gotaran

A bit flawed, but a technical marvel and shows how superhumanly virtuosic Snook is.

I live in NYC as well, and I find the post COVID Berlin-esque Bushwick only scene to be terrible. It's filled with the most dull repetitive music that AI can replicate with a god awful sound system and no atmospherics whatsoever, and while I do appreciate the lack of dress code / door policy / bouncer aggressiveness, it feels like a brutal slog to endure without drugs, and a miserable long ass train ride on the L train back to the city.

I miss the pre COVID Vegas style nightclubs in the Meatpacking District. Yes, crowded and aggressive bouncers who make up the door policy on the spot, but once you're in there's mesmerizing lighting and visual effects, top notch sound systems, the glitziness of bottle service, and the euphoric albeit predictable drops of EDM.

Google beat OpenAI at their own game.

For certain knowledge work, the job market is much stronger and orders of magnitude better paying in the US.

And nah, most if not all of my coworkers have taken two consecutive weeks off, and have taken roughly a total 25 days off the year excluding holidays.

Yeah this is why I always take more than a month off between jobs.

Besides parental leave and the very rare even for FAANG companies who offer month long sabbaticals once every five years, a month is a hard sell.

I lived in both for more than a decade. I only remember seeing a mouse sized rat once in Seattle. Never saw one in SF.

I live in NYC now and see multiple on a daily basis. Exposure therapy helps, but barely. It still scares the shit out of me a few years in.

I’d argue that NYC hasn’t done enough with rats for this reason. And indoor roaches and mice too for that matter.

As a New Yorker, it feels unsanitary at best, and psychologically jarring at worst, and I wish I wouldn’t have to deal with seeing rats scurrying around on a daily basis. But there’s been no tangible public health risk so far.

OpenAI has no clear moat though. If they shut off training, everyone would just move over to a competitor.

$80 a month is a no brainer given the productivity multiplier.

Downsize and move closer to the office

In most of NYC that’s the case

OpenAPI is just pointless abstraction like GraphQL

The ones doing AI research would be working at more prestigious institutions.

I’m skeptical of the caliber of talent at Salesforce given the unusable state of their core product.

I agree. Despite high compensation and a hiring boom, or perhaps because of it, 2020-2022 was the worst time to work in tech. I knew interns in 2012 who could code circles around those bootcampers turned “staff engineers” in 2021. Everyone at my series B employer turned into a “manager” or “leader” overnight. Being a shitty B2B SaaS meant that sales ran the show and our product was absolute dogshit.

2023 was awful too because everyone stayed put — we somehow avoided layoffs — even though they were absolutely miserable.

Now in 2024, I’ve just started a job search and things seem much better. There’s actual innovation now and I feel a sense of optimism about the future of tech that I haven’t in 10 years.

React at its core is great. Redux is great too, as vanilla React becomes messy even for moderately complex single page apps.

Whatever it’s evolved into now is a different monster.

Modern day Kubernetes and React feels like a make work program

The 4% rule accounts for inflation. The stock market on an average gives you 7% a year in returns adjusted for inflation. The 4% gives you enough cushion in case of economic turmoil.

At least in SF, tenants get pretty generous buyouts when the landlord decides to sell.

I find Japan’s IC card system notoriously confusing here with every line operating its own fare gate, the notion of a base fare and additional fare for a line, and entry gates that require you to first walk all the way out to an exit.

I loved the “luxury” techbro condos of Seattle. I’d take a cookie cutter glassbox any day over my disgusting Manhattan prewar.

If you’re at a FAANG, especially at a $300k+ total compensation, NYC is very livable. In unit washer/dryer might be a stretch, but you can comfortably get a 1BR luxury apartment without much effort in a nice part of Manhattan.

I’d expect a pay raise if I had to accept WFH.

I live a 5 minute walk from my office and I get catered lunches.

Kara Swisher is reputable… as far as tech journalists go.

I’m a cofounder at a two person currently bootstrapped startup here in NYC. Do y’all know of any good coworking spaces? No frills, just one where we can work together at odd hours with monitors and some coffee.

Even with commercial real estate as cheap as it is now, it feels more cost efficient to upgrade to a bigger apartment in Manhattan instead of getting a coworking space with a dedicated desk. It defies logic.

100% unless they are from India.

I rented a unit in a prewar in Hell’s Kitchen. The basement and trash chutes were roach infested. I had to go through absurd lengths to not get a roach infestation in my apartment. Taking out trash every night (into a roach infested chute), never keeping any cardboard lying around, caulking all gaps around (a surprising number of) pipes, plugging drains at night, applying bait and IGR every once in a while, having monthly exterminator visits (if the guy ever showed up), and then spraying a special insecticide I got every other week.

Even then, I used to occasionally see roaches in my unit. I can’t imagine what it’s like when you have an AirBnb with some very transient tenants and no pest control.

More mandatory fun. Yay.

Most remote work at CRUD fintech companies will get outsourced. It’s idiotic to pay some Bootcamp grad in Bumfuck Milwaukee a Bay Area salary.

Because Zoom is utter garbage. The competition is so much better.