bluedevil2k (u/bluedevil2k)

bluedevil2k commented on Advice for new principal tech ICs (i.e., notes to myself) eugeneyan.com/writing/pri... · Posted by u/7d7n

cmiles8 · 2 months ago

At higher levels or extremely specialized roles perhaps. But your typical big tech “principal” IC isn’t consistently making 7 figures.

bluedevil2k · 2 months ago

Yes they are

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Netflix%2CGoogle%2CFacebook

bluedevil2k commented on Oral Microbes Linked to 3-Fold Increased Risk of Pancreatic Cancer nyulangone.org/news/oral-... · Posted by u/bmau5

Wowfunhappy · 3 months ago

I find it completely strange that dental care isn't just considered part of standard healthcare. Like, so my employer's health care plan covers every part of my body except my mouth? Why does my mouth specifically need its own plan?

bluedevil2k · 3 months ago

Nor your eyes for some reason either.

bluedevil2k commented on Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says reuters.com/business/medi... · Posted by u/mriguy

bluedevil2k · 3 months ago

All the comments are missing the bigger picture with this new policy - Trump is sending a message the tech companies will need to pay up (to him) to get this policy to go away.

bluedevil2k commented on How the restoration of ancient Babylon is drawing tourists back to Iraq theartnewspaper.com/2025/... · Posted by u/leoh

nashashmi · 3 months ago

Tourism is such a wasteful tax on society. I met an Egyptologist who had been leading tours for two years so he could feed his family but he longed to go back to Egyptology and go and study the ruins even though it didn’t pay well

bluedevil2k · 3 months ago

Tourism is one of the best “products” a country can produce. It’s almost all a service industry which doesn’t strain natural resources, doesn’t cause physical health issues for its employees, incentivizes a higher level of education, and brings in large amounts of foreign currencies, helping to stabilize their own currency. The positives FAR outweigh the negatives. Countries like Saudi Arabia have embraced tourism as a great way to diversify. A country like Thailand is able to “thrive” relative to its neighbors because it derives far more economic power from its tourist trade.(20% of GDP compared to Cambodia’s 9%, Malaysia’s 15% and Myanmar’s 3%)

bluedevil2k commented on Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office businessinsider.com/micro... · Posted by u/alloyed

grepfru_it · 3 months ago

What?

Around Dell campus in Austin is a Home Depot, a hotel, a Chili’s, a strip mall with various shopping outlets and what not. You can walk there from the front door. The idea is that all the employees can walk there for lunch, they will buy things on the way home, it’s just extending economic foot traffic to the tenants of Michael Dell’s commercial properties. Now they won’t go out of business! More money for Mr Dell!

This is my theory at least. The foot traffic has increased greatly since the RTO mandate

bluedevil2k · 3 months ago

That’s absurd - the guy’s worth $130B, you think he cares about the not-even-pocket-change that would come from owning the land that a Twin Peaks is on? Dell’s RTO is purely a silent downsizing.

bluedevil2k commented on Crypto founder Do Kwon pleads guilty to US fraud charges ft.com/content/2e6fdc73-1... · Posted by u/TechTechTech

onlyrealcuzzo · 4 months ago

Is there a prediction market bet on whether or not he gets pardoned?

bluedevil2k · 4 months ago

Can Do Kwon bet enough money on “yes” to over his own roughly $30M bribe.

bluedevil2k commented on Ask HN: What trick of the trade took you too long to learn? · Posted by u/unsupp0rted

Etheryte · 5 months ago

This is a topic that often comes up, but once you pry, people usually overlook inflation. As an example, let's say you took out a $300,000 mortgage 30 years ago. The inflation adjusted cost of that today is $634,546 [0], so figuratively you end up paying more than double the sticker price just because of inflation.

[0] https://www.calculator.net/inflation-calculator.html?cstarti...

bluedevil2k · 4 months ago

What?? Something’s off in your statement. Inflation is actually a good thing when it comes to buying a house. You buy a house, get a (fixed) mortgage, and make set payments for the next 30 years. However, the payment amount never changes so as inflation takes effect over the years, your “real” payment gets cheaper and cheaper. In my case, the $1500/month I started paying in 2011 was worth a lot more than $1500 is worth today.

bluedevil2k commented on What Happens When Hertz's AI Scanner Finds Damage on Your Rental thedrive.com/news/this-is... · Posted by u/danielmorozoff

amelius · 6 months ago

Isn't that a problem for insurance companies, ultimately?

bluedevil2k · 6 months ago

Insurance doesn’t cover you when you drive outside your home country (USA).

bluedevil2k commented on What Happens When Hertz's AI Scanner Finds Damage on Your Rental thedrive.com/news/this-is... · Posted by u/danielmorozoff

crazygringo · 6 months ago

If anything, this just makes much clearer and provable what damage occurred. It's clearly evident in the photo, and yes you need to pay for damage.

On the other hand, this does make me wonder if there ought to be a threshold for damage. A small scratch to a panel can result in a very expensive panel replacement, and the car is still totally driveable and most people renting won't notice or care.

It would be one thing if minor damage could just be "buffed out", but it can't. But when the only repair option is an entire expensive replacement of a component, is that really fair? Do people really need their rental cars to be perfectly pristine? Are they willing to pay these exorbitant damage fees in order to ensure that?

bluedevil2k · 6 months ago

This part of their business model, why would they get rid of it?! Seems particularly pervasive in Europe. I got burned twice, once in Germany and once in France (both with Hertz), where they “discovered” a tiny scratch on a door they are sure was not there when I rented it. They charge a massive repair fee AND a loss of use fee. Around $900 for each of them. And the most beautiful part…they get to repeat this with the next person who rents it as well.

bluedevil2k commented on The Future of MCPs iamcharliegraham.substack... · Posted by u/tylerg

kaycebasques · 8 months ago

If you're sold on MCP, what was your "wow" moment? I've read the docs and tinkered a bit but it was a decidedly "meh" experience personally. It seems very similar to ChatGPT Plugins, and that was a flop. I don't really like the fuzzy nature of the architecture, where I never know what server will be invoked. And I have to manually opt-in to each server I want to use? To be unexpectedly useful, it seems like I would have to opt-in to tens or hundreds of servers. Yet I've heard that clients start to struggle once you have more than 20 servers plugged in...? Please excuse any fundamental errors I've repeated here, if any...

bluedevil2k · 8 months ago

Writing an internal MCP server to link our API layer to Augment/VSCode so that our Frontend developers can ask in plaintalk about API details. With over 1000 endpoints, it lets the devs find the endpoint, and more importantly the GQL fields, quickly. After some dogfooding we plan to open it up to our clients as well.