VirusNewbie

1,857 karma · joined June 5, 2021

Done lots of OSS. Scala, big data, infrastructure and more. Telco engineer at one point. Read lots of books instead of college. Currently at Google as a Sr. SWE SRE on the cloud. I think about computation, resilient software architecture, category theory and PLT for fun.

VirusNewbieon AI safety is mostly a sex cult

Some of these potshots just cheapen any arguments. "Gretta has no prior experience with non profits" uh, she was a well regarded Google SRE... her making 200k is nothing.

VirusNewbieon Can we stop with the uptime percentages?

About four years ago I did interview loops at GCP, Netflix, and Azure at the same time. The latter was a “hiring event” so all my interviewers were from different teams, either managers or TLs.

It was the interview equivalent of the multi-headed dragon meme, where the last one looks absolutely stupid. The contrast was insane, microsoft was an absolute shit show compared to the other two companies in terms of talent, personality, organization and more.

VirusNewbieon Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

Yes, agreed, 3.8 with thinking is quite good.

VirusNewbieon Proposed Rule: Eliminating the Discretionary 60-Day Grace Period

How hard is it to convert H1B to O1? At this point I gotta imagine it's easier to just do this for well paid H1Bs no ?

VirusNewbieon Ask HN: Did Google kill its enterprise workhorse model?

3.8 Flash on high thinking is better than 3.1 pro.

VirusNewbieon Nike exits the S&P 100 after 18 years and a $200B market-cap wipeout

I thought Nike had a good thing going for a while, they were able to sell cheap lower end shoes but had some good brands that stayed a little higher status.

But where the hell have they been, as other athletic companies have taken off with better synthetic fabric, nike hasn't increased in quality. Their marketing is particularly weird, making some interesting choices.

All in all, it seems the company has been badly run the last ten years.

VirusNewbieon AirPods 5

this is not even remotely true. I have plenty of headphones, Airpod Pros are quite good sound quality.

VirusNewbieon Are people who only seem happy when they're angry increasing? Seems like it

I don't think outrage porn is new. I grew up in the tail end of evangelical christianity being angry about how corrupt society was getting in the 80s.

I think shock news and outrage was a thing since TV...

Feeling 'righteously angry' has always been popular.

VirusNewbieon GPT-6 Astra

If there was no moat, nvidia and meta would have SoTA models too.

VirusNewbieon How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

>Anthropic admitted last year to losing money on inference, it had negative margins.

No they did not. Dario has repeatedly stated if they stopped training new models, they would be very profitable.

VirusNewbieon Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

Check my profile?

VirusNewbieon Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

I found 3.5 pro to be much better than 3.5 flash, but 3.7 flash with high reasoning is comparable and way way faster.

VirusNewbieon How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

yes, we should also point out when he makes silly predictions that don't come true.

VirusNewbieon How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

He charges people money for a newsletter that reinforces completely detached from reality viewpoints. If he's just making stuff up, that's called grifting, and it's good people call that out.

VirusNewbieon EVE Online moves to Python 3

>I long for a true, in-depth economic MMO

Schwab?

VirusNewbieon Ask HN: Should I leave web development to study medicine in my mid-30s?

non profit hospitals are the norm. Many insurance companies have capped profits. but the profits are capped as a percentage of revenue. So... Hmm...

VirusNewbieon Ask HN: Should I leave web development to study medicine in my mid-30s?

>The US operates a for-profit health system.

I have a non profit insurance and most of the hospitals in my area are non-profit as well. Some of the parts of the system are for profit (maybe the imaging centers?, pharma companies), but most of it isn't... that doesn't seem to be the main issue.

VirusNewbieon GLM-5.3-Flash

It looks like gemini 3.7 flash actually beats it in a lot of benchmarks, no?

https://x.com/Zai_org/status/2092616204787626030/photo/1

VirusNewbieon OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell

"How can OpenAI produce a LLM at scale more economically than Google, Amazon, and Microsoft which have experience in planet scale software and scale efficiencies unlike them".

One answer is they're quite good at poaching talent.

VirusNewbieon Do teams still use scrum and sprints?

I've worked at Verizon and Google, and they were much more interested in having quarter or bi-yearly shipping goals and really didn't give a fuck how the teams hit that goal.

Managers may or may not run daily or weekly 'check-ins' (I've never been on a team that did daily ones), there were no points assigned, there were very rough guesse of how long projects would take, but management just assumed people didn't need babysitting and people would work hard when necessary to unblock other folks.

VirusNewbieon Do teams still use scrum and sprints?

Yes, but not at big companies. SCRUM and Sprints are useful when you're a consultant and the client doesn't actually know what they want to build. When you're working at a software company, it's a red flag if product can't map out what they want.

VirusNewbieon Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

yes, it does sound weird to brag about that. 'Swapping out a data center' is something engineers working for AWS or GCP are do practiaclly every week.

VirusNewbieon Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

> Spend a minute or two thinking about the product journey GitHub would have taken under Google, and then think about how many non-search, non-advertising products have succeeded there.

Android

Youtube

Waymo

Chrome

Workspace

GCP

>Which amazing developer tools from Google do you use regularly?

Kubernetes

Jax

Tensorflow

gRPC

Istio

VirusNewbieon Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study

>In every case costs have gone down and outcomes have improved.

this isn't really true though, if you look at survival rates of many diseases.

VirusNewbieon Ask HN: Let's all sell our AI stocks, short Nvidia and pop the AI bubble

why do you like normal data centers but not "AI data centers"? What do you think the difference is? When does a normal data center turn into an AI data center?

VirusNewbieon Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's

is there any actual truth that real sugar is not as bad as HFCS? If I drink an american coke every day am I really worse off than if I have the cane sugar coke?

VirusNewbieon U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal

Google will put one job posting per PA per level regardless of one team hiring or twenty.

I have to assume they aren't the only employer to do this, so I think job openings are meaningless here.

VirusNewbieon Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

Right, but deepmind won't do well if they can't get TPUs, if the TPU network doesn't work, if their borg jobs aren't coming up fast enough, etc.

VirusNewbieon Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

Not true, they get paid at least a whole level (or two) above what we make. When I was discussing offers a few years ago, the GDM candidates regularly had six figure differentials even though they were the same level.

Maybe this isn't the same as the eight figure comp they'd get at Meta when they did their hiring spree, but no one thinks that's sustainable.

VirusNewbieon Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

> because even Gemini doesn't understand Google-internal tooling.

this is false, it's very good at internal tooling.