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Employee quits job over an Nvidia RTX 5060 (tomshardware.com)
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This is a very obviously AI written article, I don't get why these newspapers think that this is the future. Just look at this, but this style is all over the entire article: "Graphics cards are typically the most expensive components in a computer. So, when you get your hands on one for free, it's like the universe finally throwing a bone at you, rewarding you for years of kindness and suffering. Then, if that GPU suddenly gets enveloped in a legal feud, you start to second-guess your alliances, shattering loyalties in a moment"
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I would shit in the box and hand it over to Finance.
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I find that very difficult to believe
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Well, you can send me a graphics card and find out.
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I envy your optimism
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Who are the amorphous blob of Chinese netizens who control the cultural dialogue in the world?
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Dunno, but I like the Chinese Doomscroll substack for a daily glimpse into what they're talking about. https://substack.com/@weibo
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This is an extremely salient point: ...some mockingly asking whether the firm would've maintained the same tenacity and reimbursed the Intern had he been fined 50,000 RMB at the event instead
to be fair, he quit because he (rightly!) disagreed with the company's petty-minded insistence that the prize belonged to them, not because he valued a graphics card over his internship.
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It sounds like he quit because HR told him to: > HR then told the intern to "look for another company," and he submitted his resignation that night.
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I quit a company because they tried to appropriate points on my credit card gathered by their business travel.
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Salaries for interns in China are low enough that a 5060 is a huge deal.
The gruesome new data on tech jobs (businessinsider.com)
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Another thing I’m seeing from the employer side: As companies tighten their belts, they’re quicker to cut low performers that had been hanging around for too long anyway because: 1) cost reduction 2) companies had been lazy at getting rid of low performers when the market was hot and they didn’t need to cut (and couldn’t find better devs to replace them anyway) 3) with the market this skewed towards employers, you can replace low performers with better talent anyway because everyone’s looking
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Original source instead of Business Insider blogspam - https://www.hiringlab.org/2025/11/20/indeed-2026-us-jobs-hiring-trends-report/
We were told that "everyone needs to learn how to code", to the thunderous applause of all corporate stooges. It is hard to tell what is really going on. No company will admit that they are firing, e.g., DEI hires from 2023. I have seen some open source CoC loudmouths being fired, but that is not enough to establish a large trend.
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Now it’s “everyone get into the trades!” I’d recommend talking to people in the trades first. Not saying it can’t be a good move, but it is definitely hard and has its own huge downsides like poor working environments, long hours, and years to actually get into decent paying roles. Faddish career advice is usually bullshit, or it’s too late and the bus it’s telling you to jump on left the stop years ago.
Can anyone convince me this is truly an effect of AI, and not just pullback from the mass hiring during and following ZIRP in 2021-23ish? I understand either cause makes it a bad time to be a junior, but would like to hear the argument _against_ "AI is taking our jobs". (I suspect some very junior jobs have genuinely been taken by AI, but it seems to me that the driving factor is still a return-to-mean after ZIRP).
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Slightly tongue in cheek, but maybe there's just a divide in the market? I've been seeing more jobs advertised as "for people excited about using AI at work" or something to that effect. Maybe the market is bifurcating along the lines of people who hate AI chat bots and people who love them?
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Personally I think it’s “None of the Above”. Frankly I own several projects that I really wish AI would do better at maintaining or enhancing (please don’t reply with “you’re holding it wrong messages”). At least with my org and a lot of my friends companies, they’ve just kind of stopped building (non-AI) features? Not completely, but like a 70% reduction. And that’s apparently fine with the market, since AI promises infinite productivity in the future. As an example Amazon had a massive outage recently, like a world-scale, front page news outage. Then they followed it up with a massive layoff. In 2018 logic the markets probably would have been like “this company is fucked people are going to start moving out of AWS if they can’t promise reliability”. In 2025 logic, it barely even registers. I guess the assumption is that even with less employees they’ll be AWS can be even more stable in the future because of better AI. Even companies who _should_ be more concerned with reliability aren’t because _they’re too concerned about their next big AI move_. I guess in the end I still think it’s about AI but more about how companies are reacting to AI rather than replacing too many jobs.
