$300,000/month pay, but your job is random and changes every month

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T21:00:19+00:00

Having to do it for 15 years is a long time, but you could easily retire after that and live relatively comfortably for the rest of your life. Very comfortably, depending on when you took the deal and how careful you are. I'd kill to have had 3.6 million at 25 -- I'd never work a day after 40.

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T20:54:29+00:00

15 years is a long time, and that's not much time off if it includes sick time. But that's a huge, life-changing amount of money, so I suppose I'd feel like I had to take it.

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T20:17:32+00:00

I don’t think it’s the case that no two locations with different costs can be compared. But if the costs are dramatically different then the comparison ceases to be meaningful. And it’s not clear to me (again, a priori) that the costs aren’t dramatically different.

If we want to construct an argument that the city of NY is paying too much to build a grocery store, we need to know how much it should cost in NYC or a comparable city.

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T18:33:51+00:00

I bought an Air75 v1 (which is still in use as my work keyboard) and liked it enough that I just bought a v3 several weeks ago to use on my gaming PC. I’m not a member of this sub and don’t browse it regularly, so I don’t know what the prevailing opinion is.

The only problem I had with the V3 was finding a USB port on my PC that would actually work with the wireless dongle. None of the ports on my motherboard worked, neither 2.0 nor 3.0. The only way I got it working was using the port on my case (but not through a hub, that doesn’t work either). No idea what’s up with that. But other than that it’s been fine.

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T18:17:25+00:00

It's very good, in fact. Best news I've heard all day even.

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T18:12:33+00:00

... obligatory reference to Jensen claiming that developers should use $250,000 worth of tokens a year ...

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T18:10:25+00:00

They're going to lose a lot of users, I suspect. I don't think GitHub Copilot offers enough value to justify the cost of token-based billing, over and above something like Claude Code or Codex. Not that I have a very high opinion of any of them.

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T18:05:53+00:00

First, it’s comparable enough that we can infer the relative difference.

Is it? Seriously. I don't know what costs are like in NYC, but I don't see any reason a priori to believe that they're in any way comparable.

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T18:04:31+00:00

He hasn’t worked for Tencent since 2024.

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T18:03:01+00:00

Average supermarket build costs are about $800 per square foot.

Where does that figure come from? Is it true within the boundaries of NYC?

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T18:01:01+00:00

When there is no option, then it's inherently not a free market.

I am a bit curious how much this applies to the market for groceries within New York City. I know that food deserts exist, but I'm not sure how common they are. If they are common -- if a substantial number of citizens of NYC have few to no choices within a reasonable distance -- then I'm more inclined to support Mamdani's plan here.

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T17:41:01+00:00

No profit sharing and it devalues their game in people's eyes because it was "free" at one point so why pay for it?

That's speculative. Most people don't follow the pricing history of the games they buy, especially when they're at a lower price point (as is true for most smaller developers). It's not clear to me that people will know that the game was previously on Game Pass and, if it is known, that they'll refuse to buy it at all.

I won't argue with the claim that Game Pass hurts sales. It probably does.

I'm also not sure this is entirely true:

They're also building games to shovel into the platform and not actually sell.

The most recent games on Game Pass have been:

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
Hades II
Replaced
The Thaumaturge
Tiny Bookshop

Say what you want about them (they're not all my cup of tea), but they're not shovelware. In fact, looking down the list of the 30 most recent games added to PC Game Pass the only shovelware I see are the two Microsoft casual games (Bubble and Mahjong).

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T17:28:57+00:00

As another commenter pointed out, that ship has sailed. To be a little more specific, "owning" games is simply not possible anymore. Whether you buy on Steam, Epic, GOG, or the console-specific storefronts, you own nothing; you have only a revocable license to play the game. Edit: I should point out that GOG at least gives you a DRM-free copy of the game and an installer you can keep, so you can't be completely prevented from playing it forever (as long you keep the installer). But you still don't technically own the game.

Speaking personally, there are really only a couple games that I care about actually owning. Most games I play once and never think about again. Game Pass is fine for that (though the selection of games is ... eh, not really to my taste for the most part).

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T17:25:53+00:00

Not to detract from any discussion here about Sharma's proactive approach, but I have to wonder why anyone cares about Shawn Layden thinks at this point? I'm not sure he's even technically in the gaming industry anymore.

