everforward

I don't think the pay is really what changed all that much. Median pay for SWEs according to ZipRecruiter is $118k, which is $40k in 1987 USD (the year the person in the article started). BLS data from 1987 puts that at mid-way through the 4th income quintile, which is middle clash-ish.

Levels.fyi slants towards the higher end of pay and they say $192k, which is $65.4k in 1987 or right at the bottom of the top quintile.

Part of what changed is that software abstracted enough for hardware and software to become separate fields, so a much smaller portion of software folks are able to wire together batteries and motors and what not to go with their software.

Learning paredit is on my list of things to do.

I've been loving Clojure for hobby projects lately but my editing setup sucks for Clojure. The vi commands I'm used to using are bad in Clojure (eg copying by line almost always means unbalanced parens), and the autocomplete LLMs are very inconsistent about closing syntax correctly.

It seems super cool, I just haven't done it enough for my brain to reach for paredit keybinds instead of vim chords.

They are a pain if they get unbalanced if you aren’t using paredit. Like if I vi delete the last line of a function out of habit it’s a pain to get them back in the right order.

It’s easier if everything is parens, just hit paren til the errors are gone.

I believe it would be (let ‘(a b)), but I’m not sure if that’s valid or not. That’s how Racket does its version of defn

This mirrors my experience.

Windows gives you nice sliders for things, which they will happily break on a whim. Linux forces you to memorize a Lovecraftian string of characters to do something, but it will generally stick for a long time.

I use both, with differing ideologies. My Linux is heavily customized with keybinds and semi-niche software that enables my workflows because I know it will stick. On my Windows machines, I've accepted that Microsoft owns that machine and I have to adapt my workflow to fit their sensibilities.

That makes a lot of sense to me. The implementation feels odd to me, though. If I’m reading it right, I type in literals normally and then all these hooks decide whether they want to change what I’ve typed in? It feels like I have to remember the custom literals I have installed to make sure I don’t accidentally conform to some spec and end up with a custom literal instead of the string I wanted.

Something like EDN readers seem saner to me where I wrap the value in something that denotes the function to use to parse the value. If I do “192.168.1.0/24” I get a string literal, if I do #cidr{192.168.1.0/24} then it hands the value off to the cidr custom literal.

That’s my 2 cents, I hate when things implicitly modify my literals.

> After telling Ben that the defendant doesn't accept the subpoena (can you even refuse being served like that?)

They can't, and I'm surprised the officer wasn't aware of that. Confirm the person's ID, hand them the papers or sit them somewhere and tell them, they have been served. Process-wise, all that matters is confirmation to the court that the person is aware of and was given possession of the documents. If they don't like it and set them on fire, that's not the court or the server's problem.

I think there's also generally a process for someone avoiding being served. Ie if you can prove they're trying to avoid being served, that is per se evidence that they are aware they are being served and can be considered as served. Iirc, it's not preferred because it's way, way cleaner for the court to have a signed document but they can and will do it.

Legalities aside, this is why you'd normal hire someone to do this. The cops don't want to be involved, and especially so for YouTube drama. Hire someone completely unrelated who can show up, be completely emotionally detached and do the "I'm just trying to do my job, man" schtick. They're also much better for contested servings. If one party says the other got papers and the other denies it, there's a "he said, she said". If you hire a professional who doesn't care about the outcome of the case then it carries a lot more credibility.

Postgres is durable by default, it's ACID compliant. It is not reliable in the HA sense by default.

Either way, I'd bet a hosted Postgres with HA is cheaper than whatever PaaS you're thinking of.

Which ones are you thinking of? It feels to me like all the open source models I've seen lately are still pushed by corporate entities who don't want the legal blowback.

I can't really think of a new open source model that's "by the people, for the people" in the sense of a crowd-funded/trained model.

> I've always been annoyed when I see a Pi with nothing connected to its GPIO header; why not just use a cheap thin client?

There have also been times when Pi's were cheap enough and x86 idled so power-inefficiently that you'd save money over a reasonable time horizon if you couldn't run your old laptops at full throttle.

Absurdly extreme example, but at one point I decided to replace a couple (maybe 3) RPi's with a single old Dell rack server off Ebay plus replaced my router with one running pfsense. I knew it would be mostly idle, that thing had 2 Xeon processors to replace 3 cheap ARM processors.

Between the 2 rack servers, my power bill went up by enough to buy a new Pi or two every month. It was like $80/month extra in power bills.

> Surely someone is willing to take a 5000x boost in reasoning on a small research model... None of them have even tried anything resembling this AFAIK. It does not seem like something 100% obvious to them.