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AI is increasing the capacity of existing employees and I think we're all still discovering, everyday, better ways to leverage it even more. So when the question comes of hiring a new teammate, the value they'd bring to the table needs to be convincingly more than what I can expect to achieve alone with AI. I think the glut is ZIRP, but the lack of recovery (or very slow pickup) is AI.
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I think smart use of free LLM chat tools has increased my productivity by maybe 50%. Nothing fancy. No Claude code, Codex, Cursor, Etc. Just focused Q&A with mostly free Gemini models. I've been writing software for 25 years, though.
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As a counter anecdote, I've yet to try a model where I break even. The output is so untrustworthy that I need to spend as much time coaching and fixing as if I'd just written it myself. When it does produce a working result faster, I still end up with less confidence in it. What I'm working on doesn't have much boilerplate, though, and I've only been programming for 18 years. Maybe I need to work for another 7 before it starts working for me.
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My rule on this is that you can only judge your coworker’s productivity never your own. People are horrible at judging their own productivity, and AI makes it really easy to just dump a bunch of work on someone else.
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It’s mostly ZIRP hangover. The over hiring in those years was ludicrous. AI is having some effect at the margins but it’s mostly an excuse. Companies always prefer to avoid saying they are just laying people off. It can be a negative market signal to investors, which is paradoxical, since it might indicate lower growth expectations. It also creates possible exposure to lawsuits depending on the circumstances and state. The nice thing about AI as an excuse is you can say to your investors and board “we are shedding cost but still growing and in fact our productivity is up because we are leveraging AI!”
No tech is dead, 2015 i got endless interviews with a barely functional chrome extension. Today your expected to know everything.
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I've actually seen a pretty notable uptick in recruiter outreach over the past month or two, but it's still way way below the Good Years.
Particularly spelling and grammar.
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I wish I could hang out in the server closet, going long periods of time without coworker interaction, but you can't get far like that. Communication skills matter.
If it were 2018, I personally would have made 3 SWE hires in the last 12 months. The reason I didn't need to is because of LLMs. Not budget, not anything else. I don't think AI is so much to blame for layoffs, but I do think it is a huge component of the slow hiring. There's just less demand for coders.
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I was the first dev at my current company to experiment with Claude Code back when it first came out. Some of my coworkers tried it, and some didn’t like it at all. But now literally all of us are using it. The company gives us a $100 monthly stipend for it. We’re a small dev team, but our CEO is thrilled. He keeps bragging about how customers are gobsmacked by how quickly we’re delivering new features and he’s been asked if we’ve made a ton of hires in the last year. We’re actually down two developers from when I started. I don’t love the code it writes, but the speed is unbeatable. We still need devs, and I don’t think that’s ever going to change. But we don’t need as many devs. We’re shipping like crazy with a small team. I don’t think more people would speed us up much at all.
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Is it that LLMs are making your devs that much more efficient?
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It feels to me like everyone is holding their breath to see how the wholesale "AI can replace people" notion pans out. Whether it proves true or not, betting on the wrong result will hit hard so few want to go all in (outside of the companies that produce the tech itself). If there's anything "AI" has been able to ship at scale, it's uncertainty.
Reinventing how .NET builds and ships (again) (devblogs.microsoft.com)
> I hope this churn in .NET builds is temporary because a lot of people might be looking to go back to something stable especially after the recent supply chain attacks on the Node ecosystem. Can you elaborate a bit? This article talks about internal machinery of building .net releases. What does that have to do with "this churn", whatever that is?
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My guess is if you build with .NET Framework you can just forever run your builds, but if your source code is based on newer .NET you have to update to a new version each year, and deal with all the work in upgrading your entire project, which also means everyone in your team is also upgrading their dev environment, and now you have new things in the language and the runtime to deal with, deprecation and all that. Plus lots of packages don’t update as fast when version changes occurs, so chances are you will probably take more work and use as few dependencies as possible if at all, which may cause a lot of work. Instead it’s best to, if you need to depend on something, to be a very big Swiss Army knife like thing. I think node is just more flexible and unless .NET Framework like forever releases or much longer term support make a come back, there’s no good trade off from node, since you don’t even get more stability.
