beachtaxidriver (u/beachtaxidriver)

beachtaxidriver commented on US Intel stratechery.com/2025/u-s-... · Posted by u/maguay

ecshafer · 7 days ago

The cost of assets (especially housing, schooling, and health care) is a huge problem, and your example is a poignant one. More funding could sway a few people in that pipeline to go towards semi-conductors, but the majority of workers aren't Jane Street quality, they are technicians and engineers doing lots of highly skilled "grunt" work.

Personally I think the other half of the problem, Big Tech paying so much might be solving itself right now, excepting really only the very very top.

beachtaxidriver · 6 days ago

This right here.

When Silicon Valley was cheap enough to live in that people could casually start a company in their garage... Then people didn't have to relentlessly optimize for short term comp.

Today you have to work at FANG to afford a garage in the Bay area.

beachtaxidriver commented on It is worth it to buy the fast CPU blog.howardjohn.info/post... · Posted by u/ingve

tgma · 9 days ago

FANG is not monolithic. Amazon is famously cheap. So is Apple in my opinion based on what I have heard (you get random refurbished hardware that is available not some standardized thing, sometimes with 8GB RAM sometimes something nicer) Apple is also famously cheap on their compensation. Back in the day they proudly said shit to the effect of "we deliberately don't pay you top of the market because you have to love Apple" to which the only valid answer is "go fuck yourself."

Google and Facebook I don't think are cheap for developers. I can speak firsthand for my past Google experience. You have to note that the company has like 200k employees and there needs to be some controls and not all of the company are engineers.

Hardware -> for the vast majority of stuff, you can build with blaze (think bazel) on a build cluster and cache, so local CPU is not as important. Nevertheless, you can easily order other stuff should you need to. Sure, if you go beyond the standard issue, your cost center will be charged and your manager gets an email. I don't think any decent manager would block you. If they do, change teams. Some powerful hardware that needs approval is blanket whitelisted for certain orgs that recognize such need.

Trips -> Google has this interesting model you have a soft cap for trips and if you don't hit the cap, you pocket half of the trips credit in your account which you can choose to spend later when you are overcap or you want to get something slightly nicer the next time. Also, they have clear and sane policies on mixing personal and corporate travel. I encourage everyone to learn about and deploy things like that in their companies. The caps are usually not unreasonable, but if you do hit them, it is again an email to your management chain, not some big deal. Never seen it blocked. If your request is reasonable and your manager is shrugging about this stuff, that should reflect on them being cheap not the company policy.

beachtaxidriver · 9 days ago

Google used to be so un-cheap they had a dedicated ergo lab room where you could try out different keyboards.

They eventually became so cheap they blanket paused refreshing developer laptops...

beachtaxidriver commented on How the United States Gave Up Being a Science Superpower steveblank.com/2025/05/13... · Posted by u/enescakir

arisbe__ · 4 months ago

Professionalization and high employee debt means that the employees will choose sel-prezervation over creative inquiry and truth seeking.

Carring on with this too blantly and over time, it seems self-undermining.

I'd guess Science died the day it was born as "Science". So being a Science superpower really means being a gatekeeping Science-containment Superpower. Antiscience?

beachtaxidriver · 4 months ago

Exactly. When the average house in urban areas started being around $1M... There is no more truth seeking.

beachtaxidriver commented on America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back molsonhart.com/blog/ameri... · Posted by u/putzdown

greenie_beans · 5 months ago

> Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has. In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.

he knows a lot about manufacturing but weirdly not much about labor. very unsubstantiated, derogatory comment.

it gets worse!

> In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.

> Chinese workers are much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.

> And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.

like the fuck? where are your sources? this sounds like some ignorant shit to say

beachtaxidriver · 5 months ago

Lol that was my reaction too, this guy is an asshole. He should just leave.

beachtaxidriver commented on Supply constraints do not explain house price, quantity growth across US cities nber.org/papers/w33576... · Posted by u/pessimizer

bombcar · 5 months ago

Even in places where there’s infinite land literally you can buy 50 acres and develop it tomorrow and people are building it. They’re only building high-end luxury homes. Even the cheapest smallest townhomes are definitely into the low luxury area.

