If you’re trying to do a rebuttal, saying that wages are slightly higher than Mississippi and house prices are slightly lower than Cali doesn’t refute anything, it just serves to make the example more extreme and concrete. Look at house prices in Mississippi in relation to their income and then compare the same ratio for Cali and for London.
I'm not sure why we're doing states vs cities. Jackson (the largest city in Mississippi) has a population of 150k. If I find a non-commuter belt town in the UK with a size of 150k, then the house prices will be dramatically lower. An analysis of London house prices needs to take into account that major urban areas in general command a premium (for reasons other than the ability to earn more).
If you compare SF or LA to London, then you'll find:
City | Median Wage | Median House Price | Ratio
SF | 104k | $1.5m | 14.42
London | 67k | $890k | 13.28
LA | 73k | $1.1m | 15.07
London ends up being slightly more affordable despite lower salaries.
The whole analogy was a bit meaningless - it wasn't an apples to apples comparison. The writer mixed geographic and demographic scales to make a point that could just as well be about the unaffordability of large cities.
That’s right if the quote is net of income tax, but that wasn’t clear. While we’re on the subject we should include the 20% VAT (delta 5-10% sales tax in the states) which is the most regressive tax on the poor there is.
Roughly the same with sales tax, it's just 1/3rd of that number.
> But buy a £50k Rolex and yes there is vat.
This is wildly ignorant of how less fortunate people live. They are hit with VAT on many daily expenses. Ignoring that fact and "tsk tsk"ing them for being frivolous is the [British] way.
I'd say it's very close to even odds that the other poster is correct to say "No vat on the majority of spending".
I'd also say that VAT should be reduced to encourage domestic spending and local growth, but I did leave the country for various reasons that can be simplified as "I do not expect the UK government to do the right thing".
Yes, but you're not contradicting anything here. £5/week in VAT is what I'd expect roughly bottom 5% by income to pay, because of limited disposable income.
If you eat in a restaurant, IIRC that's VAT-rated. A meal for two coming to £20? That's £3.33 of VAT you just paid. Poorest 5% can't afford to eat out basically at all, but it quickly adds up the moment you can start affording that.
For purposes of this discussion, I believe VAT is roughly uniform across the EU + UK and some other European jurisdictions. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I did update the comment to limit the critique to the UK.
DX means Developer Experience, they're saying it lets you use the same tooling and commands to build the workers as you would if they were on CloudFlare.
I agree with the point that making the VS Code terminal behave in a special manner without opt-in is going to be disruptive to newer engineers. Why not make it a shell plugin instead and offer to install/customize the shell the first time someone launches a new shell in VS Code instead? Then it changes it system wide, like oh-my-zsh or something would.
And??? Where did you go? Did you get L5/L6? Or did you just leave and not get another job? What a wild article to have the interviews so prominently featured but not have a conclusion.
People in my experience usually don’t post about their new employer until they’re settled in for one or two months in order to not bad mouth a new employer which didn’t work out as expected.
The important part of the article is behind a paywall… how is everyone reading the article and commenting? Are they paying? even archive.is doesn’t remove the paywall.
One thing I think people confuse with context is they see an LLM has say 400k context and think their codebase is way bigger than that, how can it possibly work. Well, do you hold a 10 million line codebase in your head at once? Of course not. You have an intuitive grasp of how the system is built and laid out, and some general names of things, and before you make a change, you might search through the codebase for specific terms to see what shows up. LLMs do the same thing. They grep through the codebase and read in only files with interesting / matching terms and only the part of the file thats relevant, in much the same way you would open a search result and only view the surrounding method or so. The context is barely used in these scenarios. Context is not something that’s static, it’s built dynamically as the conversation progresses via data coming from your system (partially through tool use).
I frequently use LLMs in a VS Code workspace with around 40 repos, consisting of microservices, frontends, nuget and npm packages, IaC, etc. altogether its many millions of lines of code. and I can ask it questions about anything the codebase and it has no issues managing context. I do not even add files manually to context (this is worse actually because it puts the entire file into context even if it’s not all used). I just refer to the files by name and the LLM is smart enough to read them in as appropriate. I have a couple JSON files that are megs of configuration, and I can tell it to summarize / extract examples out of those files and it’ll just sample sections to get an overview.
Yes, I do have a map of the code in my head of any code base I work on. I know where most of the files are of the main code paths and if you describe the symptoms of a bug I can often tell you the method or even the line that's probably causing it if it's a 'hot' path.
Isn't that what we mean by 'learning' a codebase? I know my ability is supercharged compared to most devs, but most colleagues have it to some extent and I've met some devs with an even more impressive ability for it than me so it's not like I'm a magic unicorn. Ironically, I have a terrible memory for a lot of other things, especially 'facts'.
You can sorta make a crappy version of that for AI agents with agent files and skills.
There’s a company called driver.ai whose idea is to parse your codebase and provide the “map” (navigation of code structure and connectivity) to LLMs. (I haven’t tried it.)
Yep, some ovens (like mine) even have a Proof setting that keeps it at 100 degrees F automatically, for as long as you want. We make a lot of bread is how I know this
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