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I think it's important to remember that Dotnet projects can use code built for older releases; to an almost absurd degree, and if you don't go to before the .NET Framework divide, you largely don't even need to change anything to move projects to newer frameworks. They largely just work. The .Net platform is honestly the most stable it has ever been.
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The past three years of dotnet upgrades have been completely painless for me.
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What do you mean? The .Net ecosystem has been generalized chaos for the past 10 years. A few years ago even most people actively working in .Net development couldn't tell what the hell was going on. It's better now. I distinctly recall when .Net Framework v4.8 had been released and a few months later .Net Core 3.0 came out and they announced that .Net Standard 2.0 was going to be the last version of that. Nobody had any idea what anything was. .Net 5 helped a lot. Even then, MS has been releasing new versions of .Net at a breakneck pace. We're on .Net 10, and .Net Core 1.0 was 9 years ago. There's literally been a major version release every year for almost a decade. This is for a standard software framework! v10 is an LTS version of a software framework with all of 3 years of support. Yeah, it's only supported until 2028, and that's the LTS version.
I'm moving from Python to Java because of how much easier it is to actually use all CPU cores in Java and strict typing prevents so many bugs and it is much faster. I don't think it is actually that much more complicated than Python in 2025.
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That’s one reason I’ve preferred .Net. Put ahead of time compilation on top and it is glorious.
out of curiosity, why not kotlin? I had the impression it was the jvm language to reach for by default these days.
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Has too much sugar, and without JetBrains IDE you're stuck with a plain text editor. Not sure if it's generalizable to normal Kotlin or not, but learning Gradle Kotlin DSL made me want to rip my hair out when trying to understand what happens under the hood.
Problem is though Python is slow at runtime. May not matter for many use cases, but I've worked with a lot of startups that suffered terrible reliability problems because they chose Python (or Rails, or Node to some extent) and the service cannot handle peak time load without a lot of refactoring and additional app servers. Depending on your framework Python is at best ~3x slower (FastAPI) and at worst ~20x (Django) than asp.net on the techempower benchmarks, which maps pretty well to my real world experience.
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Most web apps are waiting on the DB anyway. Rarely have I seen the speed of the actual framework make any meaningful difference.
What They Don't Tell You About Maintaining an Open Source Project (andrej.sh)
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I like the article a lot. Very thoughtful.
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For anyone interested in this (and certainly for OP) I highly highly recommend the book Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal. When I was raising my profile on my open source farming robot, this book really helped me understand the types of projects one might want to foster, how to think about users, and generally gave me very helpful guidance on becoming an open source maintainer! Take a look: https://press.stripe.com/working-in-public
You're talking about being a tradesman on a forum dedicated to software and maybe making a company out of said software? If people liked the idea of being outside in the weather, doing manual labor as you've described, there is a very large chance they would not be on this forum.
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As we all know, the only real job is writing React web apps.
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Most of my career has been in software development. Running an ISP / carrier is more fun as there's more of a variety from day to day (as is the case for anything entrepreneurial) while still involving technical skills. There is a need for with some programming from time to time, but it is usually tied to solving a particular business need. I'm sure there are other people out there frustrated with the software grind. My point is that change is always an option. There are interesting problems to solve in the world that exist outside of large software projects that most folks here have the required skill sets to tackle.
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It's very often that people here lament the fact that they're not outside being outside, in the weather, doing manual labor. How may of us don't dream, at least once a week, of walking out into the woods, or taking up woodworking instead, or wondering how long it would take to retrain as a plumber? I channel that into my gardening during the appropriate seasons, but now that it's November, all that woodworking equipment in the garage is lookin' mighty appealing.
