A company being "worth" some amount doesn't mean it has that much money and real property; it means there exist people willing to buy shares, on the margin, at a price which works out like that. One of the common (very rough) approximations is that a business is worth as much as the profit it's expected to make over the next 20 years. But one of the reasons (there are many) that this is only a rough guide, is that if you tried to sell too much of a big company all in one go, it usually depresses the price a lot, and the other way around (trying to buy a whole company) tends to raise the price a lot; both effects are because most people have different ideas about how much any given company is really worth despite that rough guide, and trade their shares at different prices while you're doing it. You may note this is a circular argument, this is indeed part of the problem.
IIRC, Facebook's cash is more like $81-82 billion.
Yes it is a different kind of worth, but it is not worth less because of it.
This common argument to not take market cap valuations seriously doesn't hold.
True, Meta as an entire entity is not liquid. A forced sale in entirety would produce a massive reduction in compensation. But that is a highly unlikely and contingent reduction.
It is also true that if you have Meta's equivalent in cash, the value of the cash is likely to drop, while the value of Meta likely to grow, over any appreciable time. In that sense, $X cash is worth much "less" than the $X market cap.
These seeming contradictions are the result of different practical tradeoffs in structures of wealth. Not because market caps reflect misleading or overstated accounting.
Having a market cap? You mean a non-zero market cap?
Or do you mean a greater vs. lesser market cap? As compared to what?
If market cap was intrinsic value underlying itself, the business would be irrelevant. That is a circular “origin” of value that even novice investors would want to sell out of. That doesn’t work.
Success that matters for investors isn’t evidenced by a high market cap. But by a market cap not keeping up with business growth. I.e. shares becoming undervalued. By actual/predicted growth increasing faster than cap, or cap falling faster than actual/predicted downturns.
No, market cap is a representation of the expected future success, but share cost depends on this expectation. Higher expected future success, higher share cost. So, the only reason to buy shares is if you expect the market cap to increase.
(I think, someone please correct me of I'm wrong?)
Plus, the money he borrows is not taxable. If he sold stock he would have to pay taxes before he could spend the income. Sure, he now owes money to someone, but he can refinance those loans again and again, and live tax-free the rest of his life while we, poor working stiffs, pay the taxes that built the airport where he parks the private jet he bought with the money he borrowed.
People seem to get the weird idea that borrowing against their stock holdings is some special thing rich people get to do with products that the rest of us don't have access to. It's not. Margin loans are widely available to the tune of ff+1%ish or lower, and if your brokerage's publicly offered rates are probably a ripoff, they're almost certainly negotiable. The bar for access to "institutional" rates is basically 100k, the regulatory requirement for portfolio margin.
Yes, there are specialized products catered to billionaires. But those aren't getting them better rates than someone with a $200k portfolio (Zuck is not conventionally a less risky borrower than the Options Clearing Corporation!). They exist to work around the fact that some borrowers can't just casually liquidate their stock on the open market, let alone at face value. By all accounts these products are more expensive than retail.
Mostly this is an expensive (but maybe still less expensive than taxes, depending on the rate environment—it's more of a no-brainer in ZIRPland) way to diversify out of a single-stock portfolio without selling by adding leverage. At Zuck's age, it's still very unlikely to make sense to borrow instead of sell to spend. He's been known to pay real taxes in the past, they just look small relative to his imputed wealth growth because rich people don't spend a lot relative to their wealth growth because they, quite by definition, have a lot of wealth.
I think people take issue with the taxes loophole. They have GAINED from the VALUE of their stocks, but they don't pay taxes on that. It should be law if you realize value from stocks you pay capital gains on those stocks. So if a loan is collateralized by $1,000,000 worth of stock value taxes should be paid on $1,000,000.
The trouble is that a bank is not lending against the nominal value of the stock as collateral. That number is almost entirely fictional. Taxation of capital gains at time of sale is less a loophole than a reflection of the difficulty of assigning a fair price to assets that are not perfectly liquid.
Also, you'd totally gut retail home equity lending as collateral damage, with disastrous social policy consequences.
