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ramesh31

3,949 karma · joined June 16, 2021

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ramesh31··on Jobless tech workers are being left out of San Francisco's AI boom
>"Okay but what if they are outdoorsy and like to spend weekend in places like the Sierras, snowboard/ski, and proximity to national parks?"

Whiteface and Killington are about the same drive as Tahoe from SF, with vertical on par (3k+). Catskills even closer. There's no Yosemite obviously, but upstate NY/Vermont is as good as it gets east of the Rockies.

ramesh31··on Let Me Ch...
This is like a checklist of bad writing cliches
ramesh31··on Jobless tech workers are being left out of San Francisco's AI boom
>"Where though?"

NYC is an infinitely larger, more varied, interesting, and multi-cultural city than SF. Better transit and more affordable too, while reaching similar salaries. Anyone who's not drinking the tech-bro kool-aid but still wants to be part of the industry at the highest levels should be there.

ramesh31··on Jobless tech workers are being left out of San Francisco's AI boom
>Instead you could have one or two local devs from your social circle, swing by their desk at 9am and they have the feature that Claude built merged by lunch?

Because the amount of skill it takes to do that is not commensurate with a salary high enough to afford living in SF.

ramesh31··on Ask HN: What's it like working at Google nowadays? Core teams like Search, Ads?
>"We just let the LLMs rip and spend most of our time in the sleeping pods or the buffet. Six figures for days of relaxation. It truly is the good life."

There was a sweet spot in mid-2025 where this was actually the case; Claude Code early adopters could complete sprint work in their sleep while the rest of the world (management) hadn't caught on yet.

Now it's just "oh, this should take you guys a day, right?"

ramesh31··on US Reps Lead Democratic Resolution Opposing A.I. Bubble Bailout for Big Tech
>"Better to just oppose all bailouts for all sectors, always."

This is exactly the line of thought that turned the Wall Street crash into the Great Depression, which we learned from and did not repeat in 2008. The answer lies somewhere in the middle.

ramesh31··on The Style Is Father of the Man
The way Harold Bloom talked about him, there must really be something there. But I'm squeamish. What to do?
ramesh31··on CNC Stone Carving
>"Their grandfathers never had it that definition, but they somehow think their grandfathers never struggled and otherwise had it a lot easier than their grandfathers really did."

I don't think it's that they think they never struggled. It's that the struggle resulted in something. Work hard, because it will probably earn you a promotion. Put a little extra on the mortgage every month, because you might be able to pay it off one day. Save a bit for your kids college, because then they'll be able to afford it. All of these things are practically quaint at this point. Some people can pull it off, but it's the exceptional case now, not the median as it once was. Increasingly you need a 90th percentile 21st century income to get a 50th percentile 20th century life.

ramesh31··on CNC Stone Carving
>"Concretely it absorbed an excess of male heirs so they could live a comfy life and would not try an hostile takeover over their elder brothers' state."

That was often a consequence, but in general it provided an alternative pathway to male success in life and a means of advancing through a respected status hierarchy that did not depend on the traditional markers. Something sorely lacking today, when even outside the question of inheritance you are faced with the near impossibility of achieving the economically independent and socially valuable life that your grandfather or father had by simply working.

ramesh31··on CNC Stone Carving
>"When AI wipes out programming jobs over the next few years, do you think we will see a revival in the number of young men going into monkhood?"

The church historically absorbed excess males in this way and gave them a dignified purpose in life, it's not a crazy thought at all.

ramesh31··on CSS-Tricks has a new owner
>"I'm concerned about the long time viability of this move considering the current landscape of web development."

I owe Coyier and CSS Tricks a huge debt to getting my career started in the 2000s. It's loss will be tragic. But web development (as we knew it) has gone the way of elevator operators. Dead and gone. Good on the guys for getting their bag while it still had some value.

ramesh31··on Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
How can the numbers ever work? $15k pays my electric bill for a decade. I get that it amortizes beyond that, but it's a heck of a sunk cost that just doesn't make sense IMO.
ramesh31··on Pharo 14
>"Reading stuff like this continue to make advances and new releases is like a fever dream when everything else is all AI."

Do the advances mean anything though? Alan Kay is a personal hero of mine, I love the aesthetic of Smalltalk, and the dream-that-was once upon a time of such a system was a real missed opportunity for the evolution of programming environments. But is it anything more than a neat hobby at this point?

ramesh31··on Lego collaboration with Daft Punk
Multi-platinum global superstar pop music duo does a thing for money. More at 11.
ramesh31··on Where Wealth Is Moving in America (2023)
>People vote with their feet. This shouldn't be a negative. Some people don't want to be over taxed and over regulated in places like CA and NY, so they move to states they see as fitting their needs/culture better.