> maintaining kaneo means helping people debug their setups. and honestly? it's taught me more than i expected. > people run kaneo on setups i never imagined: > behind corporate proxies > ... > in kubernetes with custom networking It's OP's project so they're welcome to support whoever they want but I definitely would not offer free support to customers who are obviously using the product commercially, especially in large enterprises. It's FOSS, so they can use it for free if they want, but if they need custom support or features, they're a great user to tell, "Sure, I'm happy to help you with that if you purchase a $500/yr support contract." You'd be surprised how many customers like that don't care because they have a corporate card and that amount is too little to require approvals or much process.
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> if you purchase a $500/yr support contract 500/hr more like.
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I wish. In my company that is an instant no. The amount of legal contracting bull we have to go through for that would quite literally take 9 months.
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This is not as simple as it sounds. Just yesterday I had a call with the Delft university of technology in Netherland, they want me to add some features on the free version of my FOSS product [1] but they did not want to pay anything. Over the last month, I was in contact with a 800B publicly traded company for a 1.8k per year invoice, once we agreed on the general direction they kept adding expectations, first was to sign tons of paperwork with their security checklist, legal stuff which took a few days but when they start asking for things that would take potentially weeks more, I invite them to do extras on a contracting basis, since them I have never heard back and of course they never paid a dime. I have literally tons of stories like this from governments to F500. In my bubble the paid support plan mostly work with US entities. [1]: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
But the company wants a proper invoice. And not every single developer is interested in founding a Limited and getting the tax office breathing down their neck every year. Also, look at Gitea. People got paranoid and forked the project after the original author did exactly that.
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Come on, stop with this slave mentality please. You can make invoices without funding any company and without the tax office getting in your hair. It's not illegal to charge for your services and never has been. You can declare that income just fine, or skip it. The tax office won't bother you.
> But the company wants a proper invoice. And not every single developer is interested in founding a Limited and getting the tax office breathing down their neck every year. I feel like it shouldn't be poor form to say on this site - a site that predominantly has been about building tech companies and revenue streams - to get over it and charge them .
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Especially a site that frequently champions, shall we say... more creative forms of running a company in its early stages (like how Spotify started out charging money for pirated music). If it's okay for OpenAI to launder copyright, it's okay for you to send a net-30 PDF to a Fortune 500 company. Alternatively, people could just stop complaining about it.
I don’t understand. It’s your project, you do what you want and nothing more.
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Ya OP is shadow boxing. There is absolutely no need for any of these things. Tons of open source exists as only source code and a license, nothing else. No docs, no issue tracker, nothing. People who need it use it, learn from it, remix it, whatever, but there need not be any engagement at all from the given repo's maintainer.
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Seriously. If I throw something up somewhere, you get a tarball, a README, and no way to get in touch with me. If the code helps you, fantastic! If it doesn't, then I hope you at least got something out of the experience. But "as-is" means what it says on the tin. I'm not sure why people are so hellbent on treating every message from every stranger as important.
Yesterday I received this message from a random github user: "Seriously. No SSO at all in free version? This is poor. Very very greedy and poor" [1] If you do not spend a lot of time explaining things at length, people will link back to how much an asshole you are. [1]: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/issues/661#issuecomment-3570368093
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I would pull my hair out.
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In the words of Lizzo: "Let 'em say what they gonna say. They gonna feel how they gonna feel." Back in the day, we called this "feeding the trolls", and the advice hasn't changed: ignore them. You don't owe every single person online any part of your short, precious life. Issues have delete buttons (and there are other hosted SCMs besides GitHub). I encourage liberal use thereof.
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Ew gross
Ironwood, our latest TPU (blog.google)
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So we will be getting wrong answers faster now.
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Google having their own hardware for training and inference is newsworthy, but the link is pretty bad. Here is a much better source https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/ironwood-tpu-age-of-inference/
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> It’s designed for AI with AI CUDA engineers, your job security has never felt more certain.
Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled (jayd.ml)
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I can highly recommend using YouTube through Firefox with extensions or ReVanced that try to fix these hostile and anti user decisions. Although I do sometimes wonder why I do spend so much time on a platform that hates me so much.
