Thread.sleep(100000) everywhere until it breaks. Then lo and behold you have fought fires longly and bravely until midnight on Friday after the release. Don't ask me why it's rewarded, and, of course every now and then they switch to rewarding different things.
That might work until someone else in the org gets curious and checks the git history… I suppose some clever obfuscation might be enough to get around that but then at that point you’re basically writing malware for your own product…
Much easier to liberally sprinkle mutex locks and "Thread.Sleep(1000); // Quick fix" everywhere until the problems almost always go away!
Meanwhile the guy screaming that this is eldritch madness and can't ever work is "not a team player" because the guy that wrote the code was a hero for applying yet another layer of band aids to the gaping wounds.
If the rule change goes through then SpaceX could be added to an index such as the S&P 500, where many (most?) pension funds invest. "S&P 500 has been considering a rule change to waive the earnings requirement and shorten the seasoning period for mega-cap IPOs like SpaceX." "Pension funds allocate 30% to 50% of their total portfolios to broad U.S. equities [in the form of index funds.]"
My understanding is that the S-1 showed a Q1 loss of xAI of $2.47 billion in Q1. But with the Anthropic Colossus-I rental agreement at $1.25B/month or $3.75B/quarter, xAI should now be net-neutral to cash-flow positive.
If Colossus-II rents networked GB-200s, that could be up to +$47B/year at $9/hour/GB-200 for 555,000 GB-200s. For reference, current rental rates are $10-$27/hour for the same hardware. With Anthropic at a 55% month-over-month growth rate (implying a $150B/year run rate by August, or, more likely, sometime in late 2026), it seems very possible that xAI could be highly profitable as the only available compute resource.
I'm not saying +$47B Colossus-II deal will happen, but even a small fraction of that remains highly material to xAI economics. xAI is likely already cashflow neutral. (Where am I wrong?)
the xAi revenue comes from renting their infrastructure to their biggest competitor. Anthropic is going to IPO for aprox 1/2 the valuation, is profitable, and can cancel the contract with 90 days notice.
Unfortunately, it's not that easy. Axon terminals of neurons release neurotransmitters. We know of dozens of different types, but are not certain that we know about all of them yet. The same synapse can release multiple different neurotransmitters too, with one or more released depending on the axonic signals. And what to these chemicals do? It depends! There are receptors on the post-synaptic cell that respond to neurotransmitters, but there can be multiple different receptors that respond differently to the same neurotransmitter. Again, we aren't sure we know about all of them. The post-synaptic neuron is probably also listening to neurons of other types that signal using different neurotransmitters that it uses to determine if it should transmit an action potential or not. Oh, and invertebrates (like nematodes) send graded potentials (not action potentials like us vertebrates usually do) where the signal strength can vary.
In short - we are a long way from being able to simulate a nervous system. Our knowledge of neuronal biochemistry is not there yet.
Any niche? I mean, possibly large-scale data processing, yet I've seen people go more niche than that. In other words if your resume has 5+ years in one particular industry then that might be whom to target.
My niche is basically - I'm building distributed systems with minimal external dependencies that are fast and work reliably on the minimal amount of hardware/complexity. I do focus mainly on data processing and gathering.
The result is, that my client does not need that many servers or that big of a devops team to manage the service and it's reliable and scalable.
For example, I have build events gathering distributed system in Elixir (without external systems) that handled 930m events (33k reqs on peak hours) per day on 2 dedicated servers and that was only because minimal HA was required. It resulted in processing and aggregating of few billions of rows per day, in almost real time (few seconds behind realtime). It's still up to this day, few years later with only outages being updates of OS and Elixir/erlang updates to the app.
I love learning and understanding things - do you know of any niche that would fit mine and where I could go deeper with my knowledge and experience?
> diskless laptop with a USB live distro with no RW filesystem
Which distro? One known problem is that browsers still transmit their location. If the network and the laptop are hundreds of yards distant, that's an instant red flag. Once that problem is corrected, there may be unknown problems to deal with.
TAILS. And unless you are using GPS, which would be a silly thing to do on a device you were using to achieve maximum anonymity, your laptop has no idea precisely where you are.
Have an upvote. The "Note: It is allowed to cost money." reminds me that the $5 charge on MeFi filters out alot of noise. However, this doesn't necessarily promote an increase in quality. Much of the discussion can be, like Reddit, cute or snarky one-liner comments.
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