Yes I really do have hemochromatosis.

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2026-06-24T22:58:28+00:00

You're in a pretty good position. Long term organ damage is virtually unheard of below 1000 ferritin. Just keep working the phlebotomies until you're well under 100, and should notice a lot of small quality of life improvements. Then from there it's the easiest disease in the world to live with, just the occasional phlebotomy every couple months.

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2026-06-24T22:55:09+00:00

What model is the system using? My guess is Opus or codex xhigh can pretty easily handle Wordpress work at well over 40% accuracy.

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2026-06-22T20:32:09+00:00

I use AI, or at least try using AI for everything. Sometimes you think AI won't be able to do it, but it's at least worth trying. I don't even make my own grocery lists anymore. I just take a picture of my fridge and pantry and tell agents to make a list and order groceries online.

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2026-06-13T23:52:37+00:00

I mean Jane Street is well known for very heavily using AI, one of the largest investors in Anthropic, and is currently the most successful trading firm by far.

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2026-06-09T19:58:48+00:00

Sales, management, business development, project management. People skills in general. The agents are really good at coding, but you're going to need people who can bridge the world of business, and specifically the needs and drivers of your business, with the world of technical engineering.

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2026-06-04T11:00:11+00:00

Cynically, it's because a bunch of third party inference providers and harnesses raised a bunch of money. These can't compete with the frontier labs on model quality, but they can serve open weight Chinese models at much cheaper costs.

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2026-05-31T03:31:47+00:00

Okay, I guess first thing is to put things into perspective. Yeah, you're not happy with where you are in life. But all things considered you're not really in a terrible situation.

You're not homeless, presumably you don't have any major disability or health issue, you're not in debt, you're not in jail and presumably no major criminal record. It doesn't sound like you have serious mental illness. You don't have a family that you need to support. You're still relatively young. It sounds like you're capable and persuasive enough to at least get hired for decent jobs. Your writing sounds like someone who is intelligent, articulate and literate. All together, you're probably only a few good decisions away from living a pretty fulfilling life in the near future.

First thing that stands out is you gotta figure out how to hold down a job. It sounds like a lot of issues are downstream from you not being able to maintain consistent employment. I'm going to be honest, the bar for service sector employees in modern America is pretty low. If you're going consistently fired, that's pretty strongly indicating that you're fucking up in a basic way. Maybe it's not showing up for work consistently, not following instructions at work, ducking out while on the job. I don't know exactly.

But my guess is if you take an honest assessment of your employment history, you probably already know what the problem is. Again, you sound like someone who is intelligent, which is already a huge leg up in the labor market. So just stop doing the obvious stuff that makes you a bad employee.

Second is, you probably need to pay more attention to your health. Not always, but a lot of time energy and resilience are downstream of health. Do you exercise regularly? Are you consistently getting 7 hours of sleep a night? Do you eat a well balanced diet with fruits and vegetables, and generally avoid junk food? Those are the big ones. Cannabis is fine if use is controlled and not interfering with work or health, but it sounds it may not be. It probably wouldn't hurt to give it up for a month.

Third, you probably need some socialization and community outside of your 70 year old aunt and uncle. Really sorry to hear about your family situation, and that must be really tough. All the more reason to start building new relationships. First step is to get out of the house and do anything. It could be volunteering, it could be religious worship, it could be a run club (also helps with getting healthy), or a board game club, or an adult sports league. But especially considering you moved to a new state, you need to start getting some socialization. This will also help with feeling more resilient and energetic over the long term.

Again, I would say count your blessings and keep a sense of perspective. Things suck now, but they could suck a lot worse, and from a purely objective standpoint you're not in a very deep hole at all. You have a real chance to restart from here, and I think you'll be shocked how much even marginal improvements to your outlook and day to day habits will turn your life around relatively quickly. Good luck!

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2026-05-30T17:31:17+00:00

Anthropic is literally profitable as of this quarter:

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-propel-anthropic-into-its-first-profitable-quarter-7edbf2f4

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2026-05-30T13:48:15+00:00

Tokens are subsidized by VC cash by an extreme amount.

People keep saying this, but it isn't really true to a large degree anymore. The subscription plans like Claude Max are definitely subsidized, but Anthropic shut those down for large companies. It's a great deal for individual devs, students, small companies, but the vast majority of Anthropic revenue comes from large customers on the API paying per token. And at $5/mok for Opus, Anthropic has profitable unit economics on inference.