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What's the polymarket on NO videos on the homepage AND THREE ads?
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They have also gotten more aggressive on trying to get you to sign in. I have appreciated the shitty UX changes they have made which has resulted in me using it less. It’s just filler and I need less of that in life, so thanks for chasing me away.
Tell me what it means. Maybe you are right.
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xenophobia is a fear of foreigners. What about their comment expresses this? because they said "folx" ? lol wtf?
It’s crazy you can pay for premium, which is not cheap, and you can’t disable shorts. The number of times I clicked “show less” and it has zero effect on the number of shorts.
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"Enhancer For Youtube" is a firefox extension that disables much of the nonsense in Youtube's UI. I can't use youtube without it anymore. There might be a chrome version? Idk, using chrome with youtube is dumb af tho so probably don't do that.
What's crazy is that I can't turn them off for my children. I complain about it to Google. They ignore it. They couldn't possibly give a shit. I should probably complain to my congressman. Who also won't do shit even if they actually give a shit.
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You could just not let your kids go on YouTube. There's a long history of people not using it. Most people today don't use it.
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I successfully kept my kids off of YouTube until their elementary school gave them Chromebooks. Then they were at least only on YouTube during class.
Shorts are up to 3 minutes long now. At this point they are just vertical videos. I fully expect the supported length to keep increasing!
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Vertical videos with much shitter UI. Inability to skip ahead or turn back may be understandable for <30 second videos, but not more.
Because unlike YouTube, porn is an actually competitive industry with plenty of “tube” sites to choose from. So they have to compete on UX.
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There's an old adage that if you follow the tech that porn adopts, you'll generally be ahead the average consumer curve. I think there's another version that if porn adopts a tech that means that the tech will work. Like, a lot of VR adoption early on was porn. By a lot, I mean most.
Google "Ethical Capital Partners." Operates: Pornhub RedTube YouPorn Brazzers Digital Playground Men.com Reality Kings SpankWire
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Very US centric take here. Ya know there are other countries, languages, etc out there, right?
YouTube has become so bad that I had to resort to Tampermonkey scripts to become bearable. First was the disgusting pink tones in the progress bar. Then the oversized thumbnails / less videos per page. Then the horrible over sized player controls. And now the oversized suggestions on the side bar. Not to mention the obnoxious amount and duration of ads. It's getting worse and worse. These are all symptoms that something is very wrong.
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you can do all this with one extension and no scripts: Enhancer for Youtube. Also recommend DeArrow and SponsorBlock. But also flip content creators a $5 every once in a while. That's more revenue than they'll ever get from you watchin their videos.
Not really related but... have anyone else noticed that suggestions on the home page became much worse recently? I'm getting a lot of unrelated videos which are often very old, like published up to 18 years ago. OTOH, videos from subscriptions are not getting suggested, I often have to check individual channels to see if they posted anything new. What's happening?
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If you pay attention, this happens every few months. This is youtube tweaking the algorithm. Every time they tweak the algorithm, content creators scramble to figure out what changes they made so they can exploit it. That's why every few months all the major channels change their styles to all be the same. Gotta exploit that algo!
I noticed this morning there was a new version of the YouTube app on my Apple TV. I can’t wait to find out how they screwed this one up. My personal long-term complaint is the length of video titles. Lots of people like to make really long video titles. So right now there is one on my screen titled “The Best Decisions Every Video Game Console Developer Made”. Now if you didn’t know, that is not the whole title. But there’s absolutely no indication of that. The only way you actually know that is either by checking or if the stuff on the screen is clearly not the end of a sentence. So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in the title. In this case you also see “(Part”. Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that. The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video. Obnoxious.
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There are two apps called "DeArrow" and SponsorBlock that basically everyone should be using. DeArrow replaces thumbnails and titles with crowd sourced versions. I can't use youtube without it anymore. Usually the titles get replaced with stuff like "How to build a table" instead of "Watch the world explode as I try to make a table!!!!!!!!!!!!". Same with thumbnails. No longer are they over-saturated close up AI generated garbage images, but usually just a screenshot from the video that shows what's really going on.
