sobchak
@sobchak@programming.dev
- Comment on Tesla sales plunge 40% in Europe as Chinese EV rival BYD's triple 4 hours 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 day ago:
- Comment on Bring out the trumpets and pour out the beer 1 day 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] 4 days 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? 6 days 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 6 days 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 6 days 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 6 days 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 week 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 week 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 week 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 week 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 week 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 week 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 week 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 week 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 week 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).
- Comment on AI experts return from China stunned: The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over 1 week ago:
China leads the world in scientific publication, even when only taking into account reputable journals and high-impact publications. There’s no doubt in my mind the US will decline further with the current attacks on science and education, and anti-intellectualism in general.
- Comment on Which way? 2 weeks ago:
I had it done once when I was still a child, and the issue reoccurred. No issues for more than a decade from the ones I had as an adult though.
- Comment on Router suggestions for a complete noob 2 weeks ago:
I had a Mox and it was the most stable router I’ve ever had. Never had to power cycle it, and I even have to power cycle my fancy Asus somewhat often.
- Comment on Trump says he plans to put a 100% tariff on computer chips, likely pushing up cost of electronics 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, Apple’s stock went up 5% yesterday because of Tim Cook’s meeting with Trump (where he promised $600 billion investment in US manufacturing), and Apple’s saying they won’t be affected by the new 50% tariffs on India. There are also ghost factories that were built during Trump’s first term.
- Comment on Tucson City Council votes 7-0, unanimously to kill AI Data Center 3 weeks ago:
I never understood the popularity of AWS. It’s much cheaper using VPSs and even dedicated servers sometimes. I’ve worked on very cost-sensitive projects where I rolled our own highly-available k8s and postgres clusters on dedicated servers and VPSs and saved the company a shit load of money. Only used the “cloud” to store backups (Backblaze). There’s tons of other options other than major “cloud” providers, and they’re often much cheaper.
- Comment on GitHub CEO delivers stark message to developers: Embrace AI or get out. 3 weeks ago:
Hmm, a lot of my career was done doing embedded programming, where mistakes in production are very costly, and software/hardware has to be released with basically zero bugs, so that may be where the disconnect is. I still think bugs and technical debt are costly elsewhere too if the product is going to have a long lifecycle, but executives are just dumb.
- Comment on GitHub CEO delivers stark message to developers: Embrace AI or get out. 3 weeks ago:
For open source stuff, Codeberg is good. For private stuff, just git + ssh is good. Gitlab and Bitbucket are fine for corporate stuff, I guess. An organization could just self-host a Forgejo (or Gitlab) instance as well.
- Comment on GitHub CEO delivers stark message to developers: Embrace AI or get out. 3 weeks ago:
I keep hearing stuff like this, but I haven’t found a good use or workflow for AI (other than occasional chatbot sessions). Regular autocomplete is more accurate (no hallucinations) and faster than AI suggestions (especially accounting for needing to constantly review the suggestions for correctness). I guess stuff like Cursor is OK at making one-off tools on very small code-bases, but hits a brick-wall when the code base gets too big. Then you’re left with a bunch of unmaintainable code you’re not very familiar with and you would to spend a lot of time trying to fix yourself. Dunno if I’m doing something wrong or what.
I guess what I’m saying is that using AI can speed you up to a point while the project accumulates massive amounts of technical debt, and when you take into account all the refactoring and debugging time, it results in taking longer to produce a buggier project. At least, in my experience.
- Comment on GitHub CEO delivers stark message to developers: Embrace AI or get out. 3 weeks ago:
I think part of it is because they think they can train models off developers, then replace them with models. The other is that the company is heavily invested in coding LLMs and the tooling for them, so they are trying to hype them up.
- Comment on 🐀🔥🔥🔥 3 weeks ago:
Chamoy on fruit or candy is awesome.
- Comment on GitHub CEO delivers stark message to developers: Embrace AI or get out. 3 weeks ago:
I’ve tried Copilot for a while and played around with Cursor for a bit. I was better and faster without Copilot due to sometimes not paying enough attention of the lines it would generate. This would cause subtle bugs that took a long time to debug. Cursor just produced unmaintainable code-bases that I had no knowledge of, and to make major changes, would be faster for me to just rewrite it from scratch. The act of typing gives me time to think more about what I’m doing or am going to do, while Copilot generations are distracting and break my thought processes. I work best with good LSP tooling and sometimes AI chatbots (mostly just for customized example snippets for libraries or frameworks I’m unfamiliar with; though that has its own problems because the LLMs knowledge is out of date a lot) that don’t directly modify my code.
- Comment on As governments around the world are set to make the Internet more restrictive and privacy-invading, we need a solution 4 weeks ago:
If doing an overlay network (network on top of the Internet), you probably won’t be able to do much better than Tor or i2p.
We confirm the trilemma that an AC [anonymous communication] protocol can only achieve two out of the following three properties: strong anonymity (i.e., anonymity up to a negligible chance), low bandwidth overhead, and low latency overhead.
freedom.cs.purdue.edu/projects/trilemma.html
This applies to all types of anonymous networks as well (BT, Wifi, etc).
- Comment on Silicon Valley AI Startups Are Embracing China’s Controversial ‘996’ Work Schedule 4 weeks ago:
More like $200k in total comp (but I suppose if the stock rockets like 5x after you’re hired, it can end up being $400k). Senior positions can make > $400k/yr in total comp. Some companies have back-loaded vesting schedules so they can get rid of you before the majority of your options vest though.