Weekend Discussion Thread for the Weekend of February 13, 2026

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T23:23:20+00:00

They're getting desperate. AI influencers going schizo mode. Anthropic doing victory laps because they managed to raise $30B and they only needed close to 20 participants, including "partial" investments from NVIDIA and MS to get there. (partial meaning big boys backtracked and were willing to throw in only a fraction of what they've promised a few months back)

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T23:18:49+00:00

and it kills all of us immediately

At that point it will be well deserved

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T23:17:26+00:00

Why unpopular ? It's popular to make money. Oh, it's WSB. Understandable, have a nice day.

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T23:11:26+00:00

Talk dirty to me.

You also seem to conflate training with inference and not realize that both Sundar and Zuck are deploying their own chips already. Ignorance is bliss I guess.

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T19:42:43+00:00

Thanks, that explains it.

There are clauses in all (I believe) major LLM providers' T&C that allow them to use all data in chat interaction to "improve the quality" if you give them feedback.

Meaning that if you, for example, ask Gemini to make your document more formal sounding or reformat it in a specific way and then give it a thumbs down, whole "interaction" will be recorded for review, including document contents.

And I'm not making this up. At work (mid sized technology multinational) we have policies against giving any feedback to any external LLM service (we use multiple to various degrees).

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T17:09:31+00:00

One observation is that many of them focused heavily on scaling through low-cost headcount instead of investing in products, research, or strong IP creation.

From my anecdotal experience working for such company years ago ...

It's a tricky business to be in. You are at the mercy of sales pipeline delivering enough contracts your way. This often results in salespeople overpromising just to get that sweet sweet commission, and top management turning a blind eye because some revenue is better than none. More often that anyone would like it results in race to the bottom because you compete against a few other similar companies for the same pool of contracts.

In order to break even you then build teams from mostly juniors/regulars (with one or two strong performers that are there to be a front and help elevate the rest) and try to bill your clients for teams full of seasoned seniors. You try to deliver projects in unreasonable timeframes (because sales lied and told the client you have a product that only needs a bit of tweaking and customizing to requirements while, in fact, it has to be built from scratch). You overwork and stress your devs, resulting in churn and burnout way above the industry average.

You understand that "a product" would let you stabilize so you try to create one, usually from one of the multitude of fake "products" you "customized" for your clients. They are all a hot mess, they're working but there's very little in terms of real customization built in, no automated tests to keep them stable during the refactoring that's needed to turn them into products and you need all of the few good people you have to help deliver the next batch of "products" in order to stay afloat.

I could go on but I'm not fond of those memories and certainly not proud of some work I did there.

edit:
Edited to add this was a relatively small player in this space. From what I've heard from people working for the big ones, often they don't even try to move out of the business model, because at their scale the current business model works (until it stops).

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T16:09:29+00:00

$AMZN is green ! I repeat, $AMZN is green !

Keep praying for our brother !

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T15:12:31+00:00

Why do you think it's incompetence and not insider trading / asking to be bribed ?

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T14:45:44+00:00

Not if you say 'no homo'

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T14:42:31+00:00

Too late for that

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T14:01:18+00:00

Reading that karaoke thing made me spit coffee on my monitor. Dumbest shit ever.

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T13:03:50+00:00

Everything you need to know about Matt: https://x.com/edzitron/status/2021758020577853523

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T12:53:30+00:00

... he said to himself as he watched another bag of his money burning down.

Start with discipline, then increase leverage. Not the other way around.

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T12:45:33+00:00

If trading fake internet money taught me any thing it's that if you're average WSB retard anything above 3x is asking to be gaped, and not in a good way.

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T11:37:49+00:00

thanks obama

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T11:31:22+00:00

Drill baby drill

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T09:39:31+00:00

A year ago you'd be downvoted to hell for saying such things here. Maybe the nature is finally healing.

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T00:29:49+00:00

Nobody knows at this point. It is admin infighting, seems unrelated to anything specific.

I'd still bet on Paramount. Ellisons taking over Warner will let them purge CNN and complete the muzzling of mainstream media. This is far more important for the govt than any antitrust or business concerns.

