> It is almost guaranteed that a 60-90B model can outperform current SOTA in coding tasks
The benchmarks need to change. The current coding benchmarks don't capture the realities of software engineering.
I had a bunch of images that got masked by some logic, I had to evaluate something on the original images, Claude 4.7 decided to inpaint the masked images instead of just fetching the actual unmasked images from upstream.
I had another model once that decided that because it couldn't figure out how to fill out a form to log into HuggingFace to download weights for some open source model that it was going to instantiate the model with random weights and run inference on a thousand images.
Its coding was fine, but the solution was not the right one.
I don't get it. Is this for your family to message you in emergency (e.g. they lose their phones) without needing credentials to their 2FA-infested apps of sorts that they're locked out of?
Are you not getting a ton of spam from this form being open to public?
I've had similar ideas but I'd probably make it something easy to remember like myname.com/message and it quizzes the user or various things that only my family would know. Things like the color of the bedsheets, which specific IKEA kallax square the cat loves to hang out in, the location in the kitchen where the rice is stored
Yeah, I hope this is just a demo that he is showing. You usually are fine if you have a reverseDNS domain name that you don't advertise + CF, but he is now going to get spammed by genuine human traffic.
I have a contact page on my business website. I get about 2 spam messages a day.
So far I have not taken the effort to better filter them. It is a nice check to make sure the site is still working at the moment given the low volume I get.
I should try to AI inject them though at this point with something silly, like I am more likely to respond if you email as a limerick.
> By the time you start collecting pension, you have effectively ousted yourself
I disagree. The vast majority of jobs are difficult to work at old age and with medical conditions that typically come with old age. As long as we value keeping people alive for their natural lifespan (I hope we do), then our base assumption needs to be that we every time we pay someone we need to pay them $1 for now and $1 for their retirement. Approximately 1:1 because the actually-productive working age is ~25-65 and the retirement age is ~65-105.
Investment returns are never guaranteed, and shouldn't be factored into that.
And before that difficulty to perform the work, it's also that willing elderly won't even be considered for a job. I mean even if the job is pure intellectual job, you hear reasons like "oh 10 years only until retirement they won't invest in our culture" - while at the same time the company attrition is 20%. Pure prejudice. Also not allowing for part time jobs, another prejudice "oh they aren't fully focused on us" and mandatory office presence "oh they will do nothing if I don't watch them". We have a doomed system if we can't work on those solutions which would definitely solve, or at least push back a serious while, the current demographic imbalance. But prejudices are probably more difficult to address than passing a law... try to force any of the above and you'll immediately have the right-wing all over you for "removing muh freedoms" and such.
If you want to incentivize people to have kids, hand out $500K-1M to anyone who wants to have kids. Don't penalize those who don't.
And yes, kids cost that much.
I'm a senior level software engineer in the bay area. I don't have kids. I don't think I can afford them. I'm tired of people telling me I can afford them. The world works differently today. In the 1980's, if you had a stable job that let you leave at 5pm, you could more or less handle kids.
Today, leaving at 5pm means risking PIP and not having an income; your company may lay off people randomly without notice; your rents could go up 10-20% unexpectedly; groceries could double in price over a couple years; you basically need to be working round the clock to not get PIPed and even sustain an income. And if you work around the clock you also need cash to hire nannies because you don't have the time to raise them yourself. As such I wouldn't even think about kids in this world without having saved up the full sum of my expenses AND their expenses for their ENTIRE life until 21 years old in CASH before even having the kid. We just don't have the job security today.
I have 4 kids and can say that they absolutely do not have to cost that much. Child care is legitimately costly until they reach school age (age 5), but if you use public schools, cook modest meals at home, recognize that kids will survive and even thrive without costly extra-curricular activities, and avoid cities with outrageous costs of living like San Francisco or New York City, then having children is quite affordable. I live in the Midwestern United States. I know many families who live very comfortably on less than $100k per year.
That isn’t to say you should have kids. That’s a really personal choice. And it can come with huge amounts of extra anxiety around job security, for sure. But there are tons of options for arranging life and work to make it happen if one really wants to.
> I have 4 kids and can say that they absolutely do not have to cost that much.
Look, my electricity bill doubled. Will the landlord pay for efficiency upgrades? Nope. Will the landlord still increase rent? Hell yes. My water bill doubled. Extrapolate those numbers.
Taco Bell used to cost $5 for a meal, and now costs $14.
My $5 sandwich now costs $15.
50%+ of my income is lost to taxes of sorts. Before you lecture me on tax, I know my taxes better than you know me. Sales taxes, self-employment taxes, tariffs are all taxes.
I get hit with $5-7K of medical bills a year. With insurance. I have a rare idiopathic heart condition, so that's my cost (systematic tax) to stay alive, and probably would be the cost for a potential genetically-infected kid to stay alive as well. I also pay $3K/year in orthodontics last and this year, and another $2-3K in preventative care out of pocket. After my orthodontics is over, I'm sure some other $4K/year shit will come up. I'm stashing up cash for all of this.
