boonhet

@boonhet@sopuli.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PewDiePie releases Codex/ClaudeCode/Cursor killer, Odysseous (FOSS)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Funnily enough, you can use Vibe, Claude and Codex with local models if you configure them so. OpenCode supports it explicitly (while still retaining a cloud option because dev wants to make money)

  So this isn’t anything too new, but eh, at least it’s more attention to the self-hosting capability of LLMs for code agents.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The circle of life⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  What data? If he could’ve built the cars without paying a single employee, it would’ve been more profitable. That, however, was impossible. Hence, “necessary operating expense”. He just realized that the actual necessary expense was higher than what was previously thought, and in fact it was underfunded.

  You CAN invest into human resources, but salaries ain’t it. If your new employees are having trouble getting started and you spend the time and effort to build an onboarding plan, that’s an investment. It’s a one time thing that pays off repeatedly in the future. If you buy or build amenities for your employees to have a nicer time in the workplace (even just a coffee machine and ping-pong table), even those are investments. Employer-provided housing for employees? If it’s owned by the company rather than rented continuously, it’s an investment.

  Mind, the expense still dictates the quality of your service or product. Like I said, AI hasn’t replaced us yet. But if there was an AI you could host on-prem, that could replace one single human worker perfectly and improves over time like the human, and it cost, say 50 grand for a server to run it and a grand a month for the electricity, but the human it replaces has a total cost of employment of 5 grand a month? Just over a year and it’s paid off. THAT is an investment, versus continuing to pay the employee indefinitely.

  I pulled the numbers out of my ass because actual nvidia DGX servers cost way more than that, but it’s to illustrate the point of what’s an investment, vs what’s an operating expense. And an entire server dedicated to one company could run multiple agent instances in parallel off of one LLM, if our hypothetical future human-replacing AI is just an LLM with an agent layer, so perhaps it costs 500k and replaces 10 people instead. Also the human employee price here is closer to eastern europe than western europe or US.

  R&D is the one exception to labour costs being an expense vs investment. Paying someone building a new revenue stream is an investment, because one day that revenue stream will pull in more money, even if it’s no longer being actively developed. The hours people spend working on maintaining all the old stuff, which in most big orgs is honestly a fuckton of manhours, however, are an expense.

  Look, I’m not trying to assign humans a lower value or anything. I’m just saying that from an accounting perspective, most employees are just a necessity to keep the thing running, like electricity. The process of R&D is a bit of an exception and some businesses will even give their software or other intellectual property a value in the books and depreciate it over time. But even then, the investment is into the product, not the people. Because the people can bail on you at any time, barring some special exceptions.

  TL;DR: Look, I’m saying employees are a NECESSARY business expense. It’s just that we’re not slaves and after a large bonus or whatever, your employee can just… leave. You absolutely can get more productivity and better retention out of your employees by paying them more, but it’s not an investment on its own. Investment in the business implies future value even if you stop investing. As such, the best investments into your employees are actually things that still benefits the next employee after the current one is gone. Equipment, amenities, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The circle of life⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Which country?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The circle of life⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  To solve the turnover issue, sure. It’s not like the employees had that many other places to go to that could afford to do the same, he could just double or triple everyone’s salary and nobody’s going anywhere. It was a necessary business expense. EXPENSE. He could’ve made more money if he didn’t have to pay it. Similarly to the raw materials, electricity, and every other unavoidable business expense.

  It’s also not the same for software engineers, for an example. Too many companies hiring, or at least there used to be until a few years ago. You have to not just pay a lot of money, you also have to have a large bonus 3 or 4 years down the line, often in the form of stock options. Otherwise your engineer making 300k will just take the next job for 400k in half a year to a year.

  In normal companies that can’t afford bonuses that are more or less life-changing windfalls, there’s no “investing” in employees. You can pay the market rate for a new grad and they disappear in a year or two to another company that doesn’t take new grads at all but rather poaches employees once they’ve gotten some initial work experience and thus they waste less money than the companies hiring and training juniors and can afford to pay more. The company that doesn’t “invest” in employees, gets more bang for its buck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The circle of life⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Uh they’ll just claim the AI is being used in another country then?

  There’s really no way to definitively decide the tax jurisdiction of an AI agent.

  Good luck figuring this one out without a tax on unrealized gains in companies and good luck figuring that one out for companies if they can just scheme around it by reinvesting all their profit indefinitely.

  A complete ban on AI might be in order.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The circle of life⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Huh, it’s been an operating expense since, let me check, the dawn of business?

  “Investing in” your employees doesn’t make a ton of sense when they could just hop over to the next company after a year, much like loyalty in a company doesn’t make sense. It’s all a business transaction in the end so if you can get a better deal, you should.

