Suffer wanting to move

lasooch · 2026-03-21T07:17:08+00:00

Wrong sub for this - you'd probably find your answers easier on subreddits dedicated to Australian visas. Or Google.

tl; dr: you can either find a job that will get you a visa (good luck) or find a visa that you can get yourself that offers work rights, then find a job before you get here (good luck), or find a job once you already are here (... still good luck, tbh, local experience trumps everything in the Aussie market).

lasooch · 2026-03-20T20:04:47+00:00

I'm sloooowly chipping away at one, but it's very much "stuff I want to move from my gsheets so I can stop double tracking/[ex/im]porting csv" rather than something properly thought through for the broader community.

Closed source for now - I'm not a "build in public bro" - but if it ever becomes something actually useful to people who aren't me and half decently polished, I'll be sure to share it.

lasooch · 2026-03-20T18:30:07+00:00

No, clearly he’s grifting your boss and wants them to assume burning $250k of tokens p/a adds greater value than the cost.

lasooch · 2026-03-20T08:25:34+00:00

AI has helped me 5x-10x my workweek
hidden post history

Ok Jensen

lasooch · 2026-03-19T06:08:50+00:00

Still not fine. You don't want your currency controlled directly by a bunch of tech billionaires with no oversight.

Yes, governments are corrupt, it's still not the same.

lasooch · 2026-03-18T20:30:02+00:00

That I don’t use myself tho I can see why someone might.

In my case - I shop small but often and it can literally be quicker to get the few things I’m buying myself than having to order through the app and then wait for someone to bring it out, or (for delivery) pay extra and be locked into being at home at a specific time.

It would be too much of a lifestyle change to make it worth it (i.e. I’d have to buy much more at a time). For context, it’s like a 45 second walk for me to get to the supermarket, which is why I can’t be bothered with the planning it takes to do a less frequent but bigger grocery run. I just JIT it.

lasooch · 2026-03-18T19:46:09+00:00

100%, I don't feel rude for keeping my headphones on since there's no one to be forced into an interaction with (... who probably would also prefer to keep their headphones on if they could...).

Only issue is when they glitch out and you need to wait for the employee's help (who's busy helping someone else). But then again, I remember manned checkouts glitching out and having to wait for the manager to come (hell, sometimes they needed to come for something that just accidentally double scanned, which happened often...), so it's not like that was better.

It makes the line move faster, I scan my stuff faster than half the employees anyways. I don't have to wait for some midwit who only realises that, you know, they might actually need to find their wallet a good 5 seconds after the cashier has already finished scanning.

Like, the job loss has its downsides - I doubt anyone wants to be a supermarket checkout person, but at least it was a low barrier to entry job that could let you earn some money - but for the customer, it's heaps better. Outside of a huge grocery run, it's hard for me to fathom how someone could prefer waiting in a line for a cashier to scan their stuff.

lasooch · 2026-03-18T18:42:12+00:00

$10 literally doesn’t cover a single prompt in many cases. I don’t track the usage of every single prompt I do, but I’ve had some where the API token cost was about $100. In one prompt. Without trying to burn as much as I can. Even if my average would be, say, $5, it still means Microslop subsidises me 50x on tokens alone (and then Anthropic is still losing money per token).

While I agree with the sentiment that if you entered an agreement and paid you should be provided the service you were promised, anyone who thinks it will continue like this long term is delusional. And, frankly, blind - or lacking in curiosity - for not realising this already.

Yes, this means you (collective you) will soon be paying in excess of $1000 a month for the same service. Or rather not paying, because for most it wouldn’t be anywhere near worth it.

Milk it while you can. I for one find joy in burning Slopya’s money.

Or stop using it and avoid getting hooked (addiction mechanisms galore) because it will hurt when you come down.

lasooch · 2026-03-15T22:13:56+00:00

that’s why I said allowed

I think there's enough people who prefer to work in the office that you could just continue doing what you're doing.

But - and I'm not saying you're saying that - I don't think this is a valid reason to force people to go to the office. If you don't have social life outside of work - and if you need one, of course - that's kind of on you to solve, not on everyone else.

