paulus_magnus2

Is it only my impression that in recent model releases every vendor is zooming in on hard skills: code, code, some math + physics ? AI is increasingly Jagged ?

We were promised AI can find cure for cancer and in powerpoints most enterprise value comes from Business-AI.

It might as well be that before business-AI can be done we have to cover the basics at superhuman level. All basics, not just entry level jobs like excels, coding jira tickets.

One-shotting a full game (albeit super impressive) looks like overfitting one skill over explaining why we have not much progress in other areas.

I live in an IT bubble and cannot tell if outside IT/math the models are also getting significantly better ?

Maybe one of the hiring managers lurking here can make an exception and admit their true rationale.

For now, I suspect the main issue is: you don't want the fallout of advertising the job at current market rate of £60k when all your existing employees are on £40k for the same position.

Kepler did make progress - he showed that equal area covered by the planet on the orbit implies that the orbits are elliptical (and vice versa). Enough progress for the next guy to take it further.

The next guy was Newton - he knew the solutions to a central force problem (thanks to his invention of Calculus - notation for calculating with infinitesimals). Movement with conserved angular momentuum <=> movement with the equal-area property <=> happens for a force ~1/r^2. From that he concluded that the central force is "gravity". The deriveration is simple enough for 1st semester physics student, but you will need to cleverly change variables once or twice to get a familiar integral.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_central-force_proble...

There is ~5-10 ways I want to comment / react. Hard to choose the first one..

There is a nonzero aim to cause outrage by the distribution chart & even more by the explanatory video. Perhaps we should defuse this as first angle of response.

Not all inequality is good/bad and not all is undeserved. And not all inequality is correctly described by net wealth alone with no additional measures or dimensions.

We don't have enough tags to distinguish a 28-year old NYC lawyer earning (or soon-to-be) $200k with $200k in student loan and negative equity RIGHT NOW from a 55y old working 2 minimum wage jobs at Amazon, sleeping in a trailer park.

In 10-15y one of them will be a millionaire and the other will be a poverty line retire without a pension.

And does the wealth include the pension pot? If you don't do anything silly, by the time you're nearing retirement you're sitting on a 500k home equity (split with the wife) + 500k each in retirement plans. So if you + the mrs both work a median job you end up with $1-2m family wealth.

Capitalism in EU works with different constraints and frictions so that we get less millionaires and also less people with negative wealth but the median family wealth (near retirement) in US is much higher than in EU.

IANAL nor ICJ nor ICC to officially name genxxide but This looks much (MUCH) worse than the worst thing Putin did to Ukraine

Indeed SpaceX is boiling multiple oceans at the same time and betting the timing will align.

-- SpaceX is building a starship factory, not just starship. The market won't deliver enough demand, they need to create their own

-- V3 Starlink constellation targets 100k sats. With 50 sats per flight (100t to orbit) you need 2000 flights to build constellation and then 400 flights per year to replace sats after 5y lifespan.

-- There was that idea of ballistic human travel but this is unlikely to materialize

-- There also was solarsat/powersat where solar power is beamed from space and if you massaged your math the right way the numbers were ~promising

-- AI saves the day. We "need" 1mln AI sats. That solves the demand and justifies the spending. for now

Starship is not yet reusable but they have the MVP and a fantastic position to iterate forward.

-- they have an orbital launcher with the largest diameter cargo bay

-- larger sats have bigger antennas and bigger PV area and more bus power. this scales as diam^2

-- 26 x Starlink v3 ~40-65 tons to LEO

-- every launch generates revenue, locks out the orbit for competitors.

-- they can launch more volume, more mass and cheaper than anyone else by a large margin

-- the design is validated - things will work

-- there is technical debt, issues but the rocket did the job

Caveats

-- timelines for full reusability are optimistic etc

-- there will be other issues in scaling to launching gigawats into orbit

-- cooling will have to be

-- Musk might go Full Villan mode before the thing works

[meta] I really didn't like that other negative comment getting voted to the top. Looks like it's made by someone who never worked in a bigco. For every bigco I worked, at any time there were hundreds if not thousands of open issues. You could list them and try arguing the company is about to fail and you'd scare people who don't know better.

It's the judgement of the severity of the issue that matters not #no_of_issues. And if there were 0 issues would our job exist?

[edit] getting the formatting right is very hard, maybe we could get a preview / TinyMCE ?

(in the comments here) there are some very interesting topics touched that would definitely warrant a discussion of their own.

One of these topics is how (in many countries) the government become the enemy of it's people - the politicians are aligning willingly (or with help of corruption) towards the rich elites (oligarchy). And they are building a failed state, two tier state - a system where the law only applies to the weak and the strong (plus politicians) can roam unchecked.

In theory the government is hired by sofereign to govern the country to the benefit of the people. In practice government can do just about any bad deed and there is noone to stop them. If you ever lived in 2nd or 3rd world country this is nothing new but the 1st world democracies have enjoyed wonderful egalitarian libral state for many decades and many of them are turning into authoritarian states. Or worse.

This doesn't conclude all my observations but I will stop myself here to see what other people think

Wouldn't it be enough to have a "walkman" styled mp3 app? Or even a smatwach-app or even just walkman-buds?

