This is not really Veblen situation. A lot of these are primarily money laundering outfits, the artificially high prices, are simply a means of converting cash into bank deposits. Similar schemes exist in art, sculptures, and jewelry. There are some mom and pop type stores that are legit and some of the money goes to actual artists who make these but the ones in Palo Alto (or similarly unattainable rent neighborhood rug shops), are not that.
That’s internet lore. Nobody is buying a $50,000 rug with cash. If any of the people were, the rug guy wouldn’t have a place to bank. Reality is you can move a few rugs a month and make ok money.
There’s a market for these types of businesses. In my area there’s a dude with a company that sells and maintains $50-150k+ Christmas light and decoration displays. He has ~100 customers. The men’s clothing place I go to is a group of guys hanging out having a good time - it doesn’t look busy, but their 4-5 customers a day are dropping $3-10k/visit.
Stores like that are “laundering” money like the rest of the commercial real estate world… by playing games with various (legal) tax schemes. They are no more illegal than a Hampton Inn or AirBnb guy.
Real money laundering places are restaurant/bar, laundromats, arcades, and low income residential.
Tax schemes are there to save taxes using legalism loopholes, these places are happy to pay the taxes on "cash" purchases to bank the proceeds. Nobody is buying 50K rugs is correct, most of the transactions are self reported for the purpose of paying taxes and depositing funds. IRS and fincen are not in it together, in fact IRS encourages people to pay taxes on ill gotten gains.
Wrong question. There is no reason to link the sort of dirty money with the type of laundering business. The process of laundering, and need thereof, are universal to criminal industries.
I interviewed at yahoo during the tenure of Marissa Meyer and decided not to join after noticing a strange lack of diversity in my interviewers (I saw a similar lack of diversity at Apple Pay much more recently), anytime top level organizations become infested by monocultures, it becomes impossible for progress, new ideas and innovation to take foot. It doesn’t matter which clique or group has infected the organization by giving priority to conformity over diversity, it all ends the same way. This is not a call for institutional DEI, this is about being on the lookout for monocultures in innovative organizations.
They were trained in a large and not insignificant part on reddit content. You only need to look at the kind of advice reddit gives for any kind of relationship questions to know this is asking for trouble.
All the ones I've seen are terrible. But that's likely because I don't subscribe to them and they are large enough to occasionally show up on Reddit's front page. Anything that shows up on the front page is crap.
The point, though, is that the LLM likely has a larger exposure to the larger subreddits than the better smaller ones, and perhaps is more likely to reflect the attitudes of the larger ones.
I am a software engineer in his 50s, with stints in big tech, big bank and fintech with domain expertise in payments, risk, performance engineering, and data. In addition I have led global teams of hundreds of engineers with outcomes that have transformed multiple Fortune 500. I have been unemployed for a year and a half with no light at the end of the tunnel. Most of my network of similarly older professionals and C level executives has either retired or suffering similarly. Thankfully I am rich and still getting deferred executive compensation checks from multiple Fortune 500 companies but I am bored and think I have more to offer. I am working on a couple things to allay my boredom, we shall see if something comes of it.
As an engineer also in his 50s, I can relate, based on one concept: "wanting to work" versus "needing to work". I'm definitely not rich, but I could probably retire if I wanted to. I just don't want to. I want to work; I enjoy it. Many of my friends have retired, and they all seem bored to me. However, many/most people need to work to pay the rent, put kids through college, etc. I never really grasped this concept when I was younger, because, back then, it was all need to work.
I feel like I'm a better employee now, because I feel like I can be more honest. If a manager says something stupid, I feel totally comfortable checking them on it. When I was younger that wasn't the case. I was always nervous about retribution. However, there's a flip-side to this: a lot of managers don't like to be checked. Also, there's exploitability. When I was younger, I never said no to any proposed work, regardless of how it impacted my "personal time". Now, my attitude is, "Work this weekend? Nope. Get a junior to do that. I'm going surfing this weekend." LOL
Have a good friend, a 68yo guy, with grown-up kids (as in having their own families, houses, careers, etc), just happily hacking away in SQL, Python, building dashboards in PowerBI, learning AWS and bunch of other stuff, as a consultant. He says he'd be bored out of his mind just sitting at home.
Who says you can't have role models in your 50s? :)
One of the _many_ reasons job statistics of all kinds is completely useless. According to these numbers you (and I as I was looking for a job for 1.5 years myself recently) are happily retired (according to analysis of employment figures that I read from time to time). Hence, "nobody wants to work" and all that.
I am seeing this in my community as well, it has become nearly impossible for early career folks to find opportunities and it is due to a number of factors. In addition to economy, the fast ramp up of hiring in covid and of course AI, we now have geo-political headwinds in the mix. If you are in this situation, or if you would like to help make a difference, please reach out to me, email is in profile. @Dang, if this is not appropriate, please let me know.
One of the interesting ones we encountered was in the JDBC driver of our chosen database at the time. Under load, the application core dumped. Mind you this is java, running a native jdbc driver, no JNI in sight. It took some gdb stepping to figure out that under load, the JIT compiler got a little aggressive and inlined a little more code than there was room in the JIT buffer - result? a completely random core dump. Once I did find it, it was a simple matter of increasing JIT buffer size and adding more heap and ram. Tracing assembler generated from byte code generated from java was just part of the issue, the fact that the code itself had nothing to do with the issue is what made it interesting as the buffer size is set in a completely different area by the jvm. Fun times.
This is similar to an approach I use but instead of a queue, I accomplish this using a ring buffer that wraps around and overwrites entries older than window size. We maintain a global window aggregate, subtract ring buffer slot aggregate for entries dropping out and accumulate new entries into new slot aggregate while adding it to the global aggregate. Everything is o(1) including reads, which just returns the global window aggregate.
Yes, but how do you update your max when you drop old values. That's the issue with max forming a monoid and not a group.
The whole point of the post is that this is easy to implement for sum, but is difficult for max. Posting how someone solves the problem for sum isn't really addressing anything new here.
I am in phoenix, it is summer right now so things are double dead but even in fall to spring months, I have tried to find tech meetups (my interests are c++, c99, java, distributed systems, data engineering and non generative AIML/infra) and I can’t find any activity in the 5th largest city in US. I have tried to host things myself but only my friends or coworkers showed up, where are my fellow passionates?
I think there are enough out there with the surge of Covid relocation population.
Godaddy used to host some when I was briefly there for work in the early 2010s but the meetup.com tech community was definitely non-existent. I would have been very active if it wasn’t dead. Just need some catalyst to get it started. :)
