sobchak
@sobchak@programming.dev
- Comment on Everyone should have a home server (or a friend that has one) 4 days ago:
Outside of the “stars” and directors, people working in the film/tv industry already have a fairly low income (median salary for professional actors is ~$47000/yr).
- Comment on How to manage docker compose apps? 1 week ago:
I think compose files are usually pinned to a version, or use a .env file that needs to be changed to update to a new version.
I personally don’t update very often; usually not until I’m forced to for some reason. I find that just checking the documentation for any upgrade/migration guides, and doing it manually is sufficient. I don’t expose this kind of stuff publicly; if I did, I’d probably update regularly.
- Comment on Renewables blow past nuclear when it comes to cheap datacenter juice 1 week ago:
A lot of the companies and people responsible for having all these datacenters built are heavily invested in SMR. So they’ll probably be used anyways.
- Comment on 'Windmill': China tests world’s first megawatt-level airship to capture high winds 1 week ago:
Tidal too. Slows the Earth’s rotation a minuscule amount more than usual.
- Comment on Sniper attacks Texas ICE facility amid soaring tensions over US immigration 1 week ago:
I’m not really big on “conspiracy theories,” BUT are we supposed to believe the shooter was shooting detainees, and “engraved” a single bullet casing with a sharpie with the message “anti-ice”? Image
- Comment on A ‘demoralizing' trend has computer science grads out of work — even minimum wage jobs. Are 6-figure tech careers over? 2 weeks ago:
Idk, I’ve worked with recent grads where their work likely did bring in > $100k in a year. Maybe only took a month to get up to speed. Commits from all devs should be reviewed, and all code should be tested before pushing to prod, so those catastrophic costs should rarely be a problem. We had a good relationship with professors at a local university, and they’d send us their top students. The students would work with us for a while before usually getting picked up by big tech.
Pretty sure my work right out of college brought the company around $300k the first year (wrote the firmware for an electronic control board mostly by myself, which allowed the company to secure a large contract).
- Comment on A ‘demoralizing' trend has computer science grads out of work — even minimum wage jobs. Are 6-figure tech careers over? 2 weeks ago:
Didn’t something like 150k employees and contractors get DOGE’d and the admin is targeting 300k by the end of year?
I was doing contract work related to environmental research that relied on grant money and all that dried up.
- Comment on A ‘demoralizing' trend has computer science grads out of work — even minimum wage jobs. Are 6-figure tech careers over? 2 weeks ago:
If their work brings in > 100k in revenue then they should.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Hmm, I missed the part about being maxed-out on roof space. Great article and blog by the way!
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Guessing it would be more practical to have enough solar panels to fulfill energy needs in winter.
- Comment on Are Cars Just Becoming Giant Smartphones on Wheels? 3 weeks ago:
Kind of disappointing Bezos is involved though.
- Comment on Are Cars Just Becoming Giant Smartphones on Wheels? 3 weeks ago:
I don’t think that’s the reason. China makes tons of aftermarket replacement parts and even OEM parts.
- Comment on Big Surprise—Nobody Wants 8K TVs 4 weeks ago:
HDR is more noticeable, but yeah, I don’t care if it’s 1080p or 4k.
- Comment on Tesla sales plunge 40% in Europe as Chinese EV rival BYD's triple 5 weeks ago:
I’m completely out of shape and don’t exercise at all, but commuted to work on a bike when my workplace was ~5 miles away. Wasn’t hard at all and only took a little longer than a car. Had a rack on the back and bags to pick up groceries too. If you need carry a lot of heavy tools every day, it obviously wouldn’t be ideal. Even then a bicycle trailer could be used up to something like 100lbs.
- Comment on Bring out the trumpets and pour out the beer 1 month ago:
- Comment on Bring out the trumpets and pour out the beer 1 month ago:
Depends on specifics. I haven’t been able to use the free tier for years. These companies collect all kinds of data from its users too.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
The obvious body work and Bentley are both status symbols. The body work needs to be comically obvious to be an effective symbol.
- Comment on Do hvac companies install wall air conditioners? 1 month ago:
In my area, the HVAC companies that will do mini-splits are extremely overpriced (I think they usually only use them for commercial installations). Quoted me $25k for 4 minisplits. Did it my self, including electrical, with Mr Cool minisplits for something like $10k. The bad thing is I think Mr Cool units don’t give you the full BTU unless you manually put it on “turbo” mode, and the thermostat isn’t accurate (I have to recalibrate it depending on the season).