The physical casette /CD is obsolete, most people don't even have music stored on their internal storage and just stream things. And if you don't have the cassette /CD inside you don't need the form factor. You could probably stream via a smartwatch or in the future directly to the buds.

[Invert, always invert] If you're not a homeowner then "you'll own nothing and be happy",

Homes are not #1 best investment asset and they shouldn't be but the world works better if people own homes they live in. It's a matter of not having the most significant part of your life being exposed to the market volatility. Plus it nicely aligns incentives of the neighbourhood.

Go and check areas that are mostly rental and see how maintenance (of both homes and infrastructure) is forgotten on the altair of rentmaxxing.

Of course if you're at $400k at FAANG, your best investment isn't realestate but for majority of middle class and working class buying your own home, taking a good care of it and passing it to your grandchildren is a very good investment. Also the society benefits.

The easiest way to solve the unafordability without putting everyone into negative equity is WFH. Land is only expensive near where traditionally the good jobs are. Just allow people to move to a low cost area, build there and WFH

-- OK. Added location context for the vehicle

grok works, chatgpt still fails

[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/69932b20-3eb8-8003-9d9c-b4bba53033... [2] https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk_f32dd53d-7b36-4fa2-b3...

I see things were fixed already [2][4] but luckily a friend showed me this issue yesterday [1][2]

[1] 2026-02-15 https://chatgpt.com/share/6992e17b-9b28-8003-9da9-38533f257d...

[2] 2026-02-16 https://chatgpt.com/share/6992e135-c610-8003-9272-55058134d4...

[3] 2026-02-15 https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk_97e9717b-c2de-47e8-a4...

[4] 2026-02-16 https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk_b161bb03-4bed-4785-98...

We tried a few things yesterday and it was always telling you to walk. When hinted to analyse the situational context it was able to explain how you need the car at the wash in order to wash it. But then something was not computing.

~ Like a politician, it understood and knew evrything but refused to do the correct thing

Haha. True, CI success was not part of PR accept criteria at any point.

If you view the PRs, they bundle multiple fixes together, at least according to the commit messages. The next hurdle will be to guardrail agents so that they only implement one task and don't cheat by modifying the CI piepeline

The blog[0] is worded rather conservatively but on Twitter [2] the claim is pretty obvious and the hype effect is achieved [2]

CEO stated "We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor"

instead of

"by dividing agents into planners and workers we managed to get them busy for weeks creating thousands of commits to the main branch, resolving merge conflicts along the way. The repo is 1M+ lines of code but the code does not work (yet)"

[0] https://cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents

[1] https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2011776630440558799

[2] https://x.com/mntruell/status/2011562190286045552

[3]https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1qd541a/ceo_of...

Why are we always blaming the lowest developer for things? How about we target the Jira overlords who know exactly what they are doing?

I was once in a team developing a billing system that was counting how many times NSA invokated APIS to snoop on ATnT subscribers. The whole thing was very decoupled and dynamicly set up it took us developer very long time to figure out what this is used for. But the PM knew exactly what they did from the start.

No need to ban it. Just automaticly award full salary for 2x the noncompete period they put in your contract, payable in full a week after contract termination.

How does this look outside coding? Do we know of any other professions where there are whiteboard / leetcode style interviews?

The single biggest opportunity equalizer for the young generations come from 2 unlikely sources: COVID (mandatory WFH) and Musk (ubiquitous internet access). This opens doors for anyone who is hard working and can follow though a long term plan. No generation wealth needed. Study hard, get remote work, buy a cheap piece of land in the middle of nowhere, get married, get a mortgate, get kids.

Focus on your own stuff. Avoid politics, avoid social media, avoid HCOL cities, avoid career ladder. Do your 9-5 each day, log off and invest time in a hobby, family, farm etc.

That's not the 1st time I see this thinking fallacy.

please talk to your grandparents about the topic and report back to us.

How is housing expensive?? Assuming a 1.2m house (for easy math). You pay 200k down and take a 1m loan which is 6k/mo. After 10y you sell the house for 2.4m. Having paid 720k, ~500k of mortgage is left over. So 200k turns into 2.4m -500k -720k = 1.18m profit.

Rather than renting for 5k (600k over 10y).

How is housing expensive??

Please let's not glorify working from 6am (effectively allocating time since 5am for work) unless you also left office at 2pm. Only seeing your children on weekends to make your boss 10% happier is not something to be proud about

this is another overreach of collectivism virus creeping upon us to make parenting even harder.

As of 2022, the average cost of raising a child to age 17 is $310605 [1] [2]. That does not include all the unpaid parenting time which is probably another 40h per week between the parents. So we're talking 18+ years worth of unpaid time invested (or sunk) into your child. And when they go to work the government gets to tax them and keep all of it.

Financially speaking we've invested $500k (equiv) into each child and the government gets to keep all the return.

For the government and capitalist system it's much cheaper to import "ready" adults from abroad after someone else bore the cost.

