bstn

scientist. vibe coder.

[bstn @letrplB]

@gmoneyNFT What does this “included until June 22” mean? Got the same message + “switch to usage credits to continue”

Are they excluding it from plans then? 🥶

[bstn @letrplB]

@OGDfarmer Embrace the madness

[bstn @letrplB]

@elonmusk surely not for the better with these low-brainers

[bstn @letrplB]

the greg isenberg x alex finn combo on hermes agent is quite painful to watch. not because the content is bad - it isn’t. but alex is so toxic over-confident in everything he says and does. the success speaks for them, but also against the mass of evangelists - sorry.

[bstn @letrplB]

@scaling01 tax-funded media does not auto-imply good media. they compete in the same attention economy - just not with their existence at stake

[bstn @letrplB]

@sherwoodones @gmoneyNFT point your agent at this, maybe helps. obsidian is just the ui on top of the md vault, can be plugged in here, too.

https://t.co/xr5b4DjTrL

[bstn @letrplB]

@signulll ars contexta but different. you may like dream and no-surrender

https://t.co/xr5b4DjTrL

[bstn @letrplB]

@0FreeRadical0 @OdedRechavi exactly this!

[bstn @letrplB]

@OdedRechavi And they get to read just abstracts of the polished, possibly cheery-picked positives. This will change

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

Notes on 100+ Recent Technical Interviews

I interview a ton of engineers. Recruiting is the single most important technical CEO activity. Here are a bunch of impressions

1. There is a severe ZIRP engineering overhang that is currently washing out. They're getting laid off, managed out, etc. after having been massively overhired around 2020-2022. This is worst for Tier-2 big tech (think PayPal, Bill, etc.) but also FAANGs. These are overwhelmingly bad engineers.

2. This flood of unqualified but good-on-paper candidates makes this the hardest SF hiring market I have ever seen, due to the amount of nominally strong-looking candidates that you need to grind through.

3. I am highly skeptical of "AI as a cause for engineering layoffs". I think this is a large-scale polite fiction -- the companies don't want to admit they overhired, the engineers don't want to admit they are bad at their jobs. Everyone's blaming AI when it's really just the market rectifying itself.

4. Many of these engineers appear never to have had a real engineering function at their corporations. They're sitting in meetings, "making decisions about technology" but are unable to write software. I leave many interviews baffled by what exactly they were doing for so many years, let alone what their manager was doing.

5. I have interviewed some engineers from FAANG companies so shockingly nontechnical that I am forced to conclude that there is either (1) a lot of resume fraud going on or (2) that there are kickback grifts within those organizations -- people hiring their cousins and splitting the pay, that kind of thing. I have no other explanation.

6. There's a fun side-effect where after interviewing 20+ people from certain small but public companies, I actually feel like I am gaining a short sellers' advantage: there are financial technology companies out there that, knowing what I now know, I would never deposit a single dollar into.

8. Based on this "exhaust" data, and extrapolating a little bit, maybe aggressively so: I think folks like @pmarca are basically right when they say that ~every tech company is overstaffed by a factor of 2-4x. Whatever the reason -- staffing ahead of need, monopolizing certain engineer types (Google-style), headcount-driven promotion incentives, the reality is that a lot of these companies are not being run for the shareholders. The aggregate SBC expense is insane, and I expect this is going to get rectified eventually.

I'm sure that AI will play a role in rectifying this -- but I fear that people are going to blame AI for taking people's jobs when the reality is that the jobs were already long-gone, possibly always useless, but the highly-paid butts-in-seats remained. People will be mad at AI for taking away their lucrative sinecures. Maybe that's the same effect from a public policy perspective, but it feels different morally.

[bstn @letrplB]

@DCinvestor @punk9059 liquidity maxing for the early investor dump

[bstn @letrplB]

Because they are acting even more short sighted on almost every important frontier at comparable incompetence and trust as other parties. 1) back to coal/gas and into dependency of russia again - these are 20th century energy sources, not 21st. 2) flat 25% tax on all, no tax on inheritance - nominally easing tax burden for everyone (what the middle class loves about it) but silently facilitating wealth accumulation at the top 3) the math still doesn’t math on their program (less taxes, but better socials) 4) remigration in the cheap way - a flat "throw immigrants out" without distinction of social values of immigration - this is the most complex topic and them claiming to have a simple solution just shows their lack of nuance.
Many of these things and more will not stop the decline of the country, but rather facilitate or at least throw progress back in high-stakes domains. Many of them saw the rise of the party as a chance to get a seat on the safest ship to personal enrichment - politics (but this is my personal perception of what happens around individual members).
I won’t convince you, but at least I want to present an alternative view so you can evaluate for yourself.

[bstn @letrplB]

genuinely curious where the money for cheap energy, retirement at 63 and social improvements will come from while they want to cut taxes to flat 25% (which essentially only serves the richest 10% who would have known…) The math is not mathing. The problem is the afd articulates obvious and simple solutions to population pain that are neither obvious nor simple. They just claim having the benefit of doubt that they never were in power to do things right. The only reason I would like to see them in power once is to see them fail miserably same as the other parties. But honestly I don’t want the damage done just to prove some of you that’s obvious. And here it comes: I am not saying that any of current parties in power do the right thing - but I know that the afd is an even worse option.

[bstn @letrplB]

@KaiXCreator Sure, why not?

[bstn @letrplB]

@encrypted lol

[bstn @letrplB]

@7sameddin @MarioNawfal even if true - the download surely was finished between posting (Nov 4, 2024) and recording it (11.02.2025). Not that I want to evaluate the situation, but Mario’s story is just false based on the evidence

[bstn @letrplB]

@0xDesigner Quite certain that this doesn’t work. Where would it train that model?

[bstn @letrplB]

@achimh @MarioNawfal the letter is in English… doesn’t make sense

[bstn @letrplB]

@NotSoEasyMoney it’s not like people haven’t thought about it. But there’s no material that can transduce the power fast enough (30 ms) without loosing most as heat or being vaporised. Plus one strike is acutally only around 280 kWh, so not as much as you would think 😅