IDK, my team at a FANG has an average tenure of around 7 years and the ones less than that are new hires. I keep getting refresher grants every year. I'm sure this article rings true for some people but not me.
I'm an "old-hand" at a non-FAANG big tech, and have not had a meaningful refresher in a few years, or even a salary bump for that matter. This is a bad time to be looking for a new job, but I should have jumped ship years or even decades ago. I'm sure I'm under-compensated for my level of experience. Don't get caught in this trap like I did.
The job hopping thing was definitely a trend, but I think it died with ZIRP. kinda weird to reference it now, but I guess it does have relevance to the state of some of these older services. The original teams are long gone
Copying Google AI's response here as it's at least as good as what I was going to recall:
> Fever is a key part of the innate immune system, acting as a protective response to infection by raising the body's temperature. This increase in temperature inhibits the growth of many pathogens, enhances the activity of immune cells like leukocytes, and improves the effectiveness of the adaptive immune response.
My Vietnamese in-laws commonly make a sweat tent to shorten the duration of sickness. I can't say if it works, but it's something I intend to try next time I'm sick.
When I feel like I have a virus I usually put on my hoody which I only wear when I feel ill and a scarf and before going to bed I drink a lot of herb or ginger tea (like two cans)
this is will heat up your body and you get some night sweats, this usually helps reducing the sick time.
I can't say if it actually helps, but its become a ritual for that occasion
I wonder how the economics are shifted in China which is dependent on foreign oil but has plenty of (some very dirty, some clean) electricity? I'm sure subsidies are playing a great role(as they do in all things in China) and national security concerns are making EV trucks more viable.
At a macro level, more exports and less imports mean things should be good for their trade balance. Though you might rightfully worry about e.g. debt and other misaligned things in the Chinese economy. They have poor utilization of their production capacity for e.g. batteries.
The Chinese think in terms of expensive and cheap electricity rather than dirty and clean. The reason they have so much clean energy growth is because it's saving them money.
Subsidies are a very political/ideological talking point. But the traditional fossil fuel economy isn't exactly free from subsidies, incentives, tariffs, and other government instruments. The US having a dependence on oil and gas is hard to separate from its huge budgets for incentivizing and protecting that.
The Chinese have been very strategic about their R&D in the last few decades. It's paying off though. Demand for their clean tech exports is increasing and just when oil/gas markets are becoming increasingly volatile they are managing to be less dependent on those.
> The Chinese think in terms of expensive and cheap electricity rather than dirty and clean. The reason they have so much clean energy growth is because it's saving them money.
No. It's for both reasons, cheaper and cleaner. The pollution in cities was absolutely dire and a real health hazard as well as an embarrassment internationally. EVs including scooters and trucks are a large part of the reason the air is cleaner now.
When I was in Wuhan, I talked with an engineer who was having his second child. I asked what he thought about raising kids in such bad air pollution. He said at least it is getting better each year.
> Deepmind gets to work directly with the TPU team to make custom modifications
You don't think Nvidia has field-service engineers and applications engineers with their big customers? Come on man. There is quite a bit of dialogue between the big players and the chipmaker.
They do, but they need to appease a dozen different teams from a dozen different labs, forcing nvidia to take general approaches and/or dictating approaches and pigeonholing labs into using those methods.
Deepmind can do whatever they want, and get the exact hardware to match it. It's a massive advantage when you can discover a bespoke way of running a filter, and you can get a hardware implementation of it without having to share that with any third parties. If OpenAI takes a new find to Nvidia, everyone else using Nvidia chips gets it too.
This ignores the way it often works: Customer comes to NVDA with a problem and NVDA comes up with a solution. This solution now adds value for every customer.
In your example, if OpenAI makes a massive new find they aren't taking it to NVDA.
Nvidia has the advantage of a broad base of customers that gives it a lot of information on what needs work and it tries to quickly respond to those deficiencies.
Weird they'd do this after developing several generations of their own inference chip. Google is basically a competitor. This may just be a ploy to get better pricing from Nvidia.
On point 5, I think this is the real moat for CUDA. Does Google have tools to optimize kernels on their TPUs? Do they have tools to optimize successive kernel launches on their TPUs? How easy is it to debug on a TPU(arguably CUDA could use work here but still...)? Does Google help me fully utilize their TPUs? Can I warm up a model on a TPU, checkpoint it, and launch the checkpoints to save time?
I am fairly pro-google(they invented the LLM, FFS...) and recognize the advantages(price/token, efficiency, vertical integration, established DCs w/ power allocations) but also know they have a habit of slightly sucking at everything but search.
Software folks treat their output as if it's their baby or their art projects.
Hardware folks just follow best practices and physics.
They're different problem spaces though, and having done both I think HW is much simpler and easier to get right. SW is often similar if you're working on a driver or some low-level piece of code. I tried to stay in systems software throughout my career for this reason. I like doing things 'right' and don't have much need to prove to anyone how clever I am.
I've met many SW folks who insist on thinking of themselves as rock stars. I don't think I've ever met a HW engineer with that attitude.
You don't need an app to use X though. I've been on X for over 5 years and never installed the app. In fact, X is far better with Firefox+uBlock on mobile.
It points out when they are not using the app, and if they suspect a VPN. I saw one screenshot where it said "Desktop Browser" or something to that effect.
The number of otherwise intelligent folks I follow on twitter who occasionally brag or make note of their follower count without realizing 80%+ are bots is way too high.
I think that's by design though. Tolerate bots to get high-value users to participate more after they think real people are actually listening to them.
