I worked at such a place for 15 years. The downsides for me were lower pay, no equity, and not getting broad industry experience. I ended up leaving, and I now make a lot more money, but I do miss it.

Funny enough, it happened because of the 2022 layoffs. I figured I'd be fine (and was), but it made me go though the math and realized I was close to escape velocity. On one hand, it made getting excited about uninteresting work that much harder, but because I wasn't quite there with enough buffer, the bad job market still gave me anxiety.

In my case it was easy because I didn’t join the company until after I was already independently wealthy, from an IPO (quitting that company was an easy decision too, due to all the magical changes that happen after IPO).

Yes the expectations are probably still higher, but these companies don’t expect everyone to grow past “mostly self-sufficient engineer” as the parent comment suggests, and for people that do want to do that there’s a full non-management path to director-equivalent IC levels. My impression is that small companies are more likely to treat management as a promotion rather than as a lateral move to a different track (whenever I hear “promoted to manager” I kinda shudder)

It would be nice to have that, though. But my industry isn't known for stability to begin with.

To go into specifics of actual problems solved and do so intelligibly, I'd have to provide specific context, which I'm not comfortable doing here.

It's a lot easier to describe "interesting problems solved" using less identifiable (and more generally interesting) details if one is in platform/infra and/or operating at a Staff+ level -- both of which I have been in the past (and loved it), but am not at the moment.

It's not worth the internet points for any of us to post details beyond what we do.

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...

And that's ignoring the inherent inequality of birthright.

And it's one thing to pop a fever reducer when you already have antibodies from prior exposure or immunization (which vulnerable groups tend to be in large enough numbers). It's another thing to pop it when you don't.

And it's really weird that anyone would think of something amorphous and uncertain like climate change as a reason not to have children. Even the unlikely worst case scenarios are still going to have less impact than the major wars and plagues that our species has lived through. Some people just lack a sense of perspective.

Dense population creates all this, in reverse without dense civi you wouldnt have all the gadgets we have today :-D

The family used to tax the grown or mostly-grown children in the form of farm labor. The government in many prior centuries taxed like 2-5% total and the rest was intrafamilial support.

Now it is flipped on its head. Everyone else's families tax your child for their social security, socializing the benefits while still you retain most the costs privately.

Thus tragedy of the commons situation. Why make that investment when you can just tax everyone else's kids and rest assured of your own social security, if they don't pay it you can just have them tossed in a cage or their assets seized, no need to have children yourself.

Coincidentally, my aunts did not have to have more than 2, and almost every single one had 2 kids.

Why on earth would you believe that? People have bred animals for millennia. You think they didn’t understand that sex was a required step?

I imagine people have understood that sex led to pregnancy since before Homo sapiens.

People didn't have options besides "not having sex" that worked very well.

This is a toxic myth and acts as excuse to blame extrinsic factors that won't see change by the time you'll need them to, even if they can be fixed. Economic life today can be a lot more complicated for middle class professionals and skilled laborers, but they were only ever a fraction of the population in the first place, and families in tougher circumstances than today's middle class folk figured out how to navigate the cards they were dealt.

Emotionally, it legitimately sucks if you come from a comfy middle class background, and have a career that you believed should have been good enough to deliver the life you remember your parents or grandparents having and now doesn't seem to be. It feels unfair and disorienting, maybe. But the fact is that middle class lifestyle is gone for now, and if it does manage to get restored, that restoration will take a generation or two to come.

In the meantime, you have to figure out how to adapt and live that more modest and "more complicated financially" lifestyle. It can be done. Lots of people have been doing it for a long time. Along the way, you'll probably discover that lower class folk who never had the luxuries of your parents and grandparents in the first place were not seeing the world as something they had to "suffer in": they lived in homes, but often with more people in them. They traveled, but more infrequently, less glamorously, and with more pragmatic rationale like "visiting family" than "seeing the world". They had parties, but served simpler dishes on less fancy platters. They had "child care" when two parents worked, but got it by exchanging favors with family or neighbors instead of sending half a paycheck to a prestigious daycare. They laughed, they drank, they had kids. It's not a world of suffering to just not have some luxuries.