- Comment on Computer Science, a popular college major, has one of the highest unemployment rates 1 month ago:
Ha, yeah, I started at a community college, for an associates in IT, and it was mostly Cisco, Visual Basic, and MS SQL. Went to a 4 years school for a BS, and it was more about logic and different programming paradigms. Then at grad school, it was mostly theoretical stuff and algorithm analysis.
- Comment on 95% of Companies See ‘Zero Return’ on $30 Billion Generative AI Spend, MIT Report Finds 1 month ago:
My theory is the money-people (VCs, hedge-fund mangers, and such) are heavily pushing for offshoring of software engineering teams to places where labor is cheap. Anecdotally, that’s what I’ve seen personally; nearly every company I’ve interviewed with has had a few US developers leading large teams based in India. The big companies in the business domain I have the most experience with are exclusively hiring devs in India and a little bit in Eastern Europe. There’s a huge oversupply of computer science grads in India, so many are so desperate they’re willing to work for almost nothing just to get something on their resume and hopefully get a good job later. I saw one Indian grad online saying he had 2 internship offers, one offering $60 USD/month, and the other $30/month. Heard offshore recruitment services and Global Capability Centers are booming right now.
- Comment on do what you love 1 month ago:
Yeah, the CS head at the small college I went to was also the Philosophy head (he got his doctorate in philosophy). The same formal logic class was a requirement for the CS, philosophy, and law degrees.
- Comment on Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle. 1 month ago:
Some big tech companies pay that, theoretically, in total compensation for entry level. These companies make about $1 million per employee.
- Comment on Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle. 1 month ago:
I think it’s the same in all developed nations; constantly needing more skills to achieve the same standard of living. I think a lot of it is from nearly all resources getting more expensive to extract (oil, wood, iron, etc) due to us having already extracted all the low-hanging-fruit, and needing to move on to more resource-intensive methods like offshore-drilling, fracking, importing lumber long distances from harsher climates. The other drivers are the attacks on labor and executives/shareholders taking more profits for themselves instead of paying their workers more.
- Comment on Sam Altman admits OpenAI ‘totally screwed up’ its GPT-5 launch and says the company will spend trillions of dollars on data centers 1 month ago:
I think I read the RLHF kind of makes these logprobs completely unusable too.
- Comment on Sam Altman admits OpenAI ‘totally screwed up’ its GPT-5 launch and says the company will spend trillions of dollars on data centers 1 month ago:
I think it’s driven by the investors. In the case of big tech, the large institutional investors are rewarding companies any time they say “AI” and lay off workers. In the case of startups, VCs are almost exclusively investing in startups that use “AI,” and have a lean or offshore workforce.
- Comment on Computer Science, a popular college major, has one of the highest unemployment rates 1 month ago:
I find it hard to believe the true numbers are this low. Every job posting gets many hundreds or even thousands of applicants. It’s a shame so much talent is wasted by so many people being unemployed and doing “unproductive” things like spending months applying to jobs.
- Comment on Computer Science, a popular college major, has one of the highest unemployment rates 1 month ago:
IDK about most. But, I’ve seen many OS contributors say they’re looking for work. Seen one recently saying he won’t be contributing much to the project anymore because he’s housing-insecure. Seen maintainers for popular projects get laid off and are now looking for work. Seen people with 10+ and 20+ years of experience not being able to find a job after many months.
- Comment on UK Official Calls for Age Verification on VPNs to Prevent Porn Loophole 1 month ago:
Does Snowflake still work in China? Thought I read they’re now able to detect and block it.
- Comment on Why LLMs can't really build software 1 month ago:
I’ve used AI by just pasting code, then asking if there’s anything wrong with it. It would find things wrong with it, but would also say some things were wrong when it was actually fine.
I’ve used it in an agentic-AI (Cursor), and it’s not good at debugging any slightly-complex code. It would often get “stuck” on errors that were obvious to me, but making wrong, sometimes nonsensical changes.
- Comment on AI experts return from China stunned: The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over 1 month ago:
There’s a lot of indication that LLMs are peaking. It’s taking exponentially more compute and data to get incremental improvements. A lot of people are saying OpenAI’s new model is a regression (I don’t know, I haven’t really played with the new model much). More foundational breakthroughs need to be made, and these kinds of breakthroughs are often the result of “eureka” moments which can’t be manifested by just throwing more money at the problem. It’s possible it will take decades before someone discovers a major breakthrough (or it could be tomorrow).
