YMMV but I've never seen a tech company give less than 2 weeks pay when doing layoffs.
I'd rather take the money and not have to work while I find a new job than to have a warning that my job is going to end in 2 weeks while I'm expected to keep working.
Another "America vs Europe" (well, UK): I have my notice periods written in my contracts, whether that's one month or three months, and it is always bi-directional.
Giving up to 3 months of notice to change jobs is wild. What are the consequences if you tell them you're leaving in 2 weeks instead of the notice period?
Typically in US tech companies layoffs don't give employees a notice period, but they do give severance pay. So you stop working effective immediately but you either get a large check or continue to receive paychecks for a period. That period depends on the company but it's usually within the range of your notice period. You don't have to work during it, though.
For very senior staff they can get an injunction against you, stopping you from working elsewhere. For lower staff they can withold unpaid wages and charge you for the cost incurred of getting the temp cover up to the notice period. Given how high temp/contractor wages are compared to employee costs, this can be an insane number, especially in tech where an employee might be on £200 a day, but a contractor might charge £500-1000 or more.
The flip side is that other employers understand that you can't fill a position immediately. There's not many circumstances where a unique opportunity really appears on no notice.
In situations where you are in dispute with your employer and want to walk off, the traditional solution is to file a number of disputes and get yourself signed off as sick with "stress", then quietly negotiate a mutually agreeable exit.
this could be because the business have all the power in the relationship, especially in bad job markets like today. When they hold all the cards they can make us dance for them and they never dance for us
If you have desirable skills, why does the business have all the power? If you don’t have desirable skills and yet remain employed, how could you expect otherwise?
well personally I think the people you hear complaining about being abused by their employer are more unskilled, otherwise they would leave for greener pastures as you said. But unskilled people are people too! And they have rights and should be treated fairly
If you're getting fired for cause then it is not an amicable breakup and the norms for when you're trying to maintain a relationship obviously don't apply. Layoffs for any reason other than "the company is out of money and is shutting down tomorrow" which only pay two weeks severance would be unusually stingy.
Depending on the size of the market in your area, or the market in general, not giving two weeks is effectively blackballing yourself. The city I work in is small enough I might have trouble in the future after leaving a manager in a lurch or burning a bridge.
Is that how things should be handled? Nopers. Is it how things are due to employers having more power than employees? Yeahpers.
Just being real here though, hiring flaky employees is enormously expensive. Every hiring manager / business owner would just as soon not waste their time on it. So there are these heuristics that have organically developed for how to spot good employees vs bad. Not having the stability, foresight, or courtesy to (be able to) give notice is merely an indicator of whether you have your shit together. Similar example: an HR director once told me early in my career that drug tests (back when those were a thing) are basically just IQ tests - the company doesn’t give a shit if you smoke pot, but if you can’t control yourself enough knowing you have a test coming up or you can’t figure out how to engineer a workaround, you’re probably dumber than the candidates we want.
The system is reasonable in the sense that it’s explainable and predictable on both sides. Social convention seems preferable to me in this context to binding contracts.
ChatGPT came out in 2022. Back then it was just a chatbot. Now we have AI agents. What matters is how we use them and how the agents get better. That’s what will move AI forward.
An 'AI agent' is just a chatbot that is told to type commands on a REPL-like interface as part of its system prompt. It's still processing pure text-based requests and responses, they're just not restricted to natural language.
A lot of people dont know this , also the chatbot (chatgpt) itself is a next token predictor (the GPT) that's been given an initial text that says " pretend to be a chatbot .." and asked to complete it , the coherant chatting behaviour is something thats emergent .
later on someone figured if you asked it to output a reasoning before it gave a response its output would have more logical coherence, as though the reasoning output tokens functioned as a scratch space for it to work on.
No, chatbots are LLMs trained for question-answering through RLHF (its not just a prompt). But yes, if you just zero-shot prompt a bare LLM you can still "talk to it" & you are correct on everything else as far as I know.
At lot of people don't know this, also the human brain is a squishy lump of meat. that's been given a childhood and the prompt "act like an adult", and asked to behave. The coherant chatting behaviour is something thats emergent .
later on someone figured if you shove Adderall in it and it to think before it speaks, it gave a response its output would have more logical coherence, as though the Adderall concentration drugd functioned as a scratch space for it to work on.
How much must one tie their self-worth to a chatbot to debase themselves like that? To think that a winner in the arms and intelligence race of animal kingdom, a member of the species that made this chatbot, would put down themselves like that in the defense of the thoughtless silicon is absolutely laughable and depressing at the same time.
I'm merely pointing out the logical fallacy of thinking complex systems can't arise from simpler components in an obtuse fashion. Ants are stupid individually, yet they're able to create giant structures in the wild. Hating on AI and calling it next word prediction isn't going to save anyone's jobs. Organizing will. Voting will.
good name recognition for Anthropic mega IPO. everything Anthropic does now is all gear toward its IPO from buying Bun, Stainless, getting big name AI guy to join...etc.
Frontier AI labs is pivoting to something that can justified their IPO. just like OpenAI shut down other services and pivot more into coding. They want to show profitability before their mega IPO.
This is a classic Elon move. He bundled up his company that is, shall we say, crap, into his most valuable company, then tried to hype it up as much as he could. Like when he promised Tesla cars would self drive in X years but it never happened, then pivoted to AI/robots, then re-routed Tesla’s GPUs to xAI, etc.
Cursor might not be the new hotness, but if we believe that agentic coding is the next wave and we’ve gone from asking chatbots to actually using agents for coding, then yes, this move makes sense for Elon to hype up a SpaceX IPO.
I've subscribed to Jetbrains all product for years. If the agent coding is going to be the next wave. Jetbrains is really behind. Even Microsoft offer better agent coding with VScode and Github copilot cli.
They’re definitely playing catch up, but the IDE integration makes interactive development really nice. Claude is good for one-shotting things, but I find JetBrains AI integration really useful for working with large codebases where I may be unfamiliar with things.
I think they’ve been caught in a bad spot. They’re a profitable company, but nowhere on the scale of Microsoft. And they don’t have billions of VC to effectively price dump. Other tools that can focus on one thing and burn cash are advancing quickly and some of them don’t really need an IDE at all.
The semi-recent introduction of ACP integration in the JetBrains IDEs has been a nice bridge. But now it’s confusing how everything comes together. I really hope they can survive.
DVD discs is not good for long term storage. it can get scratch and became unusable. you want a NAS/PC then rip the dvd and use plex or Jellyfin to watch your collection.
DVDs are extremely robust against scratches, even more so than CDs. Unlike CDs, which have the data protected by only a thin layer of lacquer under the label, DVDs sandwich the data between two layers of polycarbonate. The error correction is improved too.
Unlike hard disks, they're practically immune to shock (e.g. being dropped). Unlike SSDs and unlike hard disks, they're immune to ESD. And even if you somehow manage to damage one, it's just one, not your whole collection.
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