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sakex

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Resetting Xbox 16 days ago

3% profit margin means you're better off selling the business and investing the cash into US bonds at current rates.

Another thing in that vein is features that were built because the previous approach was obtuse. For instance, find it harder to explain async/await in JS to people who never experienced callback hell, or why there is a borrow checker in Rust to people who never tried C++.

How I Left YouTube 7 months ago

Levels in big tech are just a way to keep you motivated. You'll work harder to get a promo.

In the end it doesn't matter, you'll make more money by either leaving or getting a retention offer.

They won’t notice those extra 10 milliseconds you saved

Depends what you're doing. In my case I'm saving microseconds on the step time of an LLM used by hundreds of millions of people.

The point you're missing is that people were making the same kind of comments about Amazon and Uber not too long ago

I was laid off from Google in January last year alongside 150 people in my extended team. I managed to find a different team in Gemini, so now I'm part of Deepmind. I have very conflicting feelings because on one hand I really enjoy the work, the team, and the absolute genius of people I get to talk to; but on the other hand, I have some resentment for being so inhumanely laid off, I am sad for the people in my team who were not as lucky as me, and I know it can happen again any time.

I have some doubt about #2. Weren't Big Tech companies paying senior engineers $300K+ - in 2025-adjusted dollars - back in 2013?

Yes but big tech got bigger. Google had a 4th of its current workforce for instance, Meta a 10th, etc. It got much easier to get into those companies.

Such an accurate description of what I went through in Switzerland. Kids are mean, and I had to be mean to survive too. It stained my character in ways I am still trying to overcome more than a decade later.

Einsum in Depth 2 years ago

That's something I wish I had when I started looking at einsums. It gets interesting when you start thinking about optimum paths (like in the opt_einsum package), sharded/distributed einsums, and ML accelerators.

I have a hard time imagining who would suffer from this more, but I have an even harder time imagining anyone would benefit from this.

I agree to some extent, but I'd say it depends on the programming language. For instance, in Python, you absolutely need documentation because you don't know what type is expected, what different values can be passed or even the optional kwargs etc. It's also very common to pass strings as parameters when one should be using enums, which means you can't know what are the possible values without having the doc or diving into the code.

In Rust however you can get away with way less documentation because the type system and signatures are self explanatory. And if you're doing things right, the set of values you can pass to your function is limited.