I’ve never seen it explained as to how it’s different in kind from a home equity loan - you still need income from something to pay the loan back (and if you say you pay it from the loan proceeds you’re just donating to a bank with extra steps).
It's very simple: if the terms are satisfactory and against an agreed upon collateral (e.g. shares) banks will give you a loan that does not require periodic payments. The interest on the loan does accumulate of course, and is just added to the principal that the borrower owes. The bank is happy as long as the value of the collateral is higher than the current outstanding loan. If the loan is in danger of going "under water" the bank can either liquidate the collateral to pay itself, or the borrower can renegotiate the loan and deposit additional shares.
It's similar to a reverse mortgage. Say Fred and Wilma own a house worth $4MM with no mortgage on it. With a reverse mortgage a bank will lend them $2MM. Fred and Wilma make no payments and continue to live in their house, spending the $2MM while the interest on that loan just increases the amount they owe the bank. After both Fred and Wilma have passed away the house is sold and the proceeds are used to pay back the outstanding loan. If there's still money left over, it goes to their heirs. If the sale comes up short, the bank loses money, which is why these reverse mortgages are typically less than 50% of the value of the house and they typically have higher interest rates than conventional mortgages. From Fred and Wilma's point of view, they can use the value of their house now, while continuing to live in it. They essentially spend their children's inheritance.
At the same time, isn't Zuck's worth based on his shares of evilCorp while evilCorp's shares are what you just said. Ergo, the Zuck isn't worth all that either???
Yup. All the headlines following the pattern "${billionaire} {gains|loses} ${x} billion this week" are mostly just fluff, the marginal share price of any given stock wanders all over the place even without forced sales or people trying to buy them out.
There's some interesting exceptions, like how Musk has managed to sell Tesla shares totalling more or less as much as the business itself has made in total lifetime revenue; but even then, Musk's theoretical net worth is very different from how much he could get if he was forced to sell all his shares suddenly.
Owner-CEOs like Musk and Zuckerberg get all the effects of such randomness, but the only examples I can think of such people getting into billion-dollar legal troubles tend to be examples which go on to sink their companies completely, so I'm not sure what impact a fine of "merely" 10% of cash reserves would do to investor confidence as expressed in share price. And this is not the only legal case Meta's facing right now.
MacKenzie Scott (Jeff Bezos' ex wife) show it can be turned into real money. As of December 2025 She had given away $7.1 billion in 2025 charitable donations, and $26.3 billion since 2019.
In reality there is the ability to execute on the shares to turn them into real money.
Jeff Bezos holds less than 10% of Amazon stock himself. Which is a huge amount of money, and a not insignificant amount of which can be turned into "real" money and even with some decline is still a phenomenal amount.
In that same time period the stock valuation has more than doubled.
That's why billionaires use shares as collateral to get loans. It's money once removed, and it continues to be spendable so long as the share price stays high.
I sincerely doubt that Meta's share price would crash as a result of Zuckerberg getting an expensive judgement.
I respected the "No Pure Managers" part. That's similar to what happened at our org.
The question remains, if there are no pure managers, then is this CSM / Sales shipping production code? If yes, then it's indeed scary...
> No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
My experience as well. It sounds nice at first, but since it’s tied to org flattening these “player-coaches” end up with 15-20 reports, which is way too many for even a pure manager.
I noticed it was especially bad for on-call and incident response; these managers get pulled in to all the incidents because of their status and supposed involvement, but are not particularly useful in those rooms, adding even more cooks to the already crowded kitchen.
I worked somewhere once where every once in a while we'd have to create a new deploy meeting because 1) our code was deployed manually over the course of hours and 2) every manager imaginable wanted to be in the meeting asking questions and directing people... you couldn't actually speak to anyone you had to talk through their manager.
I experienced a flavor of this, too. We had some outages, management said no more daytime deploys, so we had after-hours “deploy parties” whose scope and participant count increased weekly. The smarter managers said it was temporary, but couldn’t say how we’d move back towards continuous deployment. If anything went wrong in any service, you’d end up with a dozen or so folks on a zoom call for 3 hours. We did this once or twice a week.
