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sophia01

97 karma · joined July 3, 2025

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sophia01··on OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race
It's Coca Cola vs Pepsi. Yes some might even say Pepsi has been shown to taste better, but people still buy loads of Coke.

Of course the tech savvy enterprises will use the best models. But the plumber down the road doesn't care whether she asks Gemini or ChatGPT about the sizing of some fittings.

sophia01··on How good engineers write bad code at big companies
The matter of fact is that big companies (think the usual monorepo business going on in FAANG) don't care about the actual code. The code was never the point of the exercise. Eventually you realize this. Code is like the ether. The company needs it in order to do its thing, and the code needs to be dealt with in order to operate.

In the end it doesn't matter how normalized and pretty you design the database, someone will eventually show up and write a pipeline that dumps every row of it into JSON once an hour and ships it to some far away corner of the company. Someone will write a shitty script to deal with the fact that those rows don't represent a consistent point-in-time snapshot of your database. In the end it doesn't matter anyway, it'll all be rewritten or coerced through some migration into some ugly system in a few months anyway that it doesn't conform to and could never match.

The thing that matters is the process. When you decide you want to do it, do you have the process to mend the ether to do what you need it to do in two months? Do you have the processes in place to catch it when it's so catastrophic it's blowing up your balance sheet?

sophia01··on Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war
Thats not true. They price the stocks at current market value and tell you how many you'll get + what the vesting schedule is.
sophia01··on Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war
> The back-loaded vesting schedule is such blatantly cynical bullshit.

I don't understand this. A friend was recently offered an insane pay package from Amazon (compared to another big-tech). The way I saw it, the Amazon pay package was more attractive than the alternative because of the back-loaded vesting schedule.

Basically they pay you out in cash for the first two years, then after that you have an option to keep working there. If the stock price goes down in the first two years, you got your guaranteed cash -- no risk (and it would be a good time to interview again). If the stock price goes up, you now have basically an option on extra exposure in the form of staying longer with highly valued RSUs, and now getting some high proportion of your pay in RSUs.

It just seems straight up better? If you want the stock instead of fungible cash, just buy it on the open market?

sophia01··on How we replaced Elasticsearch and MongoDB with Rust and RocksDB
They're not open sourcing it though?
sophia01··on GPT-5
Driver license and selfies. Also still not available in API after doing that! Edit: I do have access now via API.
sophia01··on GPT-5
API usage requires organization verification with your ID :(.
sophia01··on Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
> The UK is not that different by comparison.

Do note that the UK is 15.6x as dense as Finland, and the climate is quite different: e.g. in Helsinki (southermost city) mean daily temperature is below freezing point 4/12 months of the year (very consequential for driving). E.g. in Scotland even the mean daily minimum does not cross freezing point in any month.

OECD data has Finland at 0.36 fatalities per 10k vehicles vs 0.41 in the UK.

https://www.itf-oecd.org/road-safety-dashboard

sophia01··on Cerebras Code
Yeah just checked apparently it is available as a preview (not on main models/pricing page).
sophia01··on Cerebras Code
My understanding is that the coding agents people use can be modified to plug into any LLM provider's API?

The difference here seems to be that Cerebras does not appear to have Qwen3-Coder through their API! So now there is a crazy fast (and apparently good too?) model that they only provide if you pay the crazy monthly sub?

sophia01··on Researchers map where solar energy delivers the biggest climate payoff
When I read "map", I think "map"...
sophia01··on Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507
Have been using this all morning for some integral-heavy math for my PhD (trying to bound certain analytically intractable integrals). It's a bit hit-or-miss. It's been able to come up with some pretty impressive bounds but also feels like more than half it does some really dumb stuff. Compared to Gemini 2.5 Pro it's pretty solid. Its thought traces are really silly though sometimes: it'll pretend to check websites or "pull out a calculator".
sophia01··on Show HN: Price Per Token – LLM API Pricing Data
But the data is... wrong? Google Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite costs $0.10/mtok input [1] but is shown here as $0.40/mtok?

[1] https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing#gemini-2.5-fla...

sophia01··on Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507
If this is actually competitive with Gemini 2.5 Pro that would be insane esp for an Apache2 truly open weights model, let's hope it's not too hacked to shine on benchmarks!
sophia01··on Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024)
Oh come on. You are going to debate whether a 3% parasitic tax is good or bad. Interchange is paid on debit card transactions too, it's not credit card specific.
sophia01··on Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds
The title is disappointing: it implies a causal relationship. The study was an observational study.

Indeed, you can outrun a bad diet: we all know that. The study just shows that the lack of activity isn't the main reason for obesity. Both things can be true simultaneously.

sophia01··on I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA
Thank you!

I am wondering how narrow the focus has to be for an EB-1A. I have been involved in a wide variety of projects, some receiving a good amount of media publicity (100+ mentions across various media), others adding up to a good number of citations (100+ total citations), and I'm also involved in a startup venture that while not yet a breakaway success, is growing quickly (60k+ users, growing 50% yoy). I'm unsure if these can be molded into an appropriate form given they don't necessarily make a coherent story.

I'm also wondering what the bar is for "command a high salary or other significantly high remuneration in relation to others in the field". Is a solid salary within the usual bands at a big tech enough? Or does it have to somehow be significantly higher in relation to others in a similar job position at the company?

sophia01··on I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA
Thank you Peter, this is super helpful!!

Does your firm do immigration law consultations or do you have any that you would recommend to ask some more questions?

sophia01··on I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA
I'm graduating from my PhD and starting a FAANG research role. I'm Australian and about to start in F-1 OPT status.

I am interested in an EB-1 or EB-2 (possibly NIW) visa, but am concerned about a long period where I can't travel (aka re-enter).

What's the practical difference between E-3 and F-1 OPT (with STEM extension) in my case? Is it easy to switch from F-1 to E-3 at the same role?