Google "Dark pools". Currently they account for slightly over half of all US transaction volume. Yes, they're still regulated; no, we do not have visibility inside them.

I can already, completely above-board, sell someone a block of DRS'd IBM shares for crypto if I want to. Let's all be clear this isn't about denominating stocks in Bitcoin.

Rather, this is effectively about recording stock transactions on a blockchain. Nothing more and nothing less than swapping a distributed transaction log for a traditional ledger.

The implication is clear, the SEC is at least considering the idea of creating shares as a token cryptocurrency. In this case, the tokens are backed by real shares. That's not a technical requirement, though, and a future company might someday skip the major exchanges entirely to list only as a token. To be clear, there's nothing sacred about the exchanges and their "house rules"; there's nothing inherently wrong with using a blockchain vs a ledger; and to reiterate, this has nothing to do with "buying stocks with Bitcoin".

On that last point, I consider OKXICE's decision to accept payment in some nondescript "stablecoins" as extremely unfortunate. Not because I'm a cryptophobe, but because it muddies the waters as to the viability of the core concept of tokenized equity itself - Though that's a bit of a tautology, given stocks are already "tokenized equity". Whether we denominate them in USD or BTC or cowrie shells is an entirely separate issue.

We're running a business here. We need real software, not toys created as a fun weekend experiment with a chatbot or burning money to run an agent and get 50% (or more likely 5%) of the way there.

How dare the people who create your revenue streams demand reasonable working conditions?

Of course employers are welcome to set the terms under which they'll give us money. And similarly, we're free to set the terms under which we'll accept their money. That's how it works.

Personally, I love companies announcing draconian new RTO policies - There aren't many better indicators their stock price is going to spike short-term then tank a few quarters later. But that has nothing to do with working for those companies. On that front, it's just a hard "no", to the point I'm seriously considering becoming a professional "interview troll" once I retire!

I hate ads more than the average bear, but I have to admit, I have no idea where people are seeing these either. Are "ads" someone intentionally loads and watches really ads, or are they merely short-form content?

That said, if these are everywhere and the very fact I'm using FF with uBlock Origin is the exact reason I haven't seen these... That is the sort of viral advertising most companies dream of.

There's a fuckton of cigarettes manufactured every year. "If all your friends jumped off a bridge"... Good riddance!

LPT: You can also turn your phone to watch the content. I know, mind blown, right? Pass it along!

I'm not saying I would or wouldn't take this particular buyout, but as you point out, it's not a safe assumption the default severance would be the same absent this artificially sweetened offer. At a quick glance, New Jersey is the only US state that requires any severance at all, beyond making employees whole for time worked and paying out accrued PTO. Many do have additional requirements around mass layoffs, but nothing comes anywhere near two weeks per year of service. Even NJ, as the best-of-the-best (honestly surprised it's not CA or MA, but not in this case), only requires one week per year of employment.

That said, I see the GP's argument come up quite often in any online discussion of layoffs, and it took me years to finally figure out, this topic basically comes down to a simple class issue: If someone is a moderately well-paid salaried employee, a severance offer is almost always going to beat UI by miles (and as you also pointed out, that's not a mutually exclusive choice, UI just picks up after severance ends). If someone is a low-paid nonexempt worker, by contrast, severance is usually nonexistent and employers playing games around UI claim appeals are a lot more common.

There's also other benefits to consider, most importantly health insurance. Severance offers usually allow employees to keep their group health insurance during the severance period, while COBRA is eye-wateringly expensive even for someone formerly paid well.

The highest UI check in the country is in Washington state, and only comes out to $1208/week, for a maximum of 26 weeks (barring certain exceptional circumstances). A Principal Engineer (level 65) at Microsoft averages just shy of $246k/year and this buyout is offering up to 39 weeks total.

Weekly, that's $4.7k vs $1.2k. Total, that's $184k vs 31k.

I can guarantee nobody smart enough to be an engineer at Microsoft (as much as we might make fun of their culture and products) is dumb enough to fail that one-question math exam.

The real world is more complicated than that. For example, we still have a Windows 7 machine in my office. It has some very expensive but still very useful software locked to it that has no direct replacement available on either Linux or Windows 11. Obviously we have to be careful about security and controlling access to a legacy OS like that.

Blunt statements about "forcing an upgrade" are worthless in this kind of situation. Chances are anyone who is still using a system like that has a good reason for it, at least if it's in use professionally. We buy these assets because they solve problems. Those problems might or might not have a useful and cost-effective solution available on a different platform. If there is no modern solution available and the original still works, your statement that "the old ways are obsolete" is by definition false.

What you do need to do is rationally assess the risks and the threats you face and provide other ways of mitigating the risks and protecting against the threats if you can't rely on, for example, a legacy OS that no longer gets security updates to be secure by itself. But then ideally you shouldn't be relying on any single device or piece of software being secure as your only line of defence anyway, and assuming you already have some degree of defence in depth, accommodating unusual requirements is more a redistribution of security responsibilities than a fundamental change of approach.

Yes, it does look like we broadly agree here.

I suppose the main thing I'd have said very differently is the terminology, in that I wouldn't regard the kind of incompetent senior as a senior in the first place. But then I'm pretty old school about this: to me, a junior developer needs quite close supervision to produce useful results, a regular/mid developer can perform routine tasks with minimal supervision but might need more help with larger or more complex tasks, while a senior is someone you can give more or less any task on your project to and they'll figure it out, and senior is also the level of someone who would be capable of supervising and training a junior.