#shorts
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Was just talking with my son about how some YouTubers who made short videos long ago started making longer and less succinct videos because they thought the algorithm favored long videos and then TikTok happens.
I used to pay for YouTube premium. I stopped doing that, uninstalled the apps, and now use it through the browser with adblockers. (Yes, on my phone and iPad.) It works so well I’ve gotten at least half a dozen neighbours to do the same. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a definitive step up in UX.
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I used to pay for YouTube premium. I stopped doing that, uninstalled the apps, and now use... rumble and tiktok.
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Anyone else notice that most youtube ads are really bad . Seeing a product in a youtube ad now causes me to be more likely to believe it's a ripoff. Things like a cheap $5 fan being sold for $60 as roughly: "Super efficient A/C that will save you $100s on your electricity bill and can cool a room down in just minutes"
I never managed to install it it complains about youtube app being separated into parts or smth like that
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That's a feature: if you can't work out which YouTube apk to patch them you'll never work out the rest of the installation process.
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Its a bold strategy, Cotton, lets see if it pays off for em
I do pay for YouTube Premium, I see no ads, and everything works pretty conveniently. What's your point, that with a bit of extra effort you can pirate content?
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For me, and many people, advertising is a mental health issue. I don't enjoy those ads, they are very disturbing and jarring. It causes me anxiety and I don't like the things that those ads normalize. I don't think most people, especially americans, realize how far off the rails our society is in terms of our normalization of insane shit. So, for health reasons, I block nearly all advertisements. It is a HUGE mental health win. There is a ton of research behind this, as well. I'm not going to pay extra money to disable a health concern. I'll block ads instead. I should not have to PAY MORE for a product that doesn't damage my health. I will always happily directly support content creators. I will not watch ads.
its pirating content in a way that you dont generate revenue for youtuber that expect from ads
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I'm not generating revenue for a lot of companies who are in the advertising business. That's not the definition of piracy. Find another word.
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Most content creators have links to support them with donation or patreon. Once a year choose 3 small youtubers (larger ones are already multi-millioners, they don't need your help) and drop them $5 each. Now you just did 1000% of what they could get from you watching ads.
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what's insane, even $1 is more than they'll get from you watching every single one of their videos. The issue is processing fees on that payment, so might as well give em a bit more. It's wild how low the payout on ads is. Seriously, just flip people $1 every once in a while and it's more support than ads. It's so stupid how people get all morally superior when they figure out that someone block ads.
To be clear, this is not a value judgement. I pirate content sometimes, and I use adblockers, but ad blocking is definitely piracy – you're circumventing the method of paying for content. I realise that online ads have other implications such as tracking that, say, a blu-ray rip downloaded from a torrent doesn't have, but the reason for piracy doesn't change the fact that it is.
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I'm pretty anti-piracy, and I don't think ad-blocking is piracy. Metaphors are dangerous, but, for the purposes of this specific comparison, I see piracy as breaking into a video store and taking a disc, and ad blocking as allowing some people into my house but not others. YouTube is free to block me as a user or put its content behind a paywall if it doesn't like me doing this, but I am also free to decide what comes into my browser.
It's becomes piracy when you create a new distribution without ads... which you're doing with ad blockers.
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That is not what distribution means. I am allowed to splice up my personal copies of videos.
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https://www.tivo.com/support/how-to/how-to-use-SkipMode A data point is TiVo who are, apparently, still around and have a 'skip ads' button on recorded content.
The advertiser is buying the right to put an advert in front of you, not the right to a sale. Whether they convert you is up to them, their product, their offering, etc. I think you can never buy a single product from an ad and this is still piracy. That said, a lot of advertising is not performance/pay-per-click focused as you've described and is instead brand advertising. The point of the Coca-Cola christmas ads is not to get you to buy a coke today, it's to have a positive impression that builds over years. This sort of advertising is very hard to attribute sales to, but a good example of how you don't need to buy a product for seeing the ad to be worth something to the company.
