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sokoloff

45,022 karma · joined August 22, 2008

E: jim at cimpress dot com

Disclaimer: I work as VP, Logistics, Optimization, and Operations for Cimpress, but all views here are mine and not Cimpress nor Vistaprint's.

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sokoloff··on RealPage rent-pricing case wraps with nearly $360M to renters
It would dramatically reduce the availability of rental properties. So, if you really hate renters, it’s a good thing I guess.

Extremely low chance that I’m going to put my entire net worth on the line to own and rent out housing in my own name.

Exactly zero chance that I’ll do it in a multi-family or apartment building.

Holding these things in corporate title is sensible risk management and compartmentalization.

sokoloff··on RealPage rent-pricing case wraps with nearly $360M to renters
I’m struggling to see how real estate would be catastrophically harmed by higher salaries. Could you help me see the line between those two points?

Naively, if I knew everyone’s salaries were about to double, I’d hope to be holding a fair amount of real estate going into that doubling.

sokoloff··on Study estimates 75% of NFL players who died over 15-year span had CTE
I think we had an ambulance on-site for all our high-school football games.
sokoloff··on ChatGPT and Codex usage limits merging
You already have the choice to cancel your subscriptions and run local LLMs that keep your data local and private to you.

Other people also have that choice and many choose differently from you, but no one’s taken your choice away.

sokoloff··on Cuba is skipping its November 1, 2026 clock change and staying on DST until 2027
Then parents who do morning routine or drop off have to come in an hour later, and their partner also wants to wake an hour later so they can stay up with the family an hour later, which means they don’t want to open the coffee shop until an hour later, so now the random commuter wants to start later so their coffee shop is open, and pretty soon it’s just as easy to say “ah screw it, we’re just going to change the clocks twice a year…”
sokoloff··on AI promised less work. I've never worked more
I suspect the one who fires 80, does twice as much, and (maybe optionally) pays the 20 125% (as if they were 25) probably handily beats them both.
sokoloff··on America has lost 200k of jobs in media, film and the arts. How much is AI?
I see tons of straight-up fully AI videos being offered, whether it’s NotebookLM discussions of some topic, some nonsense reading of “accepted answers” to a tech query, or the maddening “here’s three ways old money acts”, I assume based on being interested in tech topics and retirement saving topics.
sokoloff··on America has lost 200k of jobs in media, film and the arts. How much is AI?
Taking the low end of “more than $100K” as being exactly $100K, 3.2M people earning $100K/yr each is $320B/yr and many earn way more than $100K, obviously.

I think either your $50B/yr in the US figure is low (would mean less than 1 in 6 dollars is earned in the US) or, I think more likely, your 3.2M figure is too high.

Where did you source the 3.2M figure?

sokoloff··on America has lost 200k of jobs in media, film and the arts. How much is AI?
It’s confirmation bias; you notice and remember the misses while mostly overlooking the hits.
sokoloff··on LLMs are making formal software verification feasible at a much larger scale
I think it will create a lot of jobs (overall) that pay twice the median wage.

The fact that some of those jobs would have paid 3-5x the median wage in 2021 isn’t a scathing indictment of AI, even if it’s inconvenient for the slice of the world who could have made 4x the median wage and now only makes double it.

sokoloff··on How employment is changing at Anthropic
Then you must think it exists outside the human brain, right?
sokoloff··on How employment is changing at Anthropic
> it is helping people realize their ideas are stupid or their busywork doesn’t matter way faster.

While this is a possible explanation, it seems far more likely that people are finding more private/solo ways to pursue whatever their equivalent of “make the next Facebook” or “predict the stock market”.

I would be very surprised if the was a reduction in total duration of pursuit of these type of ideas. I think there’s just a reduction in them asking you as a dev to help.

sokoloff··on Monte-Carlo Simulations
I agree that it’s a tool to explore risk. I just think it’s more useful if you pull the likely universe of outcomes from the sequences of the past (sliding your retirement across multiple starting dates) more than worry about what happens if we get multiple -43% years in a row. There’s no realistic portfolio that will survive that, but also no realistic underlying economic model where that happens (or if it does, where what you have saved really matters).
sokoloff··on I love software rendering
“I just need to find another 12K of conventional memory to launch this game…”
sokoloff··on Monte-Carlo Simulations
I don’t think a pure Monte Carlo is as helpful as “replaying” past actual scenarios (or a hybrid of the two).

