>Nobody at Anthropic is taking a 5 week summer break or working a 35 hour week
The people working at Mistral, Expedition 33, or other top successful software coming out of the EU, most likely also aren't working only 35 hours/week either. In fact some probably squeeze some work on weekends too out of dedication and pressure to meet deadlines.
In a lot of Austrian SW companies for example, have "all-in" contracts where you waive your rights to the scrutiny of the standard 38,5h/week in exchange for a "higher" salary with longer work hours and less time tracking. Similar cases in France I believe.
The 35h/week European meme people here parrot, you mostly see only in civil servants, old established monopolistic companies with moats and strong unions, not in scrappy start-up trying to make it and fix a bug before release, or semiconductor companies fighting a tape-out.
So no, work hours aren't what's limiting EU startups.
I’ve worked most of my career in US tech satellite offices and I have not experienced EU team members to be less productive than US team members, nor spend less time on work (if anything, more really since they also need to be available for US time zone overlap).
It’s true there are chill jobs here, as there are in the US.
But ambitious people tend to work as much as ambitious US people (and it’s really more like 40 hours work weeks - 39,5 where I live since lunch is not work time). But again, many are not really counting, it’s just a full time job.
Vacations (typically 3 weeks summer holiday and additional weeks to distribute over the year) does create longer time on skeleton crew. Skilled tech labour is also cheaper so you can just hire more to make up for it.
It is interesting to think how AI will potentially change the dynamics back to this from general purpose software.
In a world where implementation is free, will we see a return to built for purpose systems like this where we define the inputs and outputs desired and AI builds it from the ground up, completely for purpose?
Probably. It’s already happening with SaaS as an example. I’ve mentioned this on HN a lot in past but my (established) company has been rolling its own CRM and some other tools with AI.
It seems we can build a product ourselves in the same time it would take us to talk to saas vendors and draft the RFP/requirements. We can build it and iterate as the requirements are being forged, so can essentially have completed software with just the features we care about, with full ability to add features in future (something saas doesn’t promise) often before an implementation would even kick off. We’re searching through all our SaaS products and i expect we’ll cut 50% of them in 1-2 years. The ones that are sufficiently complex or regulated have some protection (like accounting systems).
There was a rumor going around Silicon Valley that if ICE came to San Francisco in force that Mark Zuckerberg's house was going to go up in flames in retaliation. You will be surprised to learn that the oligarchs talked to Trump and they did not come.
The billionaire class has enabled armed masked police in our streets, endless layoffs, basically don't pay taxes at any reasonable percentage, and basically have rigged politics with Citizens United.
Given that, I can see how people are resorting to 18th century French tactics.
The top 1% of income earners pay 40% of all the federal taxes collected. The top 25% pay 89% of taxes.
Net of transfers, 60% of households receive more from government transfers than they pay in taxes.
The idea that rich people don't pay taxes is just not correct. The entire system is basically rich people subsidizing everybody else through byzantine distributional systems.
GINI is still going up. That means we are getting less equal over time. The entire system is subsidized by the rich because nobody else has any money! By definition rich people have to pay.
If we have a pool of $100 and I take $99 and you get $1, and then I get taxed $5 and you get taxed $0, I still have almost everything. Is this.. unfair to me?
It's in fact the opposite of what you said: everyone else is subsidizing the rich, who have gamed the system to live extravagant lifestyles. Eventually this will lead to a revolution and all us rich people will be beheaded. It's the normal outcome of this sort of thing.
The top 0.01% still pay enormous taxes. Elon one year personally paid $11B in taxes.
I get that a lot of people think people's unrealized capital gains should be taxed, so maybe the argument you're making is something like:
"People with very large paper-gains based on appreciation of the market-value of the assets they own pay 0% taxes on those unrealized gains"
In which case, yeah, that's definitely true. But if they sell those assets, they pay taxes. Some of the taxes from those sales can be offset by doing things like donating enormous sums of money to charity. And sometimes people take loans against their equity, which is not a taxable event. Though, in order to pay those loans back, they have to sell something (taxable) or earn money elsewhere (also taxable). So loans are tax deferral...
Buy assets (stocks, real estate, etc.)
Hold them as they appreciate (no tax on unrealized gains)
Borrow against them (loans are not taxable income)
Die without ever selling
What is happening is that they are becomming richer and lower ranks are becomming poorer. Simply, they are so much richer that the little fraction they pay on taxes looks big.
This perception that "lower ranks" are becoming poorer is just empirically not true.
On every metric, people in all income brackets are earning more on both a gross and COL-adjusted basis. It is the case that top quintile income has increased more than bottom quintile income, but a faster relative increase does not mean the other group is getting poorer.
The other very interesting thing is that there is statistically not really a "upper ranks" and "lower ranks". The majority of people in the 1% each year are there for the first (and often only) time. And a very, very small percentage of people in the bottom percentiles remain there for their whole life.
Some interesting research:
* 12% of the population will find themselves in the top 1% for at least one year
* Nearly 70% will spend at least one year in the top 20%
* More than half will have at least one year in the top 10%
* While 12% may reach the top 1% at some point, a mere 0.6% stay there for 10 consecutive years
All of that is to say, the idea that there are is some entrenched upper class waging war against some entrenched lower class is just empirically not true. If you dig through the data what you'll find is:
1. People who are just entering the workforce don't make a lot of money
2. As people spend time in the workforce, they make increasingly more money
3. When they retired, they start making less money but tend to have assets to live on
It's far more dynamic than most people's intuition leads them to believe.
Billionaires aren’t becoming billionaires from income. It’s increased stock valuations that create that level of wealth.
I constantly see posts focused on high earners already paying tons of tax. They do, but this should reinforce the point that the ultra wealthy should be paying more tax. People aren’t saying the guy on £500k should pay more, they’re saying the guy with £100m in assets should be.
A research step (gather insights from across the codebase and internet for how to accomplish the next step), planning step (how should I sequence implementation given that research), an implementation step, and a verification step (code review of the implementation) is super effective workflow for me.
> The full setup works with any project that has a benchmark and test suite.
so having a clear and measurable verification step is key.
Meaning you can't simply give an AI agent a vague goal e.g. "improve the quality of the codebase" because it's too general.
Seems clear to me that OpenAI at this point is a Ponzi scheme waiting to collapse. This is why they are trying to IPO and dump their shares on the public market before they go bankrupt.
Not happening
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