"Live in the Midwestern United States" and "avoid San Francisco", you say. But there are no jobs there. None that I could get. Everything I could get wanted me to be 3 days/week on site in silicon valley. Jobs that I found in even LA or Boston were literally half the salary or less. Jobs elsewhere were less than 1/3 the salary. Considering more than half my salary goes to taxes, tariffs, and more taxes of sorts, my partner and I really need that cash.
I don't have time to cook every meal at home. I don't have time to see kids. I'd get PIP from my job if I did that. Today's jobs don't let you work 40 hours a week; you need to work closer to 80. At my last job I worked 70 hours a week and still got PIPed. My coworkers took my ideas, finished them on weekends, worked 100 hour weeks, presented to leadership on Monday without my name. I didn't meet the "bar". My work is making millions for a big corp as I write this. Just not in my name.
Public schools are expensive. Because you pay for it in housing costs. Wherever housing is cheap, public schools are shitty. I live where housing is cheap, relatively speaking, for the bay. But I don't have kids, so it works out.
My financial planning model works like this.
For every $1 I need to support myself and my partner, I need to earn about $8. $4 goes to <strike>taxes</strike> government laundering, $4 left. For the $4 left, $2 goes to retirement (base assumption is the economy is now irreparably broken and S&P500 isn't necessarily going to grow in the next 40 years like it did the past 40), $1 goes to my catastrophe fund (in case of very realistic war or AI unemployment), $1 goes towards spending now.
My partner and I barely meet that 8x bar. That is my bar to feel safe. I couldn't meet it with kids. Without kids, we have a sane and happy life. Everything is covered, from the taxes to the whopping medical bills to housing. End of story.
It also doesn't work like this in all job domains in the US. These hyper-competitive FANGlike employers are meat grinders. You can live well enough on a modest wage a few hundred miles away in the Central Valley working for a public institution with a pension. It still exists even it's less so than it was 30 or 40 years ago.
Same place it always does, just print it. Of course, that still effectively penalizes those who don't want children, but the penalty is less legible to the public so there are fewer objections.
I really don't fucking know. That's not my problem. Either increase my salary by $500K for a couple years, or stop taxing me to death (state taxes, federal taxes, sales taxes, indirectly paying property taxes via rent, taxes disguised as car registrations, tariffs, so many goddamn taxes I don't have any money left to save), stop starting wars elsewhere, stop squandering money, anything.
It's not my problem, really. I'm very happy childless. Unless that money materializes, I can't afford kids.
It's just that in the US, there are 3.6 million babies born each year; even taking the low-end of a $500k one-time payment to one parent, you're already talking a $1.8 trillion / year program, slightly larger than Social Security's $1.6 trillion program.
Social Security is funded by a 12.4% income tax, with half nominally paid by the employee and half nominally paid by the employer.
You'd need a similar tax to fund such a benefit, which would amount to a 15% income tax, assuming the program isn't too successful in raising birth rates.
"Rights" is not the point. You're correct that a country doesn't have to welcome you.
However, the US has been a prosperous country because it welcomes ambitious, hard-working, and skilled people from around the world. They immigrate, build inside the US and for the US, and the US economy grows. This is how the past several decades have worked, and restricting legal immigration would basically destroy this country, its economy, and everything that makes it a great place to live.
I'm a citizen of the US, and I 100% want more smart and hard-working people from around the world to come here and set up shop.
This is not true. It’s a pernicious lie that the United States has always been doors open, and this falsity makes discussing this topic increasingly impossible because it’s like there’s two different realities that aren’t reconcilable. The US became the economic powerhouse and world power it did during the most restrictive period of its immigration history. The amount of immigration over the last 30 years, and especially over the last decade, is completely unusual and unprecedented. I can go to neighborhoods in the city I grew up in where I played baseball as a kid and it is quite literally completely foreign. A lot of people, and you seem to be one of them, think that America’s immigration system is a cosmic vacuum cleaner that scoops up would-be Einsteins from around the planet and plops them in US cities where they churn out unicorns between writing an opera and running a 10k. This isn’t the case.
The percent of the US population that is foreign-born is about the same as it was before 1920.
To use your vocabulary, it is a pernicious lie to pretend that America's success from WWI through the WWII recoveries was due to immigration policies, rather than other major countries having their infrastructure destroyed and being forced to use the US as a key supplier due to rather large wars.
(and that's ignoring that US population had booms in there that meant that even though immigration was persisting, there was just a big increase in domestic births).
Though if we're going to adopt those immigration policies, perhaps we should also adopt the tax strategies, corporate regulation, and worker unions that accompanied that growth.
I'm quite fine with that. I drove through an Armenian neighborhood of LA and stopped for a meal at a restaurant whose name I could not comprehend and it was really, fucking tasty. Zhengyalov Hatz in Glendale, if anyone is wondering.
