staticcaucasian

messenger is an absurdly popular app that keeps users in the platform and also increases the intensity of their usage, ultimately leading to more eyeballs, ads and revenue. If you look at it that way, relatively small features, and by association, improvements to the effectiveness of those features by a couple of SWEs each, gets you tons of business impact.

When it launched we all talked about the serving/inference costs being massive. In hindsight if they had a paywall, it might not have self-imploded so fast, might have stayed aspirational, and they might have a profitable business today. Interesting case study.

Volts covers nuclear fairly often. Check the transcript history if you're genuinely interested. It's not a compelling story; solar and wind are _really_ cheap now, and our modeling and software is getting way better at accommodating them. Nuclear just isn't economical at all in comparison.

Does this actually need to be local? Since the chat bot is open to the public and I assume the course material used for RAG all on this page (https://canvas.illinois.edu/courses/54315/pages/exam-schedul...) all stays freely accessible - I clicked a few links without being a student - I assume a pre-prompted larger non-local LLM would outperform the local instance. Though, you can imagine an equivalent course with all of its content ACL-gated/'paywalled' could benefit from local RAG, I guess.

The Partner is the consultant. The 'recent grad' is just extra low-cost apprenticeship for the partner. The customer is (ridiculously over-) paying for the Partner's time and tolerating the apprentices that come along for the ride.

Exactly. This is an apartment complex with some so-so on-site retail situated on a light rail trunk line, just outside of a university and eventually downtown Phoenix. Reduced parking but still accessible to delivery drivers. In most other cities this would be just a 5-over-1.

The "hired to do nothing" Tech Company meme was almost entirely actually just recruiters: https://www.wsj.com/articles/these-tech-workers-say-they-wer...

Around these parts a lot of the affected laid off were the upper end of that equity range. Expensive long-timers or over-hires who aren't producing at the level they negotiated. I don't feel bad for them.

I just want to say, every one of your bullet points resonated with me - work hurdles, fatherhood, aging parents, societal ugliness. Let me be your clone and perhaps you can be mine - go take the sabbatical.

Because the fixed rate is based on treasurys and the inflation rate is based on inflation, they're essentially locked-in at zero truly real return. Which is not a bad 'floor' position for your portfolio!

No need to assume it's written there clearly:

Combining the two rates To get the actual rate of interest (sometimes referred to as the composite or earnings rate) we combine the fixed rate and the inflation rate, using the equation in the example below.

The combined rate will never be less than zero. However, the combined rate can be lower than the fixed rate. If the inflation rate is negative (because we have deflation, not inflation), it can offset some of the fixed rate. If the inflation rate is so negative that it would take away more than the fixed rate, we don't let that happen. We stop at zero.

I think this is making clear how many restaurants were only making margin on the up-sells like beverages. At the high-end it's alcohol and dessert and at the low-end it's soft drinks and packaged snacks. It's extremely often discussed that your fancier restaurants live or die by their bar.

It brings to mind the early 2000s MTV show Diary, which always led with the tagline "You think you know... but you have no idea"

There's probably some German word for it, like Schadenfreude

For less than you might pay for a car, or a year of college, or heck, what you might put into your 401k for the year, you can offset effectively your entire life at $16,000. (80y lifespan * 20T/year typical American emissions * $10/ton current price). I am expecting my first child and I've thought about registering for carbon offsets in his name instead of a typical baby registry.

Unfortunately of course, that will only do so much, because the growing global demand for things like air travel, personal car ownership, meat in diets, or air-conditioning mean the numbers on this chart will start to get uglier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

I meet a lot who are students (eg, nursing). Driving for Uber is their only job, they'll do it as many hours as they can get, approaching FT. But they need the flexibility, they might do it in the short-term when they're between school terms or clinicals, and oftentimes they are free at the points where we need the most drivers on the road.

Agreed. Burry seems to be getting a lot of responses but almost none of them seem to have actually listened to what he said (or even read the article). There is real risk from the index-matching synthetic techniques that these funds are using.

That's why they say land is an investment and appreciates; houses depreciate. Bet the land in those remote areas is still worth the small value they paid for it while the houses are losing value by the minute.

In a similar vein, I've taken to traveling over the July 4th holiday every year now. For many people, it can be a very long weekend, or is easy to turn into an entire week+ trip. It's not really celebrated outside the US (except for maybe a bar or two, go get one drink with the expats and have fun for an hour), and I don't find the celebrations back at home to be particularly fun anymore. Plus, with the way it falls at the edge of a month/quarter/fiscal year for some, it's likely a slow time at work anyways. This year with it falling on a Thursday, you could probably take off 6/29 to 7/7 and barely miss any work.

That's not how that math works, _at all_.

Besides, you have an asymmetric opportunity, since you can interview, get an offer, and decline it if you don't like the new option. You don't need to quit before interviewing. In fact, that post-offer woo phase can give you a huge chance to get more information about the new gig.

Your answers read exactly like most of the people I know at Microsoft. I think to a certain extent companies with high average tenure produce cultures where people become risk-averse and reinforce these values through statements like your own.

For what it's worth, by staying there you are leaving a serious amount of compensation behind, assuming your skills could find you another job. $225k would be $350k elsewhere, easily. Many of the MSFT lifers I know don't really have a skillset that would translate or be valuable elsewhere, due to their focus on their company. That's probably true of most cases where someone stays at a single firm for a long time.

By no means am I suggesting there's anything wrong with your worldview, just pointing out that in this industry, you are leaving serious comp behind by not shopping around. Your work after moving would probably be more enjoyable and interesting, too.