Went on for about a year, worse each week, before i left.
I've experienced this as well. I call it the "better safe than sorry" strategy, and the issue is it ignores the very real cost of all the extra effort and work, from the literal costs to the slow releases to the loss of people who just can't take it anymore.
Yeah I don't know - my experience is that a manager's competence is essentially the toss of a coin. The only non-technical manager I've had was great and the only hands-on player-coach manager I've had was terrible so not enough of a sample size to drill down.
For me this is all about team size. It works if you have small teams, maybe max 6 people. But anything above 8-10 this is a total no go. Because management tasks just are not able to be done well at that point.
You right, but there is a very real coordination problem above the team when you're doing bigger things. I've recently experienced an organization with approx. 25 teams of 5-8, and because of their organization they had way too many concurrent initiatives. It was very hard to effectively swarm multiple teams on fewer (bigger) projects.
In my experience, managers don't have to be hands-on, but they need to be able to recognize people with talent and unblock them do their jobs, to be able to spot process improvements, including channelling the AI hype to productive outcomes, and to be a steadying influence in a crisis (without adding noise). If a manager doesn't have technical ability, its impossible for them to do those things.
Everything but the AI bit are on my list of manager qualities too, but the best managers I've had weren't active programmers, and one had zero coding background.
Knowing what you don't know and knowing how to get qualified information from people around you makes up for a lot of not having a programming background.
If anything, the managers with technical backgrounds who weren't active programmers tended to significantly underestimate the difficulty of doing something because back in their day, things were different or some such nonsense.
I think I am a better manager than engineer, not because I'm a shitty engineer but because I recognize the superior strength in my team and do waht I can to leverage the basic principle that if someone is better than you in many things, they should still specialize in the thing they are best at.
They're still going to have upwards of 5 levels in their hierarchy, so this is obviously for the plebs who are front-line managers, not the several layers above them, as (for example) I'm not sure what a strong player-coach VP of Engineering would exactly look like. I got to Director and quit because it was impossible to be a true contributor at that level or higher. You can see this when you're in critical mode like downtime or a breach; senior management is useless.
No pure managers is a shitty situation where anything people related is an after thought. That’s how you end up with a shoddy crew with a revolving door.
> No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
This has always been the case where I work, long before AI.
> This has always been the case where I work, long before AI.
And surely the place you work hired with this in mind. Many places have not, and yet now expect PMs who haven’t coded in years, or in many cases not at all, to contribute to their products’ codebases.
what a weird thing to emulate. player coaching is super rare and there were very few good ones in the last 40 years.
why not, managers should be like left handed specialist relievers, they come in for a short time to handle a specific issue and otherwise let the team alone
Worse, crypto is irreversible at least there are legal channels elsewhere to undo. Even if these people don’t touch the crypto side they still create backdoors for phishing
This is exactly what stood out to me, too. Before this Tweet, my feelings towards Coinbase were completely neutral. After this Tweet, I want nothing to do with it.
> Over the past year, l've watched engineers use Al to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Nontechnical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated.
There's plenty of non-critical code that I would trust non-technical people with good AI tooling to touch. As long as their access is segregated from the actual critical stuff. But let them write marketing pages or help and documentation pages. Let them write internal reporting code or build tools to use themselves.
I ran content and educational pages for Kraken a few years ago. This was just as AI was getting useful. I was told by the head of security, the guy who coded all the original software, not to use any outside AI tools to proofread or edit. Then, a few months in, the CEO, Jesse Powell, asked why we were so slow in producing content - we had to edit it all by hand, as you do. We explained the security issues and he said "Who cares, just use it."
So on one hand they are the most secure business on the Internet and on the other hand YOLO!
I mean, this is semantics. Production is not the same thing as "important", but to me production code means customer facing. Internal tooling isn't production.
Have fun trying to get your funds out of Coinbase. I managed after about 3 days and 10 support tickets. The process seems intentinally broken. What a nasty company.