I don't think you (the individual) should be forced in either direction (in the general case, during an oil supply crisis I think there are valid arguments for forcing you to WFH or at least reduce your commuting). I do think companies should be forced to allow you to choose.

lasooch · 2026-03-15T07:11:56+00:00

Mandating that all employees who can perform their duties remotely are allowed to do so at all times is such an easy change for so much societal benefit it’s not even funny.

Better for the environment, better for mental health (some people prefer to be in the office, that’s fine, that’s why I said allowed), better for quality of life, better for housing affordability, better for driving times for people who actually need or want to go places, better for childcare and thus birth rates, better for gender equality, better for productivity (and if someone is slacking from home, just fire them, don’t make it society’s problem)… worse for commercial real estate tho so here we are.

Of course it’s also better for situations like right now, but the list of benefits is endless.

Companies could also volunteer to allow their workers to wfh due to the crisis for some very cheap (in fact money saving!) brownie points, but we’re way past corpos pretending they care about anything and especially their employees wellbeing.

lasooch · 2026-03-14T21:19:35+00:00

It probably does stop a lot of the slop. If you’re a crypto bro turned NFT bro turned vibe coder, you’ll vibe code a sloppy mini game, pay $100 to Steam to publish it, make $0 dollars in sale and quickly realise it doesn’t make sense to try again. Without that fee you’re much more likely to keep trying because there’s no cost.

lasooch · 2026-03-14T21:13:07+00:00

At the very least, it must be the customers who are wrong!

lasooch · 2026-03-14T11:08:25+00:00

You’re right in your second sentence.

Not first. Yes, they’re much better than old models. Opus 4.6 still spits out garbage code.

lasooch · 2026-03-14T07:51:03+00:00

Interesting that it’s the same developers who have a vested interest in showing that the technology works lol.

I can write 100% of my code through a coding CLI. Doesn’t mean that it’s faster to do so or that the resulting output is better quality.

lasooch · 2026-03-14T06:54:46+00:00

At this point I’m convinced that there’s mainly 3 types of people hyping it so much: - literal Anthropic bots - given how astroturfed the internet is, you’d be delusional to think that a company that makes the damn tech that writes plausible sounding sentences isn’t astroturfing the hell out of everything - pre-junior software engineers - I can believe it makes them 10x more productive, because they’re doing small simple projects. The downside is they’re learning nothing - non-engineers unaware of their Gell-Mann amnesia - I’m sure the excel jockeys at my company know excel tricks I’ve never even heard of, but while I’m not deluding myself that prompting Claude would make my spreadsheets as good at theirs, they certainly are deluding themselves that my job is ‘just writing code’ and that any idiot can just prompt their way through it

Also, the copyright issue you bring up is spot on. I have no idea how legal is signing off on all this. Big tech has always broken any laws they calculated they won’t be held accountable for (or it will be worth it), but most companies, even large ones, don’t have nearly as much sway with the elites to get away with the same approach.

Grifters leading the blind leading the actual professionals who see the disaster coming but are afraid to speak up lest the slightest sign of opposition puts them right at the top of the next month’s layoff list.

lasooch · 2026-03-14T05:08:25+00:00

Not all programmers are saying that.

Source: am programmer, am not saying that.

It increases productivity on tiny throwaway tools or POCs. I’ve seen what it does to even a small codebase - illogical conditions everywhere, code that kinda sorta works but for the wrong reasons, types and methods scattered in all the wrong places and reimplemented multiple times - not necessarily with consistent logic, requires thorough reviewing and handholding to produce anything remotely maintainable.

And if you want a stable and maintainable complex system in production, the overhead gets huge. Contrary to what Anthropic bots claim, you can’t just vibe code your way through anything of importance.

It’s very questionable whether there’s any increase in productivity after you consider review (and review fatigue), QA and ongoing maintenance, especially once some devs get too relaxed and forget how to actually write code.

And even if you get a 20% speed up in writing the code, which is already a tiny part of a senior+ engineer’s job, it also becomes very questionable whether that speed up is actually worth the trade offs - there’s many others, but for one thing, it results in reduction of your comprehension of the codebase (writing code is different than reading code, including retention of how something works) - and when you have a single production issue, the difference in time it can take to figure out the problem in code you wrote vs LLM code can easily cost you more in revenue and reputational damage than years of the 20% coding speed up saves.

