greyb

You clearly haven't met a Chinese RedNote user.

If a country hands out enormous subsidies but yet isn't leading in anything, then maybe it's time to consider what structural reasons are causing these subsidies to be squandered and whose bottom lines are being padded.

I think I'd rather pay Chinese sales tax than work with Fireworks, but thank you for the suggestion.

Any way to avoid China sales tax or is that just the cost of doing business?

I’m an arts graduate from a well-ranked public Canadian university where domestic/in-state students are heavily subsidized by public funds (domestic students pay only 20-30% of the real cost of enrollment[1]), and I’m probably more sympathetic to this rule than a lot of people in this thread.

A lot of my peers fell behind financially after graduation, struggled to find work relevant to their interests, and then concluded that they needed a master’s degree to become competitive. But in many cases the real problem was not that they lacked another credential or the right credential. They were aimless, had no clear professional direction, and were using more school to postpone dealing with that. They got into $200-300k CAD of debt because Canadian universities are built to enroll at scale and no real meaningful filter exists to weed out people who have no business going down this path. [2]

Universities encourage this because they want to have it both ways. They market the degree as a path to professional opportunity, admit at enormous scale, and charge enough to sustain constantly growing faculties (with the majority of those costs being borne by the public ledger). Then, when graduates struggle, they retreat to “education was never about earnings” and “you learned lots of useful soft skills that employers want, it's your fault for not marketing them better.”

An arts degree should at least certify some meaningful level of writing ability, judgment, discipline, and intellectual competence. In my experience, the same credential was awarded to excellent students and to people who could barely construct an argument. Some of the dumbest arguments I heard during my degree were in fourth-year seminar courses.

Anecdotally, most of the international students I knew were very capable and competent, which made sense given how much they were paying to be there (some families went into extreme debt by Global South standards to get them there).

Meanwhile, the domestic admissions system felt largely non-selective and seemed designed around educating as many people as possible. That may be a defensible public policy goal, but it also means the credential itself becomes a pretty weak signal and a lot of people were never there for educational enrichment or to pursue Liberal Arts as a meaningful field, but because their parents made them - and they thought they must have a degree to be successful because people without degrees are surely crude barbarians.

Earnings are a crude metric, but “trust us, they became better thinkers” is not accountability. And funneling underemployed graduates into master’s programs and aimless paths are not a solution.

Arts educations should be gated, not necessarily based on funds, either with difficult trials to prove competency or real life experience. For example, theatre programs should admit people with existing experience in background acting and community theatre. North America can adopt 3 year degrees similar to Europe, make the breadth year optional, and actually weed out the incompetent by the first year if we insist on having zero admission standards amidst rising grade inflation. (NC programs produce credible credential signals despite being open admission).

[1] https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/1896-who-pays-universit...

[2] The sad irony is that pretty much everyone I know (n=5) who took 2+ years between graduating high school and starting post-secondary got jobs or snazzy PhD offers shortly after graduating post-secondary, on top of having to pay nothing for tuition because parental contributions aren't expected for "independent" students for Canadian student aid. I think making more students discover themselves in the real world before letting them do post-secondary could genuinely yield better results in way-finding and independence that's critical for post-grad outcomes.

Edit: found it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_dead_drop

I wanted these to exist so badly, it was a fun and quirky concept, but people kept bashing it online as the stupidest idea ever, and the few dead drops that existed in my city routinely got destroyed.

I also built my own PirateBox too, but the only thing that was ever uploaded to it was a creepshot of me and my PirateBox. Turns out when Public Wi-Fi exists, they're actively ignored.

Wafer discontinued their own "Wafer Pass" flagship coding plan within weeks of launch and had to issue prorated refunds. Now they're bragging about squeezing costs down even further via quantization, even though their implementation is clearly lacking.

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Q9i-wafer-pass-flat-rat...

They don't keep logs but they've been transparent that if they ever receive a lawful court order to intercept new communications, they must comply. I honestly don't think this is unique to any VPN provider. Even if a VPN provider refuses to comply, authorities can simply backdoor or facilitate lawful interception however they'd like.

Whomever finds great enjoyment in reading this may also enjoy Jan Whitaker's blog 'Restaurant-ing through History'. [1] They are an old-school blogger with a particular interest in American restaurants, and enjoys email correspondence as well.

[1] https://restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com/

Or a troll? I'm so confused.

The irony of questioning someone's communication skills immediately after this exchange is hard to miss.

Your reply doesn't seem to be in good faith. Please provide your formula for calculating effective per token cost.