The tax system and incentives need to be re-arranged if we want people to have children. Even the biggest proponent (Musk) isn't doing anything to help out. Surely his employees have no time for parenting after these 60h weeks.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/09041... [2] https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-true-cost-of-raising-a-child

The progressives should really pick up on the benefits of WFH and become active proponents.

WFH is the biggest equalizer of geographic opportunity, decreases physical disability impact, decreases carbon footprint, improves meritocracy, decreases opportinities for bullying and mobbing and other power play. Increases chances of mothers being able to work. You name it, this ticks all boxes.

Why haven't they already??

WFH is an invention equal to washingmachine + dishwasher where 2h each day is not being lost anymore by unproductive activity. With plenty of externalities on top of the lost time.

If (only as a test excercise) for 5 years we mandated the employer to bare the commute cost we would quickly see if RTO / WFH makes more economical sense.

Microsoft has access to ALL corporate data of ALL companies (sharepoint, teams, outlook, office365). Remaining step is to link chatgpt to it and train automated agents.

Unfortunately this was published a few revisions too early IMHO. And a couple of peer reviews but the exploration itself is a nice try.

Due to nonlinearity of the rocket equation some assumptions are really really really off [a] [b]. V2 only has 2500m/s deltaV [5] and the launch vehicle's delta-v needed to achieve low Earth orbit starts around 9.4 km/s [6] (the actual delta-v is typically 1.5–2.0 km/s more for atmospheric drag and gravity drag). [7] Therefore V2 only deliveres (2500/9400)^2 (7% or 1/14 of the needed kinetic energy)

Trouble is we only get to convert 1-4% of the launch mass into payload in LEO with chemical engines. And that's for large rockets with economies of scale.

Sputnik (rocket) Mass: 267,000 kg Payload to LEO 500kg [3]

The smallest orbital rocket is the Japanese SS-520 with the following characteristics: It can launch 3 kg to orbit in 4.4 minutes. It's a modified sounding rocket with three solid-propellant steps. It's only 9.54 m long, 0.52 m dia., and has a mass of 2.6T @ liftoff [google]. The SS-520 rocket cost less than $5 million [google]

Bolting a 2nd stage on top of V2 was tried in [2] programme and with both stages at ~0.7 reliability things only work half the time. Not commercially viable.

Is there a market for small & cheap rockets? [8] What about dual purpose ? W54 "Davy Crockett" Atomic Projectile was the smallest nuke designed to maintain fission and could be carried around in a backpack! The final weapon was 10.862 inches (275.9 mm) in diameter, 15.716 inches (399.2 mm) in length and 50.9 pounds (23.1 kg). I guess this could be worked with. With the current risk of global war everyone should be mass producing a small launcher. However this way we still only get 1cubesat into orbit per $1m, not what the autor aimed at.

To get below $1000/kg into orbit we will need a bigger boat. And that's what SpaceX is doing.

(sorry to not have these in the nice order)

[8] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/36261/why-isnt-the...

[a] assume that our bigger, more complicated (two-stage), and higher tech (LH2/LOX instead of Ethanol/LOX), launcher costs ten times as much as the V2

[b] If our mass produced LH2/LOX launcher equals the performance of the Delta 6925 by placing 3900 kg in LEO, the cost to LEO is US$333/kg; if we achieve better throw-weight, this figure goes down accordingly. If we build the thing so cheap, dumb, and heavy that its payload is only 1000 kg--one metric ton--the cost rises to US$1300/kg, which is still a factor of ten lower than the comparable cost to LEO for Ariane, Atlas, Delta, and Titan.

[1] So yes, a stripped-down stretch-tank engine-augmented two-stage V2-derived rocket, massing 351 tons as opposed to the 12.5 tons in the original, would be able to reach orbit*. :)

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTV-G-4_Bumper

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_(rocket)

[1] https://www.quora.com/If-boosters-were-strapped-on-the-V2-ro...

[5] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/59879/how-much-del... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_orbital_energy

The value is this magic building: you put metal sheets & plastic granulate in one door and cars come the other door.

Most other vendord are only a marketing shell whereas everything is outsourced to a galaxy of suppliers. Tesla has full vertical integration and captures value of the whole chain including dealerships. Plus Teslas are have performance of supercar and can demand much higher margins.

We should ask ourselves why other launch providers have not done this? Why have we been told by BMW, Mercedes, Lexus "this is all there is", "people will only buy so many $100k cars per year". Then Tesla came an squeezed $1tn valuation into a niche we've been told does not exist. Or is impossible, unprofittable and we don't need that much innovation. Should we immediately fire all other CEOs?

In the end Musk hires the same people from the same planet, uses the same raw materials, banks and same customers.

Elon did his usual "escape forward" trick but in the end this iteration does not deliver what was promised.

I reserved a $40k truck in 2019 that was supposed to be much easier to manufacture than regular cars - hence the relatively good price. No expensive paint shop, much easier line to make body panels of cold rolled steel bent into shape. Exaskeleton from a single. Industrial design, no side mirrors, no wipers. 6 passengers.

We should ask ourselvelves are the original promises still possible under a different package? And please make it road legal for Europeans with a regular driving licence.

Could this be the real reason women are paid less than men?