Daniel

Heading 4 is finally here 😤 The years of “just bold the text and pretend” are over. Rolling out now.

I listed 3 requirements. The last 20 submissions I got matched 0 of these requirements. I'm so tired.

I would like to purchase a handful of code problems that modern LLMs can’t solve. Requirements: - programmatically verifiable (can be tested without human interaction) - “before” state (repo before the commit that implements the solution) - example code that actually solves the problem I am willing to pay up to $500 per problem that I can easily test locally and confirm current models (gpt-5.3-codex, opus 4.6) are unable to solve. If you can’t tell, I’m running out of “too hard for LLM” code tasks 🙃🙃🙃

Nearly every board meeting : "Hiring strong infra folks is incredibly hard right now"

like if you’re even kinda good at kubernetes or C++ you’re unbelievably employable rn

taste is a new core skill

what is a *real tangible benefit to being in san francisco as opposed to being anywhere else if you’re in tech?

> be me, applied scientist at amazon > spend 6 months building ML model that actually works > ready to ship > manager asks "but does it Dive Deep?" > show him 37 pages of technical documentation > "that's great anon, but what about Customer Obsession?" > model literally convinces customers to buy more stuff they don't need > "okay but are you thinking Big Enough?" > mfw I am literally increasing sales > okay lets ship it > PM says there's not enough Disagree and Commit > we need to disagree about something > team spends 2 hours debating whether the config file should be YAML or JSON > engineering insists on XML "for backwards compatibility" > what backwards compatibility, this is a new service > doesn't matter, we disagree and commit to XML > finally get approval to deploy > "make sure you're frugal with the compute costs" > model runs on a potato, costs $2/month > finance still wants a cost breakdown > write 6-pager about why we need $2/month > include bar raiser in the review > bar raiser asks "but can we do it for $1.50? we need to be Frugal" > spend another month optimizing to hit $1.50 > ready to deploy again > VP decides we need to "Invent and Simplify" > requests we rebuild the entire thing using a new framework > framework doesn't exist yet > "show some Ownership and build it yourself" > 3 months later, framework is half done > org restructure happens > new manager says this doesn't align with team goals anymore > project cancelled > model never ships > manager gets promoted to L8 for "successfully reallocating resources" > team celebrates with 6-pager retrospective about what we learned > mfw we delivered on all 16 leadership principles > mfw we delivered nothing else > amazon.jpg