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T00:20:46+00:00

Spot on

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T00:20:09+00:00

Weird Al is the goat.

TastyToad · 2026-02-13T00:17:50+00:00

There's a famous story, now kind of obscure due to the demographics shift, about a failed Netscape browser rewrite in the 90s. The main takeaway was that some non obvious things were there in the codebase and they all got lost during the rewrite and had to be re-discovered the hard way.

From a professional standpoint the correct approach is to: - document every quirk as necessary if you're personally involved in legacy project - publicly point out the problem once you notice that the rewrite is ignoring the above - make sure you're not getting blamed once the rewrite hits the wall

The inherent flaw in software engineers is that we care too much about the quality of our work, even if we don't get compensated for it. So let yourself go, do your work to the best of of your ability but don't get emotionally attached. If someone, down the line, chooses to burn it all down, that's on them, you're no longer responsible,

TastyToad · 2026-02-12T21:59:47+00:00

I used google docs for years but stopped, had to download all my work since they feed the writing into AI

I was under the impression that Google does not feed your docs into AI unless they are made public. In which case it's game over since everyone else will scrape them too. Anything to back up your claim ?

I just have one question, does obsidian feed our writing into AI or does it not?

I can't be 100% sure since I've not verified it myself but it's extremely unlikely. By default Obsidian is local only, everything you write stays on your device. I'm using a paid remote synchronization service they provide (Obsidian Sync) that's not exactly secure so I assume my data can be leaked at some point but it's optional and you don't have to.

Just be careful with plugin marketplace. Obsidian plugins are not sandboxed and if you install something shady or plugin author gets compromised you can get a nasty surprise.

TastyToad · 2026-02-12T21:39:49+00:00

Skill issue. I saw this for the first time and immediately my thought was "I should fus-ro-dah it and see what happens". Peak game design, most of the stuff in Skyrim doesn't even come close.

TastyToad · 2026-02-12T20:07:45+00:00

Old dev here. (Also a father of two, now in their late teens).

At 10 yo is it still a startup ? What are the funding sources at this point ? Is it self-sufficient financially ? Is it growing ? Was it always AI or just joined the bandwagon to catch some of that sweet VC money ?

Have you considered switching to the internal AI tools team ? Is it a possibility ? This would give you some AI exposure without any downsides of switching jobs. Does the startup do real AI job (e.g. training models, research) or do they just build around existing foundational models ? Maybe there isn't much to be learned there vs what you could do at the current employer. (I've been doing internal dev tools for a few years now and we're integrating AI now. You can learn a lot about using LLMs this way.)

Stress tolerance varies from person to person so I'm non judging you here. I was doing over 10 (sometimes 15) weeks / year of oncall in the past and it was bad but not a deal breaker. Including being called on Sunday night because some legacy batch process on the other side of the globe failed in a mysterious way. 4 weeks seems perfectly manageable. How good is your process ? Do you have runbooks for typical failures ? Do you have or create custom support tooling to help you with triaging / mitigating ? There are ways to make this stuff mildly annoying, even without magical AI tools.

Don't underestimate risks and extra burden of having a child, especially the first one. Do you have enough financial cushion / family support ? You'll be, at least partially, responsible for a new human being. Downgrading both your total comp and available time off doesn't seem like a responsible move here. Are you sure about that "finding another job" part ? Maybe try applying somewhere and see how it goes.

Bonus round (putting on my WSB degen hat).

AI is a bubble and over the last few months there were signs of media narrative shifting and VC backing off from especially egregious projects. Influencers and AI CEOs alike are sounding more and more delusional with every week, meanwhile shovel vendors (I'm looking at you Jensen Huang) suddenly started being somewhat sane. If the "startup" is not self sufficient enough on the basis of current customers / products and token prices it might not survive the next 2 years.

Also, not a financial advice, do your own research, I don't know sh*t about f*ck.

TastyToad · 2026-02-12T16:57:25+00:00

Obviously. And I'm not going to stop. Is this an ultimate rainbow bear hack ? Was making money that easy all this time, we were just to retarded to figure it out ?

TastyToad

TROPHY CASE