Doesn't this just shift the same hard problem from code to people? It may seem easier to assess the "quality" of a person, but I think there are all sorts of complex social dynamics at play, plus far more change over time. Leave it to us nerds to try and solve a human problem with a technical solution...
Readit Newsskeeter2020 commented on Software factories and the agentic moment factory.strongdm.ai/... · Posted by u/mellosouls
$1k per day, 50 work weeks, 5 day a week → $250k a year. That is, to be worth it, the AI should work as well as an engineer that costs a company $250k. Between taxes, social security, and cost of office space, that engineer would be paid, say, $170-180k a year, like an average-level senior software engineer in the US.
This is not an outrageous amount of money, if the productivity is there. More likely the AI would work like two $90k junior engineers, but without a need to pay for a vacation, office space, social security, etc. If the productivity ends up higher than this, it's pure profit; I suppose this is their bet.
The human engineer would be like a tech lead guiding a tea of juniors, only designing plans and checking results above the level of code proper, but for exceptional cases, like when a human engineer would look at the assembly code a compiler has produced.
This does sound exaggeratedly optimistic now, but does not sound crazy.
>> $170-180k a year, like an average-level senior software engineer in the US.
I hear things like this all the time, but outside of a few major centers it's just not the norm. And no companies are spending anything like $1k / month on remote work environments.
Didn't you have a specific per day expense budget? I think there is a department of labor guidance for local travel and a department of state guidance for international travel.
Usually, if your per day expense is less or equal to the guidance (where I work we do $90/day), no one cares. If you go above, you pay. The per day expense is for food. Alcohol cannot be claimed as an expense unless you are in sales.
Even in your short, simple comment I see 4? 5? (or more?) pieces of administrative policy that need to be policed, and then we need a process to handle these rules - and the edge cases (ex: what if I'm travelling with someone in sales but I'm the senior employee and we take a client out for dinner? only sales can expense alcohol but typically the most senior employee must pay), and the resubmission process, and the approve of exceptions process, and on it goes...
I remember at a previous job I had to do a fair bit of business travel. The company had their own internal tool for filing expense reports.
I would do the typical thing of "take picture of receipt, upload receipt, specify how much it cost, etc.", and for the most part it was seemless and it would be sent to my bank account.
One time, I bought a box of Fiber One bars at a CVS Pharmacy and expensed that. I got a phone call from the billing department asking why I would expense something like that and I said something like "because I don't usually eat that healthy during business travel and I suspect you can guess the reason after that". They told me they would get back to me, and then I got an email telling me that they rejected the expense report and I would have to file it again to get the rest of my stuff reimbursed.
I can be a pretty petty dude, so I filed it again, completely unchanged, I get another phone call telling me to remove it, and this repeated two more times. Eventually I complained to my manager and he was able to get them to let me expense it and it all worked out.
I find it amusing, because the box of Fiber One bars was less than five bucks. I suspect all the time that they wasted of theirs and mine probably cost considerably more than the $5 would have saved from not covering it.
37 signals has a story about this, and the birth of policies & procedures that cost far more than the "crime" they're intended to prevent, because in your case it was $5 in granola bars, but that scenario will repeat itself for the rest of time, and extra resources will likely be dedicated to this "problem area". This seems inevitable as companies grow, and is one of the signals I use that it's close to my time to leave.
skeeter2020 commented on The largest zip tie is nearly 4 feet long and $75 thedrive.com/news/youll-h... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
They're 47 inches long. Amazon (UK) has 48 inch long zip ties for $14.45 (pack of 12), 60 inch long for $18. Not quite as thick or wide, sure... But that's not what was in the headline :P
the article highlights not just the length, but the comical thickness of it too. It reminds me of those giant promotional watches for some reason...
TIL about all that stuff, Moltbook, Openclaw, Gas Town, and I don't get it anymore. It's too much. Forums for chatbots with their own religion but its actually a crypto scam and vibecoded hypesoftware to scam people with sh*tcoins because yolo and whatnot. I'm out.
I read a bit about Gas Town, and I'm still confused if it's a super-inception, metajoke that I don't get; or a clever, invite-only party to which I'm not invited. All the original article (and the discussions & responses to the responses) did was make me feel stupid, but I have enough experience and self-worth to know I'm not stupid so I'm just going to refuse to play. I recently spent more than a week pretty disconnected from this all and haven't felt that good in a long time!
skeeter2020 commented on OpenAI could reportedly run out of cash by mid-2027 tomshardware.com/tech-ind... · Posted by u/thenaturalist
OpenAI have signed something like $1.5tn worth of future spending deals as of the end of last year whilst making something like $13bn of _revenue_ for the year. There's no way that any of this can add up
"signed" $1.5T, or issued press releases that hint to $1.5T in synergistic, cross-collateralized theoretical future deals funded by market frenzy and investor inertia? i.e. how much of their own money has OpenAI committed?
skeeter2020 commented on OpenAI could reportedly run out of cash by mid-2027 tomshardware.com/tech-ind... · Posted by u/thenaturalist
Where is the actual financial modelling? This is pure speculation?
I understand being bearish and frightened of AI but this accounts for absolutely NOTHING, and especially doesn't include any projections on potential ad revenue which is likely going to be huge given their DAU and what you can extrapolate their ARPU to be based on other big tech advertisers.
Altman saying they are going to spend a Trillion+ is (if anything) an anti signal to what the actual financial plan looks like. He is way out front as the hype man and booster. Most of what he says is wishful thinking or an outright lie.
skeeter2020 commented on PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch theregister.com/2026/01/1... · Posted by u/smurda
That's right.
My parents, being much over 80 years old, have been using for many years Linux, more precisely Gentoo Linux, but they have no idea what "Linux" is.
Obviously, I have installed all software on their computers and I have kept it up to date.
However, after that, they have just used the computers for reading and editing documents or e-mail messages, for browsing the Internet, for watching movies or listening music, much the same as they would have done with any other operating system. When they had a more unusual need, I had to search and install an appropriate program and teach them how to use it.
They had the advantage of having a "consultant" to solve any problem, but none of the problems that they have encountered were problems that they would not also encounter on Windows. Actually on Linux when you have a problem, you can be pretty certain that someone competent can find a solution, in the worst case by reading the source code, when other better documentation does not exist. On Windows, I have encountered far worse problems than on Linux, when whole IT support departments scratched their heads and could not understand what is happening, for weeks, and sometimes forever.
By far the main advantage of Windows over Linux in ease of use is that it comes preinstalled on most computers. I have installed Windows professionally and it frequently has been far more difficult than installing Linux on the same hardware, but normal people are shielded from such experiences.
Most modern Linux distributions have one great advantage in ease of use over Windows: the software package manager. Whenever you need some application, you just search an appropriate package and you install it quickly and freely. Such package managers for free software have existed many decades before app stores (e.g. FreeBSD already had one more than 30 years ago) and they remain better than any app store, by not requiring any invasive account for their use, or mandatory payments.
>> They had the advantage of having a "consultant" to solve any problem, but none of the problems that they have encountered were problems that they would not also encounter on Windows.
I drew a hard "no family tech support" line decades ago, and the difference then is that they can at least find a Windows tech-support consultant. What happens if an octogenarian phones Geek Squad and says they're running Variant <X> of Linux?
Feels like making a messaging app but "how messages are delivered and to whom is left to the user to implement".
I think "who and how someone is vouched" is like 99.99% of the problem and they haven't tried to solve it so it's hard to see how much value there is here. (And tbh I doubt you really can solve this problem in a way that doesn't suck.)