Now compare what you can get for that money in both countries, and you will inevitably discover that the German is wealthier in every way that matters.
Counterpoint, when I lived in Spain, I had to remember never to talk about money with the locals in any way. They were poorer than anyone I have ever met in the US. They literally had to go without water at times because they couldn't afford to buy a bottle for $2. And there is no such thing as free water there. And this was in Barcelona, their richest city. For reference, everything there is about half the cost of the US but their average income was 1/4 of the US.
PS The only thing Germany is richer in than the US is snobbery and rudeness. Seriously, I wouldn't live there for any amount of income or cost.
I’m tired of people saying this. I was in Taipei recently and had to do a reality check, because obviously, the exchange rate means the food seems cheap, but I checked again against local incomes, and yes, it turns out: Taipei has abundant cheap food relative to local incomes, beyond the wildest dreams of most American cities.
Americans need to stop telling ourselves this lie. We get so little for our money compared to other countries, and we should be furious.
so you think restaurants are the most important indicator of wealth? Americans are rich in land and cars. Whether thats important to you is a different question.
But I think the average resident of Taipei would trade their street food for a 3000 sqft house with a yard and a pool and a quiet neighborhood and 2 large luxury vehicles.
The average American doesn’t have this. The average resident of Taipei would not trade their quality of life for the actually equivalent quality of life in the United States. Source: multiple Taiwanese immigrants I know personally, planning to return home for this reason.
Or let's not jump straight to the racist vibes and maybe think about how American agriculture is highly monopolized, uncompetitive, and operate deeply like a cartel.
American agricultural/food practices is a legit reason why food in this country is 20-40% higher than elsewhere. Because capitalists want to squeeze every cent of profit before they fuck off into the abyss.
You’re going to get downvoted for this, but you’re right. Literally any international travel to an actual first world country will ruin America for you. This country is a backwater in terms of infrastructure, culture and quality of life.
Every time I read one of these it’s the same. No one ever even tries to look at quality of life measurements, or cost of living relative to income, or measurements of precarity (e.g. How secure is my job? How secure is my housing?).
What I think everyone in this country knows intuitively is that relative quality of life is constantly getting worse, there’s no indication that it will improve any time soon, and there are plenty of indications that it will continue to get worse.
How do you measure that in a way economists can understand? I don’t know. But I trust my own intuition, and the lived experience of myself and my peers, more than an excel spreadsheet of aggregate GDP.
Is this not addressing quality of life getting worse?
"Americans in the 21st century have experienced roughly triple the typical rate of inflation in the 2020s compared to what they’d grown accustomed to. Everything that people buy feels like it is constantly slipping out of the zone of affordability, and that is absolutely maddening to many people, no matter what the economic statistics suggest they should feel."
Yeah, the "economist" view of a country's state always seems awfully reductionists: "Those few KPIs look good, so there can't possibly be a way in which things are bad. So the rest must be 'feelings'."
I've seen plenty of people look at those metrics and they certainly do tell a story of growing inequality and instability. To me, it seems more obvious that those issues are largely unaddressed by the people in power because they're more concerned with growing their wealth than taking care of their people. I suspect that's obvious to Americans given their overwhelming distrust for institutions, politicians, etc. Unfortunately Americans seem to lack the ability to discern who actually cares about them. By seeking change we've ironically bolstered the opposition to our basic human needs.
And why that anecdote happened is pretty informative. Someone was cooking the data to make themselves look good. It took 1 call to support to prove this was the case. I'm betting they didn't last long after that.
I'm speaking colloquially, not statistically. More literally, I mean "absolutely, but also relative to various things." See the parent's reply to you for concrete examples.
The sooner you acquire the mental model, that AI coding agents are more or less the average of Stack Overflow, the better your expectations for, and this your productivity with, these things will be.
While I have never personally been invited to a spring gay peptide party at a SoMa warehouse full of twinks, I have not been able to avoid exposure to these sorts of people. It feels like they are making up a larger and larger portion of incoming engineers, but that may have always been true.
Then again, I’m now seeing ads for “leukopaks” on tech websites. It really does feel like the culture has shifted for the worse.
I wonder how long it will take the software industry to re-learn the 2010s lesson, that basing your entire business on (and in this case, firing half of your employees and replacing them with) another company’s API is a bad business decision
Now we just need the RAM market to get back to normal. Or at least fine OpenAI for speculating on raw wafers. There's an article on the front page [0] with this passage that gives me hope that consumer access to VRAM may improve
> On the infrastructure side: OpenAI signed non-binding letters of intent with Samsung and SK Hynix for up to 900,000 DRAM wafers per month, roughly 40% of global output. These were of course non-binding. Micron, reading the demand signal, shut down its 29-year-old Crucial consumer memory brand to redirect all capacity toward AI customers. Then Stargate Texas was cancelled, OpenAI and Oracle couldn’t agree terms, and the demand that had justified Micron’s entire strategic pivot simply vanished. Micron’s stock crashed.
realistically any 'huge' frontier model that takes a rack of H100s to infer against is probably going to have downtime no matter who runs it.
downtime is always going to 'scale' poorly against loads that require a lot of hardware thrown at them, even with lots of good fail-over -- probably worse for the small vendors because they don't have the contracts supplying them with hardware first so availability is already at a premium for them.
so, I guess i'm saying yeah I hope frontier-level-models get out soon in the open arenas, but I suspect the same or similar level of exclusivity will exist as long as they take that much compute to operate.