Maybe I won't have to be concerned about job security some years from now, when everything becomes FUBAR and companies will need a legacy systems expert/software necromancer to a) discover, spec and re-formalize what their machine-generated black boxes are doing; b) build comprehensible and maintainable systems; and c) be responsible for what happens in the process aka swear by my work. While (a) probably can be done by a machine alone, and (b) can be done by a machine-and-human tandem, (c) absolutely requires a human.
But the few years to come are going to be wild for a lot of folks out there.
I don't expect Coinbase to publish a "we're hiring everyone back" in 5 years from now, but I hope at some point media will spot those trends as they'll - I have no doubts - will happen, and propagate that tune.
Must be the KYC/AML people. I've notice fintech is on a hair trigger to freeze your money for hallucinated reasons. Once they have your money frozen, they can use it as float to pad their numbers for investor decks and draw more interest. Spin up some AI CS agent that just deflects and wastes your time and they can stall out paying for weeks to months.
I realise you're joking, but crypto is now a heavily regulated industry, the KYC/AML requirements are no-joke and non-compliance will get the company's licences in a given country/state terminated.
For the end user it looks like an evil cash-grab, but really it's the company protecting itself from regulatory vengeance.
The missing bit is that compliance is for governments and business partners, not for any end-users. For the purposes of KYC/AML process, end-users are objects, not subjects.
Your coins frozen with no reason given even internally except for "machine said no" - no one gets any slap on the wrist unless you sue real hard, happen to win, and most likely that'll be just a scratch that won't be noticed enough to change any attitudes.
The Man sees that someone they don't like transferring their coins through the fintech company - that's what those companies are really concerned about, because it would be a punch in the gut the company will feel.
Thus, the incentives. Current social design doesn't punish for false positives (until they hit really high levels), only false negatives.
Coinbase gave my confidential "AML" information to criminal extortionists-- I hadn't even had an account with them for a decade because I realized they were bad eggs long ago.
What licenses of theirs were terminated? Seems to me that the regulatory oversight is a joke.
No I'm not joking. That is the bullshit answer they (note: crypto/fintech space in general, not necessarily Coinbase) give. But when pushed on the occasions I've had my funds frozen they are never able to provide any evidence or what specific reason they have for triggering KYC/AML, just vague bullshit handwaving and AI customer service agents that lie about them "being on it" or some such and then your money gets returned when they're done squeezing it for interest (yes no one cares about your $50 but they do when it's some fractional percent of millions of accounts getting triggered at any particular point in time.) You can check something like the customer support reddits of a variety of crytpo and fintech companies, it is always filled with people have their money frozen for some long period while conveniently no one is looking at it while it is sitting there drawing interest, then maybe after a month someone tells them they need to hop on one leg while reciting Deuteronomy chapter 1 with a passport booklet in their hand and blink their eye 3 times while turning their head and that is all they were waiting for all along (I'm embellishing a bit here but that seems to be what KYC checks are like nowadays when they pop up).
Just a vague nonsense about compliance, that magickly aligns with padding their float. In reality they are using compliance and regulatory language as a shield to prop up their numbers. They are using KYC/AML to hold your funds hostage, as it's the most plausible explanation that also allows them to legally seize it under a legal sounding explanation. The fact that they do have to perform KYC/AML and there are penalties for not doing so just happen to make it a valid enough sounding excuse for when it's used overly aggressively because it lines up with other goals.
If they move the hair trigger to freeze funds 2x as often as they need to against the innocent false-positives to pass compliance checks, due to a hair trigger, then it falls under plausible deniability and even better when the regulator comes they can say some insane bullshit about how good their KYC/AML is. If they freeze it less often but instead just steal some for a little while and then return it, then it's more obvious a crime has been committed. It's obvious what they're up to.