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> the right to put an advert in front of you The advertiser may well think that's what they're buying, but what they're actually getting is the right to send my browser a URL, which they hope I will fetch and view. I would prefer not to, so I don't.
I will not be pretending that. I am _asserting_ it. I made no such agreement with YouTube. I am very confused why you think I did
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Are you going to lie that you didn't know that the videos are shown to you in exchange for ads? Entering into a contract doesn't necessarily require you to sign a document. Quite a few contracts that we make every day require no formal acceptance, like entering a shop.
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I agree with this. There was no meeting of the minds, no contract. But, the terms in the Google account probably include something about the terms for viewing youtube videos.
And I pay for Premium, because each premium view is more valuable to the creators than the ad supported one.
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for what it's worth, you could divide up your youtube premium membership cost and give that to 500 creators and they would see more revenue in their pocket than your premium watches get them. Premium viewcount is grossly over valued by the people who pay for it, because they need to justify their sunk cost. I doubt most content creators even track it because the difference is minimal. We're talking a few bucks a month, tops. I remember when youtube premium first came out and YT pimped this trope super hard. Then it came to light that the difference is basically nothing because most people don't pay for premium.
I used to think they were a foundation dedicated to funding extreme sports who also happened to sell an energy drink as well. Their business is basically selling poison but creating such absurd quantities of great free entertainment that everyone forgives them.
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I mean, in terms of getting your caffeine, Redbull is basically the least poison in the game. It's not even a lot of caffeine and doesn't contain a lot of the other shit that stuff like Monsters contain. Like really, checkout the redbull ingredient list sometime. There's not much to it. Not saying it's healthy at all. Nobody should really be drinking energy drinks, but Redbull is probably the least awful of the bunch.
I did that and now it shows only polarizing videos on the right from both ends.
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Oh, mine shows no recommendations at all. Just a blank home screen. So I basically either watch my curated subscriptions or something I specifically searched for.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
The fall of Labubus and the mush of modern internet trends (michigandaily.com)
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They're falling already? Excellent, I was hoping I could get to this point without ever having to figure out exactly what they were.
Maybe things go a little faster now, but doesn't seem too different from Pogs, or Beanie Babies or any other trend in a long line of them.
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beanie babies were rational, there was a supply constriction that seemed permanent, the founder resolved it and flooded the market, leaving bagholders and decades of mockery but I would content it was not an example of irrational exuberance labubu’s are part of a flooded market as well, but there was never anything to suggest it wouldnt be flooded only an expectation for demand to keep up longer than just half of this year
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Beanie Babies were irrational because it is irrational to go into a collector craze over stuffed animals
They are and I hate it. It‘s bad enough with trading cards, but now every single collectible is employing gacha mechanics and it’s frustrating.
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I don't get it. It's a "collectable". Your "hobby" is "collecting". You put your "collection" on a shelf and look at it. That's not a hobby to me. It's just consuming for consumption's sake.
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For eg Magic cards, a secondary market formed very quickly where you could buy exactly what you wanted.
> I’m not sure if I’m making sense, Not sure how you could make sense when the topic it self is nonsensical?? Trying to rationalize internet fads just seems as futile as getting involved with the fad itself.
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Not necessarily. Things that make look weird on the outside might make sense as status games on the inside. (Or other weird 'games'.) It's no worse than the peacock's tail.
They have just started showing up in stores around me. I can believe they have fallen off social media feeds while still growing in sales silently as people get them to put on bags or gift rather than post on tiktok.
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Most sales are made on the way down, that's the case for any trend.
I don't think this is true. There has been an explosive growth in cultures which are interest based rather than location based. Board games, furries, car people, kpop, etc. These groups all have their own inside jokes, terminology, events, etc. What has been lost is gathering a random sample of people in the same city and them all being on roughly the same page about culture.
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> There has been an explosive growth in cultures which are interest based rather than location based. Board games, furries, car people, kpop, etc. These groups all have their own inside jokes, terminology, events, etc. Sure, but those aren't internet culture. The internet is barely a hobby/interest any more, it's just part of the infrastructure of every hobby/interest.