I don’t have reason to believe that 40 years in a row would all have randomly and independently chosen results from a distribution (pure Monte Carlo) as a better model than past actual results.

sokoloff··on The Fatal Flaw of 911
I think most everyone but you interprets “GPS radio” in GP’s post to mean a “radio capable of reviving the GPS signal” same as I would call the thing in the middle of car’s dash an AM/FM radio.
sokoloff··on New Withings Users Must Pay $99/Year for Apple Health Syncing
Who the hell designs a consumer scale that can’t work in a typical bathroom?

In what room did they possibly imagine their device would be used?

sokoloff··on The cost of getting a job today
My point is that LLMs will soon be seen as “things you just have” not as "solely for the purpose of the interview".

I think that's probably already the case for the median software engineer and maybe even for the median software engineering candidate.

sokoloff··on The cost of getting a job today
The relevant question is “how incidental/baseline to life is this expense?”

We require clothes for on-site interviews. We require phone service for phone screens and electricity and internet service for video interviews. We don’t pay gas/mileage for on-site interviews for local candidates. People think of those as incidental/de minimus expenses and we ignore them.

I think LLM subs are going to be just as baseline as mobile phone service very soon (far, far faster than mobile phone adoption was in the US or Europe).

sokoloff··on The cost of getting a job today
It’s not all candidates, only candidates who progress to a certain gate in the process.

I think “we offer a $50 (or $20 or whatever) Visa/Amex gift card as part of this interview step” is easier to admin, might skate by finance more easily, and avoids all the tech support angles of “here’s how to use our specific tooling” and concerns of them misusing your key for something nefarious.

sokoloff··on Worlds more habitable than Earth?
The highest production year was 1943, with 65 completions (including those built for Britain) and of those 65, only 6 were Essex (fleet) and 9 Independence (light) carriers with the other 50 being small escort carriers.
sokoloff··on Worlds more habitable than Earth?
> Nobody would chose to sacrifice themselves and their descendants (because that's what such an expedition is about), for mere curiosity.

I bet if you had a one-way mission to Mars leaving in 12 months, you’d have a flood of applicants. Many hundreds minimum and probably several thousand.

Out of 8 billion people, assuming you had selection criteria that were even as strict as 1 in 1000 qualify, out of that 8 million, I think you’d easily be able to raise a crew.

sokoloff··on Worlds more habitable than Earth?
I would expect indoctrination something like what keeps alignment among devout religious practitioners would be forced to emerge. The alternative is extinction on a spaceship hurtling into the vastness of space.

I suspect education on that ship would look a lot different than it does on Earth.

sokoloff··on Worlds more habitable than Earth?
> the Apollo program supported 5-digits worth of very good jobs nationwide.

It was 5-figures of direct NASA employees and over 350K workers in contractors.

sokoloff··on Deloitte falsified documents to evade tax on Abramovich's wealth
They have dozens of offices in the UK and Germany, 13 in Netherlands, …

It hardly seems surprising (nor damning) to have one in Cyprus.

sokoloff··on NYC's "Click to Cancel" rule is now in effect
Isn’t basically every typical residential lease advertised exactly that way?
sokoloff··on How to Build Wealth as a Career Person
Neither QQQ nor SPY is a leveraged fund.
sokoloff··on Documents add to evidence in climate deception case against ExxonMobil
But you can fund research in other labs/companies and then bring in-house the research you like to commercialize and leave research results you don’t like with companies like “Exxoff Research 37” if having negative research results becomes a liability.

You can then even truthfully claim to be funding basic research that doesn’t directly benefit your commercial interests.

sokoloff··on Documents add to evidence in climate deception case against ExxonMobil
Is what a scientist at Exxon wrote in 1988 more relevant than what hundreds of fossil fuel extraction, refining, transportation, and retailing companies are doing today and tomorrow?

An existential threat to human survival demands action to stop all of them not selectively or preferentially only the ones who knew a little more than others 38 years ago.

Doing the latter is not only nearly totally ineffective (as they’d be instantly replaced by others taking market share) but also ensures that companies take great pains to never do in-house research on things that might be harmful.

sokoloff··on Documents add to evidence in climate deception case against ExxonMobil
I suspect that 38 years from now, future versions of us will look negatively upon Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and Sierra Club's opposition to fission reactors for electrical power generation, whether as a transitional approach to reducing fossil fuel combustion or longer-term base load generation, and there exists today at least one internal memo/email suggesting that their anti-nuclear policies are harmful to the environment. (Some current versions of us are looking negatively at that, but not all.)
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