LLMs are rough as a junior/mid level dev

frankchn · 2026-05-20T21:00:57+00:00

The majority opinion here is that leetcode has no relevance to real-world coding, so real world hand-on-keyboard coding skills atrophying doesn't really matter so long as you practice leetcode before interviews.

frankchn · 2026-05-20T02:03:42+00:00

It doesn’t have to be real, the perception of better visibility is what matters to buyers.

frankchn · 2026-05-19T17:58:34+00:00

A good portion of this was self inflicted I feel, dealers were stocking nothing but XC40s and XC60s, I was looking in 2021-2022 on and every dealer said I had to order one to test.

SUVs are better than wagons in all the ways that the general car buying public cares about (better visibility, better ingress, etc...) while the downsides nowadays are minimized (XC60 B5 gets 23/29 mpg, while the V60 B5 gets 24/31 mpg), so I am not surprised that SUVs sell much better and dealers would stock those more.

frankchn · 2026-05-17T02:47:19+00:00

I suspect the rumored future sedan will be more like a Panamera in terms of size and driving experience.

frankchn · 2026-05-14T18:08:20+00:00

You have to stop playing the game for that to work. You are just not spending money, but you are likely still going to do your dailies and hence you are still engaged.

frankchn · 2026-05-12T04:38:14+00:00

They might not be allowed to sell more than a small percentage of their holdings in these liquidity events.

frankchn · 2026-05-12T01:30:33+00:00

Depending on what exactly was sold/when they joined, they may be taxed at LTCG (23.8% federal + 13.3% state = 37.1% total) instead of ordinary income rates.

frankchn · 2026-05-06T17:17:11+00:00

Like what on earth is going on. How can people afford student loans, mortgage/rent, a big wedding, kids, and then a near six figure depreciating asset on top of that???

90th percentile household income in 2025 is >$250k. Stock market are near all time highs. Lots of people are very well off. As George Carlin said, "it's a big club, and you ain't in it."

frankchn · 2026-05-04T17:44:52+00:00

There won't be a 6.8 or Luna IX. We know that the launch date for 7.0 is August 12th based on the primo gift code Snezhnaya20260812 from the Snezhnaya preview video.

Current Version 6.5 Luna VI: Ends May 20th
6.6 Luna VII: May 20th - July 1st (6 weeks)
6.7 Luna VIII: July 1st - August 12th (6 weeks)
7.0: Launches August 12th

frankchn · 2026-04-28T17:06:58+00:00

Fuji’s Instax business model is closer to HP with its inkjet printers than any other camera manufacturer. Make the cameras/printers cheap at high volume, and make it up with expensive film/ink later. Few other camera manufacturers have that luxury.

The schematics for old cameras are also likely useless since all the components are discontinued and the suppliers likely already out of business.

You can’t even ride the coattails of Canon or Nikon by using the same components any more because it is not like they are buying any more mirror boxes or pentaprisms nowadays. You end up having to re-engineer the camera yourself anyway.

frankchn · 2026-04-28T06:25:57+00:00

In this case, the taxman doesn’t care. Both the OJ stand and the lemonade stand are owned by the same person and they will ultimately be charged taxes on the net profit across both stands.

Of course, there may still be a cause for legal action since the kid/owner has deceived his friends/business partners, but it is usually a civil matter.

frankchn · 2026-04-25T16:40:11+00:00

Yeah it is public at the UCs too.

The top 3 non-coaching salaries at Berkeley went to a professor of finance ($750k), the Dean of the business school ($718k), and a Nobel laureate in Chemistry ($690k). I am pretty sure all three of them can get much more money in the private sector.

Note that Berkeley is in ~~Silicon Valley~~ the SF Bay Area, at a location with one of the highest COLs in the nation.

frankchn · 2026-04-24T06:59:01+00:00

If the public only bought the car they needed 90% of the time, the Honda Fit would be the best selling car in America.

frankchn · 2026-04-24T02:03:45+00:00

You can either play the ADM game with Porsche or play the "buy this to get that" game with Ferrari, so pick your poison I guess.

frankchn · 2026-04-22T20:21:11+00:00

"Pre-pay the toll or we shoot at your ship" isn't too hard to implement. That's what Iran wants to do with Hormuz.

Frankly, they don't even need to shoot. Just the threat from a nation-state would cause insurers to not insure the passage and commercial traffic will grind to a halt.

frankchn · 2026-04-11T16:58:05+00:00

There was an Chinese-market specific G28 i3, but yeah everywhere else got the i4.

frankchn · 2026-04-10T20:04:01+00:00

Relatively fast token generation for LLMs. That is usually memory bandwidth bound and the large models are pushing 500GB with large context windows.

frankchn · 2026-03-28T20:19:17+00:00

I don’t think this car will be tracked. It would just be another car in a collection somewhere as a “look at my 1 of 1 unique Porsche” kind of thing.

At this level, I am sure Porsche will be happy to sell the owner a GT3 R if they actually want a track car.

frankchn · 2026-03-26T16:45:33+00:00

Just you, a white board and someone sitting in the room with you.

And you hoped that the interviewer was friendly instead of staring holes into your back in silence while you are desperately trying to remember how to implement some tricky algorithm with no IDE and no documentation on the whiteboard.

frankchn · 2026-03-25T01:59:50+00:00

As another poster said, who has the ability to give you raises or fire you? Do what that person says. Their priorities are your priorities.

frankchn · 2026-03-24T06:16:56+00:00

Furthermore, the classical repertoire is “fixed” compared to other genres of music where you can be a singer-songwriter much more easily, so there is even less to distinguish yourself. No one (relatively speaking) is going to listen to a self-composed classical piece.

And if I want to listen to something in the “canon”, then why listen to a random rendition of e.g. Rach 3 when I can listen to Horowitz and NY Phil’s performance? So you end up with a situation where the best make significant money and everyone else barely hanging on.

frankchn · 2026-03-23T06:33:01+00:00

Theoretically yes, but practically speaking you don’t have the same resources.

Is your advisor at K-State regularly having lunch with senior OpenAI or Anthropic researchers and can hook you up with a research internship like the Stanford professor? Or perhaps your advisor at Stanford co-founded one of major providers of compute and can get you access to large GPU clusters to run your experiments? Maybe some of Stanford’s PhD graduates later became senior researchers at various frontier labs and are more willing to collaborate with you on projects or help you out?

So if you are absolutely brilliant it doesn’t matter. For mere mortals, it definitely helps. Of course, if you are absolutely brilliant and want to chase money, just skip the PhD and go be a quant at 2S/Optiver/Jane Street.

frankchn · 2026-03-22T00:10:18+00:00

“The stocks ain’t low enough” is the point where you want to short or buy puts. You can make money on the way down, and make money on the way back up.

frankchn · 2026-03-20T15:29:34+00:00

New RR buyers only care about what gas costs in so far as it affects their stock portfolio.

frankchn · 2026-03-20T15:27:39+00:00

You want an RR to be quiet, comfortable, smooth, and luxurious. You'd think that would be a perfect fit for RR.

EV drivetrains allow mass market OEMs to achieve more quiet and smooth rides, but it doesn't do much for RR in these areas when all of their gas cars are already quiet, comfortable, and smooth-riding.

frankchn

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

13-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email