It would have been more effective to pay Micron to build up the capabilities to be a general-purpose fab to compete with TSMC.
Readit Newsdehrmann commented on US Intel stratechery.com/2025/u-s-... · Posted by u/maguay
dehrmann commented on Enshittification Is Our Fault theahura.substack.com/p/e... · Posted by u/theahura
I'm sure this will be unpopular but a large majority of these recent negative practices are a result of consumer behavior. Things like microtransactions, dealer markups on cars, clickbait, are all so prominent because they _work_. We have the power to reject them, yet people don't. The algorithm driven feeds with engagement bait and rage bait work.
And many other situations are damned if you do damned if you don't. Journalism websites have paywalls and people complain. They have ads and people complain. One way or another these people have to get paid. It's the same with shrinkflation. If costs increase, then either the product gets smaller, or the price gets higher. Either way, people complain.
> dealer markups on cars
Cars are special. They have some of the same issues other high-priced items that you buy occasionally and are a pain to shop for. Think mattresses, tires, and homes. There's information asymmetry, and actual comparison shopping is hassle. This is a setup for painful buying experiences.
With cars, lots of states also restrict manufacturers from selling directly to consumers. I guess it helps with competition at the consumer level, but manufacturers still have leverage over dealers (see This American Life #513).
With real estate, NAR only just (in 2024) got in trouble for price fixing commissions.
dehrmann commented on Show HN: I Built a XSLT Blog Framework vgr.land/content/posts/20... · Posted by u/vgr-land
Haven't seen this much interest in XML/XSLT in 20 years.
dehrmann commented on It is worth it to buy the fast CPU blog.howardjohn.info/post... · Posted by u/ingve
At my former job at a FAANG, I did the math on allocating developers machines with 16GB vs 64GB based on actual job tasks with estimates of how much thumb twiddling waiting time that this would save and then multiplied that out by the cost of the developer's time. The cost benefit showed a reasonable ROI that was realized in Weeks for Senior dev salaries (months for juniors).
Based on this, I strongly believe that if you're providing hardware for software engineers, it rarely if ever makes sense to buy anything but the top spec Macbook Pro available, and to upgrade every 2-3 years. I can't comment on non desktop / non-mac scenarios or other job families. YMMV.
FAANG manages the machines. Setting aside the ethics of this level of monitoring, I'd be curious to validate this by soft-limiting OS memory usage and tracking metrics like number of PRs and time someone is actively on the keyboard.
Long have I wanted a cat door that would only open for my cats, not the mean neighborhood one that eats their food. I can’t be the only one. I’ve been meaning to try to build one with a camera, rPi and Google Coral, but never got around to it. There’s the matter of the locking mechanism and more.
Take a look at SureFlap and OnlyCat. They use RFID chips in the cats.
Rolled my eyes on "For experts only: don't do it yet". Shut-up already. I will do it right now because it will nag me forever and then surface will grow, and every time the new code interacts whith what-could-ve-been-optimized I will spend 5min thinking if I should already optimize it
I used to work on FAANG-scale optimizations. Generally, the only code-level optimizations worth bothering with are ones with inefficient (think O(n^2) vs O(n) and caching) algorithms. Those get you because they work during testing, but fall over in prod. You should also optimize DB and RPC access patterns when appropriate. As things scale, there can be larger architectural changes that help. Finally, there are cute micro optimizations that everyone thinks will matter. They don't.
My forum traffic went up 10x due to bots a few months ago. Never seen anything like it.
> Loading static pages from CDN to scrape training data takes such minimal amounts of resources that it's never going to be a significant part of my costs. Are there cases where this isn't true?
Why did you bring up static pages served by a CDN, the absolute best case scenario, as your reference for how crawler spam might affect server performance?
> My forum traffic...
> Why did you bring up static pages served by a CDN...
This is easier said than done, but pushing the latest topic snapshot to the CDN whenever a post is made is doable.
dehrmann commented on Palantir CEO Alex Karp's Letter to Shareholders palantir.com/q2-2025-lett... · Posted by u/nalinidash
With a P/E of 530 its hard to imagine a better short opportunity in the market. As much as palantir likes to pretend its a software company it is a bespoke software company which has only slightly better scaling laws than a consulting company. Make no mistake I have the utmost respect (if fear is a form of respect) for their surveillance capabilities. But that doesn't justify the market cap.
> With a P/E of 530 its hard to imagine a better short opportunity in the market
Bitcoin has an infinite P/E.
Edit: P/E is also goofy for barely profitable companies. If you plot earnings on the x axis, P/E on the y, and hold price constant, you'll get a 1/x curve. It's not continuous at zero, and it ramps up quickly.