Low barrier to entry and hard to get fired once you're in.

Rotten people put on a good face in the interview and then spread their misery around for decades to some of our most vulnerable. It happens in pretty much every unelected position in the public sector in my experience.

Almost certainly not at the scale of the consumer gaming industry, however!

Google is making millions of TPUs per year. Nvidia ships more gaming GPUs, but it's not like multiple orders of magnitude off.

I'm willing to bet TPUs wouldn't be nearly as successful or sophisticated without the decades of GPU design and manufacturing that came before them.

Current manufacturing numbers are a small part of the story of the overall lineage.

It's pretty interesting that consumer GPUs started to really be a thing in the early 90s and the first Bitcoin GPU miner was around 2011. That's only 20 years. That caused a GPU and asic gold rush. The major breakthroughs around LLMs started to snowball in the academic scene right around that time. It's been a crazy and relatively quick ride in the grand scheme of things. Even this silicone shortage will pass and we'll look back on this time as quaint.

Of course you are right, but in addition they wouldn't have even made them if GPUs hadn't made ML on CPU so relatively incapable. Competition drives a lot of these decisions, not just raw performance.

You are missing his point. They very likely don't start building TPUs if there were no GPUs.

I'm not missing the point. If you recall your computer architecture class there are many vector processing architectures out there. Long before there was nvidia the world's largest and most expensive computers were vector processors. It's inaccurate to say "gaming built SIMD".

You are missing the point - it's an economic point. Very little R&D was put into said processors. The scale wasn't there. The software stack wasn't there (because the scale wasn't there).

No one is suggesting gaming chips were the first time someone thought of such an architecture or built a chip with such an architecture. They are suggesting the gaming industry produced the required scale to actually do all the work which lead to that hardware and software being really good, and useful for other purposes. In chip world, scale matters a lot.

The Cray-1, which produced half a billion USD in revenue in today's dollars, at a time when computing was still science fiction, did not demonstrate scale? I just can't take you in good faith because there has never been a time when large scale SIMD computing was not advanced by commercial interests.

In this context scale = enough units/revenue to spread fixed costs.

I'll take your word on lifetime revenue numbers for Cray 1.

So yes, in todays dollars, $500 million of lifetime revenue - maybe 60-70 million per year, todays dollars - is not even close to the scale we are seeing today. Even 10 years ago Nvidia was doing ~$5 billion per year (almost 100x your number) and AMD a few bill(another 60-70x ish)

Even if you meant $500m in annual (instead of lifetime), Nvidia was 10x that in 2015. And AMDs GPU revenue which was a few billion that year, so it's more like 17x.

That's a large difference in scale. At the low end 17x and at the high end 170x. Gaming drove that scale. Gaming drove Nvidia to have enough to spend on CUDA. Gaming drove NVidia to have enough to produce chip designs optimized for other types of workloads. CUDA enabled ML work that wasn't possible before. That drove Google to realize they needed to move away from ML on CPU if they wanted to be competitive.

You don't need any faith, just understand the history and how competition drives behavior.

We don't need to know the exact boundaries of what's acceptable to recognize obviously harmful behavior and make efforts to stop it on a societal level.

This is the classic "perfect is the enemy of the good" type scenario.

Let's make imperfect progress if that is what we're currently capable of.

The drug so popular no one thinks of it as a drug any more.

Criticism without a better solution is only so valuable.

How would you do this instead, and why?

I went through the exact same thing as you, and I needed some time to explore different ways of living. I tried being a drone pilot, a kayak guide, and a paddleboard instructor and learned a lot in the process.

After those forays I designed and built a trailered coffee from scratch and now I run it on a public park that overlooks the ocean.

I am more fulfilled than ever, I can pay my bills, and I get to do WAY more "real" engineering than the bureaucracy of my past life at FAANG ever allowed for.

Thanks for your positive story. How were your finances before you got off the rat race? Were you quite comfortable for a risky situation or you just risked it and it worked out?

I was in an extremely good spot financially when I quit (years of runway) due to living well below my paycheck for years of working at FAANG.

I was terrified to do so, but the only alternative I could see at the time was killing myself if I had to continue as is (lots of mental illness prior to and greatly exacerbated by my time in tech).

It is the biggest leap of faith I have ever taken, and I do not have a big appetite for financial risk.

Corded yard tools will always suck because they can only pull <15A on a standard US outlet. They just don't have the juice.

It's always better to go with batteries for electric outdoor stuff for that (and other) reasons.

What kind of batteries are you running that can support the equivalent of 15A AC for hours?

I have both a battery leafblower and a corded one. The corded is far more powerful and of course does not run out. The battery one is quick and convenient for small cleanups but only gets about 10 minutes from a full charge, then it's back to the charger for hours.

Recently I cleaned up a large roof full of leaves, took about an hour with the powerful corded leafblower. That would've taken weeks with the battery one given the small power and the ~10 minute runtime.

I mostly use the battery one since it's easier and most jobs I do are tiny. But it is no substitute for the corded one.

You cycle multiple packs to run for hours.

Your battery blower sounds like it's just not very good.

I can move piles of wet leaves easily with my makita blower that uses two 18v batteries. It's a pretty old model too.

Batteries can surge power and not risk fire hazard like AC over a long extension cord. Manufacturers know this and have to intentionally limit draw way below the 15A ceiling so a 100ft 14AWG cord doesn't trip breakers or burn houses down.

You don't normally need that much power continuously, you need surge capacity.

It seems very likely to me that the sensations experienced during exercise are highly variable among individuals.

I say this because my experience is very different from yours: I get a very perceptible "high" once I get into the rhythm of a good workout. Think mild euphoria, mood lift, and general feeling of "rightness" in my body once it's been well wrung.

This only happens if I'm in decent shape, though. If I've fallen out of shape it's a slog.

Edit: I can't remember the podcast, but I recall some discussion of emerging clinical evidence in exercise response variability along many dimensions that may help explain the disconnect.

A friend told me he was addicted to running because he literally got high from it. I said, running hurt for me. He said it used to for him too. I asked how long until it stopped hurting. He said 2 YEARS!!!!

There's no way I'm going to run for 2 years on the hope that one day it will stop hurting and get enjoyable.

I've done weight training for about 5 years now. It's not fun. I definitely get no "high" from it. But I do like the results.

There is no universally "correct" granularity.

You could easily scoff the same way about some number of API endpoints, class methods, config options, etc, and it still wouldn't be meaningful without context.

It's ok to split or lump as the team sees fit.

> There is no universally "correct" granularity.

There may not be a universally correct granularity, but that doesn't mean clearly incorrect ones don't exist. 50+ services is almost always too many, except for orgs with hundreds or thousands of engineers.

Credentials should only be provided at the application root, which is going to be a different root for a test harness.

Mockito shouldn't change whether or not this is possible; the code shouldn't have the prod creds (or any external resource references) hard coded in the compiled bytecode.

I totally agree, I’m being tongue in cheek, but given how poor some codebases can be, the more precautions the better ie compilation failures on non-mocked functions.