paulmendoza's comments

On: Trump sides with Musk on support for H-1B visas fo...

[paulmendoza]

The problem is that a lot of the H1B people being brought in to fill jobs Americans could do aren’t the top 0.1%. Far from it. No one is against bringing the top 0.1% here.

On: H1B Debacle Discussion

[paulmendoza]

Yes, I agree. If these really are amazing engineers then pay them like they are.

On: H1B Debacle Discussion

[paulmendoza]

Those companies can train Americans or pay enough to attract talent.

On: AWS Code Commit Ceased Onboarding New Customers

[paulmendoza]

CodePipeline is another good example of just horrible user experience. You need a lot of hours of training to figure out all the different permissions required to get it all to work. It is a mess.

I use GitHub Codespaces now for much of my deployment automation.

Codebuild is also a real pain.

[surfingdino → paulmendoza]

Permissions are the bane of my AWS experience. Once you figure them out it's simple, but finding what you need in their docs is difficult.

On: How can a time traveler encrypt info so it's only ...

[paulmendoza]

Use an encryption key that is a headline from a newspaper for that day. This assumes the time travel works like the Marvel movies and not like Back to the Future.

[mywacaday → paulmendoza]

Headlines are short and dictionary words, would be broken in next to no time.

On: AI's $600B Question

[paulmendoza]

Amazon has a some AI chips they created themselves. Same with Tesla. They are both behind Nvidia and probably won’t catch up BUT raw performance isn’t always the most important part. Often it’s the cost per compute unit and companies are quickly getting close to Nvidia.

[julianozen → paulmendoza]

Can more less sophisticated chips perform as well as fewer more expensive chips?

On: Large Language Models are not a search engine

[paulmendoza]

Google has become so horrible that an LLM that is right 80% of the time is better than a search that has links to pages that are 90% spam and ad covered pages.

On: The inside story of Elon Musk’s mass firings of Te...

[paulmendoza]

Clearly an impulsive decision by Musk.

[quantified → paulmendoza]

Well, if Tinucci disagreed with him, clearly she can't be trusted and her entire organization is tainted. </musk:sarcasm>

On: Leadership is a hell of a drug

[paulmendoza]

“And I've never formally held a position of leadership in an organization.”

It shows. Whoever wrote this is very immature. Management isn’t making a big ask here.

On: Thousands of small businesses are struggling beca...

[paulmendoza]

Section 174 software changes was designed to punish blue states in order to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy so their budget would balance.

[baazaa → paulmendoza]

Yes and I'm talking about the original 2016 house-republican DBCFT proposal which would have eliminated tax on investment in general.

Section 174 is a hack to fix a moronic tax that would have been replaced if not for the left. There shouldn't be a section 174 to even amend. And as I said, software development clearly is development, the change makes perfect sense.

If you want R&D to be taxed (even with deductions which get amortized), and you work in R&D, you don't get to whinge when a loophole gets closed so you get taxed like other R&D expenses. The people getting bankrupted by this deserve it insofar as they opposed the tax reform bill that would have elegantly solved this problem forever.