The one that got me was a supposed foundation legend from Sumer that a handful of strangers came and taught them civilization.

The idea of a remnant people floating down a river to escape some sort of societal collapse and then being adopted into a new tribe for their usefulness has a certain something as a hypothesis goes. It’s the “strangers” part that’s a bit suspect since how would you not meet neighbors like that. Unless the river was the end of their journey and not the start.

- reducing headcount by 50% down to ~70 people = firing 70 people

- at a generous estimate of total burdened cost of $1M/person/year, that's $70M/year

- which accounts for a full 5 years of that war chest

- and, moreover, "at its lowest point" suggests that perhaps Replit has expanded headcount again since; the article mentions that it has done some acqui-hires.

Levels.fyi shows Replit salaries in the $200k–300k range, so even at a 2× burden rate, I think that this is probably a significant overestimate of the costs.

Firing 70 people when you have $100 million that you haven't touched, have raised money on top of that, and have many years of runway for the people you fired… comes together to paint a picture that is, imho, less than flattering.

    # NeMo does not run on 3.13+
    python3.12 -m venv .venv
    source .venv/bin/activate

    git clone https://github.com/NVIDIA/NeMo.git nemo
    cd nemo

    pip install torch torchaudio torchvision --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu128
    pip install .[asr]

    deactivate

    import os
    import sys
    import nemo.collections.asr as nemo_asr

    model_path = sys.argv[1]
    audio_path = sys.argv[2]

    # Load from a local path...
    asr_model = nemo_asr.models.EncDecRNNTBPEModel.restore_from(restore_path=model_path)

    # Or download from huggingface ('org/model')...
    asr_model = nemo_asr.models.EncDecRNNTBPEModel.from_pretrained(model_name=model_path)

    output = asr_moel.transcribe([audio_path])
    print(output[0])

You'll need to modify the python script to process the response and output it in a format you can use.