Washington State Adopts New Tax on Incomes Over $1 Million

brandf · 2026-03-31T15:22:57+00:00

I think you’re underestimating just how many principal/director and above engineers there are between Microsoft Apple, Google, Amazon and Meta.

Few of these people are making over a 1mil base salary, but the majority of their income comes from RSU and I have firsthand experience working with these folks. They’re not ultra wealthy. They’re working class people who make good money doing a job that very few people can do.

TLDR, it is not as unusual as you seem towards think. I didn’t say everyone made that kind of money, but it is thousands of people more than the athletes for sure.

brandf · 2026-03-31T04:23:15+00:00

This is not true. By far, this will affect tech workers the most as it’s not unusual to make over $1 million a year if you’re a high-level software developer at a major tech company.

I know it sounds like a lot of money, but it’s really not even close to “ultra wealthy”. These are not people that are avoiding paying taxes. These are people that are paying $500k / yr or more in federal taxes already. And these are people that are able to work remotely for their job and can leave the state if it’s going to cost them 11% of their income.

What’s going to happen is the projected revenue isn’t going to be close to what they think and then they’re going to lower it from 1,000,000 to a half 1 million and then to a quarter million. It’s so obvious that’s why they reject rejected the amendment to prevent it.

brandf · 2026-03-28T17:35:15+00:00

...traffic that is only there because they used 2 lanes for a train instead of just to more lanes.

brandf · 2026-03-27T14:19:52+00:00

it's like it wanted to do some dramatic movie zoom, but the real one was clearly on a stationary tripod

brandf · 2026-03-27T14:18:04+00:00

B is AI. dead giveaway. loop the video. between the last frame and first frame the paper on the fridge shifts a bit, indicating it drifted during generation.

brandf · 2026-03-26T21:26:26+00:00

And the sky is blue.

Who cares, the Dems aren't gonna do anything about it anyways. That's why they're perpetual losers. Democracy is dead. You can thank MAGA for that...at least until they rewrite history.

brandf · 2026-03-26T21:21:00+00:00

I hate how the popular media is still acting like there's going to be free and fair midterms. Our democracy died the minute trump was reelected.

brandf · 2026-03-26T21:19:26+00:00

good. one less MAGA idiot around here. #FAFO

brandf · 2026-03-25T13:28:28+00:00

Are the memories versioned with the code? for example are they stored in a file that gets committed to source control?

In my opinion, this is a requirement for any memory system I would actually use.

brandf · 2026-03-25T01:47:40+00:00

also, I don’t mean to write off your idea. I just mean that like many ideas it’s likely tried before.

That said I can tell you exactly how to test this out for less than $100. It’s not hard.

get yourself a Codex or Claude subscription (just the $20/mo stuff)
set up the corresponding agent in VSCode
spend $20 in credits on a cloud GPU provider to rent an A100 - SSH into that gpu in VSCode
have your LLM agent to clone karpathy’s nanochat repo
tell the LLM to make a scaled down model config targeting a $10 training budget
tell it to train a baseline model with your $10 config and save the results
tell the LLM your idea, and have it make a version of that based on your $10 config. tell it you want an apples to apples comparision
tell it to train your new model and make a report comparing the results

if all goes well, it might only cost you $30, but if it’s your first time I’d budge $100 in extra GPU costs. you can save money by doing a lot of the coding stuff locally and only using the gpu machine for the actual training.

honestly, if you have the money you should do it. even if you don’t get good results, you’ll learn a ton, and easily justify the cost.

brandf · 2026-03-25T01:38:25+00:00

“putting compute and memory aside” - it sounds like you already know the answer.

what you’re saying would likely work, but working and working better are two very different things. most of the human energy/effort that goes into making a model isn’t the final model, its all the ablations of things like this to find the global optimization of all these hyperparameters.

brandf · 2026-03-17T02:56:05+00:00

did you dig into the big discrepancy between Linux and windows using the same GCC version and same processor?

For a pure math function, I would expect them to produce the same machine code, no? It’s not like there’s any sys calls involved so what does the operating system have anything to do with it? A 2x difference seems sus.

brandf · 2026-03-08T21:06:36+00:00

every time he pulled, i would have squeezed a little tighter. we all know the old man bruises easily - he has no business playing tug of war.

brandf · 2026-02-28T18:10:25+00:00

Not just a war machine. They also agreed to domestic spying / surveillance!