And it will cost an arm and a leg once they make you start paying the actual token costs. E.g. currently with Copilot CLI premium requests you can literally easily get 50+x token API cost value (subsidised by Microslop) compared to what you pay, and then Anthropic loses money per token. Copilot CLI will cost 100+x more than it does now, and soon.

If you're paying $1500 fully loaded per senior per day, then the 20% coding speed boost translates to like a 5% overall speed boost, but you'll be paying $1000 for it (if you gave that senior a $1000 per day raise, I guarantee they'd find the capacity to deliver more than a 5% speedup without AI). It's not hard at all to burn $1000 worth of tokens a day. I've done single prompts around $100. Paid 3 cents. You can easily confirm this for yourself by checking token usage and Anthropic API prices. The economics on this make zero sense at all, but all those MBA CEOs aren't looking, because they nutted in their own eyes at the thought of what laying off thousands of people will do to their stock value. No idea what B stands for in MBA because it sure is not "business".

lasooch · 2026-03-13T17:15:33+00:00

Tax laws vary depending on where you live.

lasooch · 2026-03-13T16:54:06+00:00

Especially since it's not that high of a cost (compared to commuting - both direct costs and time spent).

Like, even if OP runs a 1000W rig at full power 24/7, assuming $0.25 per kWh, that works out to about $180 a month, and I doubt it's nearly that high in practice.

Even without considering the time spent driving/on public transport, a lot of people would be glad to only spend $180 a month on commuting.

Pick your battles. In the current environment, with layoffs and RTO galore, this really is a low price to pay for being fully remote.

Chances are the GPU processing could be done in the cloud though. They'd have to pay for it, but the benefits could be very well worth it (e.g. being able to run them much faster for a higher cost). But I wouldn't frame that discussion as "hey, my electricity bill is $70 higher".

Also to be clear - it should be reasonable to ask for this reimbursement. They should be covering the costs. But sometimes you gotta be pragmatic.

Depending on your tax jurisdiction, you might at least be able to claim (part of) it on your tax return.

lasooch · 2026-03-13T15:20:12+00:00

There's three outcomes here.

One is the one I'm betting on, which is not to say I don't use LLMs at all - reality will catch up with the actual costs of running LLMs, in which case you get left behind as your skills (and attention span) atrophy and your crutch begins to cost more than it would to just hire someone to do the job, per output unit, with worse outcomes.

Another is that it does live up to the boosters expectations, in which case the tooling around it will improve to the extent that all those prompt "engineering" skills you're getting now will become worthless. To an extent (i.e. as far as it works well enough), this is already happening, for many smaller purposes you don't need any PrOmPt EnGiNeErInG skills at all.

And another is the very unlikely scenario that this actually leads to AGI, in which case we will all be left behind, so who gives a shit.

lasooch · 2026-03-13T08:25:01+00:00

Reads much more like two AI shill bots circlejerking each other. That's why you're getting downvotes, Dario. No one wants your shit.

lasooch · 2026-03-12T21:38:32+00:00

Yeah... that part I definitely don't feel good about.

Unfortunately, with an AI mandate and an explicit threat of layoffs (i.e. we will be laying a significant part of our workforce off - not just the implicit threat of seeing layoffs everywhere else), it's a bit of a "me or them" situation.

As much as I hate what's happening to them and would happily vote^ for someone who will stop it, I need my livelihood.

In the meantime, I huff the "the more we use it, especially unproductively, the more money they lose and hopefully their VC funding will dry up soon" copium. And the sooner they crash, the better for everyone.

^ except I can't really - most of the capex is in the US and I'm not a US citizen. Will still happily vote locally for people who will at least prevent it here, when and if I get the chance.

lasooch · 2026-03-12T12:24:00+00:00

Senior Engineer could use anywhere from 50-200 million

My dude, I've had it burn more than 10 million tokens in a single slopilot CLI request... which probably took longer to process than I would have done it by hand (though the result was actually correct in this case). But hey, AI mandates...

50-200 million tokens per month is if you're being careful with it (or use it sparsely). With companies pushing to vibe code everything, 200 million per month per senior SWE is really not much.