Without knowing anything about the technology at all, if it can't be aligned I could see no one pursuing it. As far as I know, alignment is where the "don't tell the user how to make meth or generate CP" instructions end up and the last I saw eliding all the unsavory training data made materially worse LLMs.

It could maybe be post-evaluated by a non-GRAM LLM? Not being aligned is probably a fatal flaw or at least a very short runway into Congress.

No, I don't have any fears about housing security, that changes the concerns to be primarily around corruption on both sides of that.

On one hand, we're talking about taxes large enough to be multiples of a public official _per home_. Open bribery is an option, but there's also the potential to push some money into campaign funds for whoever controls the department in control of this and then under-valuing the home by a huge margin. The home valuation is subjective here, so there's no perjury for under-valuing your home by a huge margin.

The other side of this is more brazen, but would involve someone having some kind of influence over the government official that makes buy/not buy decisions, intentionally over-valuing the home, and then having the government buy it.

I also just don't really understand the point. In order for the government to make sane "buy or not buy" decisions, they have to know what the house is worth on the open market. If they already know what it's worth, why not just tax that value and skip these hoops? If they don't know and can't find that number then this policy is going to be a crapshoot because they don't know if the home owner is undervaluing the home or if that's what it's actually worth.

> Home ownership is not the definition of economic class.

It was at one point, so if you're saying it doesn't now then your "social movement" is really just goalpost moving. I'm sure the upper class does grow if you just declare that the boundaries of it are now lower. We're all millionaires if we just redefine millionaire to mean "not currently overdrafted".

> In economics, you deduct the inflation rate from growth to get the real rate of return.

Which neglects the impact of inflation on the principal. If I put $100k into the S&P in 2016 I'd have 303k now (303% value). Cumulative inflation during that period was 38.8%, so your metric says I'm at 164% rate of return. $303k today is only worth $218k in 2016 dollars though, so I'm really only up 118% in absolute value.

That's also only using the CPI, and neglecting asset inflation which impacts stock prices outside of actual value creation. More money floating around means more gets parked in index funds, regardless of whether the company is actually doing anything better.

There are definitely things I wouldn't roll the dice on from Harbor Freight.

Anything that unpredictably dumps large amounts of kinetic energy on failure is one of those.

I had a buddy that bought the tool for getting car suspension springs on from Harbor Freight, and I definitely wouldn't roll those dice.

> Why not use it?

It dramatically cuts housing security, and allows local governments to inflate their own property values by doing what is basically eminent domain without the requirement to show need. Make everyone pay taxes, use those to buy up homes, re-list the homes at a higher price. They can effectively price gouge using tax dollars. This could happen to you at literally any point, and that local government doesn't care if the house won't even sell as long as the other houses rise enough in value to cover the lost tax revenue.

I've also heard the same thing but allowing private citizens to buy them, which is almost worse. Anyone sufficiently well off can just wreck someone else's life. If I hate my neighbor and they report the real value of their house, I can force them to sell it to me so they have to move and I can resell it while only losing fees in the process. They would have to over-value their house by an amount that I'm not okay losing, which ends in a sort of auction of escalating values. At the very tippy top, if I'm Warren Buffet's neighbor there's probably not a value I can pay taxes on that would stop him from buying me out if he wanted. Any number that would be a meaningful loss to him is something I can't even pay the taxes on.

> the quality is so poor for many items that it simply is no good for society in any way.

There are some that are genuinely dangerous and bad for society, but there are tons of goods that are "the same thing but half the price because it lasts a quarter the time" that have genuine utility.

Harbor Freight has basically made a drop-shipping business out of it. I often have tools that I need but will probably use 4 times in my life, and the Harbor Freight stuff is crap but will probably work 4 times.

Copy that over a bunch of verticals and it starts to make sense. Clothing for a costume I'll wear maybe twice, niche cooking gadgets for very specific things, tools to do a one-time repair on a car, a flash drive to turn over photos to family members, yada yada.

> The main thing holding people back is the housing crisis. This is orthogonal to the value creation of businesses.

This feels wholly at odds with saying most social mobility is upwards. So most of the social movement is into a class where a home and vacations are a given, but we also have a growing class of people who can't afford a home? Per BLS, average real wages are down 0.3% YoY https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm .

> Value creation is growth. If it didn’t exist the S&P would still be 42.55$.

This reductively assumes "value creation" is the only effect on the S&P pricing. You'll note a ton of graphs correlate with it, e.g. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi is the US inflation rate, which also tracks the S&P pricing. Ie if a company is worth $100 a year ago and inflation was 4%, I'd expect to pay $104 for their stock with 0 value creation whatsoever.