  The unfulfilled promise of AI is to reduce the expense to a minimum so the few remaining people can accomplish the same work. That’s more of an investment than paying people to work for you until they find a better job ever was. In theory.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The biggest mystery known to mankind⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh I keep the hell away from all things javascript as much as possible, I’ve only had to work with node in a couple of projects, mostly did bugfixes to other people’s old code and migrated some APIs away from node to Kotlin as that was the company’s main tech stack and we didn’t have a single backend engineer who wanted to do Node, those APIs were built by someone who’d long left.

  These days if I create a new API for a personal project, it’s going to be in Rust and for professional projects it depends on what I’m being paid to use. And for personal projects, since Rust is so heavily focused on the one single build environment that is Cargo, I don’t really see the need for docker - usually the pain points are people not having postgres or openssl installed on their machines, but you can just stuff it in the readme that it’s necessary, and you get build time errors rather than runtime errors if they’re not present. I always prefer build time errors myself.

  For work I still use docker, but my main client has a fairly robust setup, where I don’t really need to worry about much, but when there is an issue, I’m usually the person who fixes it because the CTO is busy and most internal employees’ time has been scheduled already, whereas I get the “oh we need this today, can you do it?” stuff

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The biggest mystery known to mankind⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s very far from a bulletproof solution and it can cause its own issues, but if used properly, there are a lot of issues that it can help prevent.

  Put it this way: Production is on the Eclipse Temurin flavour of JDK, but your new developer downloads the Oracle one off java.com instead. Ideally both should function the same, they implement the same Java spec after all! But there might be a bug in one or the other that changes how something works.

  Now you could just provision machines with a particular environment setup, and not let your developers install random-ass packages, but most smaller companies I’ve worked for don’t really practice that for developers (less technical employees are another story). You get full admin access to your machine and you can customize your environment.

  Instead, your new developer builds the same docker container that runs in your kubernetes cluster. Same base image, same dependencies installed, etc. Day one and the project builds fine (assuming the code itself works).

  However, it’s not perfect. For one, sometimes an older version of a distro won’t support a newer version of some really low-level dependency for some weird-ass reason. It’s a fixed bug in newer versions, but your new employee decided to install Debian Stable on their machine so now they have to install docker from somewhere other than the main Debian repo. Another issue is the caching I mentioned beforehand.

  If you’ve never used docker before, I’ll give you a quick rundown on how building a docker image works, just in case.

  Generally you first pull from a base image. Depending on your use case, it might just be ubuntu 24.04, or maybe you take an image that already includes the toolchain you need (e.g a jdk image for java stuff). Your base image itself could also be based on another image, with extra stuff added. There could be tons of layers, the ‘base’ image is just the last layer you import from elsewhere before you start doing your own stuff. Then in the dockerfile, you can use different commands to build your own custom image, such as copying files from some directory on your system to the new image (like your code), or you can literally run bash commands as well. Say you used a Debian or Ubuntu base and you need some library from their repo, you just sudo apt-get install it. Or similarly you install your npm or pip or whatever packages before building. The thing is, and you can disable this, to save time, and bandwidth, docker will cache the results of each step and use cached versions up until the first step where it detects changes (usually to the files you copy to your image). But if you want it to be performant, you do all your dependency installs before your filesystem stuff so those steps don’t get re-run each time you change your code. So the first time you build an image on a particular computer, it pulls the dependencies and then until you do a clean build it might never pull them again. That’s where you can run into issues.

  And yes, you can just include the dependencies in a base image that gets built automatically in the CI and only add the code and compile steps in the image you build on the local machine. But you still have to pull the new base image!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The biggest mystery known to mankind⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh yeah, I was mostly just kidding with the LLM compiler bit. I’ve run into issues with incremental compiles working on the JVM ecosystem myself (mainly Kotlin though, as my work in the ecosystem took place early this decade). Still didn’t want to clean build every time though, because on an M1 Pro it was about 5 minutes to build some of our backend services from scratch and I tend to like a really rapid feedback loop for testing, changing code, recompiling, re-testing.

  These days my docker container reloads the entire project when I edit any file, but it takes 10 seconds since there’s no need to compile anything since it’s Python. Pure bliss in comparison (the development pace that is; I actually liked Kotlin more as a language even though Python is fine)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The biggest mystery known to mankind⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I was mostly kidding. You can always run into weird caching issues and I’m sure there are other issues I haven’t thought of.

  Docker builds in particular feel like a double edged sword. On the one hand, the entire team has the same build environment regardless of their machines. On the other hand, if docker’s cached old versions of packages in a preliminary step (e.g sudo apt-get install whatever) and something has a bug, you might run into issues till you clear the cache and rebuild then.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The biggest mystery known to mankind⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Nondeterministic compile. LLM compiler?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨5 nines of uptime⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Comment says “left for” codeberg so I’m assuming they use it but want another place to host private repos

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨College core: you sit in the class for attendance then go home and teach yourself⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’mma try that if I ever try for a 3rd time. Though second time around I had zero problems understanding any of the material since I’d been working in the field for 4 years, my ex just had a problem with me spending every other weekend in university instead of catering to her every need. First time I was just a moron who didn’t study at all and I had a pretty tough calculus course first semester and I failed it two semesters in a row lol

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CPU shortage is 'getting more serious day by day, no less than the memory chip situation' says unnamed gaming PC company⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah true, I forgot that AMD needs to compete with other companies wanting TSMC capacity.