Of course the KYC/AML/ regulatory officers are probably just pawns in this. The executives in the crypto and fintech space tell these people they need to set the sensitivity up to the 9s which does increase KYC/AML 'true positives' but the unspoken part is that money is now locked up into the company's accounts which creates a moral hazard in their fiduciary duty. They know damn well what that actually does is inflate their float, at the cost of a bunch of false positives. In theory that's satisfying AML because a function of doing so is you trigger more true positives, but in reality it's merely stealing money to increase floats not actually optimizing to meet the cutoffs to keep your license. But no one is actually going to come out and say this. It will probably take a class action suite, which I have little doubt will eventually happen when someone comes out and admits one day that these regulatory compliance triggers were intentionally set on the sensitive side for non-regulatory reasons.
> In the specific case of “Why did the bank close my account, seemingly for no reason? Why will no one tell me anything about this? Why will no one take responsibility?”, the answer is frequently that the bank is following the law. As we’ve discussed previously, banks will frequently make the “independent” “commercial decision” to “exit the relationship” with a particular customer after that customer has had multiple Suspicious Activity Reports filed. SARs can (and sometimes must!) be filed for innocuous reasons and do not necessarily imply any sort of wrongdoing.
> SARs are secret, by regulation. See 12 CFR § 21.11(k)(1) from the Office of Comptroller of the Currency...
The fact they may not be able to in one circumstance doesn't prove that they're merely following the BSA.
It's obvious when someone gets their money frozen for a month only to just have to perform a KYC check that even if the KYC check was legitimate, and these kinds of results are common over years, the delay was a result of a business decision that increased their float.
I think you're conflating the requirements with the BSA with how executives are using it in a hostile way against customers. They can make the deliberate decision to slow down KYC/AML officers and checks after a trigger, while putting them on a hair trigger, while citing secrecy under the BSA. That is the regulatory nonsense under which they are dressing up a business, non-regulatory decision. It's there to provide plausible deniability.
The compliance officer in this case is plausibly just following the law but in reality they're just running cover for increasing the float -- maybe even unwittingly.
> But when pushed on the occasions I've had my funds frozen they are never able to provide any evidence or what specific reason they have for triggering KYC/AML
They are legally prevented from telling you by the regulators, at least in the US.
If you buy into it being regulatory, you've already bought into the fraud. They're often delaying weeks to months to actually look into whatever set their hair trigger. That's not regulatory compliance, that's increasing your float. Especially in cases such as "all we needed was an updated passport check while you do the Macarena." The regulatory bit just provides the cover for the operation, the fact that it's true that regulation exists doesn't mean whatever is done under the flag of regulation was actually regulatory in nature it just means you have a more believable pile of steaming bullshit to tell the hysterical customer to make it sound like something closer to breaking the law is actually an attempt to follow the law.
Put otherwise, suppose I run a bank and you deposit your paycheck. I decide our reserves are a little low so I set KYC/AML triggers even more sensitive on a hair trigger so that an extra of 0.2% of innocent paychecks get held up an extra 4 weeks (I have also conveniently slow down / underhire customer service) which also causes me to catch 1 or 2 more real criminals. That's not KYC/AML even though that's the mechanism by which I claim to have held it. I'm not bound by the BSA secrecy in such case since the underlying trigger was for increasing the float rather than actually KYC/AML compliance.
------- re: below due to throttling ---------
I am accusing fintech and crypto businesses in general of committing mass fraud through intentionally setting KYC/AML on an artificially sensitive trigger to increase their floats, yes.
I do not know if Coinbase specifically does that
-- my limited experience with them is they are one of the few fintech companies that hasn't fucked me over.
I have an absolutely massive body of evidence that leads me to that conclusion, through my own transactions and frozen funds as well as studying a wide amount of CS complaints that show evidence that KYC/AML checks on frozen funds are stalled for weeks to months without any plausible explanation of what is happening which is not a KYC/AML regulatory action but rather an intentional choice to raise floats for free interest and padding their numbers.
Of course what's extraordinarily ironic here is when fintech claims you violate KYC/AML then "law says we provide no evidence" but if you turn around and accuse them then the industry shills will scream "without evidence" while simultaneously saying your counterparty doesn't have to provide it! They are hypocrites! The very people accusing you without evidence betray their own sins accusing you of same! They were the ones that set the bar that they don't need to present evidence, not me.
