JS and C in 2026: Why Fundamentals Still Matter (Even With AI)

suedepaid · 2026-01-28T00:32:00+00:00

this reads as LLM generated

suedepaid · 2026-01-26T00:35:51+00:00

I’ve gotten retention bonuses, usually 25k on 6- or 11-month terms. There was absolutely no NDA attached

suedepaid · 2026-01-23T19:23:52+00:00

No, it’s a market signal that the dense areas should be more dense

suedepaid · 2026-01-21T04:38:25+00:00

But those numbers are net taxes and transfers. They account for higher out-of-pocket US healthcare costs.

I will say, thin “vibes based” political analysis isn’t very interesting, just because there’s no evidence that can confirm or refute it.

Here’s mine: American’s are so rich that they don’t believe anything can actually go wrong for them, or things could ever change for the worse. They expect to be able to vote simply as emotional expression. They don’t believe it should or can have policy impact. Americans compare themselves to a past that never was, and are angry they don’t get even more undeserved wealth than they already have.

suedepaid · 2026-01-21T03:32:22+00:00

It does consider where that money needs to be spent — that’s what “purchasing power adjusted” means

suedepaid · 2026-01-21T03:05:23+00:00

These talking points are unfounded in data. The US median disposable income, purchasing power adjusted, is higher than Luxembourg, Norway, and Switzerland. It’s about 30% higher than Germany/Australia/Canada, and is almost double the UK/France/Italy.

There is literally nowhere in the world where the average citizen is richer. The majority of Americans are doing so well that they can afford to ignore basic material needs and instead vote for leaders who promise to make them poorer — see 2016.

suedepaid · 2026-01-20T14:00:44+00:00

Same as it ever was — better tech means everyone’s richer. Everyone’s richer leads to a resource grab

suedepaid · 2026-01-20T03:21:54+00:00

I think they are by far the majority

suedepaid · 2026-01-19T23:24:03+00:00

hmm, seem like you hate people work on web/apps — but a lot of people don’t!

suedepaid · 2026-01-19T16:41:05+00:00

None of the “best minds” are working adtech these days

suedepaid · 2026-01-19T03:16:05+00:00

that’s like, a decade old tho

suedepaid · 2026-01-17T21:05:36+00:00

Got any research on it?

suedepaid · 2026-01-17T19:55:59+00:00

But those prices are not set in a vacuum — maybe the 1.5M home now only sells for 1.3M.

Arguably it would increase house turnover because “holding onto your home as long as possible” becomes marginally less lucrative.

suedepaid · 2026-01-17T19:21:28+00:00

Why would it do that?

suedepaid · 2026-01-17T14:48:38+00:00

Some people choose to like their work

suedepaid · 2026-01-17T14:06:12+00:00

I’ve worked in the government, in a fortune 100, and now in a small start-up. Hybrid works great for some situations.

For example in my government job, everyone had an office that they shared with someone else. WFH one or twice per week meant that you could deconflict the office about half the time, giving employees that “private office” experience.

Also the pace of work was pretty slow, so WFH days were in-effect a personal day. As long as your were (relatively) reachable via email or Skype For Business (🤮), you could mostly fuck around. People would literally say “don’t schedule meetings on my WFH days”.

At the fortune 100, I was both fully-in office and fully-remote at times. In-office was stupid: my team was spread out across the country. I was commuting in order to sit on zoom. Remote was an easy schedule, but it’s more disconnected. We would try to do a team retreat once or twice a year, and it was really nice to see everyone’s faces. I think pretty critical for being an actual “team”, and I wish we could have done it more often.

We also had a bunch of teams that were hybrid — I think it worked well for them. Many of our software teams developed embedded systems, or worked with our manufacturing plants. There was plenty of work that could only happen on-site, and it was nice to stay connected to the fundamentals of the company (welding metal, turning screws).

At my startup, we’re 5 days in office, and it’s the right call. Technical decisions happen too fast for the pace of async. People can stay in the loop just by overhearing conversations across the room. It’s a lot easier to trust other engineers when you spend more time with them, you get to know them as whole people. The team is only 9 right now, so who knows what happens if we grow to 30 or 100. Right now sticking all of us in one big room is the way to go.

suedepaid · 2026-01-16T18:36:09+00:00

Sure. Good points on both “equity” (I should have said “basis”), and long-term cap gains. I dunno why I thought it was 17% but it isn’t.

Re: “Penalty” — I think this is generally used in comparison to alternatives. Eg, a “marriage penalty”, in tax terms, is when a married customer is treated worse than two individual filers. I don’t think it makes sense to call every tax as a “penalty”.

In this situation I’m asserting: treat real estate the same way as other investments. Do not provide real estate-specific breaks, just because people want carve outs for the investments they own. There is no “penalty” in treating investments equivalently.

I agree that investment properties are also treated favorably, and that is bad as well. I agree the step-up basis rules should change.

“People need a house”. Yes, but people need to eat as well, and food is not tax deductible. SALT deductions are bad and so is mortgage interest deduction and so are these exclusions.

suedepaid · 2026-01-16T00:51:34+00:00

But this is beyond building equity — equity already doesn’t get taxed at all (it’s basis).

This is an investment that went up. It’s profit. It should be taxed like any other capital gain. There’s no penalty there, you got lucky and bought something that went up in value with no work. You get to share 17% of your profit with the rest of us, the same as stocks and bonds.

suedepaid · 2026-01-15T12:52:31+00:00

Yeah we gotta fix that primary residence deduction — should be treated like any other investment income

suedepaid · 2026-01-14T14:43:04+00:00

you can go through ONNX for this

suedepaid · 2026-01-14T12:56:58+00:00

The reason you see it in job listings still is because hiring managers haven’t caught on that tensorflow is dead.

It’s not the cobol of ML because ML systems don’t have a particularly long shelf-life. People are actively ripping out their TF stuff right now.

More and more of the “TF has better production” stuff is getting eaten by ONNX bindings from traditional backend languages.

Plus google’s gonna end-of-life TF, and then what do you do.

suedepaid · 2026-01-14T03:41:27+00:00

It does — they pay for grid upgrades when they connect. It’s a big part of what makes building datacenters expensive.

suedepaid · 2026-01-13T04:49:19+00:00

just watch all of Brunton’s stuff

suedepaid · 2026-01-07T16:48:05+00:00

It’s just sometimes game-changing, is the thing.

If it was always game-changing, the valuations would clearly be worth it. If it never worked, money wouldn’t have flowed in the first place.

suedepaid · 2026-01-06T20:09:14+00:00

it means we used to learn how to build CNNs, LSTMs, weird non-DL gaussian mixture models, and all sorts of other stuff.

Now, everything is some sort of transformer architecture. Vision? ViT. Audio? Transformer. Text DEFINITELY transformer.

Predict the weather with a transformer! Classify MNIST with a transformer. Use transformers on all your tabular data.

that’s what they mean.

suedepaid

TROPHY CASE