was given a Jeep Wrangler. I can’t drive it! I’m used to driving a smal hatchback. I’m sure I was a terror on the road to all around me.

I agree. If OP can consistently get interviews at FAANGs, then that’s all that’s needed for the job.

Especially London, which has to be one of the world’s great cities to walk in.

Yup. I work at a non-Apple FAANG and there are many rooms/buildings I don’t have access to (and many chats I don’t have access to- it’s all need to know).

I think the question is also, “good in what sense?”

The really valuable skill (from a dollars & cents perspective) is to be able to provide business value to _the business you’re employed at_. That might not transfer anywhere else.

Eg I doubt my skills apply to a young startup- I’m a specialist (ML research), they need a generalist.

If I work at Google on search & get really good at solving political problems related to search, that’s a super valuable skill set _to Google_ but probably not to anyone else. I’d probably get promoted and/or get big bonuses. It also probably means that, _ceteris paribus_, I’m a worse coder, as I’m spending less time focusing on tough coding problems.

They probably have a wild EUA that lets them do whatever they want. Probably also an arbitration clause so users can’t sue.

Canada has appointments that last until the judge turns 75. Seems like a better system to me.

Yeah, absolutely. My FAANG offers were ~2x what my startup offers were.

I’m surprised to hear this- my startup offers (YC companies) were typically half of what my FAANG offers were.

Why did you stop showing up?

Maybe that’s what caused the crash...

Yes, because no investors will invest with this looming over the company. I suspect this is actually a Hail Mary, where they’re hoping that someone will step forward and invest. Best of luck to them, it seems like a great idea.

I bet it’s due to a weird corporate structure that Facebook has.

Upton Sinclair got this right almost 100 years ago- “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his [RSUs depend] on his not understanding it.”

Of course, I also work at a FAANG, so people in glass houses and all that...

Oh, definitely. I lived in university accommodations that were awful. The residents the year after me sued the university as the residence wasn’t inhabitable (black mold).

Yeah, I find that people spend the least amount of money on insulation/heat that they can. I’m from Edmonton, and the coldest I’ve ever been was the winter when I lived in London, UK, as their insulation sucks and their heating sucks. In Edmonton, that’s not possible, because you have a few days of -40C weather annually, so your pipes will freeze without proper insulation (and you’ll die).

Now, it’s not comfortable living through -40C weather, but it’s as cold inside as -5C in the UK (outside it’s way, way worse, of course).

Damn, those numbers are wild. In Canada, my insurance company won’t provide less than $1m liability insurance, and the gov’t requires a minimum of $200k in coverage.

I found that to be the case with all of Chouinard’s books, especially “Let my people go surfing.” Tons of lightly veiled corporate propaganda.

Possibly a dumb question, but how do I get that link from the Pinterest one?

I’mfrom Alberta. My favorite party trick when talking to non-native Albertans is to pull up the “world rat population” map:

https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/657947826782505650/

I have no idea how accurate it is, of course.

I think it’s a mix, where some are, and some aren’t. I’d be _very_ surprised to see a L6 making $1M/year.