ucm_edge's comments

I set my kids up with Faraday.dev on their M2 Airs and it does just fine. They will have chatbots up for hours to help them with schoolwork or when playing Minecraft to give them ideas.

The big thing is just don’t lock the models into memory on lower RAM systems. That gets you into trouble when some of the unified RAM is needed for something else and you can soft lock the system. The heat is not an issue though in my experience.

Couple questions on the data here. The graphs are showing people who are distinctly a political position.

But first how distinct is distinct? Are we taking extreme activist or just pretty committed?

Second how much of the potential mate pool remains closer to political center. Seems like 30 to 35% potentially given the graph.

Because if distinct is not that extreme and you have a decently sized center pool, then your say slightly left of center males can marry the distinctly left females and have reasonable overlap on value. At least to the point political views are not a negative and shared values in other areas can be the foundation of the relationship.

The lack of a centrist pool or unwillingness of the distinct individuals to shop for mates in that pool would signal a problem, but I don’t see the article build a case for either condition.

Yeah the Pro feels like a miss. I figured it would have same specs as the Studio for its SoC but would come with a bunch of options for co processor cards akin to the Afterburner card. So a studio you can kit out for additional specialized performance.

Maybe those cards will trickle out over time, but not having them ready at launch makes the Pro feel like an afterthought right now.

I hate the meetings where marketing and product spend 30 minutes talking themselves into that kind of pushy behavior on the grounds “our customers will want to be informed.” Or our CMO who likes to say “our paying customers like being marketed to”’with total sincerity.

Not at Spotify, it happens too many places.

On one hand people definitely will shoot themselves in the foot by oversharing on social media.

Another trend I've been seeing (speaking a general sense, I know no knowledge of this particular case) is that people who have been laid off will pull a stunt like this to try to 'go viral' and get a job. I have no idea if it works or the wisdom of it, but I've seen about a half dozen people in my network who I know were laid off in a general and impersonal layoff post sob stories about being fired by an unreasonable and mean boss.

We also fired a guy who posted about being laid off from our company, despite our company not going layoffs. Legal had to send him a little reminder about the terms he signed when we offered severance and that falsely the company feels claiming the company is doing layoffs is damaging to the company.

Overall I feel like I have become aware of more people trying to position their termination in ways that aren't truthful but they feel are more advantageous for generating interest from future employers.

Sadly at about about half the Geekbench 5 score. M2 is single core 2061, multicore 15281. 6850U has single 1469 and multi 7365 scores. M2 is also ahead in Cinebench R23 and splits the single and multi in R20 with the 6850U.

To go from that to 70% ahead on multicore would be amazing because it would force Intel and Apple to respond.

The cynic in me, having watched Intel and AMD fight for the desktop crown post Ryzen launch though is skeptical that the scores are some combo pushing power limits to rather undesirable levels and extremely selective benchmarking (It's 70% better at this one thing).

I notice the article only has base power draw in it. I’d want to know max TDP before anything gets crowned. This AMD is 15 watt base, the M2 is about 20 watts.

When the M1 came out, Intel announced chips that would crush and crush it they did, while drawing significantly more power. Intel announced with a 45 watt base TDP which didn’t look too far off the M1 Max, but the 12th Intels ended up peaking at 115 watts for the 12900HK.

It basically came down to if you were looking for something portable but would be plugged in when in use, the Intel offering was superior. If you wanted battery life, the Apple product remained superior.

Competition is good and hopefully AMD remains power competitive, but given a 7800 runs around 88 watts in normal use conditions and has 120 watt max budget, I would expect that performance AMD is touting to come with higher power draw.

For us we did the main only pre commit thing and also a CI check that any MR marked as ready for review has to pass linting.

So you can go wild in your own branches and draft MRs but anything you want someone else to review has to pass.

You don’t have to use a singular bank to this. You have can have numerous banks in and sweep the money around to control exposure to any one bank. A single bank is not the norm for this kind of setup. Sweep accounts are a thing for this very reason.

Most payroll process have relations with multiple banks. They have emergency credit revolvers in place. They are resilient to single point of failure. Rippling has shown it not.

I am advocating for the fact that Rippling was not transparent in their communication and was too complacent to have a Plan B in place despite having 300 million in play. It is not the single incident is the exposure of poor practices and dishonesty during their disaster recovery.

To put it another way, I have been paid via direct deposit for over 30 years and multiple fiscal crises. There is only one company that ever failed to get full payroll out on time

At my company they still initially failed to make payroll. Eventually around 6 pm Pacific on the 15th the direct deposits started landing for most people. Although not everyone.

I think they did it via some kind of one off point process since I didn’t get an email and the Rippling web app didn’t show me as paid until midday on the 16th. Normally those occur at the same time I see the direct deposit hit.

Very unhappy with Rippling here and will advocate my company change processors. They initially acted as if they would cut over to JPMorgan and be fully up on Monday, but as time goes on it becomes clear they had to do a lot more than just change the account they staged payroll through.

