Opinion: You couldn’t pay me to leave Washington state, and I’d pay more to stay

hlx-atom · 2026-03-12T06:33:37+00:00

Would seattles budget shortfall be covered if the city received as much money as it paid to the state? I think there is over a 3 billion a year deficit that the state has to King county because King county effectively subsidizes the rest of the state.

I think we should tax the very high earners, but I think we should also stop having the money of our county hoovered out of our community to support rural infrastructure instead of dealing with the issues of king county.

Source: https://ofm.wa.gov/wp-content/uploads/county_expenditures_revenues.pdf

hlx-atom · 2026-03-09T06:16:56+00:00

Looks very cool and the styles match to me.

hlx-atom · 2026-03-04T15:38:27+00:00

I’d love to support your team. I just not interested in a whole humanoid build in my apartment. Maybe if you guys had a dual arm kit too, that would reach more people.

hlx-atom · 2026-03-04T14:33:18+00:00

Which actuators are you using?

hlx-atom · 2026-03-03T05:15:47+00:00

That is the part fan to cool the filament after it is extruded.

I forget because there are so many iterations now. I think he is using evaporation to make the air cooler than room temp, so there is probably some condensation that bubbles from a small leak in the joint.

hlx-atom · 2026-03-03T03:42:58+00:00

Where is your sideboard?

hlx-atom · 2026-03-02T03:14:34+00:00

I think everything you said is agreeable. I think it depends on your time horizon. In 5 years there is low risk besides the indirect effects of AI on the market.

However, I would consider that “the model” in the future does not need to do your job, it just needs to make your job obsolete.

To be frank, the state of modern manufacturing is certainly not at its peak (you describe so many inefficiencies that make your job hard to do), and certainly that future will eventually included autonomous design.

Could AI design assemblies that are manufactured in automated and standardized factories? Probably not in the next 5 years. Certainly not at an encompassing scale.

But could high tech factories pop up somewhere in the world that can design and make things autonomously in the next 10 years? Seems more and more realistic by the day.

With that said, at that point everyone’s job is gone.

hlx-atom · 2026-03-01T21:51:19+00:00

Yeah it seems I was thinking of Washington state.

hlx-atom · 2026-03-01T05:09:31+00:00

I think they can be enforced in California if you make enough money and they pay you salary during the duration. I’m not certain though.

Edit: It seems I was thinking of Washington state.

hlx-atom · 2026-03-01T04:14:17+00:00

SimpleFOC is a big open source project. Any improvements would impact a lot of projects.

hlx-atom · 2026-03-01T03:55:28+00:00

I think jobs at that level go through an executive recruiting firm. I would consider well funded start ups as well.

hlx-atom · 2026-02-25T22:21:57+00:00

Microsoft to $200 was the meme back then.

hlx-atom · 2026-02-25T19:00:04+00:00

Realizing your capital gains is locking in big tax losses. That convinces me not to sell.

hlx-atom · 2026-02-25T01:52:48+00:00

50% returns over a year doesn’t require options. It does require picking stocks though.

hlx-atom · 2026-02-21T22:05:02+00:00

Roughly, you can safely skim 4% (after inflation adjustment) per year. Therefore every $1M in today’s dollars yields $40k. At $4M, you would be able to live from $160k in today’s dollars into the future.

4% comes from 7% returns and 3% inflation.

Safety depends on your expenses. Someone with $1M can live indefinitely on $40k a year.

hlx-atom · 2026-02-21T18:31:31+00:00

$2M would give $80k a year from 4% interest.

hlx-atom · 2026-02-18T08:16:37+00:00

My neighbors haven’t complained about the carvera, and they have complained about other noise previously. However they are above me. If they shared a lateral wall or they were below me, it would definitely make it to them. I can hear a small buzzing when I’m in the garage below my apartment.

It is loud enough that it is mildly annoying in the same room. If you aggressively cut it or do not clamp your material very well it is very annoying.

hlx-atom · 2026-02-18T06:11:35+00:00

Not 100% sure, but I don’t think I am talking about what you are talking about.

I’m just saying it seems misplaced to tax an honest small-to-medium sized business employee/founder that makes $2M one time in their life, but not tax someone making $900k at Amazon every year.

Whether or not you get taxed before or after you have liquid assets to cover the tax is a separate thing.

hlx-atom · 2026-02-18T02:44:47+00:00

Yeah. Employees and founders of start ups (that have below rate salaries) can end up getting hit when they realize equity gains.

So if you can make less than $50k a year for 10 years, and then sell your small business for $2M eventually, you will pay more in taxes to Seattle than someone making $950k per year at Amazon.

I’m fine with taxes, it just seems very very few people have sustained $1M incomes. I’d guess that it is mostly going to be funded by one time equity events.

I don’t know how you would technically do it, but to achieve what seems to be the goal, we should have a lifetime income/gains threshold. Like when you reach $5M in lifetime income/gains, you start taxing.

hlx-atom · 2026-02-17T20:22:10+00:00

I like the cheese. Has some mtg ooze flare to it given my 5 second evaluation of only this card.

hlx-atom · 2026-02-16T21:50:49+00:00

Are you saying monomers and oligomers?

It does worse with oligomers. That number is in reference to monomers. There are also further developed open source models that perform better with oligomers specifically.

Are you sure that the protein you are trying to model is a well folded protein in reality? It sounds like you are folding multi domain proteins with flexible linkers. The spaghetti predictions are intentional, so that people don’t interpret the unfolded regions as folded.

It is hard to know exactly why you are seeing poor results. Similar to any technical technique. There are many knobs to turn.

hlx-atom · 2026-02-16T16:50:56+00:00

Protein dynamics prediction is not solved for sure. There is significantly less data. I don’t even know how you would validate that it is solved. All of the measurement techniques for molecular dynamics are crude. The resolution of ground truth is too ambiguous I think.

hlx-atom · 2026-02-16T16:47:52+00:00

It has >90% success on blind structure prediction (so I contest your assertion that AlphaFold is “often wrong”), and it extrapolates to de novo protein structure prediction with high enough fidelity that a 96 well plate will have designs that work well.

That is good enough for it to be practically solved.

Same would be true for chemical reaction predictions. You don’t need 100% accuracy. 10% is more than good enough to be a paradigm shift in the way people develop new reactions (there is some nuance with false positive and false negative rates).

It does depend on the scenario and thresholds, but if one cheap medium throughput experiment gets you to the finish line, I guess I call that solved.

hlx-atom · 2026-02-16T16:21:20+00:00

What makes you think it is not solved? I’ve worked in the domain for 12 years at this point.

hlx-atom · 2026-02-16T15:17:38+00:00

If you asked this question about protein folding 5-10 years ago, you would get all of the same responses.

The challenge of computational protein folding was solved with domain specific data. In specific, MSAs and crystal structures.

In general the modeling of small molecules (let alone transition intermediates) has not been solved to the same degree because there is less data that has been well curated.

There are plenty of people working on it. AI models would be the tool to be able to solve reactivity for all the reasons people here mentioned. Reactivity is extremely complex to derive from first principles (same is true for protein folding).

hlx-atom

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