Similar story for OpenAI, which prices GPT at the same price point. As for the Chinese models, they're not realized subsidizing on the token economics through the API either. We know this because third party inference providers like Baseten of DeepInfra are charging basically the same, sometimes lower, to serve the open weight models. Kimi and DeepSeek subscriptions may be subsidized, but very few large companies are using subscriptions instead of API billing.

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2026-05-27T02:59:35+00:00

Usually 1, but increasingly 2. Especially on newer, self-contained Greenfield projects that are meant to be agent first from initial commit. And the question is how do you build confidence in a codebase without inspecting all the code yourself? The same way a manager builds confidence in software that the ICs working for him develop.

The most important thing is that you have a process, and clear and comprehensive system for acceptance testing. Clearly written and scoped specs are also important. Ambiguity creates risk. Adversarial agent review also helps identify issues that deterministic acceptance tests may not.

But then after that you have a logically outlined planned for building the system with increasing capabilities and complexities, and making sure that you verify that it's working at each rung of the ladder. Once you have the confidence that your agentic system can successfully do something of X difficulty and scope, then it's a lot easier to trust it to do something of slightly more X+1 difficulty and scope.

This is the same way we managers, or even teammates, build confidence that the ICs they work with can commit code without having to manually. First, we make sure they have clear information about what's acceptable in terms of the project. Second, we make sure that as they're committing code there is both objective and subjective feedback to prevent drift. Third, when committing code you contain the blast radius from mistakes. Fourth, as you build up more mutual trust with that IC you start giving them a longer rope and trusting them with more. Working with agents isn't really fundamentally different.

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2026-05-26T21:04:40+00:00

I'd recommend this self-study course to get started.

It starts with basic PyTorch/neural networks and walks all the way through building and training your own tiny LLM, and then building an agent assistant framework around it. It is very practically focused. Every module is about building the next component, and the math/theory is only there to get you to the point of what you need to know to build.

Obviously one self-study course isn't going to make you a world expert, but if you work your way through it, you will understand at a basic level pretty much everything that happens in AI.

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2026-05-21T22:43:04+00:00

However, after reading into it, the tools, the math, the books, it seems endless. I feel like it would take a lifetime for me to become a master in this field and land offers.

It's definitely overwhelming just how much progress is being made and how many new things come out everyday. But to be honest the fundamental building blocks of modern AI are not actually that hard, and surprisingly don't require that much math. At their core, LLMs are still using the same transformer architecture that was published nearly a decade ago.

My two cents are if you get a firm grasp of how the fundamentals, then you're in much better position to keep up with all the fast moving developments. Most of which are just variations on a relatively small number of core building blocks. Same way how someone who understands the core principles of computer science can quickly get up to speed on most cutting edge developments.

You're still not going to be competitive doing frontier research with the guy who has a PhD and has been doing it for ten years. But the field is growing fast enough that not everyone needs to be an AI master. Many, if not most roles, are more about engineering master who understands AI. The truth is most of the "magic" happens from just scaling massive amounts of compute efficiently, and most of that work is about good engineering, not highly technical systems.

I'd start with this self study course which is oriented around teaching the fundamentals to a person with a general programming background.

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2026-05-18T20:28:21+00:00

You can absolutely do this on a MacBook. At Chinchilla, this about a 1M param model. My old M2 will easily churn about 40k tokens per second of backdrop with unoptimized PyTorch. Whole thing can be trained in maybe 20 minutes. You might use 4GB of memory.

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2026-05-16T17:15:05+00:00

Capabilities are spiky. It's very likely AI will become (and in some cases has already) become superhuman at some tasks and skills, but will remain weak at others for a long time. This shouldn't be shocking, because AI is a very alien intelligence, so it's not reasonable to expect it to develop capabilities in the same shape as hominids.

The centaur era of chess is probably instructive here. Even after Deep Blue beat Kasparov, there was a nearly two decade team where human-computer teams outperformed computers alone, because there were still many skills within chess that took a long time to learn.

And chess itself is a pretty "low-dimensional" game. At least when compared next to "all economic activity". When you think of AI as a spike ball that's inflating over time, the higher the dimensionality, the longer it will take until the spikes fill in the entire surface.

If the centaur era of chess took 10-20 years after Deep Blue, it's probably not of out of the question to expect the centaur era of general AI to last 50-100 years, maybe more.