We've had a wave of people, particularly since the tech boom during COVID, who have obviously been over-promoted due to the employee's market and title inflation. They might now have titles like "senior" or even "lead" or "staff", but they don't have the skills and experience to operate successfully at those levels. I agree the acceleration of everything due to increasing AI use tends to show these people up and I agree that a good mid-level developer using AI might well outperform them. But then I suspect in reality a good mid-level developer was probably outperforming them before AI as well, it just wasn't so obvious.

That is wildly optimistic IME. Frontier models do a great job of sounding authoritative on any given subject. This is not the same as actually having expert-level knowledge and understanding, and the choices the models make when you ask them to implement something can and often do reflect that. There are several domains I've worked in over the past few years where AIs lack even basic knowledge an expert practitioner would have, probably because these fields are too specialised to have a lot of books available or papers published, so presumably there hasn't been much subject-specific content to train the models on.

I don't think it's usually about what AI "did really badly on" at this point. It's more about whether the overheads of adding all the guard rails and then reviewing and correcting all the output end up costing at least a similar amount to just writing the code yourself.

For a junior developer, I'd say frontier models passed their standard some time ago. Today's LLMs routinely write code at the level of a competent junior-mid but with the advantage of an inhumanly broad knowledge base.

For a good senior, I'm much less convinced. The frontier models are hit-and-miss when it comes to writing good test suites, which matters a lot when they rely on tests so heavily to reach acceptable quality. IME, they are still mostly miss when it comes to the business insight that seniors will take into account and design/architecture decisions that keep the code manageable as it evolves. While they have become much better at recognising existing patterns in the code, and I would say they follow them reasonably well the majority of the time now, there are still bizarre anomalies that creep in, and they aren't very good at extending those patterns when necessary.

I think AI advocates also tend to underestimate just how much time it takes to properly review what they are doing. Take a half-day Claude session to implement some new feature. It might take half an hour to give it the initial brief and then review its plan. Make a few edits and it'll propose a new plan that is also long and detailed and has no edit markings to show what it changed so you have to review the whole thing, carefully and in detail, again to pick up the minor changes it also made for no obvious reason. Then you let it start doing its thing. You can't really leave it unattended for long because it'll stop to ask questions. Some of those questions might be whether it can run a screenful of ad-hoc Bash script to make some edits to your source files, because for some reason it decided not to show the actual edits as it usually would, so now you have to figure out what all the sed incantations are actually going to do while looking at those files in another editor or just trust it and then review all the changes properly later anyway. Sometimes it decides to change its plan mid-flight, but not always in a good way, and if you interrupt it to apply corrections or redirect, you break the neat plan flow it was in. Then you get to the end and you can finally see how everything it has done fits together, and you still need to review everything with the same care as you would with a junior developer's code and probably apply a few fixes where it's come up with weird names or not quite followed a pattern or imagined some instructions that were never there and made other changes in other parts of the system that should be out of scope.

If you read to the end of that last paragraph, you know how I typically feel at the end of a half day working with an agentic UI. And the thing is, I do those sessions as experiments fairly often to keep up with progress, but a lot of what I do is still written by hand, which gives me simple, objective data to compare the two ways of working and see whether the AI tools are really making me more productive once you take everything into account.

Currently, based on objective data comparing similar fully completed development tasks like for like, I still outperform agentic workflows using frontier models by about 25-50% on average, and I don't have to pay anyone extra fees to do that, and subjectively I also find it more engaging to work that way. So I don't really buy the hype about AIs making us all orders of magnitude more productive unless you're happy to YOLO everything forever and take the much-discussed risks that comes with.

Personally, I think the optimum use of LLMs right now is probably not to use them for the whole coding workflow like that or rely on agentic tools, but to use them for tasks like answering quick questions about the existing code, doing research like a fancy search engine, writing a first draft of some boilerplate, and writing quick and dirty throwaway code for experiments, one-shot tools and the like, where you don't really care about the quality as long as it gets the job done and you will see immediately if it has in fact got the job done. For these things, the LLM can read and type faster than me, and that's useful.

Here's the problem, and why everyone resents this crap (your fellow IT folks most of all)...

Yeah, great, you're an Exchange admin and can send email "from" any random VP you want. And you have access to their recent document history so can "spice it up" by referencing actual projects we might really be assigned to. When your phishing tests are literally indistinguishable from legitimate emails, you're not "testing" anything, you're daring people to ignore legitimate work at risk of their continued employment.

If "my boss" sends me an email, which the headers show really came from his account, and asks me to take a look at a spreadsheet we worked on three days ago - You're not being clever, you're an asshole.

1) Comcast could have started moving to fiber a decade before the upstarts and qualified for the same subisidies.
2) Comcast has received 2.6B in subsidies since 1987.
3) Remind us again, how long as Biden been out of office now?

Tovarishch, your sons are dying, cold, alone, in a Ukranian ditch; just waiting for one of the many overhead drones to notice them and blow off their manhood while they bleed out. And for what? So the ex-KGB gangster in Moscow can fantasize about reuniting a mythical Historical Russian Empire that never existed and never will?

Go home to the family farm and enjoy a peaceful life. There's no glory for you in Ukraine.