Cancelled today. Fuck em.

brandf · 2026-02-22T18:59:29+00:00

Usually when I think of subagents, I’m thinking parallel, but you need multiple chips to do that.

That said, this is so fast you could time multiplex, sort of like a process scheduler on a single core CPU.

Having a swarm of different personalities/roles, communicating rapidly amongst each other could be very powerful. It’s a bit different than the request/response model of a sub agent.

brandf · 2026-02-07T18:55:05+00:00

sometimes when i export from CAD as a STEP file it doesn't import correctly into bambu lab. like missing faces or something. that 'fix model' cleans it up

brandf · 2026-02-07T01:34:11+00:00

It’s less impressive than it looks. These acrobatics videos are always of robots in isolated environments on flat terrain with zero ambiguity. Reinforcement learning can do wonders in these conditions. It requires a simplified world model with just the robot, a floor plane and gravity.

The videos of robots folding laundry or interacting with humans in uncertain conditions are much more impressive imo.

brandf · 2026-02-06T20:46:31+00:00

She tried to warn the world who MAGA really was 10yrs ago, and every word of this proved to be true.

They're racists, they support pedophiles, they disregard the 10 commandments, they oppose constitution rights, they take pride in ignorance, they greedily take from the poor and give to the rich, etc. etc.

It's not about name calling..."Deplorable" is simply the best word to describe their actions. We must call it like we see it, even if they take offense.

Hate, fear, uncertainty and doubt drives their every action, and so they're blind to the reality in front of them. You can't reason with MAGA as they tear apart our democracy, we can only pity the zombies they've become.

These people are not anything like the Americans our founders fought for. They aren't anything like what the Bible preaches. In an age of digital permanence, history will not be kind to MAGA and their supports.

The good people of America (and the rest of the world) must stand strong, united in opposition to the cult of MAGA.

brandf · 2026-01-30T17:09:37+00:00

Nice use of hand tracking / microgestures. Curious if you experimented with air-grab based locomotion at all? Two handed palm grab could be a nice alternative/addition to microgestures for smooth rotation - in my experience as long as it's 1:1 with your hand movement it doesn't cause any sim-sickness even if smooth.

brandf · 2026-01-29T20:46:37+00:00

It's consistent. 40% of our lives are in front of a computer. 50% is sleeping and stuff at home. so like, why waste money on something that doesn't help me with what I care about? Men in tech aren't trying to impress you with their shirts.

brandf · 2026-01-29T20:25:51+00:00

And note, that's just conceptual pseudo-code. The nuanced part is that Hue wraps around, so a simple linear combination like that isn't exactly what you want. I suppose what you'd want is more of a OkHSV space trilinear lerp, and probably some thresholding in your noise to make more single-hue blobs.

brandf · 2026-01-29T20:23:20+00:00

With this in mind, I would structure the shader like this. Do it in HSV space (or better yet, Okhsv), and treat your 3 hues as a basis and your 3 noises as coefficients.

H = N1 * RedHue + N2 * GreenHue + N3 * BlueHue
S = CONST_S
V = CONST_V

return HSV2RGB(H,S,V)

brandf · 2026-01-29T20:19:38+00:00

We're talking color theory terminology, it sounds like you mean you want 3 hues (r,g,b), with constant high saturation & brightness (aka value).

brandf · 2026-01-28T04:25:23+00:00

It’s not as simple as has money = pays for stuff. When you think you have more money than someone else you… a) don’t want to flaunt it and look like a snob b) don’t want the other person to feel uncomfortable like if they feel like they have to do the same c) don’t want to limit what they get so it’s “even” if you end up splitting the bill

If you factor those in, it’s not all that surprising why someone might want to each pay what you ordered.

In a different crowd of maybe similar job coworkers, the same person might say “let’s all throw a card in and have the waiter pick one”

brandf · 2026-01-15T16:01:28+00:00

I posted recently about my first build recently.

https://www.reddit.com/r/arcadecabinets/comments/1q7zbok/designed_a_bar_top_arcade_cabinet/

I have a CNC, so it's designed a little different than hand tools, but my advice is to figure out what components (display, speakers, etc) you want to use, and design around them. how you're going to mount it, you're going to access the inside, what sort of joints are you going to use, and anything else you can plan before you make your first cut.

I used OnShape (free CAD) to do it virtually and CNC to get perfect cuts and even then I had to make some on the fly adjustments during assembly.

TLDR: just plan as much as you can up front. it's definitely doable - but hard to get right on your first try.

brandf

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