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Right, your $80 shoes are going to be fine for a while, and $15 ones probably won't. But you're getting diminishing returns super quickly if you're buying $400 or $800 shoes, and perhaps even going backwards

But there are a lot of people who go to a lot of effort to make you think negotiating your salary or bonus isn't an option, or is icky, or not a thing you can or should go to the mats fighting over, or that moving house is hard because it's worth a high % of your entire productivity to tell you that

Right. But that's because people compartmentalize them separately. Your salary and rent are seen by most people as the background noise to your finances that you work around, but your discretionary purchases are "real", when the reality is almost entirely reversed

Being able to argue your salary 5% better at interview, or to argue for a bonus that's a bit bigger is worth more than all the points and vouchers and bulk-purchase savings you'll make that year, and it's not a collaborative exercise; your boss is not on your side or playing fair in that negotiation

like most people overpay on rent and are underpaid at work because landlords and companies ruthlessly exploit the fact you'll take a lot of pain before demonstrating you'll move

The main thing I think is that the two really big things in your budget are salary and rent/mortgage, and you need to stop thinking of those as immovable blockers while micro-managing the rest of your budget, but spend a lot more time deliberately thinking how to improve the state of those

tbh it's a rounding error for most people. For the vast majority of people your finances are super-dominated by rent/mortgage as outgoings and by salary/wages as income

also late payment fees another big one

the other big poverty tax is not being efficient with funds because it's not big enough for you to get good advice on them

the biggest tax on poverty tbh is not being able to get a capital foothold (e.g. deposit for a house, have real savings etc) that lets you eventually compound your earnings

can LLMs output assembly directly? Sure. So can people. There's a reason most people don't, and it's for the same reason that making LLMs do it is also stupid: it's crazy inefficient, prone to errors, harder to prove correctness over, and almost always doesn't produce better performance anyway

he has giant computers and infinity staff, he should give it a go tell us how it works out for him

god, he is such an idiot

my view on all these things is very boringly capitalist, in that I think the right salary is ~ the number that gets peer-equivalents outside of academia to apply to it and keep them from jumping ship when they see what commercial sector would pay them. Which is actually pretty large numbers

probably quite high, but I think the resentment comes less from their salaries being high than that there are a lot of e.g. faculty who are grossly underpaid

interviewer (sucking air through teeth, putting pencil to paper) I'm gonna put that down as "irregular employment"

interviewer: so it says you were at your last gig for just eight years, and there's a pretty long career gap afterwards

will never not be super funny to me that peter's post about graphs was after I was chatting to him about them, and all of AI twitter is now obsessed with trying to find the hidden meaning of it

true, tho also in school we used to think the same about numerical methods (calculators can do that! why should we learn how to do multiplication of big numbers by other big numbers?). I think AI is perhaps a bigger problem there, and harder to tackle, but also of a form that has always existed

I mean, rapid technological advances are the reason we have reached peak fossil fuels thanks to the giant expansion of solar power, have reduced air pollution in cities with EVs, etc, and were able to produce a COVID vaccine so quickly. Not all technology is apps on a phone.