This makes me deeply curious about how LLMs understand language. Do LLMs relate cognates more than words that are dissimilar in different languages? I wonder if that plays some role in the effectiveness of tokenization.

> Isn't it just a matter of not changing the previous context?

Yes, but a lot of harnesses change previous context. E.g. the system prompt injects the current time/date, working directory, files in the working directory, etc. Compaction also changes the whole previous context. I _think_ changing the list of tools also invalidates cache, so invoking a subagent with different tools would invalidate the cache.

My vague impression is that it's in a similar vein to functional programming languages. It generally disallows doing things that lead to bugs (cache misses in this case), and presumably allows you to do those things in a way that makes it much clearer that this is likely to cause cache misses. I would guess that in this paradigm, you don't mutate your existing session, you derive a new session by mutating the prior context into a new context.

My argument is predicated on the assumption that mainstream hardware manufacturers will copy the way Apple and Framework have made system memory usable for inference.

In that world, a) we are already at or close to having enough memory in local devices to do inference locally, and b) that memory isn't inference-specific and can be utilized for other things. Most devices come with enough memory to do some level of inference, and some come with plenty (eg a gaming desktop probably has 32GB+ of RAM in it).

You aren't going to run Kimi on it, but I think the reality for a lot of consumer inference is that it doesn't need to be. It's going to be a lot of things that are soft, and easily answered by a search API, so the LLM really just needs to be able to skim and summarize. Going a step further, we may even see some kind of hybrid approach where a local OpenRouter kind of thing decides whether the task is soft enough to do locally with models that fit in RAM or if it needs to be farmed out to a PaaS provider.

People that want NixOS should absolutely be free to install it, I just think making it the default makes the system dead on arrival. There are hordes of people using Arduino's editor on esp32 boards because they don't want to learn esp-idf (not a judgement, Arduino works fine enough for most uses).

> I don't really understand why would the team that already got a full plate decide to also invent a whole new Linux system while they're creating their hardware device.

Honestly, I just wouldn't solve that. Nix makes the product way harder to sell, and home-building a solution is either a) an entire product all by itself, or b) shitty, in the "it only works on very specific happy paths" sense.

I also frankly just don't think it's a feature worth as much to consumers as it costs to make. At worst, it's a minor inconvenience to reflash a Pi card. If I'm really lazy, I just disable systemd services for whatever was on it and layer the new stuff on top. It's like 5 commands to get it back to "close enough to fresh".

China also does massive amounts of investment in new technologies and local companies. One of the reasons capitalism concentrates wealth these days is that it’s cheaper to generate enormous capex to prevent paying for labor than to deal with the opex of labor. Ie the road to wealth requires either wealth or investment from the wealthy.

In capitalism, the wealthy provide the capex and reap the profit. In China, the government provides a lot of the capex and claims a lot of the profit (either directly or indirectly). They can then re-invest that, use it to set salaries free from market forces, etc.

The US could do more of that without getting into the contentious issue of raising personal taxes. Ie the government could control the flow of GPUs into the country, asserting that it had the right of first purchase, distribute them to a tightly controlled private company (think power or water company, with margins set by law), and probably make a profit on the cheaper hardware because they’d be a massive purchasing block. We won’t, though, because Google, Amazon, Oracle, etc are currently posed to make a _ton_ of money off doing basically the exact same thing.

“Late-stage capitalism” is the normal term for expressing a belief that capitalism tends to eat itself over a long enough time horizon.

> The owner of FoodCo put in a lot of their money upfront to make the company happen in the first place. Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.

This is blatantly untrue in the face of even a cursory thought. If the deli didn’t exist, that worker would have done any number of other jobs. Subsistence farming, doing deli stuff out of his house, maybe even community funding a coop grocery store.

That was how things worked at many points in human history. Instead of “private citizen makes $thing and collects rent” it was some variety of “municipality funds $thing for the community”. That just doesn’t extrapolate to a global economy well, for better or worse.

I think there’s a realistic chance consumer inference moves on-device. I think it really depends on marketing.

My non-tech friends and family would probably be served perfectly fine by local models today, if they had a working web search tool. Their queries are often “soft” and don’t have an exact answer. My mom and aunt used it to pick a hairstyle, my mom used it to get an image of what a room would look like with particular drapes in it, etc. Stuff I think mid-sized local models like Gemma or smaller Qwens could do without issue. They just don’t have a device that will run them.

