boonhet

The people who buy new vehicles usually do it for the warranty that lasts several years so the cost structure of ownership is entirely predictable.

You can also buy a 25 year old Volkswagen 1.9 tdi. Some years your cost of ownership will be fuel and oil changes (and those cars basically take no fuel), but at some point you’ll need new unit injectors costing 2-3x the car’s value for a set. Will it be the month after you buy the car, or will it be in 5 years? It’s a lottery and you’re better off replacing all 4 when it comes to that, rather than doing one at a time.

Cars in the range of 5-15 years of age are even worse because they’re more complex and some of the parts are super expensive. And it takes around ~10-15 years to know if an engine or transmission design is truly reliable (if it has big problems, we might find out sooner).

I’m going to use German cars as an example again because those are the ones I know best, but for example when BMW had the M57 diesel, that was basically the best modern diesel engine. 500k km? 700k km? No problem whatsoever. Only real issues would be the occasional injectors, turbo and maybe some coolant hoses, but those usually started surfacing after 300k or 400k km, at which point you expect SOME issues.

Then N57 came out as its replacement and a few years later we knew about the potential chain and valvetrain issues. Kinda sucks, because they’d also moved the chain to the rear of the engine, but you can get it done for a few hundred euros yourself, or somewhere between 1500-3000€ at a shop. But it took nearly a decade before we knew about the crankshaft issues and those are an engine killer. I’m talking a full rebuild of the bottom end with a NEW, not re-ground crankshaft since these have a special coating from the factory IIRC. Prepare around 10000€, which incidentally could be more than the car is worth by the time you find yourself doing this work.

Now that engine’s replacement, the B57, has been out for 8 or 9 years and as far as is currently known, it has nearly no typical issues beyond some plastic coolant pipes that get brittle over time. But we don’t know what other common issues might start surfacing as more and more of those engines reach high mileages.

Now if what you’re thinking is “just buy a Toyota and you’ll have no trouble”, well, Toyota has made absolutely horrible engines in the past, for example the 2.2 diesel. Head gasket failure was notoriously common. Again, something that you wouldn’t necessarily know when you’re buying a 5 year old car because the issues haven’t started surfacing en masse yet.

Might very well be that they were talking about the PS6 since the announced date was 2028 and they’ll probably have the PS6 come out around that time or even before?

Remember, PS4 release date to PS5 release date was 7 years. PS3 release date to PS4 release date was 7 years. Logically they’ll try to shove the PS6 down our throats starting November 2027 and any new games coming out on PS6 only, are going to be digital only. Game releases aiming for Christmas 2027 are still expected to target both platforms, hence free to ship both physical and digital.

It’s just a single lost sale so it doesn’t matter to Sony or R*, but I was considering getting a PS5 to play some Sony first-party games and GTA VI assuming good reviews… But then we got the digital-only announcements for the future of PlayStation and GTA VI… And apparently GTA VI is going to lock you out of some singleplayer content if you don’t get the ultimate edition or whatever… Yuck.

“Hurr durr I’m incredibly privileged and the job market has been kind to me so it’ll be kind to everyone”

You realize that most people can’t just drop everything they’re doing and get a degree, right? And a lot of people have jobs that require them to actually be present more than a few hours a week so they can’t do it while staying employed either?

A bachelor’s degree alone takes three years. Then you’re gonna have an internship at some point before anyone even considers you able to do a job in another field. How is that “doesn’t take years to get into another field”?

The undeniable and obvious fact you’re avoiding is that loads of people have jobs that they find satisfying in a “life well lived” kind of way.

And there are billions in the world who don’t have that.

There are loads of corporations who’s employees believe in what they’re doing.

Yea, but they’re still working for a corporation. They’re all still contributing to the same machine, doesn’t matter if they’re directly working for a tech company or not.

Your timed piss break anecdote is not an example of a satisfying job. A job where you make minimum wage is not an example of a satisfying job.

It was an example of a job where you actually do good for the world. That’s what those kinds of jobs are like. You get abused to pieces because the company has a noble mission so you’re more likely to stay around. This btw was considered to be head and shoulders above the company it metastasized out of (founders of the original company sold it and had their family members start up a competitor so their noncompetes wouldn’t matter, then everyone got laid off a while later by the new owners). It now employs 500 people, or about 0.5% of the city’s population if you include pensioners, children and everything.

I’ve heard of tons of problems with so many other companies in other industries too. Not paying salaries on time or at all, closing down with zero notice when the owner moves abroad and transfers everything out of the company bank accounts so nobody can be paid their last salaries or severance, forcing people to work unpaid overtime… Tons of small businesses pay you in cash so they can save on tax, but that means you don’t get national health insurance or pension contributions…

Quite literally, the job market out there is shit, getting worse every year. You should count yourself lucky that you’re in an industry where you can just hop into a tangential industry and have skills carry over, or that your job affords you enough free time to get a degree, or that you’re not working for capitalists. Gratz, it’s a one in a million job you found yourself in, same as me. But the thing about one in a million jobs is that there are only a few thousand of them in the world.

Some corporations have shit objectives, others do not.

The objective of a corporation is to make money. Doesn’t really matter which corporation.

There are loads of people who work for companies and really believe they’re making the world a better place through their work.

And most of them would be wrong I’m sure. They’re just making profit for a corporation. I’m sure most OpenAI and Anthropic employees also feel like they’re making the world a better place.

I’ve had exactly one job in my life that wasn’t software engineering. I was definitely making the world a better place, as I reduced e-waste generation by tons upon tons. Specifically, I fixed thousands of laptops slated for landfill, many of them fairly new and high spec so they’d get several years of usage after refurbishing.