Today many young people would consider that life to be stifling, boring, or "suffering" but it was fine. Kids really don't care as long as they feel secure.

There’s major inflation in middle class expectations. People earning median income are expecting a very upper-middle-class lifestyle. A house bigger than their parents owned with nicer finishes, two new cars, frequent travel, eating out constantly, etc.

My parents were on the upper end of middle class when I grew up and we lived in a home with carpet and laminate countertops. Now everyone wants hardwood floors and quartz and more square footage, too. A lot of folks are driving cars that cost a year of their take home pay. Cost of living is too high but expectations seem to have risen even faster.

What you’re sensing is that things that were luxuries are now not. It’s not a big deal to pay $500 for the quartz countertops when your house is $800k.

What has gone up is the cost of essentials and the base level of goods to participate in society: housing, transportation, medicine, and education.

So yeah a TV you thought was untouchable is 3 days of minimum wage work. But it’s orthogonal to why people feel economically disposssed.

Unfortunately, the music has to stop, and that's where we are now

But I also feel like people grew up or had to grow up earlier back when. My parents were married, bought a house and had kids on the way by their mid 20's, when I was that age I had just about finished my education and started my first fulltime job, it'd take another decade to buy a house. Buying a house / getting a mortgage is a major commitment, and I think you'd get a big boost of adulthood / personal development if you do that in your mid 20's.

I moved to the middle of nowhere after my kids were born. One day I let my child walk home "alone" from school, for the portion that is on our own property, and of course as soon as you do that a fucking Karen will randomly pop out of nowhere, and start interrogating the child. It is like clockwork. You could be 100 miles from civilization and as soon as you do something someone somewhere disagrees with, a fucking Karen (and even in a minivan, down rugged rural dirt roads, how the fuck did she get there?) will magically be there that exact second with a cell phone at the ready to call CPS. Thankfully I was able to stop her before that happened, as I was actually watching from behind the bushes, which in itself is shameful but saved my ass.

I only wonder if there is going to be a next stage, the magical "midlife crisis", where I'm going to question all my decisions up to that point and I'm curious how I'm going to handle that.

The only reason this would not be the case is if you have specific requirements for the life of your child.

> The only reason this would not be the case is if you have specific requirements for the life of your child.

If humans could do without 2000 years ago, if the kids in africa can do without now, then clearly the same is true for your own children. God knows they don’t need $7000 braces, which are unaffordable to 99% of the US population too.

Feed them, and love them.

Azure is a product all right, but there’s nothing particularly better there than anywhere else.

    // Not real MIPS, just what I've gleaned from a brief look at some docs
    LOAD addr, register
    ADD 1, register
    STORE register, addr

That's a problem if any sort of interrupt happens (if you are multi-threading then a possibility). If it happens at the load, then a separate thread can update "addr" which mean the later STORE will stomp on what's there.

x86 and ARM can do

    ADD 1, addr

    LOAD addr, register
    MOV register, register2
    ADD 1, register2
    COMPARE_AND_SWAP addr, register, register2
    if (cas_failed) { try again }

    loop: LL r2, (r1)
          ADD r3, r2, 1
          SC r3, (r1)
          BEQ r3, 0, loop
          NOP

Criminal organizations take a different approach, much like spammers where they can purchase/rent c2 and other software for mass exploitation (eg ransomware). This stuff is usually very professionally coded and highly effective.

Botnets, hosting in various countries out of reach of western authorities, etc are all common tactics as well.

The less believable part for me is that people persist long enough and invest enough resources at prompting to do something with an automated agent that doesn’t have potential for massively backfire.

Secondly, they claimed to use Anthropic own infrastructure which is silly. There’s no doubt some capacity in China to do this. I also would expect incident response, threat detection teams, and other experts to be reporting this to Anthropic if Anthropic doesn’t detect it themselves first.

It sure makes good marketing to go out and claim such a thing though. This is exactly the kind of FOMO panic inducing headline that is driving the financing of whole LLM revolution.

(granted you have to have direct access to the llm, unlike claude where you just have the frontend, but the point stands. no need to convince whatsoever.)