The level of unwitting irony here is off the charts.
Just one rebuttal ago, it was explained why it was okay to freeze customer funds without providing any evidence.
Now we are Jekyll and Hyde'ing back to getting upset about an accusation without evidence. That was a crux of my entire case! I am being damned, for allegedly, using the same standard of evidence as my accuser (though I dispute I am presenting as little as them)!
If that's your case, then you have concluded and rested my case for me in my favor. The entire KYC/AML argument falls apart because it fails your requirement to present evidence at accusation.
Either accusation without present evidence bad, in which case KYC/AML as it is used in stalling people for weeks to months without providing evidence totally falls apart and I rest my case -- or -- that standard of evidence is OK in which I've at least presented as much or more evidence as fintechs provide in their accusation against customers (nothing) and in that instance I also rest my case.
Whichever of these last two Jekyll and Hyde responses we pick, it isn't working against me.
1 - hold the parents accountable for putting a dangerous weapon in the hands of munchkins without supervision.
2 - phone manufactures and or internet providers that sell and connect them, must include a bouncer bot system like a locked phone. The parents get to choose and change which set of bouncers filter the phones.
These can be simple like 18 and over content according to your jurisdiction block.. but I would hope they would spend time to choose multiple bouncers that block different things for different values and offer ways to request access to blocked things.
The problem is that those are treated almost like an app, you need a $99/year developer certificate to publish them.
Many third party ticketing solutions venues and events use do support this, but for instance if you want to sell tickets for a party and self-host, you need another external integration, or a developer account. Generating a PDF with a QR code, and publishing an .ics file is essentially free.
My guess is that the are requiring this in order to reduce the amount of fraud there (I am sure there still is some, but...). Apple really does not want to be involved when someone can't get into the Taylor Swift concert that they paid some scammer a lot of money for the Apple Wallet ticket they got.
Having an authenticated developer account at least provides some level of speed bump to scammers, and a better starting point for the police.
There are many events that are still sending you a pdf file with your tickets. Until fairly recently, that included major venues too.
The charitable explanation is that the wallet is designed for credit cards, and tickets were an after thought. Though I suspect it is really Apple trying to keep a walled garden, just like they always have.
"The Microsoft and OpenAI situation just got messy" is objectively wrong–it has been messy for months [1]. Nos. 1 through 3 are fine, though "if they can't keep up with the tech, OpenAI is moving out" parrots OpenAI's party line. No. 4 doesn't make sense–it starts out with "we" referring to OpenAI in the first person but ends by referring to them in the third person "they." No. 5 is reductive when phrased with "just."
It would seem the translator took corporate PR speak and translated it into something between the LinkedIn and short-form blogger dialects.
Being objectively correct isn't the goal of the translator, the translator can't possibly know if a statement is truthful. What the translator does is well... translate, specifically from some kind of corporate speak that is really difficult for many people including myself to understand, into something more familiar.
I don't expect the translation to take OpenAI's statements and make them truthful or to investigate their veracity, but I genuinely could not understand OpenAI's press release as they have worded it. The translation at least makes it easier to understand what OpenAI's view of the situation is.
> "they" refers to OpenAI. Not a grammatical error
I'd say it is. It's a press release from OpenAI. The rest of the release uses the third-person "they" to refer to Microsoft. The LLM traded accuracy for a bad joke, which is someting I associate with LinkedIn speak.
The fundmaental problem might be the OpenAI press release is vague. (And changing. It's changed at least once since I first commented.)
IME, at least with black beans, overnight is enough. You don’t need to see the actual sprouts, you just need to kickstart the process.
It doesn’t change the taste, and you can control the texture by how long you cook them. Soaking also means it takes less time to cook.
Source: Brazilian who grew up eating black beans several times a week because it’s the number 1 staple there. Usually served in a creamy bean sauce and white rice for the full range of BCAAs - not that I understood that then, it was just delicious.
I just did it in the past few days. Soak overnight in any container you want. Drain. Rinse it a couple times a day until sprouts form. Maybe a few days. I usually wait a few more so the sprouts are a few cm/one inch long.