But yeah, this is the kind of stuff that makes the US awesome. "Would-be Einsteins" are far from the only flavor hard-working people who I absolutely welcome.
Cato is doing their usual thing here where they lie by omission.
>These foreigners, if not properly disposed of, will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its directions, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.[1]
-Thomas Jefferson
The Founders had a conception of immigration that is completely at odds with the free for all that exists today, and Cato is partially responsible for people incorrectly thinking that the US was “literally built on the idea of immigration”.
Europeans who arrived, seized land, imported enslaved people, broke treaties, then later decided that later arrivals were the real problem? Those Europeans?
Would you prefer the United States didn’t exist or something? What is even the point of this comment. “Bad things happened in history, there was violence and war and conquering, woe is me” this is what you sound like. Profound, truly.
Did you roll a dice and pick one or are you actually familiar with Navajo history or something and that’s why you tried to use this retort as a way to imply you’re not allowed to have opinions on American immigration policy unless you’re from a Native American tribe?
> because it welcomes ambitious, hard-working, and skilled people from around the world
"From around the world" more like the "world tour" definition
They were welcoming mostly Europeans. First from WASP countries, then for more southern/eastern ones. And then from East Asia (I'll save the rant about the word "Asian" for another time)
Every piece of data shows some groups excel while some groups lag behind
(of course I haven't forgotten about other groups of people that came to the US but most of those didn't come willingly)
Thank you for your interest in my emotional states, and you make a good point. However, I don't think these situations are the same.
In terms of population, the biggest London is 9.1 million people and the 2nd-biggest is under 500,000. Quite a big difference! I think that's why when someone says "London" one can usually reasonably assume they're talking about the one in England, unless otherwise specified (or unless they live near a different one).
The biggest Orange County is 3.1 million and the 2nd-biggest Orange County is 1.4 million, so the difference is not nearly as great. I'd even suggest they're in the same general category of size. In the context of a national/international website, it's far less clear that one of the "Orange County"s is so overwhelmingly what people refer to that its state need not be specified.
> the kids must first get visas to their parent's countries
The bigger issue honestly is that the kids may already have grown up in the American culture and fluent in English and it could massively disrupt their education and well-being to throw them into another system somewhere else, depending on how they were raised and whether they are fluent in the language of the country of their parents. In many cases they are not.
1. Citizens have a right to enter at ports of entry, can refuse to hand over social media accounts, etc. Greencard holders are still at the discretion of border officials.
2. Citizens can wander the world and live abroad for however long they fancy and always be allowed to return to their country of citizenship when things go awry. Greencard holders can't do that.
3. Citizens get consular protection, greencard holders don't.
> have migrated to improve their lives, not to altruistically benefit a foreign country
These are not mutually exclusive. I want a better life, and I also have career ambition and skills that I'm willing to deploy in a place that will give me a better life in return.
Well…your motivation is not altruistic to the host country in that case, it’s selfish.
You want a better life, the country providing it is arbitrary as long as it accepts the currency that you can provide for that better life by your skill set.
If it was altruistic you would emigrate because you believe in the country you are emigrating to even if it meant your life was worse.
> your motivation is not altruistic to the host country in that case, it’s selfish
There is nothing wrong with that. I'm selfish, you're selfish, the government is selfish, everyone in the host country is selfish. It's human nature. We all want good lives. That's the reason a transactional economy exists. It's good for the country's GDP and overall economy to welcome outside talent, and that outside talent enjoys being rewarded for their contributions, and over time, their new place of residence becomes a part of their cultural identity. That's how things usually work.
Not everyone is a saint.
> If it was altruistic you would emigrate because you believe in the country you are emigrating to even if it meant your life was worse.
Reality check: 99% of people would take a better life over a worse life. And there's nothing wrong with that. The entire world is built with this as a base assumption.
Also, reality check: Life in the US kinda sucks unless you have a well-paying skilled job or a lot of money. In either case you'll be contributing to the economy.
I made no claim that selfishness is wrong or altruism is right. Nor did i make any claims as to what life is like in the US—so I don't need any “reality checks” about what your personal beliefs are about life in the US at specific income levels, it’s not relative here. Being poor in the US probably sucks compared to being rich in the US. I am also sure that you can say that about literally every country on this planet.
My comment was about why this was not a “it’s both” type of situation. So just own your motivation for what it is—you emigrate so you can get a better life in a new country than you can get in your old country. That’s honorable enough.
The benchmarks need to change. The current coding benchmarks don't capture the realities of software engineering.
I had a bunch of images that got masked by some logic, I had to evaluate something on the original images, Claude 4.7 decided to inpaint the masked images instead of just fetching the actual unmasked images from upstream.
I had another model once that decided that because it couldn't figure out how to fill out a form to log into HuggingFace to download weights for some open source model that it was going to instantiate the model with random weights and run inference on a thousand images.
Its coding was fine, but the solution was not the right one.
reply