151–160 of 218 posts
I'm excited for the AI wildfire to come and engulf these AI-written thinkpieces. At this point I'd prefer a set of bullet points over having to sift through more "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence.
It's more things like AI delivering pizza that's under threat. You know, the actual value.
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That “rational move” has always been a good move, regardless of AI. This is a boom/bust industry, and the next boom will come in a few years. While we’re at it, if you’re making engineer money, you should be targeting retirement at 50. I’m not saying you have to do that, but it sure helps to have that option.
> if you’re making engineer money, SV & big tech engineer money. Majority of engineering fields do not make that kind of money to retire at 50. Comfortable compared to the rest of the country, sure.
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> if you’re making engineer money, SV & big tech engineer money. Majority of engineering fields do not make that kind of money to retire at 50. Comfortable compared to the rest of the country, sure.
I think maybe that was implied, considering the topic of conversation and website we’re on. That said if you’re making $250k+ a year and not on track to retire by 50, seriously please open a retirement calculator and figure out what you need to do to get there.
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Well, interest rates are high right now, but you’d be surprised at how little down payment you need for purchasing a house or a condo. If you’re a tech worker with a stable career making that kind of money, most underwriters will just give you the loan. I think people commonly underestimate how accessible this stuff is It’s easy to make a 40 year forecast spreadsheet for retirement, including housing costs, property,…
I left Silicon Valley 5 years ago. Are people getting $1M+ loans with zero down these days?
I mentioned Lifestyle creep before but what is with everyone’s fried brains?
A small condo in a nice neighborhood in Santa Clara is below $500k. Yes, that’s a lot, and you certainly can get more bang for your buck if you’re willing to do a little commuting.
Btw a $1m house is accessible if you make $250k yr, although to be honest, I would highly recommend against it
If energy is indeed the limiting factor here, then maybe the companies building space-based compute (in which energy scales linearly) will remain after the wildfire. The key is for them to build before the money runs out--I'm not sure they will have enough time.
That is a very optimistic scaling assumption - and would almost certainly require substantial in space infrastructure (large scale lunar and asteroid mining and refining, lunar mass drivers, at least solid core nuclear drives) before you can even thin building all the necessary radiators and structural mass.
Musk is planning for 1 megaton/year of satellites, each with 100kW, yielding about 100GW per year.[1]
He thinks they can do that in 4 years, but adjusting for Elon-time, it's probably no less than 8 years, if ever.
But will the AI money last that long? Maybe not.
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Historically, this is not how technology that improves productivity has affected the economy. I’d encourage you to learn more about economics and the history of automation.
Doing this stuff is literally my job. Large banks have tens of thousands of call center employees and a large % of calls they handle are perfectly solvable with a good AI bot. They are working very hard to cut call center staff as quickly as possible. People don't realize how much a call to customers service costs. Back when I was at MSFT, a call to tech support for our product costs $20 to have someone pick up the p…
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$250k+ a year means ~$12k monthly salary. A semi decent apartment in SV will cost you ~$3k Bills(phone, internet, electricity, etc) another $1k. If you are married, groceries at least $1k. Even if we assume you don’t do anything else in life, and you are in perfect health best case scenario would be $6k savings a month or $72k a year. It would take you 10 years to save $720k plus whatever you make from investments. T…
6k month over the past decade is circa 1.7m today depending on which index fund you chose. Assuming a 4% draw down (conventionally agreed to be safe) is over 5.5k a month.
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That's a cool dream, but my question is: is it happening? Out of the things you listed the only ones that seem plausible are translation team and data entry team, though even there, I'd want humans to deslop the output.
I'm telling you of what I've either worked on or seen myself. Just a couple days ago a scheduled a furnace repair through an AI receptionist on the phone. Layoffs in tech support and customer service already happened last year. Entry level sales jobs doing cold calling have been replaced all over the place.
> The return is measurable and often immediate, not hypothetical.
It's one thing to let go some people and replace them with AI.
It's quite another to have a measurable and often immediate, not hypothetical return on that decision.
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$250k+ a year means ~$12k monthly salary. A semi decent apartment in SV will cost you ~$3k Bills(phone, internet, electricity, etc) another $1k. If you are married, groceries at least $1k. Even if we assume you don’t do anything else in life, and you are in perfect health best case scenario would be $6k savings a month or $72k a year. It would take you 10 years to save $720k plus whatever you make from investments. T…
$2k per month for groceries and utilities for a married couple is insanely high, in any part of the country.
For a long while we managed to stay around $500-600 but that was before COVID inflation. I dunno how the official inflation rate's as low as it is, we don't buy much that'd be considered "luxury" level (we're not buying caviar, say, and rarely even get stuff like the grass-fed "fancy" butter [actually yellow instead of white, tastes like something rather than just having texture but no flavor] instead of the cheapest available) and I'm pretty sure we buy a lot less meat per person than the US average, but if we fill up a cart now it's like $250-$300. I've hit $150 on small shopping trips where I didn't even fully fill one of the smaller, short carts.
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$250k+ a year means ~$12k monthly salary. A semi decent apartment in SV will cost you ~$3k Bills(phone, internet, electricity, etc) another $1k. If you are married, groceries at least $1k. Even if we assume you don’t do anything else in life, and you are in perfect health best case scenario would be $6k savings a month or $72k a year. It would take you 10 years to save $720k plus whatever you make from investments. T…
$2k per month for groceries and utilities for a married couple is insanely high, in any part of the country.