They also failed to have a secondary banking relationship in place, credit revolvers or other contingencies that let them handle this in house, etc. In 30 years of getting paid and working through times like 2008 when major disruption to banking and credit availability occurred, to me Rippling stands alone as the only company that failed to run payroll on time and it took a single point of failure to make them fall.

Also the Scorpion wreck has been surveyed twice and imaging shows the nuclear weapons are still there in the wreck. Wreck is ~3k meters deep, so no one is going down there to get themselves a 1960s vintage nuke whose only value is the fissile material.

An entity capable of executing that recovery operation is capable of making their own, buying one from a less savory nation state, etc.

For me the worst is you talk to someone at a company, be it phone or support chat, and it becomes clear the person wants to help but the policies of the company prevent their customer support people from doing anything meaningful. The support person has no power, may not even be employed by the company in question, etc.

Then you get the salt in the wound customer satisfaction survey of "Did X resolve your issue today?", "Was X polite to you?", etc. If you score the person low you can cost them the job. If you score the high, the company celebrates high customer satisfaction.

You almost never see the question "Did the company put our support person in a position to help you successfully?"

The most blatant offender I ran into recently was Verizon has made a number of things like updating your autopay method app/website only. You can call Verizon customer support and talk to a human and all they can do is tell you they literally cannot take your credit card and you need the app. Because someone at Verizon decided their humans can take one time payments but not update autopay.

Insufficient profit. Had a startup based around an depreciating asset that we held and rented out. Costs recovered in three years and then two years of profits before asset was sold for the last bit of money.

We were profitable on each individual asset we had to the tune of about 6.5% return after five years. Not profitable as a company though. Costs were fixed though (about 80 people in an office) so if we could have gotten more capital to buy more assets we would have become profitable. No one wanted to wait five years to get l 6.5% back in the midst of a bull market. So we failed to raise and died.

In tech I think there has been a social expectation to appear like you are growing over all else.

Low performers weren’t fired, product lines that weren’t successful weren’t shuttered, etc all because one of the goals was to have a line going up and to the right on the growth slide because market sentiment demanded it. The CEO wants to talk about 3x-ing the company at the annual meeting.

Now that investors don’t have as much cash to burn, market sentiment demands the shuttering of unprofitable business plays and a narrative around a more rational headcount.

So we are seeing both. A manager who grew their team 3x during the pandemic is just dumping their mishires that were difficult to fire in the we must grow above all else meta. In other cases companies are shutting down entire business lines and laying off both high and low performers in a mass cull (some places transfer out the high performers before the layoff others just shutter the division).

A year ago, myself and other Director / Senior EM folks were sitting around in our Zoom, looking at our headcount allocations from C-Suite and talking about how while the company wanted hyper growth, we all needed to find ways to control the growth/not hire as many as the company wanted us to hire, because otherwise we'd end up doing lay offs in 18 to 24 months when the econ cools (turns out we overestimated that bit). Every middle managers saw it, some of the more experienced ones who had gone through this cycle before shared tactics they'd used last time to make it seem like you're playing ball (so Talent doesn't rat you out for blocking their Hire A Bazillion People OKRs), etc. It was a regular topic in our leadership meeting and we all covered for each other when slow hiring got brought up.

We ended up hiring 60% of the targeted headcount before interest rates started spiking and everyone else slowed hired before transitioning to layoffs. So now we're the only division in the company that has open lines and can replace attrition. Meanwhile two other divisions have layoff rumors floating around.

All these CEO "it's my fault" letters ring hollow with me. The responsible ones were the ones that didn't just hop on all hands and announce "We're gonna 3x headcount!" and instead kept their hiring rational, managing their board and investors as needed. People are getting laid off now, because senior leadership wanted to have nice happy meetings where they pretended we could just 3x revenue every year for every and thus any kind of spend was justified on the grounds revenue would surpass it sooner or later.

Junk science is a huge problem in law enforcement. Treating lie detectors as canonical, the blood splatter analysis to recreate crime scenes, this kind of stuff.

It is especially problematic because police orgs are generally pretty good at adopting new techniques. But unfortunately the marketplace of ideas they have to shop in suffers from overrepresentation of garbage products. A huge part of law enforcement enhancement is going to involve cleaning this market up.

Activity is the signal. Self taught but goes to a ton of meetups. Enrolled in one of the legit online master's programs, etc. Ofttimes bootcamps can appear on these resumes. Someone did a bootcamp, realized it wasn't enough and kept growing in a manner.

People who treat the bootcamp as the terminal level of knowledge plateau.

I hire them and give them a task somewhere between support engineer that executes well documented code snippets in run books and junior engineer that does very basic CRUD web app development. Making internal dashboards for the customer success team, etc.

Give them about 32 hours of work a week and 8 hours of tutorials on other things. Build them up from there.

I still lose about 35% of them. A combo of firing for lack of ability and the devs getting upset and leaving when promotions and raises come slow. Because the ugly truth is a lot of the bootcampers hit a plateau. I have had a couple push through to my bar for senior, but most cap out in my mid range.

During the shortage the ability to hire and get solid mids out of 65% of them was a net positive. Right now though it is less important given the talent coming into the market.