I am not sure why the small team argument is relevant. This is a crowded market, there are dozens if hundreds of third party inference providers in the world right now. I'm glad that's a good excuse that works on you but I'm not sure why the average user should care.

Wasn't aware that Cohere was still around but this release doesn't exactly instill confidence.

It's being kept alive because the Canadian government is desperate to have a local frontier lab and is willing to inject funding and force its adoption in government services, but leadership at Cohere is known to be weak in Canadian tech circles, and they pivoting to an enterprise-first market around production RAG rather than anything close to frontier work.

I'm glad they're doing open weight releases but they're not viable in the long-run. It is embarrassing sharing similar spaces with them, but I'll try this release out in OpenCode and re-think afterwards.

Because in a free market, making rational choices about pricing in line with the industry allows you to build capital to further expand, which coincidentally also lets you buy more RAM.

Claude allows you to reverse engineer binaries now? That's pretty cool. I'm quite surprised to hear that, I thought it was one of their guardrails. Most of the reverse engineering projects I've seen seem to rely on Chinese models.

They will usually refund you if you end up getting charged because you forgot to cancel. It isn't worth the headache of a chargeback.

Plus they have to pay a fee for chargebacks regardless of whether they think it's valid or not, so strong disincentive.

Racket is used across CS programs that have adopted the How to Design Programs book [1] (some schools do not use the original book, just the textbook for source material).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Design_Programs

This was miserably failing for me on a new install. Guess the reason why may have been less to do with my skill and more to do with being on a broken version (or some mix of it).

I bought a Pixel phone. As per the sales terms, the phone came with one year of Gemini AI Pro service. Except, the redemption process to get the year of service didn't work for me. I contacted Google, they never fixed it or offered any solution. I simply didn't get the year of service I was promised.

I fixed this by deleting the subscription data for Google One (which also refunded me a prorated amount for my Google One plan), and then waiting a day.

Building solar panel installations in remote locations still requires linking that back to the main grid, and all the in-between infrastructure needed to transform and transmit that power. Building it in an urban location allows you to tap into the existing grid without much added public investment, similar to how some power grids will purchase power from homeowners as an added incentive for doing a home solar install.

Meanwhile, there is a whole grey market built around this. People sell “CGNAT mobile proxies” that ride on carrier and ISP NAT, and the whole point is that they are a pain to block without nuking huge ISP ranges. So they get marketed as a convenient way to dodge shadowbans, spam filters, and basically any abuse defense that relies on IP reputation.

Sources mentioned in the article.

[1] Powell's remarks: https://www.federalreserve.gov/mediacenter/files/FOMCprescon...

[2] The kids are alright?: https://secure.ubs.com/global/en/wealthmanagement/insights/c...

Can managers/directors of engineering even qualify for a TN under the recent renewed scrutiny?

This remembers of the Youtube channel TRNGL [1]. They got banned from posting for some reason, and their channel was about to be deleted within a few days. They had no following, so they instead looked for bypasses to put a video publicly. They found that while their uploading rights were disabled, they were able to use Creator Studio to record a webcam video begging for help since nobody was hearing their pleas. They have ~200k subscribers too.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@TRNGL

This is one of the most magnificent buildings I've seen in my life and everyone should go see it even if you're not religious.

On the flipside, I remember thinking it was a kitsch architectural icon and my family was bullying me into going to visit by dictating my plans while solo traveling.

When I went inside, I had a brief moment where I was struck by awe, and wondered if I should consider converting to Catholicism.

It is possible. It's just not likely either.

Similar happened to me. It's ridiculous to make the claim that a business should be able to make avoidable errors that ruin lives and disrupt societies, and we should pretend that they are worthy of reconsideration without having learned or proven that they've learnt from such a credibility ending cowboy move.

There are many VPNs on TopCashback offering 100%+ cashback. I assumed most of them were trying to build up user numbers in order to sell or get acquired, since I can't logically understand why a VPN would pay so much for an affiliate bonus.

Unique to the current moment is that there are simultaneously (1) high interest rates and a challenging economy (2) a narrative that AI adoption should enable cutting junior roles.

I'm not disputing your point, but I'm curious: given that the main headline measures that we tend to see about the US economy right now involve the labour market. How do you establish the counterfactual?

They're mostly just typical UI/UX or business consultancies trying to fit their way in the niche by offering vague advice and "data-driven analytics" services. I don't have a great deal of confidence that the average business analyst couldn't do better, but some companies don't trust their staff and need to pay someone to tell them otherwise.