koliber (u/koliber) - Readit News

koliber commented on Finland gave two groups identical payments – one saw better mental health scottsantens.substack.com... · Posted by u/2noame

bjourne · 2 days ago

You're probably not aware that €560 is subsistence money in Finland. Eat noodles every day, sell your car, keep indoor temperature at 18 C to save electricity, then maybe you have enough to pay rent. The idea that people in that situation needs to be kicked even harder to "get of their lazy asses" is cruel.

koliber · a day ago

No one needs to be kicked to do anything. Welfare payments are needed for various reasons. Some people are unable to work for various reasons and need welfare to live. Some people find themselves in temporary situations where the money helps them during hard job transitions or difficult periods in life. It’s important to give people incentives to help them achieve what will make their lives truly better. Sometimes, free money removes those incentives and temporary situations become permanent. I hope you don’t perceive all incentives to encourage constructive behavior as “kicking people.”

koliber commented on Finland gave two groups identical payments – one saw better mental health scottsantens.substack.com... · Posted by u/2noame

koliber · 2 days ago

I wonder what is the difference between the two groups as far as the rate of finding employment. Might be that the act of looking for a job is stressful.

If the goal is to get people back to work, it might not make sense to optimize just for better mental health.

koliber commented on Internal RFCs saved us months of wasted work highimpactengineering.sub... · Posted by u/romannikolaev

pdimitar · 4 days ago

Would you share how? Your comment leaves with a cliff-hanger.

I also don't get your son's response at all. How is he contradicting you at all and how does that lead to unwashed hair?

koliber · 4 days ago

It's clearer if you deconstruct the conversation about Jira and then think about the washing hair and shampoo comment. It's a stretch, but when you see it is should make sense.

I ask my team to clarify requirements better. They say that they already have Jira. It's as if they were implying that the presence of a tool (Jira) should be enough to provide clear stories. But it's not about the tool. It's about them not using the tool properly but pointing at the tool (or process) as an excuse.

I ask my son to wash his hair. He says there is shampoo in the shower. It's as if the presence of the shampoo implies that his hair should be clean. It's not about the lack of tooling, but about the fact that he did not wash his hair with the tool that he had available.

People often blame tooling or methodology, but most often its that they don't know how to use the tooling or methodology well. They will say things like "if we only used X our problems would go away." Most likely, they won't.

I posted a lazy comment earlier because I did not have time to type it out. Apologies.

koliber commented on Internal RFCs saved us months of wasted work highimpactengineering.sub... · Posted by u/romannikolaev

StackBPoppin · 4 days ago

I've tried suggesting this for my team since there are constant complaints of lack of communication. However, the response to this is "we have Teams/Jira/Confluence", but 99% of Jira tickets have no comments for clarification, Confluence has articles that are out of date by 5 years and Teams is never used for clarifying requirements.

koliber · 4 days ago

That's like me trying to get my son to wash his hair and him responding by saying "We have shampoo in the shower."

I am right and my son is right, but his hair is still not washed.

I became a more effective manager and a better father when I learned how to talk to him better.

koliber commented on Internal RFCs saved us months of wasted work highimpactengineering.sub... · Posted by u/romannikolaev

koliber · 4 days ago

Love the title. Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes: "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."

This is what user stories were supposed to accomplish in a more lightweight way.

The whole scrum DoR (definition of ready) status means that something is clear and ready for development.

Stories are written and are sent to the engineering team for clarification. This is where the comments are supposed to come in. There is a clear step for clarification of stories, before the story is ready for development. It gets marked as DoR when that clarification is done.

It does not matter if you use RFCs, user stories, or hallway conversations as your process of clarifying work. If it does not work, it does not work.

Any way you can get your teams to communicate more clearly is great.

koliber commented on IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off businessinsider.com/ibm-c... · Posted by u/nabla9

writebetterc · 17 days ago

You're saying $8 billion to cover interest, another commenter said 80, but the actual article says ""$8 trillion of CapEx means you need roughly $800 billion of profit just to pay for the interest". Eight HUNDRED billion. Where does the eight come from, from 90% of these companies failing to make a return? If a few AI companies survive and thrive (which tbh, sure, why not?) then we're still gonna fall face down into concrete.

koliber · 17 days ago

right. My goof. That adds two more zeroes across all the math. More crazy, but I think in the realm of "maybe, if we squint hard."

koliber commented on IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off businessinsider.com/ibm-c... · Posted by u/nabla9

rc1 · 17 days ago

Nit: its $800 billion in interest, your comment starts with $8 billion

koliber · 17 days ago

right. My goof. That adds two more zeroes across all the math. More crazy, but I think in the realm of "maybe, if we squint hard." But my eyes are hurting from squinting that hard, so I agree that it's just crazy.

koliber commented on IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off businessinsider.com/ibm-c... · Posted by u/nabla9

koliber · 17 days ago

NOTE: People pointed out that it's $800 billion to cover interest, not $8 billion, as I wrote below. My mistake. That adds 2 more zeroes to all figures, which makes it a lot more crazy. Original comment below...

$8 billion / US adult adult population of of 270 million comes out to about $3000 per adult per year. That's only to cover cost of interest, let alone other costs and profits.

That sounds crazy, but let's think about it...

- How much does an average American spend on a car and car-related expenses? If AI becomes as big as "cars", then this number is not as nuts.

- These firms will target the global market, not US only, so number of adults is 20x, and the average required spend per adult per year becomes $150.

- Let's say only about 1/3 of the world's adult population is poised to take advantage of paid tools enabled by AI. The total spend per targetable adult per year becomes closer to $500.

- The $8 billion in interest is on the total investment by all AI firms. All companies will not succeed. Let's say that the one that will succeed will spend 1/4 of that. So that's $2 billion dollar per year, and roughly $125 per adult per year.

- Triple that number to factor in other costs and profits and that company needs to get $500 in sales per targetable adult per year.

People spend more than that on each of these: smoking, booze, cars, TV. If AI can penetrate as deep as the above things did, it's not as crazy of an investment as it looks. It's one hell of a bet though.

koliber commented on AI CEO – Replace your boss before they replace you replaceyourboss.ai/... · Posted by u/_tk_

tylerflick · 23 days ago

Musk isn’t getting a trillion. Tesla sales would have to skyrocket.

koliber · 23 days ago

Imagine that they do skyrocket but the RoboCEO is in charge trillion gets distributed to shareholders.

koliber commented on Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering? · Posted by u/_1tan

antonvs · a month ago

A lot of settlement in financial markets is still pretty slow. That’s a big reason why there was so much fintech interest in blockchain.

You may be thinking of high frequency trading. In that case, traders interact directly with an exchange - e.g. via direct market access[1] - so it’s a pre-established two-party interaction. There’s no particular technical difficulty with making that fast. Usually, slow transaction times are a consequence of the structure of the market, not a technical issue particularly.

[1] https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/career-map/s...

koliber · a month ago

In the broad picture of engineering, I would consider this to be technically difficult. Many pieces of the puzzle need to interact correctly to remove latency, from physical location, network gear, decision about where software runs, removing unnecessary layers of everything, to algos and data structures, and doing razor-tight tradeoff analysis favoring low-latency at every step along the way. It’s also expensive. So it’s hard to agree that this is not hard. On the flip side, if you find this easy and want a job, msg me.