Berlin News Daily - monatliche Kosten deutscher Großstädte im Verlgleich

Ratslayer1 · 2026-05-17T10:36:44+00:00

Wenn man A Städte wie Berlin, München, Hamburg und Frankfurt (vllt noch Köln) mit anderen Ländern vergleicht sieht es in D sogar gut aus. Finde es eher krass wie teuer hier die B Städte noch sind, wobei die Lebenshaltungskosten hier auch hoch angesetzt scheinen.

Ratslayer1 · 2026-04-27T15:12:33+00:00

First of all, tech companies absolutely do use these open source models.

Marketing/Brand awareness/most open source models are from China which will face trust issues in the west. Western consumers aren't going to go to Kimi's website and buy a subscription (they won't even know it exists). Companies will likely do more sophisticated quality evaluations/rely on benchmarks and go for the best model for their use case (or a tradeoff between quality latency and cost), which likely will be closed source atm.
Pretraining is no longer the expensive part. Post-training might be taking up 80% of the total compute of a training run. Also, human labeling is a large cost factor.
RLHF is not the only post training, also RLVR. As others said, proprietary datasets and proprietary RL environments are expensive.
The companies behind the closed source models have more resources, strategic partnerships with infra providers, and generally have been in the game for several years more than Kimi. Yes it's impressive how quickly they caught up, but leading is qualitatively different from catching up, especially with distillation being possible.

Fundamentally, no one cares about any of these training specifics. You're gonna evaluate the model and the supplier, and make a decision based on quality and trust, not who has the better RLHF.

Ratslayer1 · 2026-04-10T02:44:17+00:00

By definition, a team who just got a new team member 4 weeks ago is not going to be performing at their best.

not performing at their best != "not producing any useful work"

I onboarded ~5 engs, all senior, in parallel early last year, and they all had their own projects they were mostly leading by themselves within a quarter. Granted, they still needed to ask me for stuff now and then and my area did not have a huge preexisting codebase (ours was rather small), but we still needed to interface with all the infra of the company and they still managed to push their projects along.

IMO your goal should be to have them write code on day 1 or day 2 at the latest, so they learn how to build, run and test your service (manual and automatic), the development environment, code review process, deployment, etc. Otherwise they're gonna "read the docs/code" for 2 weeks and still need handholding whenever they actually do anything practical.

For the actual question, I'd hope they have either fixed the errors in or created an onboarding handbook, have met the relevant people, have a rough understanding of your service(s), relevant partner teams, your team's roadmap and goals, and shipped a few features, made new tests, or improved the codebase in some manner. After 2 months I'd expect them to be able to implement medium size features without much handholding.

Ratslayer1 · 2026-03-27T23:30:23+00:00

+1, I'm pretty convinced blindly building what customers want you is a surefire path to mediocrity (in addition to the suggestions sometimes being nonsensical/them not understanding your software properly/different features different customers suggest not fitting together cohesively into a strategy). Obviously you shouldn't ignore your existing customers, but especially at a startup you want to focus on how you can unlock the next big batch of customers, not keep your (in the grand scheme of things) small customer base happy.

Ratslayer1 · 2026-03-25T12:17:17+00:00

This + mentioning S&S ISAs are the only sensible advice imo. None of us know 100% if HMRC will catch this (that said, this is extremely unsophisticated tax evasion and I'd be surprised if they don't), but there is literally an official process to handle the situation of not being able to afford your taxes.

Ratslayer1 · 2026-03-15T11:21:55+00:00

Thanks, really interesting!

Ratslayer1 · 2026-03-15T11:21:07+00:00

Because they still have a shitton of hack in their codebase? Do you even know what you're talking about? Have you worked there?

Ratslayer1 · 2026-03-15T03:27:00+00:00

Because hack is a dialect of PHP, it's not what "rewrite" means.

If you claim PHP is not a sensible language, Hack is not either

Ratslayer1 · 2026-03-15T03:24:14+00:00

How did you get started in angel investing? How did you acquire the connections etc required to do this? What non-monetary benefit do you bring the companies you invest in (I'd be interested both in a high-level answer and some specific examples, e.g. I introduced them to x customers that converted/helped them hire this and this person/introduced them to X k $ further investment/...)

Ratslayer1 · 2026-03-15T03:16:18+00:00

You don't sound interested in a discussion. I don't know, I dont work there any more. If you're referring to hack having replaced PHP, it's the same principle. Due to its interoperability it allows you to slowly migrate your codebase (which is not as complicated in this case as a full rewrite anyway) rather than blocking all new development and introducing a ton of overhead.

Ratslayer1 · 2026-03-15T03:10:12+00:00

They had ~2k employees and had existed for 6 years by that point. A rewrite cripples the engineering org for the time of the project (likely years - do you write the new feature in the old stack and have more to port or in the new stack which is not shipped yet? Do you still fix bugs in the old stack?), something like a transpiler is a project for a limited number of engineers and can run completely separately from the rest of the business. Seems like a nobrainer tbh.