If they wanted to, they could build them much more affordable and save 30% off the total price, but nobody does it. Why not? It takes the same amount of time and you might as well build the more expensive one because someone will buy it and you get a percentage of the sale price.

beachtaxidriver · 5 months ago

Luxury has the same cost of land and utilities.

Costs like 15% more and sells for 30% more. Building economy is a losing proposition.

beachtaxidriver commented on The year I didn't survive bessstillman.substack.com... · Posted by u/LaurenSerino

tombert · 7 months ago

> I'm truly sorry for all that you've been through and I hope you find comfort. Reading through your other post it seems likely to me that nothing you said or did could have made any difference.

Yeah I know, that's not really why I feel guilty, at least not exactly. I feel guilty because I noticed signs of someone who was suicidal, and explicitly chose to not do anything. Even if nothing would have changed, I still think I should have tried to do something, even if it was futile.

It feels like the universe was giving me a character test, and it feels like I failed it. I would like to think that when push comes to shove, I'd do the right thing, at least in regards to someone's life being on the line, but I guess at some fundamental level that's simply not true, or at least it wasn't in 2021.

I mean, I realize that no good comes from feeling bad about myself over it, certainly not for three years, but human psychology is pretty annoying sometimes.

beachtaxidriver · 7 months ago

I read your original post and almost every reasonable person would have paused, but then have written it off as dark humor by someone they didn't know that well.

The only reason you might think there were "signs" you should have caught now is because of what happened but no one could have known in advance.

From a total Internet stranger, give yourself some grace. Or what I have also heard: Judge yourself the way you would judge a good friend in the same situation. We often judge ourselves super harshly!!

beachtaxidriver commented on Anthropic raising funding valuing it at $60B wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-startu... · Posted by u/jmsflknr

dingnuts · 8 months ago

>and chat with Claude almost every time I go out for a beer after a long day...

with all due respect, how can you take yourself seriously doing this? I tried to use an LLM as a "cheap therapist" exactly one time and it felt so phony I quit almost instantly, after about four messages.

The bot pretends to feel compassion for you! How does that not induce rage? It does for me. False empathy is way worse than nothing.

And on top of it, you're talking to a hosted LLM! I hope you are not divulging anything personal to the random third party you're sending your thoughts to..

This stuff is going to be such a huge boon to authoritarian governments.

beachtaxidriver · 8 months ago

I mean... what do you think human therapists are doing. I'm sure they have empathy and do care for their patients... but it's definitely empathy-for-money too.

beachtaxidriver commented on Polyamory doesn't liberate; monogamy doesn't protect carsonogenic.substack.com... · Posted by u/apsec112

VeejayRampay · 8 months ago

I wish someone would find a way to shield us from those topics on Hacker News, the one place that we can go without being flooded with those mundane societal issues and focus on actual technology and science

beachtaxidriver · 8 months ago

You can downvote it.

Many hackernews readers have pretty diverse interests though, and want to hear about both tech and general social issues.

beachtaxidriver commented on Polyamory doesn't liberate; monogamy doesn't protect carsonogenic.substack.com... · Posted by u/apsec112

renewiltord · 8 months ago

Given that we have this limit and our age, 3 if her health permits. If we could parallelize, one could imagine twice that+.

beachtaxidriver · 8 months ago

If you don't mind me asking, how many are you starting with now?

Because three is a lot. And if you're starting from 0 or 1 today, I can't imagine you actually want six.

beachtaxidriver commented on The Surreal Magnificence of Fatherhood shreyans.org/fatherhood... · Posted by u/shreyans

llm_trw · 9 months ago

Your parents by definition will only be able to spend 20% of the time on you that they could on a single child if they didn't neglect the others.

Seeing children with multiple siblings with less than 8 year difference between them vs single children is shocking just how differently kids are treated.

This is the most accurate but least factual description of what it looks like from the outside when a family keeps adding kids as fast as they can https://malcolminthemiddle.fandom.com/wiki/Flashback

beachtaxidriver · 9 months ago

I see your point. But I think you may be taking it to extremes.

A parent can snuggle multiple kids at once, read to multiple kids at once, take multiple kids to the zoo at once, etc.

Moreover siblings have their own rich relationships.

Having closely spaced siblings is pretty normal.