This is a big part of what I was saying in the post, people with your perspective want to put the responsibility for your job onto applicants. I have to perform for you. I have to impress you.
I've interviewed people without this attitude and basically you get interviewees that have no idea what they're doing here, they didn't research your company, they just want to train the interview process and it's a waste of time
But one thing I never did was put up arbitrary barriers. Yet, "top companies" (sorry bro, your pre-seed startup might be a great idea, but it's not a top anything yet) want a show of meaningless effort as a proof of value. And job seekers will comply because we need employment to access capital, or more specifically, food, shelter, health care and social mobility. It's pretty bleak.
It's very simple. The author might want to work for a big company because of money, reputation, office politics, big scale of projects, nice office, good networking and stability. Those companies have a ton of people applying for them for the same reason. Of course they can afford and need to put up barriers. Author think they are arbitrary but would not be able to create better ones to replace them, everyone is in the same boat.
And then the Author weirdly dismisses startups that are looking for talents. Startups that have no reputation, no stability, focused projects, small teams and less money. But they have much less "arbitrary" barriers. Here you go, you have your solution right there in front of you, in your text. Working at a startup or any small company will give you "food, shelter, health care and social mobility". But that's not what you really want. You don't really know why your interested in that big company instead of smaller ones. That question wasn't arbitrary after all.
I think you're making a lot of assumptions, maybe projecting a bit here? I didn't mention "money, reputation, office politics, big scale of projects, nice office, good networking and stability", or anything about what I was interested in. Not sure where all that's coming from.
I've actually been focused almost exclusively on startups, especially in the early stages. The last company I worked at was just me and the co-founders. This is actually where I thrive: we're growing, we're pivoting, we're accommodating a big customer, we're orienting toward an acquisition, and we need to get our stuff in order. I am the one who's going to make the hard calls, whip the processes into shape, generally get the product in order to facilitate the next steps, learn everything I can to make it all work on the fly. I live in the trenches, I wear all the hats, I do all the dirty work, and I love it. Watching a constantly failing application transform into a turnkey operation is so satisfying. And then it's on to the next challenge. I appreciate stability but I'm willing to sacrifice it for interesting problems and a big impact.
Anyway, I get the same gate checks from startups, even tiny ones, and sometimes they're even more invasive and seem to want even more excitement from an applicant. They're placing a form in front of me instead of seeking me out, and the ATS systems and platforms are making me disappear. I'm spending so much time trying to craft the right kind of response and so little time interviewing. It sucks. The broader point of my post was urging people hiring to be proactive about that task and reach out to applicants instead of pushing the responsibility off onto platforms.
You're also misinterpreting the passage you're directly quoting, which is not something I've seen, I think, ever.
I didn't say a company, any company, "will give you 'food shelter, health care and social mobility". I said "we need employment to access capital, or more specifically, food, shelter, health care and social mobility". And I said it was bleak, which you captured, but didn't see, I guess?
"But that's not what you really want"
Yes. I do want my basic needs met. I don't know why you would think otherwise. And yes, it sucks that I have to exchange being awesome for those needs, and it sucks even more that I've got to jump through so many hoops just to even talk to someone.
I also framed that whole section with "A cynic may posit...". It's a cynical view.
I then followed that with:
"Now, I'm not a cynic. While my overall worldview is deeply pragmatic, when it comes to the toil of labor, I'm uncharacteristically optimistic."
I meant that, and everything after that.
"You can't have a cake and eat it too."
What cake is being offered here, exactly? :D
Anyway, none of this really matters, I have this thing about fixing incongruency when I see it.
I'm psyched you took the time to read what I wrote. I honestly do appreciate that. If the straw man you were replying to existed in the context of this conversation, I do think you're making some valid points. Thank you.
Great thank you ! I can only react to the text I am reading and yes I also read the text below nonetheless. In front of uncertainty humans fill the holes, and all the people who have a similar discourse than you could be good templates to fill the information missing :)
> The broader point of my post was urging people hiring to be proactive about that task and reach out to applicants instead of pushing the responsibility off onto platforms
But how do you find others developers like yourself ? Most people need calls. They might say they don't like it, but they're more productive once they have them. They need to feel there is a human on the other side that cares about the results, that is waiting for them and pushing them. Most people need deadlines, even if they're fake. They need to tell people around them they have to do X before Y, they wouldn't be able to justify what they're doing to themselves and their surrounding without that fake deadline. They wouldn't think about telling coworker about a similar piece of code or feature they're working on without that daily standup.
All those boring useless things, all those methods, those rules, those office politics, they're here for a reason
If you buy Mac get at least 256GB ram otherwise just buy a bunch of nvidia cards. It really does not make sense otherwise if you are looking for performance / $. The mac (studio) is unique as it has more ram than the alternatives(I.e consumer nvidia cards or spark stuff) so it can fit bigger models but otherwise its performance is worse.
Last time I looked into it, I realized how severely it's limited by memory bandwidth. Only the M5 Ultra compares to a dedicated graphics card, but it still falls short.
M5 Pro is not that expensive and allows for model below 35GB to be used which is a lot of models. And has a boost with neural engines, its not just the memory bandwidth that makes the speed
M5 Max 64GB (sweet spot) or 128GB (only 1000 USD, better to keep it for the future) more are the best quality price ratio, future proof, reliable, resellable and flexible workloads. Harder to use as a server might be the only drawback
Depends. ROCm is pretty well-supported for example.
Non-NVIDIA backends tend to get less support and new features land slower, or features that are expected to improve performance wind up hurting it instead. That sort of thing.
For basic “token in/token out” workloads without fine tuning, it’s probably fine ??
The Ryzen AI Max 395 128gb is super cool, but not fast for inference. Order of magnitude slower than dedicated GPU but at half the cost. You can run larger models on it but it's slow. Great for local async work. Not great for daily chat or code agent driver.
Probably a comparable non-Mac setup will be Threadripper, but it will become much more expensive. My view is that actually Apple products are the cheapest on the market when it comes to performance.
I only tried a very early version of that when it was just a llama.cpp fork and Qwen was certainly better in my tests.
But I was not super impressed with deepseek 4 flash using it from the official API either, so it doesn't seem quantization fault. It is a good model, but nothing out of the ordinary in the few benchmarks I ran on it (with full awareness that benchmarks are biased).
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