What makes you say it is a bad business decision? It seems to be a fine decision to make for things like AWS, since when it goes down, a ton of websites go down and no one blames the site.
There is no way to know whether it is a good or bad business decision just because they can go down when a third party goes down. For example, if you save $50 million a year by firing half your employees and replacing them with AI, but you lose $10 million a year because your site goes down when Claude goes down, then you made a great business decision.
Oddly, I do not think you are wrong. In a pure money calculus exercise, this seems like a no brainer. Naturally, the math gets iffy the moment we are trying to capture something less tangible like 'customer may get sufficiently annoyed to drop us altogether' or 'we are no longer a respected company' or what MBAs would call 'unexpected goodwill extraction'.
I honestly don't care nearly as much as I used to, because I used to be more upset over this. Now, I simply wait to see how much is enough to rile up average Joe and Jenna.
On the other hand a competitor site that is up (or bricks and mortar competitors) might get a lot of business when AWS goes down. If you depend on AWS for operations it might be a lot more expensive than that.
Mostly I think its that management does not blame the person who picks AWS. Its another iteration of "no one got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft".
It is also an issue at other levels: if all a county's businesses rely on AWS (let alone its government) then that gives the US huge leverage over you (sanctions would shut down your economy).
This is exactly my point, though. I was simply stating that you can't be sure it is a bad business decision just because it goes down sometimes. It isn't immediately obvious from that single fact whether the business decision is good or bad, it is simply one factor to consider. Occasional downtime isn't an immediate business killer for every business.
That would require AWS to actually be down a lot, and it’s not. Betting your business on AWS being flakier than whatever alternative provider you use is probably not a good idea.
No it would not require that. Suppose you are one of 10 competitors. The others all use AWS.
Your system is down as often as AWS. When you are down your lost sales are shared between 10 of them. When AWS is down you get all their lost sales.
Obviously very simplified, but you get the point. There might be a huge gain in being up when others are down.
> Betting your business on AWS being flakier than whatever alternative provider you use is probably not a good idea.
You are not betting your business on it. You are betting the consequences of downtime only.
AWS does not seem to be all that high reliability out of the box. You can use multiple availability zones etc. but you can do the equivalent elsewhere.
hundreds (thousands?) of companies who based their business on capabilities built around someone else's API. Companies that had important features stop working because a company's API terms and conditions changed. Were you not around for this?
Corporate leaders don't learn lessons. They follow trends, chase growth, reduce the perception of risk, diffuse blame, get their business acquired, and exit with money bags in both hands. No learning from experience necessary.
I am not sure how many people learned it the first time. To be fair, it's really hard to build a business without major dependencies. The key is to assume they will fail and have alternatives available.
Only if you think consolidation of the entire tech industry being funneled into a dozen or so companies as positive sure.
Most of humanity doesn't think this, nor I doubt any devs like the current state of affairs where 4 companies dictate the direction of technology in this country.
Nobody dictates you anything - you’re welcome to setup your own dc if you wish to as some folks do. Not sure about “most of humanity” (lmao) but most of professionals in this line of work clearly don’t think it’s worth it for them
we have a big dependency on AI, both for developers (can survive without it, mostly habits) and internal workflows (very hard to go without it). So we decided to unplug from cloud AI, rent our own GPU and use an open model for both scenarios. We have been very happy with it so far, 60% cheaper and around 50% faster
Faster in what way? All the open models we have access to at work are very noticeably behind the frontier models to the point where it's usually faster to not use them at all.
Is it important to be that self reliant? I wasn't in the workforce then, so I assume if you have an outsourced system with 99% reliability it would be an acceptable risk. Not sure if any AI system will reach that level, but for potential gains it could be worth it.
Former cofounder had a $60 million ARR payment platform on a big company. They saw the success and kicked them off the api and built the same product. Now it’s billions on there public filing income statement.
The rise of the “programmable web,” internet companies offering “free” APIs on which businesses were built, and then destroyed when the company offering the API changed the terms or started charging for it. Twitter was a famous example, Facebook was a major culprit, Google offered a lot of free APIs that wreaked havoc like this, and many, many many smaller forgotten examples.
“Web 2.0” was supposed to be a web of interoperable applications with features exposed by APIs, where you could assemble little pieces of functionality into new and novel configurations. It was cool for a little while, but it was never sustainable. There was an enclosure of the commons (they were never really the commons), and now we’re all digital serfs.
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