If not a nerd lingo, there's absolutely inside jokes and new lingo. Skibidi, 6 7, blah blah. Even people saying things like "bet" are all part of new lingo that kids think is cool because the olds don't know what they are talking about. Only the words/phrases change, but the desire of kids doing something different than olds is never going to change.
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> Even people saying things like "bet" are all part of new lingo Maybe I'm just black, but there's absolutely nothing new about "bet." Unless you mean last 50 years new maybe (I can only vouch for 50 years.) Still goes to your point, though. The kids are just imitating black people like their parents, their parents parents, and their parents parents parents, and their parents parents parents parents, and their parents parents parents parents parents. The desire of the kids to repeat things that they heard black people say is at least 150 years old at this point if the cakewalk ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cakewalk ) is a good spot to date it from.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research (dwarkesh.com)
If "Era of Scaling" means "era of rapid and predictable performance improvements that easily attract investors", it sounds a lot like "AI summer". So... is "Era of Research" a euphemism for "AI winter"?
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Yes
I respect Ilya hugely as a researcher in ML and quite admire his overall humility, but I have to say I cringed quite a bit at the start of this interview when he talks about emotions, their relative complexity, and origin. Emotion is so complex, even taking all the systems in the body that it interacts with. And many mammals have very intricate socio-emotional lives - take Orcas or Elephants. There is an arrogance I have seen that is typical of ML (having worked in the field) that makes its members too comfortable trodding into adjacent intellectual fields they should have more respect and reverence for. Anyone else notice this? It's something physicists are often accused of also.
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The equivalence of emotions to reward functions seem pretty obvious to me. Emotions are what compel us to act in the environment.
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I think the bigger problem is he refused to talk about what he's working on! I would love to hear his view on how we're going to move past evals and RL, but he flat out said it's proprietary and won't talk about it.
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ML and physics share a belief in the power of their universal abstractions - all is dynamics in spaces at scales, all is models and data. The belief is justified because the abstractions work for a big array of problems, to a number of decimal places. Get good enough at solving problems with those universal abstractions, everything starts to look like a solvable problem and it gets easy to lose epistemic humility. You can combine physics and ML to make large reusable orbital rockets that land themselves. Why shouldn’t be able to solve any of the sometimes much tamer-looking problems they fail to? Even today there was an IEEE article about high failure rates in IT projects…
Yeah, that's bothered me as well. Andrej Karpathy does this all the time when he talks about the human brain and making analogies to LLMs. He makes speculative statements about how the human brain works as though it's established fact.
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Andrej does use biological examples, but he's a lot more cautious about biomimicry, and often uses biological examples to show why AI and bio are different. Like he doesn't believe that animals use classical RL because a baby horse can walk after 5 minutes which definitely wasn't achieved through classical RL. He doesn't pretend to know how a horse developed that ability, just that it's not classical RL. A lot of Ilya's takes in this interview felt like more of a stretch. The emotions and LLM argument felt like of like "let's add feathers to planes because birds fly and have feathers". I bet continual learning is going to have some kind of internal goal beyond RL eval functions, but these speculations about emotions just feel like college dorm discussions. The thing that made Ilya such an innovator (the elegant focus on next token prediction) was so simple, and I feel like his next big take is going to be something about neuron architecture (something he eluded to in the interview but flat out refused to talk about).
https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/ He’s wrong we still scaling, boys.
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“Time it takes for a human to complete a task that AI can complete 50% of the time” seems like a really contrived metric. Suppose it takes 30 minutes to write code to scrape a page and also 30 minutes to identify a bug in a SQL query, an AI’s ability to solve the former has virtually no bearing on its ability to solve the latter but we’re considering them all in the same set of “30 minute problems.” Where do they get the data for task durations anyway?
Nope, Epoch.ai thinks we have enough to scale till 2030 at least. https://epoch.ai/blog/can-ai-scaling-continue-through-2030 ^ /_\ ***
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Wait, nope because someone disagrees?
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