There are lots of sprouting tutorials on YouTube. I used mason jars, soak the seeds for an hour or two, drain and leave the seeds in the jar damp. Rinse the seeds twice a day. Eventually they start to sprout.
Many years ago at a science-y summer camp as a child, this was a "project" we did. Not for the same purpose as suggested here but just to see how sprouting happens. Cool little experiment.
I often have 10+ running in parallel. I’m attacking parallel problems that aren’t interdependent. Sometimes adding additional products can bring me up to 15+.
Gotta have really good test harnesses so they can largely fix themselves.
We have our doubts about this. Can you share your code or product?
Anecdotally, my mistakes and lack of understanding exponentiate the more I try to parallelize.
As I said in the neighboring comment, for vibe coding side projects and prototypes for work I just merge and iterate. It works out more than it doesn’t. For anything bigger at work I cannot share as I’m at Apple.
But you have to keep it in your head, and remember all stuff at the same time. How is it possible to track, and do reviews one after another? Or are these pretty long running agents?
I’m not sure what you mean by keep it in your head? I know all of the parts the agents are working on. It’ll often be a mix between bigger tasks (some large refactor, new feature, etc) and small tasks (little bug fixes).
For prototyping I just merge. I don’t bother to review the code. For anything more important than I am reviewing the code and going back and forth. Basically there’s a queue of stuff demanding my attention, and I just serially go through them.
What’s also been really helpful to me is /simplify and similar code review skills (I have my own). That alone takes an agent a while to parse through everything it’s done and self reviews. It catches quite a lot itself this way.
>I’m not sure what you mean by keep it in your head?
If the project I work on is large enough, it takes me some time to get everything I need to understand for review into the short term memory. If it's small enough, it's less of a problem for me.
I don’t understand why welfare is the answer. To me it seems we’ve super failed if that’s the case — just brings everyone down except a few ultra rich people.
UBI is not welfare. It is just a livable minimum wage, for everyone who works. For those who cannot work, it replaces welfare, but that is not it's primary purpose.
As a welfare replacement, it is much more efficient, since there is no effort spent determining who qualifies. People can spent their money however they want, rather than the patchwork of separate programs we have now.
It doesn't need to bring anyone down. It's just a different way of distributing what we already receive. For you ordinary workers, they will receive $X in a monthly check, and their salary can be reduced by $X (since the minimum wage can also be abolished).
That does mean that the desirability of some jobs will shift. Good. We have a bunch of very dirty jobs being done for minimum wage, even though demand is extremely high. I'd love to see the garbage men and chicken processors get more money for their dangerous work.
And if I get less for my cushy desk job, oh well. Especially since we seem to be putting all of the effort into replacing me, and none into the jobs that come with hazards to life and limb.
The annual minimum wage (at the federal level, not counting states with higher) is around $15k. There are about 267 million adults in the US.
That is double current federal and state welfare spending.
I'm dead tired right now so I'm sure I'm missing something, but considering that is far below the poverty threshold in any big city, I dont think we'll be solving anything by eliminating welfare in favor of UBI.
UBI is basically of no benefit to the upper middle class or wealthy, and it won't be enough for the poor who cannot work enough. It really only benefits the upper lower class and lower middle class the most.
That sounds right. But I think that's a reasonable goal.
It doesn't benefit the wealthy at all. They come off worse for it. (There are revenue-neutral versions but I don't think they suffice.) But I believe that they can afford it, and will find the result a healthier America that they won't want to abandon.
But surely you can see that if the main selling point of UBI is
"Everyone gets a livable minimum wage! Oh by the way if you had a cushy desk job, that's gone because Claude can do it, or you get paid peanuts to manage Claude instances if you're lucky. Don't worry though, you can still make big bucks by working as a garbage man or at a chicken processing plant"
A UBI is basically impossible to implement on a large scale without there being significant downsides. In what world does increasing the budget by a trillion dollars or more work out well?
If the promises of AGI pan out, there will be nothing a human will be able to do better than an AI. If humans can't contribute economically, what else could things look like?
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