Businesses won’t move. They need a huge context so they can stuff a bunch of Confluence pages in it and 300 tools and it needs to read an entire codebase and yada yada. The hardware depreciation and electricity will probably make it a net zero or even cost more than paying for API access.

I strongly disagree here. On the technical side, I'm sure it works, I almost never hear about Nix not working.

On the practical side, "learn Nix" is a _massive_ onboarding task. Without Nix, I'd probably pick one up assuming I'll find something to do with it. With Nix, I'd wait until I have a project I know is worth figuring out Nix.

If this were my project, I'd probably go with the absolute most simple answer: multiple SD card readers. Install the base OS on one card, allow hot-swapping the other card, do some mount point stuff with the other card (like maybe it auto-mounts to /usr/local, and have packages install into /usr/local). Or maybe some kind of overlayfs with the other card. SD cards are cheap, and I'd rather glue an SD card holder to the back of a Flipper than learn Nix.

Software is the only field where people will routinely argue producers can’t be expected to make a product that won’t harm its users and I don’t buy it.

The way your argument reads to me is “software as a category has such little utility that profit margins can only be derived from corner cutting”.

The reality of the landscape is that most companies don’t get hacked as the result of an incredible and novel Spectre-esque attack, it’s something bland and entirely preventable.

Eg https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-31324

SAP got a CVE because they just flat out didn’t implement auth on an endpoint in an app architecture that will execute files just for being in a certain directory, and also didn’t prevent writing files to executable paths (or maybe that’s how the feature works, not a SAP person). For every 0 day with a novel root, there are like a thousand that are some kind of humdrum “didn’t enforce auth/SQL sanitation/XSS/other well known exploit with comprehensive solutions”.

I do think there are good reasons to withhold some classes of exploit. If a hacker writes a 14 page proof on how to beat some encryption we had no idea was vulnerable, that’s one thing. Getting owned for making an insecure architecture and then not even putting auth over it is a whole other issue.

I looked through and there's a bunch of stuff that's in poor coding practice.

E.g.

https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai/blob/main/internal/fileu... <- that recursively creates directories, but will only change permissions on the innermost dir (user may be unable to cd into intermediary directories)

https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai/blob/main/internal/mcpsr... <- all the json.Marshal calls in this file just suppress errors, so if anything un-marshallable ends up in there the app will return empty strings with no errors logged

https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai/blob/main/runtime/regist... <- `Register` embeds a copy of the code from `IsAvailable` because of the locking; that could be replaced with a private `isAvailable` that has no locking that both use (after doing their own locking)

https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai/blob/main/runtime/exec.g... <- these functions are identical except for the strings.Trim, one should just call the other and then trim the output

Just out of curiosity, I enabled some other linters and it looks bad. Excluding test files, there are 110 functions with a cyclomatic complexity over 10 and 7 that are _over 50_. The worst is at 86, which is mind-boggling.

Could probably find more, but you get the drift. I'm sure it runs, but stylistically this is more along the lines of what I would expect an intern to do.

This is also sort of nit-picky, but like half the stuff in https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai/blob/main/docs/dev/backe... isn't idiosyncratic, it's just the way those things work and a lot of them aren't even tricky. The one linked is particularly blatant; that's not limited to os.Stat that's literally just how permissions work. Denying permission on inodes is a property of the folder, not the file.

I lack that confidence here, because it doesn't appear to really involve AR/VR. Eye tracking is the only feature this really uses afaict. The AR seems like a net negative here, it's just the only device Apple has that has a consistent and remotely convenient view of your eyes.

The device is large and makes the user look weird and non-present, which are net negatives.

The only benefit of the AR is showing the directional arrows, but they could get the same thing with much less weird looking non-prescription glasses with arrows sharpied on them. More realistically, anyone really using for mobility probably develops muscle memory for which direction to look to go where and then they don't even need that. At that point it's just a really expensive, really clunky camera.

I tried watching that but X either broke their video controls or disabled them so I can’t skip ahead and the first couple minutes are _slow_.

The whole bug bounty thing is a mess, admittedly, but lacking a bug bounty program entirely feels like immediately losing the moral high ground on “you should have told us first”. There’s a lively debate about what bugs are worth, but it’s objectively not $0 for many classes because a botnet developer will buy them for some amount.

Personally, a big part of my view is formed by the educated assumption that security practices will never improve unless poor security becomes a liability. That’s unlikely to happen with “responsible disclosure” because it gets swept under a rug. Immediate public disclosure changes that risk calculus a lot. I think wed see a lot more downward pressure from vendors to their suppliers if $RandomSaaS had to worry about losing their pants because Oracle had a vuln published.