Silicon Valley just means a concentration of influential and powerful actors including venture capitalists, executives, entrepreneurs who decide the fate of the technology industry. Basically the elites of the XYZ sector.
Same can be applied for DC (politics/military), NY (finance), LA (entertainment).
SV was around since the 60-90s but didn't get much attention until beginning of this millenium due to the huge value creation and control they had over the US economy. They just happen to be relevant in recent times. 100s of years ago it was the railroad and oil conglomerates, 1000s of years ago kings and feudal lords. So there is always a powerful influential class who controls the strings -- its a feature of human society.
I notice the trend that people are reading much less in public and on public transporation -- before if you went on a long-haul flight you would bring a couple of books or magazines, now people much prefer to consuming video content. On a flight every row I saw passengers either watching a movie on their phone/laptop/ or screen seat.
If you walk into a cafe it would be odd to see someone reading a book.
And its almost impossible to buy physical newspapers even the Sunday edition for the NY Times as most grocery stores or convenience stores don't carry them.
Personally I'm also guilty of listening to more podcasts and background play -- but I only watch YT visual content when its interesting there is just too much stuff out there. I consume most of my news online -- so my reading comes from mostly articles. Its just more convenient and practical now -- though requires much less effort than say reading longer form content of a book or long essay.
Lately I've been going on TikTok just out of curiosity for entertainmentto watch amusing or funny videos. Its basically like digital crack -- before you know it you spent an hour just watching mindless content and its designed to get you hooked. It really is low-effort instant gratification at its worst (probably worse than porn -- because you stop after a while once satisfied.)
And you see kids as old as 1-2 years old with personal devices watching videos -- so it seems to be a disturbing trend And I heard that professors don't even assign books since they know their students won't read them and will just ChatGPT for summaries.
Most companies aren’t Apple, Nvidia, or Google chasing the top 0.1% of “elite” talent. Outside of a few AI-focused startups, the reality is that 90% of companies are sitting on legacy codebases, still running VMs, or duct-taping CRUD apps together with APIs.
If you happen to be a superstar with a rare niche skill (like building frontier AI models), you basically skip the interview loop and get fought over with million-dollar offers. But that’s a tiny fraction of the market.
For everyone else, hiring looks a lot like dating: both sides aim for a “10,” but usually settle for a “6 or 7.” And the whole process is signaling—candidates overstate their skills, companies oversell their culture and tech stack, and the match lands somewhere in the middle.
Probably the most important non-technical skill is dealing with the egos in the industry since you will come across a lot of them.
Anyone who thinks their boss/coworkers are their friend is surely deluded. There is no loyalty in this day and age-- both from the employer and employee side.
Even asking "how was your weekend?" -- its implied that you just say good rather than sharing details of what you actually did -- they don't really care.
Just tested this on a rather simple issue. Basically it falls into rabbits holes just like the other models and tries to brute force fixes through overengineering through trial and error. It also says "your job should now pass" maybe after 10 prompts of roughly doing the same thing stuck in a thought loop.
A GH actions pipeline was failing due to a CI job not having any source code files -- error was "No build system detected". Using Cursor agent with Sonnet 4.5, it would try to put dummy .JSON files and set parameters in the workflow YAML file to false, and even set parameters that don't exist. Simple solution was to just override the logic in the step to "Hello world" to get the job to pass.
I don't understand why the models are so bad with simple thinking outside the box solutions? Its like a 170 iq savant who can't even ride public transporation.
I'm thinking OpenAI's strategy is to get users hooked on these new features to push ads on them.
Hey, for that recipe you want to try, have you considered getting new knives or cooking ware? Found some good deals.
For your travel trip, found a promo on a good hotel located here -- perfect walking distance for hiking and good restaraunts that have Thai food.
Your running progress is great and you are hitting strides? Consider using this app to track calories and record your workouts -- special promo for 14 day trial .
I use WARP.dev CLI terminal that works as a coding agent and has all the models not just from Anthropic and works very similarly to all the CLI Coding Agents (Claude code, Codex, Jules, etc.)
It works very fast compared to Cursor -- biggest limitation is that it doesn't have workspaces where you can get context from several repos for building your application.
MCP servers also work as well just a little more complex.
The biggest costs for businesses are labor costs and capex. So indirectly higher prices (inflation caused by tariffs) will demand higher wages for workers and cause higher prices for consumers for services seemingly unimpacted by tariffs.
Realize that a lot of candidates who followed the rules and told the truth were screwed out of jobs. Right now there are massive layoffs and lots of good people are out of jobs and this guy is being praised by sticking it to “corporate greed”?
Is Luigi Malione a hero and deserves to be pardoned by this logic ?
Apparently Dwarkesh's podcast is a big hit in SV -- it was covered by the Economist just recently. I thought the "All in" podcast was the voice of tech but their content has been going politcal with MAGA lately and their episodes are basically shouting matches with their guests.
And for folks who want to read rather than listen to a podcast, why not create an article (they are using Gemini) rather than just posting the whole transcript? Who is going to read a 60 min long transcript?
Well biking and cycling is considered generally a high-class sport in the US -- but when you are in a bike out in the middle of nowhere you are vulnerable. And it seems like the friendly firefighters or citizens he met on the way made were being generous and made offers to help rather than OP asking for requests.
I think yields is the main reason, although I'm not an expert in that area. If its a standard deviation difference than it will increase their manufacturing costs. Nvidia got around this from Ada--> Blackwell by simply increasing TDP for their high-end cards and adding more cores. Their is no IPC/efficiency/node improvement, if I'm not mistaken, for the first time gen-to-gen.
Quality of roads in a city/town typically correlate with the income and socioeconomic status of the location. In the Bay area, affluent suburban areas have pretty good roads (believe taxes have an effect). While cities like Oakland, Vallejo, Richmond have streets full of potholes and very bumpy roads that can even damage your car while driving at a normal speed. For state with the highest income tax wonder where the funds go to. Good article on current state of US roads. I've seen other countries in EU and they seem to have much better or comparable roads in rural areas than the US.