Sure but the point being that that would incur an exit tax from most major countries, whereas the freedom of movement within the US creates this weird system where you can gain incredible wealth benefitting from the infrastructure and economy of one state, then just walk away and decide not to be taxed any longer. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, just that that ends up screwing over the state in the long term.

ramesh31··on Where Wealth Is Moving in America (2023)
A majority of California's budget problems come from trying to absorb what should be a federally handled expense. Medi-Cal is what Medicaid should be across the board. But they end up in the classic trap for US states, which is to say you have all of the problems of a major country but none of the stickiness to the tax base like one, making it impossible to sustain these things long term.
ramesh31··on EA is shutting down BioWare
>The silver lining is that the talent didn't vanish and we have teams like Archetype working on Exodus, Stoic with The Banner Saga, or offshoots like Yellow Brick and Beamdog.

This is generally the case in the games industry. Great dev teams seem to function more like bands than companies. For however you feel about the latest iterations, the first Call of Duty was an absolute revelation to the FPS genre that we never would have gotten without the EA firing of the MoH team.

ramesh31··on PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35 out
Indeed this is undoubtedly happening as we speak to untold millions of forgotten sites.
ramesh31··on PHP 8.2.35
PHP runs literally half the web. Half the web will not apply this patch in any reasonable amount of time (a huge portion will never). This is going to be absolutely catastrophic.
ramesh31··on What shall I teach my son?
>"Spaceship Earth – we’re all in this together; let’s take care of each other and our planet."

What scares me about statements like this is that they sound so nice, until you ask: Who are "we"? Who is "us"? There's increasingly no longer an answer to that, and it underpins my pessimism for the future. No one gives a shit about the collective anything. It's too hard just to maintain your own existence anymore.

ramesh31··on Show HN: SimCity, but with Permits
Guys please just add a line to your Claude.md "never use bordered cards" to avoid the vibe look
ramesh31··on DeepSeek banned from U.S. federal civilian agencies under new DHS order
>"while the U.S. House is 59 and the Senate is 65."

The average is probably highly misleading. Young folks have started filtering in from the oldest retiring or expiring, but all of the institutional power still lies in the 70+ crowd. Chuck Grassley, 95, is third in line for the presidency right now.

ramesh31··on There Are over 1M New York City Street Signs. Here's How They Are Made.
>"The sign shop, which is part of the New York City Department of Transportation, has a staff of 46 workers, including seven letterers who lay out signs by hand and a blacksmith who makes custom brackets to securely attach signs to traffic poles."

This is one of the things I truly love about NYC. Any other city would have outsourced this operation to some third world sweatshop or massive corporation. Instead you have a whole crew of local tenured high quality jobs with good benefits run by citizens of the city.

ramesh31··on DeepSeek banned from U.S. federal civilian agencies under new DHS order
>"government banned Deepseek in February last year, including downloadable GGUF's - with some nebulously hand-wavy 'it's just too dangerous'"

With the latest research on backdoored weights this really isn't tinfoil hat territory at all, and trusting every individual agency to fully vet what they're hosting and not use 3rd party inference is a tall order. I can't blame them.

ramesh31··on 'Der Viener Schlinger': The meat cannon that launched 20k hot dogs
>"Since 2018, a Gatling gun version mounted on a prop grill has been shooting out brats at Milwaukee Bucks’ home games at the rate of 24 per 10 seconds; each is enclosed in a foam noodle, which allows condiment packets to accompany the dog."

America.

ramesh31··on Credit where credit is due
Pangram et. al are complete total nonsense. The academic world was trained for decades to rely on tools like TurnItIn.com because they were fairly reliable; searching for hashes of known text is a simple tractable problem, and so being non-technical they've conflated the two. There's no going back now unless you are performing pencil and paper proctored exams.
ramesh31··on Ask HN: How to deal with shipping AI-written code you don't understand?
You just stop caring. Everyone else did about three months ago. Time to find something new to care about.
ramesh31··on Microsoft Teams is a red flag
Written by someone who's never seen a major enterprise Slack bill
ramesh31··on Linus Torvalds's first LLM-assisted patch series
Did you consider he would have thoroughly evaluated the top contenders objectively and gone with the one producing the best results? Honestly I wouldn't expect anything else.
ramesh31··on Character.ai Files for Bankruptcy
>"Let this be a warning to shit companies with shit products and shit business models."

...that you can be a shit company with a shit product and a shit business model and still make a shit ton of money and get hired by Google?

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