And existing obligations. Most people I know, myself including, stretch our current situation as the paycheque grows.
Some of it is intentional. A lot of it is slow creep (“ah, I can afford a, b, c now..that Maserati/Porche Cayenne GTS/Urus-lol I’ve always wanted!”). While you’re doing this, your spouse and kids are doing it 2x - “oh dad got that fancy new car! I guess I can ask him for the special edition Jordans now..”). Out of guilt, you let your family join in on the buying frenzy.
Now you’ve landed yourself with new loans and obligations (more expensive car = higher maintenance cost, same with house, etc - higher expectation all around, keeping up with Joneses, charity events, …).
Getting out of all that is much more difficult than overcoming your own greed and discomfort - many are legal obligations and you basically need a multi-year plan to go back unscathed (assuming you and your family are pragmatic enough to readjust your comfort level). For some it can be leaving useful social obligations - you lose your social circle if you downgrade (may have to move further away, no more club or association memberships).
The only real remedy is to not let your expenditure go up when you get a raise. But it’s less about you and in equal measure about how your partner operates, kids, family, their expectations etc. All in all, odds are not in an average Meta employees favour no matter what they might personally think/feel.
I think it can be radically more pedestrian than this. Just affording basic life in a high COL area is insane. Getting an apt in NY and paying for childcare for two kids can already be a 16k/mo endeavor, no porche entering the equation.
.... I'm not the person you're asking but I can give curious anecdata on a home purchase....
When I bought my home, I had a purchase agreement that said 'I will pay up to 1500$ cash if the property assesses for less than X' (X being the amount I told the realtor I was willing to pay.)
And the property happened to assess EXACTLY for X.
Collusion in markets is nothing new, and even when we regulate people find ways around it.
It is very telling especially in light of the Palantir manifesto, that all of this technology is being applied against individuals instead of towards ensuring business compliance.
Hmmm. Property purchase agreements are rather different in your neck of the woods than mine!
Here (UK) we do have a bit of variety, thanks to devolution and bloody mindedness. I'm talking about English here (possibly Welsh too), rather than British (England + Wales + Scotland) or even UK (England + Wales + Northern Ireland). Wales is actually a bit more complicated than that but let's keep it simple.
Here (England), you advertise a house price and invite buyers. You generally engage one or more estate agents (realtors) I think it is called an "invitation to treat" in legal terms.
... negotiations ...
Once a price is "agreed", contracts are drawn up by both sides and "exchanged". When the exchanged contracts are both accepted, then the contract is binding on both sides. Basically: the Buyer will Buy and the Seller will Sell etc.
I think the US is fairly similar in that you do have to agree to something before it becomes a binding agreement.
I brought it up two years ago and get downvoted when I brought it up a couple months ago.
There is a story on the front page right now about someone losing their child's family videos from a youtube ban. We hear about this stuff all the time.
I suspect we are gonna be in somewhat of an arms race with AI products as the bubble grows over the next 18-24 months. This makes me worried about how disadvantaged people are going to be if they lose access to the better platform (whichever that ends up being).
Do you think AI is going to be so important that we would benefit from legal protections for access?
Or do you think the models and technology will become so small we will be able to personalize / decentralize the tech and it still be useful / competitive?
Happening already. My new claude max account got instabanned after just a few messages asking it to debug some stuff for me, that they felt like a TOS violation. Nothing remotely controversial. The main model didn't even complain, some dumber background censorship model flagged it.
I am building a very similar thing after a short stent at a robotics company in 2024. The industry is very far behind more general dev experience and tooling.
I am forced to accept the popularity of ROS but I find it to generally be a terrible experience. Are you considering an alternative? Have you used foxglove?
Hey! Great to hear from someone in the same boat. I completely agree, the general dev experience and tooling around ROS can be deeply frustrating...
I am definitely looking into Foxglove! It seems to solve many of the transport/protocol headaches, but I feel like there's still a massive gap in how we actually interact with the robots day to day, especially when you are not glued to a desktop monitor.
I'd love to hear more about your experience. What specific part of the tooling drove you crazy enough to start building an alternative?
(Also, if you are open to a quick 15-min chat to share "war" stories, let me know!)
Foxglove is not the only name in town. There are many, Transitive Robotics, the company I'm building is one of them. Different from Foxglove we are much more focused on live-remote monitoring and control, e.g., we have a pretty popular remote teleoperation module: https://transitiverobotics.com/caps/transitive-robotics/remo...
You can find all the other modules we're currently offering here: https://transitiverobotics.com/caps/
The platform itself is and remains open-source.
I will second this. You might not be able to get away without ROS compatibility depending on the market but a dependancy on it is a big pain in the neck from my point of view.
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