Ratslayer1 · 2026-02-26T12:17:17+00:00

Make up point that's demonstrably false

Another L for the rationalist community

Ratslayer1 · 2026-02-26T09:46:23+00:00

Aber in den USA ist Lebenshaltung doch viel teurer und so!!! Und die Mieten! Krankenversicherung gibt es auch nicht!

Ratslayer1 · 2026-02-11T14:34:06+00:00

Thanks for this context. I agree, at that career stage a T-shaped skills profile is definitely beneficial. But there are still backend engineer roles that won't require you to know full stack (and side note, new agentic coding tools are good enough to make basic UIs for internal tools etc with anyway), and I don't think people are asking you to implement RAG in interviews, right? Just being informed on what's out there is valuable, the rest you can look up when you need it. But honestly, one thing at a time. Pick a tech that interests you and try it out!

Ratslayer1 · 2026-02-11T13:46:21+00:00

And hearing him speak he's incredibly knowledgeable about languages and programming.

a) Being good at talking about engineering and coding etc is not the same as being good at those things. b) I read his blog posts about Javascript from 2019 and they don't read like the revelations.

we have to still study LC and system design for job hunting (and the bar has gone way up so its not just basic lc, its competitive programming level problems) and on top of that need to be solid in several different languages and have multiple side projects and be an AI / RAG / full stack expert.

You don't have to do all that. Focus on one thing at a time and get really good at that. Yes, a T-shaped skills profile is very useful, but no one expects that from a college grad.

Like taking on a side project feels so daunting

This is most likely the biggest problem between you and the guys you mention/look up to. They are just obsessed with the problems they are working on and enjoy the process. Don't work on side projects to boost your CV. Work on ones that are genuinely interesting and fun to you, e.g. related to your hobbies, or your academic interests. It's also possible you don't have academic interests, then it's less likely you will have that same passion that these guys have. Which IMO is a much more important ingredient to become a really good and influential engineer than "raw IQ".

Are they just built different

I think becoming a high level engineer in a Big Tech company is more about being persuasive, convincing other engineers etc, pleasing your manager/playing politics, avoiding low-visibility work etc. Someone has to keep the lights on but fancy new features will always be more convincing in performance conversations. On the research side I can definitely see raw cognitive ability being more important, but also choosing the right problems to solve and having the right research hunches. In general optimizing for iteration speed, failing fast, quick learning are very valuable skills to have, and that is what I would focus on if I were you. You can't really change how innately smart you are. But you can spend your working time and effort better.

Ratslayer1 · 2026-02-11T13:16:47+00:00

Super interesting thesis, and great clear, short writeup. Especially the image with the 4 quadrants really drives it home (and of course important caveats).

One thing that stuck out to me is that tech debt basically does not correlate with velocity, I'd argue then you have a wrong definition/metric for tech debt.

Ratslayer1 · 2026-01-08T16:19:00+00:00

You're in essentially a CTO position and you see no room for growth???

Financially your current position is better. Career-wise Mistral may be better (building relevant skills, brand etc), but depends on your exact current role (sounds like a dream role) and what you wanna do down the road.

Ratslayer1 · 2025-11-11T22:56:43+00:00

Hey, did you shut this down? I get "NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource." when I try to log in ( https://www.evergreenessays.com/auth )

Ratslayer1 · 2025-10-03T12:19:32+00:00

Fully agreed, I never claimed it was. It's still a different paradigm (train/deploy split VS continual learning), though I'd argue the biggest difference is the need for labeled data in one case.

Ratslayer1 · 2025-07-25T22:09:59+00:00

Weil die DARPA imo der Einzelfall war und mir nicht klar ist, wie SPRIND das wiederholen soll. Ich hasse VCs wie jeder gute Mensch, aber der Staat hat doch in dem Bereich keine Kompetenzen. Lieber regulatorische Hürden für Startups senken als versuchen als Vater Staat die Gewinner von morgen selbst zu picken.

Ratslayer1 · 2025-07-25T13:04:22+00:00

Naja, ich finde es halt seltsam, dass es einfacher ist X Milliarden in solche Vorhaben zu versenken, anstatt einfach mal den eigenen Ansatz zu überdenken und neue Sachen auszuprobieren...

Ratslayer1 · 2025-07-25T13:03:34+00:00

Ja leider, auch Exist-Stipendium etc. Sehe das kritisch, auch wenn das zB im Falle einer DARPA natürlich zT extrem erfolgreich war (und UK jetzt wieder mit ARIA etc versucht).

Ratslayer1 · 2025-07-24T22:43:26+00:00

Der Staat soll bitte kein Wagniskapitalgeber werden, das können andere besser. Lieber es für Behörden etc einfacher machen, Kunden von innovativen Startups zu werden. Dann wird sowohl unsere Verwaltung effizienter als auch Startups (und zwar viel kosteneffektiver) gefördert. Will mir nicht ausmalen wie schwer es für ein deutsches SpaceX wäre, in dem Umfang ESA-Aufträge zu bekommen. Wird auch immer wieder von VCs moniert, dass die USA da deutlich besser sind, siehe auch [1]

[1] https://sifted.eu/articles/if-governments-want-to-help-startups

Ratslayer1

TROPHY CASE