My 11-month old is an absolute saint when we’re out and about, then a horrifying tornado of destruction when he’s at home. I suspect a lot of it is just boredom, but its hard to tell because… 11-mo olds aren’t great at verbalizing their discontent.

As he gets older and he starts losing that starstruck look of wonderment at the mall or a new restaurant or wherever, I suspect he’ll be harder to control. But he’s also incredibly clever, athletic, and curious. I don’t want to discourage any of this just to make parenting a bit easier in the short term.

Can’t fucking imagine actually hitting him. I know what that did to me after the rare few times my mom did it. I still can’t bring myself to forgive her 30 years later. And there’s no way I want my son thinking of me that way.

The issue I feel, is we live in a society that equates money with importance.

A guy who can command hundreds of billions is important by way of how much pull he can exert on the overall economy. If Altman says we’re going to build a thousand new datacenters that consume a gigawatt of power a year each, and he’s breaking ground on the project next week, commodities brokers can’t just blink past it.

The headline should be Stop Talking to Technology Executives, Tax Them.

Who is the headline talking to? Unless this is a media journal exclusively consumed by Congresscritters, you’re just preaching to the choir. Nobody wants to tax the Tech Billionaires because nobody wants to get tech billionaire money plowed into a rival’s campaign.

Unfortunately, you can’t just politely ignore people with an eleven-to-thirteen-digit line of credit. That much of a hand in the consumption habits of the richest country on earth commands attention whether you like what they’re saying or not.

The real question is whether you’re going to be a WaPo-style hack stenographer who shows up at these events and whispers “These people are fairy wizards who can do real God-magic and transform the universe into a Science Fantasy wonderland!” Or you come at it from the Ed Zitron / Molly White / Riley Quinn / Any Sane Person at the Financial Times perspective, tearing into the actual balance sheets and analyzing the runways of these bloated economy leeches, and guestimating what future impact their continued operation will have on the rest of the domestic and global economies.

Tech Execs have to be taken seriously but not literally. When Zuck says he wants a trillion dollar spending line on datacenters to supercharge humanity, you have to read that with the same gravitas as a weather forecaster predicting a Cat-5 hurricane making landfall.

If you’re talking about India / China working for US firms, it’s supply and demand again.

It’s clearly not. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have a software guy left standing inside the US.

I interviewed with a shop in a University town that had a mean 6 month turnover rate for programmers

That’s just a bad business.

I can do what needs doing without AI.

More power to you.

The practice is that over half of them move on to “other opportunities” within a couple of years, even if you give them good salary, benefits and working conditions.

In my experience (coming from O&G IT) there’s a somewhat tight knit circle of contractors and businesses tied to specific applications. And you just cycle through this network over time.

I’ve got a number of coworkers who are ex-contractors and a contractor lead who used to be my boss. We all work on the same software for the same company either directly or indirectly. You might move to command a higher salary, but you’re all leveraging the same accrued expertise.

If you cut off that circuit of employment, the quality of the project will not improve over time.

In the US they’re commanding $80k/yr because of supply and demand

You’ll need to explain why all the overseas contractors are getting paid so much less, in that case.

Again, we’re all working on the same projects for the same people with comparable skills. But I get paid 3x my Indian counterpart to be in the correct timezone and command enough fluent English language skills to deal with my bosses directly.

Case in point: starting salaries for engineers in the U.S. were around $30-40k/yr up until the .com boom, at which point software engineering capable college graduates ramped up to $70k/yr in less than a year, due to demand outstripping supply.

But then the boom busted and those salaries deflated down to the $50k range.

I had coworkers who would pin for the Y2K era, when they were making $200k in the mid 90s to do remedial code clean up. But that was a very shortly lived phenomen. All that work would have been outsourced overseas in the modern day.

Our codebase had plenty of janky nonsense before AI came around.

Speeding up the rate of coding and volume of code makes that problem much worse.

I’ve watched businesses lose clients - I even watched a client go bankrupt - from bad coding decisions.

In the past few months I have actually seen Anthropic/Claude’s code output improve significantly toward this goal.

If you can make it work, more power to you. But it’s a dangerous game I see a few other businesses executing without caution or comparable results.

Would I be happy with new-hire code out of a $80K/yr headcount, did I have a choice?

If I get that same code, faster, for 1% of the cost?

The theory is that the new hire gets better over time as they learn the ins and outs of your business and your workplace style. And they’re commanding an $80k/year salary because they need to live in a country that demands an $80k/year cost of living, not because they’re generating $80k/year of value in a given pay period.

Maybe you get code a bit faster and even a bit cheaper (for now - those teaser rates never last long term). But who is going to be reviewing it in another five or ten years? Your best people will keep moving to other companies or retiring. Your worst people will stick around slapping the AI feed bar and stuffing your codebase with janky nonsense fewer and fewer people will know how to fix.

Long term, its a death sentence.

We looked at the code produced and determined that it’s of the quality of a new hire.

As someone who did new hire training for about five years, this is not what I’d call promising.

I was going to say… this is a bit like claiming “AI is sending 90% of emails”. Okay, but if its all spam, what are you bragging about?

Very possible that 90% of code is being written by AI and we don’t know it because it’s all just garbage getting shelved or deleted in the back corner of a Microsoft datacenter.

My city already has its fair share of Confederate generals and reactionary land barons littering our parks and museums. He would certainly fit in.

Imagine if JK Rowling would do that last bit for us.

There’s a line around the block of like-minded bigots who are falling over themselves to take his job.

One big reason why I suspect the killer was a Nick Fuentes influenced Groyper. The fact that Nick was front row center and immediately posted the kill-shot as it happens only fuels my suspicions.

My man died with “Counting or not counting gang violence?” on his lips. Of course his supporters are going to come out swinging with slurs and hoaxes and slanders.

I can’t imagine any better way to remember Charlie than with a bloody smear of reactionary propaganda.

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One of them deserves a statue

Statues don’t get built based on who deserves one the most.

Mandelson was sacked because of the release of the birthday book by Epstein’s estate, not by the government.

What? He’s an ambassador. Of course he was sacked by the government.

Sadly, not the first pedophile President

You don’t read the things you link

You don’t like the answers you’re being given.

Thats literally the reverse of what i am talking about.

You’re choosing to accept Trump at face value and refusing to read between the lines.

No see she was sold to Prince Andrew.

Virginia Giuffre’s family expresses shock over Trump saying Epstein ‘stole’ her

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Giuffre