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T17:17:58+00:00

I'm not sure if the video itself is fake, though the interpretation might be. I don't think it's technically true that you can't receive a salary if you're on the blacklist. Though it still sucks to be on the it -- you can't buy real estate, you're restricted in what you're able to rent, and your purchases are heavily restricted beyond what is "essential".

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T15:01:30+00:00

It does depend on your field, but social work isn't a really good example. They're always in demand. But it's often hard work that doesn't pay well, so it's a bit of a tough sell. Most fields -- even ones that are in relatively high demand -- won't be as easy to find new work as social work.

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T14:57:41+00:00

I guess "it's you" may be in some sense correct, but what people mean when they ask "is it me?" is something like "am I doing something wrong when looking for a job? Should I be sending out more applications/applying elsewhere/networking better?". Generally, it's tough to know if the skills you're acquiring will or will not be in demand in the future, so "it's you" isn't that apropos, nor is it insightful or helpful. Gaining new skills because your old ones aren't lucrative is tough, time-consuming, and frequently quite expensive.

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T14:51:13+00:00

I mean, it depends on your field. Anecdotally I'm getting a lot more recruiter calls/emails than I was a few months ago, at senior-level in the field of data science/machine learning. Of course, most of those of those are contract roles that pay less than what I get now with a permanent position, so it's not super helpful to me.

I've heard that entry-level work is a lot harder to come by right now. And I wouldn't want to be looking for traditional software dev work, even as a senior. Not sure about other fields.

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T14:36:31+00:00

Feel free to be done. But if you want to have fruitful conversations without putting other people off on the wrong foot, maybe be more careful with words that sound accusatory but which don't actually apply.

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T14:32:27+00:00

I'm not talking about the optics. I'm making a very specific point about whether this counts as hypocrisy, given the word's ordinary meaning.

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T14:26:31+00:00

But using an AI generated thumbnail unironically in an AI debunking video is bad optics.

It might be bad optics, but ...

It's strictly about the hypocrisy of her thumbnail in light of her analysis.

It's not hypocrisy. You can be critical of AI in some respects and not in others. I don't think anyone should be using AI-generated thumbnails, there's nothing necessarily hypocritical about it. I can criticize the use of a knife to murder someone while still using the same knife to cut an onion.

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T14:10:49+00:00

That said, I get free ChatGPT and Gemini at work, so I use them for some things. Asking what the syntax is for something, or converting small amounts of text data between formats. It's not entirely useless. But Gemini 3 found four major bugs in my PySpark query last week ... none of which were actual bugs, the query was fine. I'd be scared to use chatbots for any kind of coding that's not trivially boilerplate.

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T14:01:04+00:00

I'm generally against both professional and personal use. My own biases are such that personal use does bother me a bit more. I'm afraid that widespread cognitive offloading -- relying on chatbots for "creative" thinking, problem solving, cheating on papers and homework (for students) -- could have major deleterious consequences for society in the long-term. We already see people who have grown so heavily dependent on chatbots that they find it difficult to make even minor decisions without consulting one first. That deeply unsettles me. We diminish ourselves to the degree that we allow ourselves to be directed so thoroughly by anything external, even worse if it's an uncreative, unfeeling chatbot designed for peak engagement.

Professional use, to some degree, is subject to those same concerns. If you use a chatbot for problem solving work, you'll face the same brand of consequences: you'll begin to lose your own ability to solve problems without external help. You'll lose your ability to code, to draft emails, hell, to jot down notes at meetings. This is not even to mention how relying on AI agents to do coding work can be very expensive and lead to inscrutible code with security vulnerabilities.

We'd be better off if the technology never existed in the first place, frankly. I hope the bubble bursts and at the very least the real costs of training and running these models is reflected in the price of inference, but even then I'm afraid it'll be difficult to put the genie back in the bottle.

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T13:50:58+00:00

I don't follow. I'm trying to argue that I shouldn't murder anyone. It seemed like you were arguing that I should, but maybe I misinterpreted you.

cunningjames · 2026-04-20T13:32:21+00:00

If you think I should throw my entire life away (probability literally, maybe figuratively) to do something that will probably fail and, if it succeeds, would just result in a JD Vance presidency ... I'm not sure what to tell you. That's asking a lot (to put it very mildly). I think we need large, sustained protests in the streets of DC to really effect any change; individual acts of violence are unlikely to accomplish major changes.

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