What did I get in return? Poverty, timed piss breaks so I’d hit my targets (since nearly half of the already low salary was paid out as a “bonus” - after I left they raised salaries to keep up with minimum wage increases, but then reduced the bonus so they wouldn’t actually have to pay people more). The owners were also unhappy that the profit margin was only 55%, they wanted to see 60% profit margin. Probably so they could sell the company for even more money. This was a 3 year old company making over a hundred million in revenue… On a 55% profit margin. Renting a studio apartment was about half my income, utilities included.

Every job since then has been a tech job of one type or another. None of them AI companies, but it doesn’t really matter if you’re doing payroll, healthcare, whatever. Ultimately you’re just doing your job so some rich dude can buy another yacht, or so that the owner’s wife could sell the company to a private equity company after nagging her husband into suicide because he didn’t want to sell but she wanted to retire. And I DO work for a small company now, as a contractor, but you won’t believe the insane luck and circumstances that got me into this job when layoffs were already happening everywhere.

And I live in a mostly sane country where you can still theoretically get by on a job doing whatever. Now imagine you’re in Silicon Valley, earning 200-300k a year, paying a mortgage on a tiny house that cost well over a million, and your options for getting a new job are McDonald’s, Walmart and whatever other stores are shit enough to work for that they’re always looking for people, which are now paying a super high wage of $20 an hour because California. You still sure you want to change jobs?

Only way to get out without ending up homeless is literally to save up for multiple years working in that job you hate. Golden handcuffs pretty much.

Do try to remember that it usually takes years to get into another field of skilled work and you start at the bottom of the ladder, making shit wages and not everyone can just share a small apartment with roommates, some people have families

I’d wager most places in Finland have district heating. Certainly true of Estonia and Finland is even further north.

Now individual homes here in Estonia usually aren’t connected to district heating, and not all apartment buildings are, but most are and more are joining because it turns out maintaining your own heating system is a burden most buildings don’t want to deal with (nobody usually even wants to head the association)

They’ve abandoned their openness ever since they saw the widespread success of ChatGPT and GPT3. They were really only "Open"AI around the GPT-GPT2 era.

If their models truly are reaching parity with new western models as many claim, then it can’t be from distillation alone, they must be gathering their own datasets too. It takes months to train a new model.

Also distillation only really saves you the data collection and preparation (categorization). Training is still expensive, as is inference. It’s likely architectural changes that are making their inference cheaper (MoE vs dense models for one), not sure if they’ve gotten any good methods for making training cheaper.

Mate, I know people who are having trouble finding jobs at shops, let alone anything that pays enough for an adult with responsibilities to be able to afford to take it.

How many small businesses do you think are hiring these days?

You’re incredibly privileged if you think everyone can just afford to do whatever it is you do that you don’t benefit a single corporation. I assume you’re an artisan who crafts something out of materials you get from your own land or something.

No it’s not, because you’re advocating for people to be unemployed in an increasingly horrible job market.

I suggest you try going and being homeless with your kid so you don’t have to work for any corporation.

They’ll be happier that way, then there’s no forgiveness to seek since you never failed them by working for a corporation.

You’re still part of the corporate machine if you work at Walmart or McDonald’s, they won’t pay you enough to feed your family and I doubt the job is satisfying.

Like you do realise it was standard operating procedure in the US tech scene to apply for at least 400-500 jobs BEFORE the layoff craze that’s lasted years now, right?

It’s different in my country but it took me 3 whole months to find a new job when unemployed which was pretty bad compared to my previous experience. A bit later it took my friend a YEAR to get a new job. Now their boss is saying every engineer should be providing at least 3x value to customers using AI and they have no option but to stay at this job because nobody is hiring.

“My family’s homeless but at least I’m not working for a corporation anymore”

Open-weight not open source mostly. And they’re not keeping them open weight forever. Once they’ve truly surpassed the west, their future models will likely be closed down too so they could charge Anthropic level pricing and turn a profit.

Oh if you’re a retail investor selling options you’re a bit of a moron tbh, though at least with selling put options the downside is limited I guess

Yeah people seem to forget that when the US economy crashed in 2008, unemployment rose in much of the rest of the world too.

Just fork it from before 2025 when Claude Code was released?

Unlike the market cap numbers that get thrown around when people say X dollars “destroyed” from the stock market or Y dollars “gained”, this isn’t nearly as imaginary (or invented out of ether).

Depending on whether we’re talking about real shorting, or put options, it’s one of two things:

1. They borrowed expensive SpaceX shares, sold them, bought back for cheaper, the people who bought shares at the higher price paid for it.

2. They bought put options and exercised them. The bank or financial organization selling the put options paid for it.

Now I went to actually read the article and this particular number was #1, but I’m sure a lot of people profited through #2 as well (the wallstreetbets types).

AI is wildly unpopular among certain circles (Fediverse being one and I suspect there’s a considerable amount of overlap between the types of people on Codeberg and Lemmy).

Is your org entirely FOSS code, with literally nothing private/proprietary? Because if not, Codeberg was never going to be a good option for you, it only allows FOSS (and not even all licenses IIRC).

Codefloe is a Forgejo instance that, AFAIK, hasn’t decided to make any decisions on which technologies are allowed, and also allows private projects in addition to FOSS. Are they trustworthy? No idea, but if you want to be sure everything is private, you have to host your own shit anyway. Which most of us don’t have time for.

Crypto may be tainted in the US where banking systems are okay,

Are they? Even fucking Bitcoin has faster transfers than ACH lmao

For people in authoritarian countries, it is the only way to fund journalism and civil rights organisations that are illegal in their countries.

That’s literally the US pretty soon if not already tbh.