  I’m on an AM4 platform so if I’m upgrading, it’ll be to a newer and higher core count AM4 CPU, kinda stuck there. I have no appetite for upgrading to a DDR5 based platform, otherwise I’d be sorta considering Intel right now as AMD’s starting to turn on consumers even more than Intel, as was to be expected once they got big enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CPU shortage is 'getting more serious day by day, no less than the memory chip situation' says unnamed gaming PC company⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  AMD for sure is trying to manufacture mostly server GPUd for AI, but does Intel even have anything competitive in that space?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stiff upper lip, perhaps?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Fr🤮nch

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bussin⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  C - a cap in yo ass

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kevin Smith, poet.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  2009 Internet was a different place tbf

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Walmart Is Putting Digital Labels That Change Prices Instantly on Every Store Shelf in America⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair if I’m coming over then it’d be for one of two things. Either one of my freelance customers has a big project they want me to work on full time and in-person, in which case they’d likely want me in a pretty damn hot and red part of the country, for which they’d have to pay me at least double my already decently high hourly rate (I’d be ok with this if I got triple digits hourly) - and I don’t think they have any such projects coming up… Or more likely, one day I want to visit the country with my kid, go on a roadtrip, see some of the national parks, etc. They’re currently way too young to appreciate that so I think it’d make more sense in like 7 or 8 years. By then I’m hoping the fascism has died down.

  There would otherwise be more reason for me to visit - I have experience with some niche software built purely for the US market and do think I could architect a competitor in a market that only has choices ranking from bad to worse… But at this rate, I don’t trust the US to be a stable enough business environment for me as a foreigner in particular.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨it really do be like that⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pretty much. Not that I think I’d get in trouble, I just think it’d be distasteful to wear it as a normie.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Walmart Is Putting Digital Labels That Change Prices Instantly on Every Store Shelf in America⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve only ever been in one state (NY), luckily the rate wasn’t too high (something under 10% combined state + local depending on county/city I believe? Compared to 24% VAT here). Kinda tripped me up, BUT I made it make more sense by looking at the price in dollars as if it was in euros as I was mostly paying by card whenever possible anyway, so the amount that went off my bank account was fairly close to what was on the price tags.

  If I were to ever visit again, it’d be even better since the USD is now weaker, but tbf with this admin and the social media history requirement, I don’t think I’d even get into the country anyway so even being white enough to hopefully not be harassed by ICE isn’t enough nowadays lmao.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Walmart Is Putting Digital Labels That Change Prices Instantly on Every Store Shelf in America⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  … Yeah, you’re probably right.

  I’m just used to living in a country where VAT is included in prices in stores anyway

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Walmart Is Putting Digital Labels That Change Prices Instantly on Every Store Shelf in America⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ironically, these “digital labels”, although problematic in their own right, could help with that.

  1. Currently if the store employees have missed a price change on a product, it might actually cost more than the sign says

  2. It would be pretty to easy to make those include tax IF these digital labels know which store they’re in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨it really do be like that⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not a mafia boss, I wear shorts all summer (March/April through October or so) Office, doctor’s appointment, whatever. It’s shorts for me.

  I used to joke that one day I’m going to walk into the Mercedes dealership wearing shorts and ask them to test drive a brand new S-Class, but my priorities have changed somewhat in the meantime so I don’t think I’ll be doing that. Not such a huge fan of their newest interiors anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨it really do be like that⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I would like one, but unfortunately I am not diagnosed with autism. I do think it would be hilarious to wear it otherwise.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨it really do be like that⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So has the egg cracked already or is it still an ongoing process?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨it really do be like that⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I pretty much have those arms, but my jaw is closer to the lady on the left lmao

  But most of all, I do NOT have his waistline. Look at that v-taper. Thin in the middle, wide lats. I’d have to lose a good 40 KG to achieve that and the average man probably could not achieve that at all without years of working out because it’s pretty hard to get lats that wide.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨That's how the world works.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m Estonian, we only get generic grocery stores, or expensive “asian flavours” stores that sell mostly stuff you can’t find elsewhere and high quality but expensive ingredients as they seem to have mostly pretty low sales volume. There’s one that sells a 25 kilo bag of rice, but it’s not cheaper power kg than a small pack of rice from a regular store.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Im pan so anyone can apply⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that person was making more of a forever alone type joke. As in he’s waiting involuntarily.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨That's how the world works.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And the Bosch in this instance is not Robert Bosch, founder of the company Bosch, but his nephew Carl Bosch, founder of IG Farben. Famous for, among other things, zyklon b.