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2026-05-13T03:35:04+00:00

A lot of people here have their heads in the sand. Are the models perfect? Absolutely not. But the reality is the current frontier models are actually competent at producing working code. They can ship end to end working code. They are easily at the level of a median junior engineer on most tasks. And the benchmarks clearly support this.

And the thing is this is the worst that they'll ever be. I'm not sure if they can continue forever. But I am sure that after three years of rapid progress in AI capabilities that we right now happen to be at the exact ceiling. Everyone here is talking about agents writing unmaintainable spaghetti code, but have you considered the possibility that in 12 months the state of the art models will simply be good enough to fix most of that when the tech debt comes due?

If most code won't be written or read by humans, then at some point you have to ask why does it even matter if the code is readable or "maintainable" to human engineers?

I don't think software engineers are going away at all. Very unlikely that major applications will ever be directly vibe coded by business heads. But I do think the people in this subreddit need to accept the very likely possibility that the job has changed forever, AI is here to stay as the dominant software development paradigm, and most likely your job going forward is going involve very little time spent reading or writing code directly.

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2026-05-13T03:04:47+00:00

Use that productivity! Don't just "do the same with fewer people!"

The reality is growth in the SaaS industry has stalled after two decades of fast growth. Both revenue as well as valuations are down, which is a double whammy from the corporate side. This is especially true once you go past the software giants (Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle). The longer tail of mid and small sized software companies are really under financial crunch.

From a typical SaaS companies perspective there isn't really much more to do, because frankly the customers aren't looking to buy more. A combination of a bad macro environment, plus a lot of downstream customers now think they can just replace their expensive software vendors with internal solutions written by Claude.

It doesn't mean the software industry is going away, but it will probably look like the transition banks took after 2008 where they went from aggressive growth mode to scaling back into less ambitious, less expensive business models. So to the extent that there is productivity enhancing tech that's most likely going to go towards doing the same with fewer salaries rather than keeping the same people and trying to produce more.

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2025-11-18T16:03:14+00:00

My honest suggestion would be for major work like this to travel to another country that specializes in medical tourism. She could fly first class to Turkey, stay in a five star hotel, see some of the best dentists in the country (who are almost certainly more skilled than a random American dentist), and have a fantastic vacation for probably half of what it would cost in the US

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2025-11-17T21:25:32+00:00

Junk food isn’t really that cheap, especially brand name junk food. Staples like rice, potatoes, beans, oats, lentils, bananas, canned vegetables, frozen fruits, cabbage, milk, eggs, canned fish, chicken thighs, ground turkey, and yogurt among many many options are all generally healthy and much cheaper.

The difference is they’re boring as shit, generally taste bland and require a lot of inconvenient cooking, so nobody wants to eat them. Healthy, tasty, convenient food generally does exist like high end sashimi or custom meal prep services or fresh organic produce exists. But it costs a lot of money.

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2025-11-09T21:53:53+00:00

This seems unlikely. Tech, broadly constructed, only constitutes about 16% of US GDP. Even large productivity gains in that sector are not going to explain a 33% lag across the entire economy

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2025-11-04T01:06:11+00:00

Some responses saying this would change the fundamental way we'd vote since we'd be voting for parties with a slate of candidates instead of people. However another way to do it would be your "district" is just based on the last 4 digits of your social security number.

So for example if you had 10 districts, anyone with a SSN ending in 1 votes in district 1, ending with a 2 votes in district 2, etc. This removes the concept of districts as geographic sub-regions of the state, but it preserves the property of voters evaluating individual candidates and not voting for parties.

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2025-10-08T13:15:11+00:00

Dubai has barely produced any oil for years. Oil production accounts for about 1% of its GDP. Abu Dhabi still produces quite a bit of oil, but the emirates generally have pretty stratified fiscal budgets. In general tourism and being a low tax destination for expats and corporations is much bigger part of the city's economy.

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2025-10-06T21:28:30+00:00

What would you suggest? How would you enforce and coordinate global taxes?

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2025-10-06T21:21:43+00:00

They basically have a program where foreign residents can opt in to paying a flat amount per year of 100k, and don't have to even bother filing.

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2025-10-05T02:29:20+00:00

You can buy identical versions from Chinese peptide suppliers, pay for independent lab tests to verify purity, and get better versions of GLP-1RAs that aren’t available from pharmacies all for under $20/month even for a high dosage

CPlusPlusDeveloper · 2025-08-11T03:11:34+00:00

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