I have hearing sensitivity and have repeatedly asked my parents to lower the volume on TVs, whatsapp videos, insta reels 100s of times. They always lower it for 5 minutes before raising it back. Likely because they are losing their hearing, but unable to admit that.
I tend to be very mindful of others (maybe because I grew up in America), but my parents are not even mindful of my requests. Maybe it's a cultural thing? I expect those who have grown-up (or spent their whole lives) in India would do the same.
Definitely need to test this out app out when I go home.
On the flip side, people with hearing sensitivity are the most god awful people to deal with. It’s like the entire world has to quiet down for them when they could just as easily put in ear plugs instead.
Hyperacusis is a real thing. One of my kidults has it, and yes, they use active noise cancelling ear plugs or over the ear headphones and sometimes the world is still too loud.
That's a fair point. Model prices can increase. This raises the next question.
Doesn't this mean that any company that depends on headcount growth (every SaaS), loses?
100 SWE -> 10 SWE, 100 slack/gmail/notion/zoom/etc. subscriptions become 10.
And now let's recurse.
These SaaS companies that use AI and dropped 90% of engineering headcount lose revenue because their customers also drop headcount.
Let's say AI costs 89% more than it did before, so the SaaS companies still get 10x productivity from the 10 engineers, but now all their customers headcount is 90% smaller too. So what now? Does every company make a pact to grow headcount ;)
> Doesn't this mean that any company that depends on headcount growth (every SaaS), loses?
Yes, assuming they aren't also scaling their costs down with AI.
But this is mostly a moot point because we don't yet have any evidence that AI is killing lots of jobs. Companies are doing necessary/planned layoffs after over-hiring for years, and some of them are making it look better to investors by saying it's because they're smart (for using AI) instead of the truth, which is that they stupidly over-hired.
You also have to remember that AI is way, way under-priced right now. That $200/mo. Claude bill should probably be double or triple what it is. All of the AI companies are plowing money into keeping prices artificially low.
The economics will change a lot once they can't do that anymore. Google will likely dominate because they can burn their own cash from other businesses instead of cash from VCs or retail investors.
But if prices go up and these companies charge enough to be profitable, people will start to question whether it's cheaper to just have people doing the work instead.
But AI companies would want more engineers generating more tokens.
In this case, Anthropic would want 100 SWEs generating 100,000/mo of revenue. Replacing the very headcount that is responsible for token usage would hurt company growth.
Not to mention what happens when companies start doing this recursively. 100 SWE -> 10 SWE, 100 slack/gmail/notion/etc. subscriptions become 10.
If there are fewer engineers, then there will be fewer dev tool companies, and fewer managers, etc. meaning fewer Slack, Gmail, MSFT, Zoom subscriptions, etc.
Companies are showing good profits, but if every company downsizes, then every company loses... right?
With deep sorrow, the Mukerji family announces the passing of Meenakshi Mukerji on June 11, 2024. Meenakshi fought very hard and bravely against stage 4 lung cancer for nearly 5 years, and she passed peacefully surrounded by close family and so much love.
Meenakshi was born and raised in Kolkata, India. She obtained her BS in electrical engineering from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, and a MS in computer science from Portland State University, Oregon. After working in the software industry for more than a decade, Meenakshi dedicated her time to her family, her community, travel, and to the arts. She authored many origami books and spread her love and passion for the craft across the world.
Meenakshi was a beloved daughter, sister, mother, wife, and friend. Her strength, creativity, positivity, and love will continue to inspire and touch the lives of those who knew her, and also those who didn’t.
I started a portfolio website with Netlify (iirc), then I moved to Vue + Gridsome (on GitHub pages), then Next.js with Tailwind CSS, and was about to move to Vite.js over winter break.
That's 4 stacks over the course of 5-6 years. Not worth it.
Decided to do the sensible thing and use GitHub's README functionality. I prefer this approach and wish more folks in the tech community adopted it: https://github.com/SuboptimalEng
IMO there's quite a surprising amount of stuff you can do on GitHub that's highly undiscoverable. You only think of it when you see someone else on the site doing it, and then you don't necessarily know what it's called so you don't know how to research it.
I hate the UI layer, for this reason. Nothing is ever stable. I'm looking for "Boring" and "Googleable in the age of AI slop". The other alternative are frameworks small enough to easily comprehend.
The UI is often tangential to the heavy lifting done by the back end. It often needs to be "just good enough".
How can UI be stable if you’re the one changing it all the time even if all you need is a readme page that can be done in the same UI with no change for decades?
GitHub was just down the other day. Why would you want your personal website/portfolio to be tied to GitHub? Crazy "modern web dev" stacks are likely overkill, but that's not an argument against self-hosting.
Logged in to comment this. Very much agree. It's crazy (to me) that books like this gets so much hype on HN when there are much better videos that explain these topics better.
Most of my math learning starting in high school all the way through undergrad was done by watching YouTube videos. I used books to practice problems, but when it came to understanding topics more deeply, it was always some random person on YouTube who did it better.
I hope in the future, all math (at least applied math) is explained using nice visualizations + videos instead of books like this.
The same thing applies to computer science. Try figuring out even the basics, like merge or quick sort, using pseudocode in a traditional algorithms book. It's an extremely difficult and time consuming nightmare. But watch a video of how merge or quick sort works, then you gain geniune understanding within minutes.
Surprisingly one of the best summaries (~10 pages) to applied linear algebra I've found is in Nielsen and Chuang's Quantum Computation and Quantum Information.
Presented primarily without proofs which whilst argubably can be limiting isn't relevant, at least for what their goal is.
I have hearing sensitivity and have repeatedly asked my parents to lower the volume on TVs, whatsapp videos, insta reels 100s of times. They always lower it for 5 minutes before raising it back. Likely because they are losing their hearing, but unable to admit that.
I tend to be very mindful of others (maybe because I grew up in America), but my parents are not even mindful of my requests. Maybe it's a cultural thing? I expect those who have grown-up (or spent their whole lives) in India would do the same.
Definitely need to test this out app out when I go home.