ricardobayes (u/ricardobayes)

ricardobayes commented on Tips for stroke-surviving software engineers blog.j11y.io/2025-10-29_s... · Posted by u/padolsey

ownagefool · 2 months ago

Tech has built literal industries of people trying to stress you out, and they mostly don't have actual tech skills or the empathy that comes with them so back it up.

For me, I usually try to avoid anything where the working practices are strongly defined. Agile has long been a bad word.

I'm glad you're doing well now.

ricardobayes · 2 months ago

Unfortunately while the intentions around agile were noble it's pretty much a direct way to burnout or worse. The human mind is not designed to "sprint" run a marathon, metaphorically speaking, forever.

I see older devs being active in the trade well into their 60s but even as I much younger person I don't see how agile development is sustainable for a ~50-year career.

ricardobayes commented on Harnessing America's heat pump moment heatpumped.org/p/harnessi... · Posted by u/ssuds

galoisscobi · 2 months ago

> we’re waiting on people

Right on. I have a heat pump water heater and a heat pump heating system in my HVAC. Getting those installed felt like swimming upstream. Most contractors would try to dissuade me from them.

Luckily, I found a contractor who was skilled and knowledgeable about heat pumps and rebates (back when govt thought climate change was real). Very happy with my heat pump tech.

ricardobayes · 2 months ago

Honestly yeah. Even a certified heat pump engineer would try to persuade me to "just get a gas boiler" when asked for quotes.

ricardobayes commented on Harnessing America's heat pump moment heatpumped.org/p/harnessi... · Posted by u/ssuds

prasadjoglekar · 2 months ago

This. The quotes I got for a single 2 ton heat pump with a oil backup ranged from $15K to $45K.

It's insane and really made me look into the DIY installs. Even if I broke 2 of those it would still be cheaper than one professional one.

Solar install is another scam. All those companies want to steer you into a PPA rather than let you buy panels.

ricardobayes · 2 months ago

Yup, got similar quotes. I'm really not going to pay that for a day's work (2 people). The price difference over installing A/C is staggering and don't know where it comes from.

ricardobayes commented on 996 lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/9/4... · Posted by u/genericlemon24

ricardobayes · 3 months ago

Someone made a back-of-a-napkin calculation that a 165k 9-9-6 job in the UK pays a similar after-tax hourly as a normal 38-hour 75k job.

ricardobayes commented on Anthropic raises $13B Series F anthropic.com/news/anthro... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

bcrosby95 · 4 months ago

I think you're really bending over backwards to make this company seem non viable.

If model training has truly turned out to be profitable at the end of each cycle, then this company is going to make money hand over fist, and investing money to out compete the competition is the right thing to do.

Most mega corps started out wildly unprofitable due to investing into the core business... until they aren't. It's almost as if people forget the days of Facebook being seen as continually unprofitable. This is how basically all huge tech companies you know today started.

ricardobayes · 4 months ago

It's an interesting case. IMO LLMs are not a product in the classical sense, companies like Anthropic are basically doing "basic research" so others can build products on top of it. Perhaps Anthropic will charge a royalty on the API usage. I personally don't think you can earn billions selling $500 subscriptions. This has been shown by the SaaS industry. But it is yet to be seen whether the wider industry will accept such royalty model. It would be akin to Kodak charging filmmakers based on the success of the movie. Somehow AI companies will need to build a monetization pipeline that will earn them a small amount of money "with every gulp", if we are using a soft drink analogy.

ricardobayes commented on Everything is correlated (2014–23) gwern.net/everything... · Posted by u/gmays

ricardobayes · 4 months ago

Not commenting on the topic at hand, but my goodness, what a beautiful blog. That drop cap, the inline comments on the right hand side that appear on larger screens, the progress bar, chef's kiss. This is how a love project looks like.

ricardobayes commented on 1976 Soviet edition of 'The Hobbit' (2015) mashable.com/archive/sovi... · Posted by u/us-merul

ricardobayes · 4 months ago

In Hungary, the Lord of the Rings book was translated by Göncz Árpád who later went on to become President of Hungary.

ricardobayes commented on GPT-5 openai.com/gpt-5/... · Posted by u/rd

RealityVoid · 4 months ago

I mean, in certain US cities you can take a waymo right now. It seems that adage where we overestimate change in the short term and underestimate change in the long term fits right in here.

ricardobayes · 4 months ago

Of course. My point being "AI is going to take dev jobs" is very much like saying "Self driving will take taxi driver jobs". Never happened and likely won't happen or on a very, very long time scale.

ricardobayes commented on GPT-5 openai.com/gpt-5/... · Posted by u/rd

highfrequency · 4 months ago

It is frequently suggested that once one of the AI companies reaches an AGI threshold, they will take off ahead of the rest. It's interesting to note that at least so far, the trend has been the opposite: as time goes on and the models get better, the performance of the different company's gets clustered closer together. Right now GPT-5, Claude Opus, Grok 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro all seem quite good across the board (ie they can all basically solve moderately challenging math and coding problems).

As a user, it feels like the race has never been as close as it is now. Perhaps dumb to extrapolate, but it makes me lean more skeptical about the hard take-off / winner-take-all mental model that has been pushed.

Would be curious to hear the take of a researcher at one of these firms - do you expect the AI offerings across competitors to become more competitive and clustered over the next few years, or less so?

ricardobayes · 4 months ago

AGI in 5/10 years is similar to "we won't have steering wheels in cars" or "we'll be asleep driving" in 5/10 years. Remember that? What happened to that? It looked so promising.