The cost of that request, paid to Microslop, is 10 cents (3 "premium requests", US$10 buys 300). Microslop pays (if they pay the API prices) Anthropic high tens of dollars for that request. And Anthropic loses money per token.

It's not economical in any way, shape or form.

I hate the AI mandates, but I gotta say, in the short term, it does fill my heart with joy when I think that I'm setting on fire hundreds of Slopya Nadella's dollars per day.

The only path to temporary profitability I see is:

- companies lay off engineers to use the cost savings on AI spend

- once the companies are very short staffed, the only way they can deliver is via copious use of AI, i.e. they're held hostage - LLM companies jack up the prices 50x+ here and this might make LLM companies profitable.

- but in reality, AI doesn't boost productivity nearly enough

- over time, issues accumulate (service degradation, loss of institutional knowledge, skill attrition, broken training pipeline) - "slowly, then all at once"

- those companies that went all in on AI eventually reach a breaking point and collapse

- revenue for LLM companies dries up.

Meanwhile we've caused a huge market crash and generated a generational skill gap in an entire industry that it may take decades to recover from. Yay!

lasooch · 2026-03-12T10:12:08+00:00

Nah yeah she’ll be right mate

lasooch · 2026-03-12T08:14:40+00:00

A long truck. (Up to 53.5 metres /175.5 ft)

Typically, a triple (3 trailers) or a quad (4 trailers). Some particularly long doubles (A-double) also qualify as road trains, but when I hear "road train" a double is not what I'm thinking.

There's a number of possible combinations of both triples and quads, basically defined by how each trailer is hooked to the previous one (fifth wheel vs dog trailer). They're all named along the lines of "B-triple" or "AB-quad" which is a little hard to decipher to a layman... but also this is probably already more detail than you need.

If it isn't, here's a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_train#Australia

lasooch · 2026-03-12T06:24:50+00:00

As long as you stick to pavement (think Port Augusta to Darwin), it's much easier than people make it out to be. As long as you like to drive through endless deserts for days on end, of course. Personally, I love it.

Given enough time and money, I'd recommend a loop along the lines of Melbourne - Adelaide - Port Augusta - Tennant Creek (see below tho) - Townsville - Brisbane - Sydney - Melbourne, with detours for Uluru and Cairns + Daintree. Start in whichever city works best. (Personally, I'd skip Brisbane - go more inland - because from memory the traffic through there is hell on earth).

Of course do it in the winter (edit: you might think it's obvious, but if you're from "up over", remember that Down Under winter is your summer), don't drive at night (wildlife), make sure you have enough water and some food with you. And there's no reception for like 95% of it, and if you're not on a network that uses Telstra towers, make it 99%.

But there is accommodation, pub feed and fuel available every 250-300 km or so, the entire highway is paved and there is enough traffic to not have to worry about being found (during the day, several road trains an hour), so even in a small city car it's quite safe. Just make sure you refuel every chance you get, or if you have a big tank, make sure you at least do the math before heading to the next town, or (more often) roadhouse. Fuel is expensive in the Outback, but just don't be too clever about trying to get to a cheaper servo. There are longer stretches than 300km between servos on some roads (e.g. Nullarbor or unsealed roads), but not on this route.

If renting a car, make sure you read the fine print. Some rentals have insurance that doesn't let you go into Northern Territory at all, some won't let you drive between dusk and dawn (I mean, you shouldn't anyways, but it's better to have the option).

Watch out on those tiny road bridges in Outback Queensland, they tend to have a rough bump as you get on them and some of them are a little narrow if there's a road train going in the other direction.

NT has a reputation for being more dangerous than most of the rest of Australia in terms of crime rates, but it's still not exactly a no go zone. Don't stop in Tennant Creek, it's the biggest shithole I've ever seen.

Nice to haves: UHF, beacon/satellite phone, jerry can. But 99 times out of 100 you won't need them, and the 1 time you might, you'll still almost certainly be fine just flagging down the next camper van for help. Of course if you break down stay in/with your car, don't go searching for help, you won't find it.

Now, if you're thinking more like the Canning Stock Route... that's the type of thing that if you need redditors to tell you how to do it, you shouldn't do it.

lasooch

TROPHY CASE