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Like Jensen Huang said the job of an engineer is to solve problems not writing code. The code is a means to an end. This is certainly true for me as an engineer and why I'm not worried about AI.

Exactly - any USB mouse via the USB-C connector (or lightning camera adapter before that) works. External displays also work via USB-C.


I use Opus 4.6 Fast-mode. It produces significantly better results in my work than any Codex 5.3 tier.


Me too. It's great that my employer pays for it and there's basically no budget, because this configuration is 10x more expensive than the regular default Sonnet.


Rapid iteration would possibly make up for the drop in quality, but I can't afford to use fast mode as I'm a contractor and pay for my own AI usage :(


I am one of the people who uninstalled ChatGPT and closed their account and installed Claude in the last 24 hours. I know plenty of others who did the same. I wonder whether this trend can be sustained.


I dislike OpenAI as much as anyone else, but I doubt this trend will be sustained, and I also doubt this will have any huge impact in numbers.

Most people just don't care.


I have to defend the Googlers here (I work at a different hyperscaler). Teams / services need to optimize their COGS. That means optimizing infrastructure cost. A lot of pay as you go service may not have any base cost to customers but they require some infrastructure to be provisioned. Without quotas you can have a lot of provisioned infrastructure which does not produce any revenue to even collectively break even. Just yesterday this a decision we evaluated again in my team. As a team we cannot afford an unlimited quota - both because of what that would do to our bottom line and because we can't necessarily obtain all the quotas we need ourselves to provision enough capacity for our dependencies. It's a difficult trade off requiring manual intervention.


i may have not emphasized enough how important quotas are for customers. quotas are very important guardrails for orgs that ensure that newly hired engineer who wants to "test drive the cloud" by running a BigQuery tutorial they found on github, gets stopped before they burn $10k in an afternoon. however, quotas on gcp are there for the benefits of google and not geared towards the customers. first there is an ever expanding tree of potential quotas complicating production rollouts of infra and second they are all set insanely low so even the smallest POC gets blocked. requesting a small increase routes the quota through software and auto-approval, requesting a quota that allows for a production workload? 3 weeks + help from your account rep, if google has blessed you the privilege of being allowed to talk with a human googler. no account rep you say, well your production workload can just wait around for google support to potentially acknowledge your existence.


I second this. Not experiencing any Azure issues at this time.


Speak for yourself :)


Don’t worry. Self-awareness is not required. ;)


How is this different from 18F (a group within GSA which Elon killed), US Digital Service (which Elon kind of converted to DOGE) or Defense Digital Service (DDS)?

Is the only difference that the current government can claim they started this (completely ignoring they dismantled the previous programs)?


Now that the administration killed 18-F and USDS, they need a new organization that does the same thing but consists of people loyal to this administration.


More seriously, one big difference is that USDS recognized that design is as important as technology. This org only wants engineering-types.

> We're looking for expertise in software engineering, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data analytics, or technical project management. Strong problem-solving abilities and a passion for public service are essential.


https://americabydesign.gov/

Design is separate but equal.


Ha. Nice Brown v. Board pull.


Something often observed in authoritarian states is duplication of effort because of empire building. The ruler cannot trust any of his underlings- they are all sucking up to him and backstabbing each other constantly, so he pits them against each other, assigning overlapping responsibilities on purpose to keep any one subordinate from becoming too strong. This is why all of the "fascism/communism is so efficient" arguments need to actually look at the nature of Soviet or Nazi governments. As an example, there were at least five completely separate armed ground forces in Nazi Germany (1).

This constant competition between parts of the government actually led to tremendous waste. You can see it again in the Soviet space program during the 1960's. While NASA had a single purpose of getting to the moon before 1971 with a unified organization under the control of a single leader, after Khrushchev was deposed (and Korolev died) the Soviet space program splintered into a war between the old OKB-1 (Korolev's group) and Chelomei's OKB-52 that lasted for twenty years over Super-Proton vs Energia etc.

1: The Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS are the two most famous, but the Luftwaffe recruited, trained and equipped the Fallschirm-Panzer Korps and Fallshchirmjaeger- yes, German paratroops worked for Goering not the Wehrmacht. There were also five Marine Infantry Divisions under the Navy- they had half as many Marine Divisions as the US did, despite many fewer amphibious assaults! And the Volksturm, at the end of the war when things looked grim for Nazi Germany, was under NSDAP party control but separate from the Waffen-SS.


Those were services, this is a force


Don't forget to work in "dominance" and "lethality"! It really, truly, is all about criticizing and tearing the old thing down, and belatedly stepping it up again with neoconservative vibes.


I'm assuming that unlike 18F or USDS, you'll likely be asked to do ethically-compromising things?


You're missing a half dozen others.

Yeah, this is nothing more than grandstanding idealism. Their staff will no doubtably be as dumb as Space Force or Air Force when it comes to cloud and technology. I've dealt with them in various forms throughout the years contracting. BESPIN was entirely contractor driven. Their devops pipelines and how to deploy things. If that's your indicator, good luck.


Fortunately that's addressed in the extremely fine FAQ:

> How is Tech Force related to other government technology programs, including ones at GSA or the United States DOGE Service?

> While Tech Force will coordinate across all of government, it is distinct from other technology initiatives within government, including the United States DOGE Service and programs managed by GSA. These programs differ in their mandates, structure, required skillsets, and ability to convert to the competitive service.

Any questions?


I was prepared to fume here until I checked your comment history. I guess it is true that sarcasm occasionally fails to get across the cable.


How are they different?

Well, they're different. That's how.


Maybe it is all LLM generated, as in: "Eat your own dog shit"


That does not include the Copilot related APIs though.


Very common. Every Autograph Collection, Luxury Collection, JW Marriott, Marriott, Westin, W, St Regis, Le Meridien, etc has daily housekeeping - and many of those brands / collections have turn down service too.


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