Funnily enough we have had those comments with every single model release saying "Oh yeah I agree Claude 3 was not good but now with Claude 3.5 I can vibe-code anything".
Rinse and repeat with every model since.
There also ARE intrinsic limits to LLMs, I'm not sure why you deny them?
That was exactly my first thought as well. All those exercises are pointless and people don't seem to understand it, it's baffling.
Even if it's not Anthropic or OpenAI paying for the solutions, maybe it'll be someone solving them "for fun" because the paper got popular and posting them online.
How can a study like this be reliably conducted in the UK where it's illegal?
> In the UK Biobank, people were asked to estimate how many times they’d used cannabis over their lifetime, choosing from a set of ranges. We ended up grouping people into no use, moderate use, and high use, based on the number of times they'd used cannabis. And of course that's an imperfect way to group people, but it did allow us to approximate dose-dependent effects.
It's "illegal", but certain places have a semi-permanent funk hanging in the air. It's almost as if it's decriminalised, but I'd expect police to grudgingly act if you're overly blatant when smoking it in the street.
It really should be legalised so that we can earn a bit of tax from its sale and reduce the amount of cash that criminals make from it (not so much the seller to the public, but all the criminal organisations that grow and smuggle it).
> Realistically your team inevitably will have some downtime
What? My team wouldn't have any downtime even if we had 10x the amount of people.
If you work at a company where you have times where you don't have work to do, you should polish your resume because it means the company will go under.
Doing work is easy, not doing work is hard. It's trivial for any engineer to find stuff to do. The trick is doing the right stuff. Most software is bad and clunky, most requirements are wrong, and most of your customers, at best, tolerate your product.
I think most software companies need to be doing less. Deleting code, refining, and making their product genuinely useful as opposed to "able to technically contort to client needs".
It's even simpler than that. "Reading code is harder than writing code" has been repeated for decades and everyone agrees.
When you use AI to generate your code, instead of you writing it and then someone else reviewing it, there are two people reviewing it (you and the reviewer), which obviously takes longer.
Europe will never have competitive offerings until they pay their employees the equivalent of what FAANGs pay.
If you work for GCP or AWS in Europe, you'll easily get twice as much income as if you do the exact same job for Hetzner or OVH.
You can't build equivalents to GCP and AWS without paying the same. I work for a FAANG right now in Europe and I wouldn't consider even a single second any European cloud provider as potential employers.
> Europe will never have competitive offerings until they pay their employees the equivalent of what FAANGs pay.
Stop focusing on the absolute number of "$/year", and things will make more sense. Seemingly you'll be able to live a more lavish life in Spain given 1/4 of the salary compared to FAANG, yet your life is better and you can afford more.
Higher salaries aren't always better, especially when you're almost willfully ignoring more important things like purchasing power and quality of life.
I'm not comparing European salaries with American ones, I'm comparing salaries paid by American cloud providers IN EUROPE with salaries paid by European cloud providers.
> Higher salaries aren't always better, especially when you're almost willfully ignoring more important things like purchasing power and quality of life.
Senior SWE salaries I'm finding in a quick google search in Spain are 80k eur. According to levels.fyi [1] Google (and presumably the other clouds) are paying 170k eur. The comparison isn't even "is 4x the salary better in the US?" it's "is 2x the salary better in the same place?" which is obviously yes.
But you still won't get with 170k in the Bay Area, what you get in Paris, Madrid, Nantes or Barcelona with 80k.
In France, if you get 80k net, you do actually get ~160k, half of which is collected/distributed before by your employer to various mutualised funds (health, retirement, unemployment, state taxes, employee benefits, etc.).
And the mechanism is somewhat similar in other EU countries.
80k net is 6.6k. If you're getting 80k (which is the very upper end of the range) it's likely you are in Paris, where you're gonna give at least 2k of that on rent for a shitty damp place, and double that for something decent.
Trust me I would love to quit consulting and be able to have a chill permanent job that can afford me a good flat and lifestyle. I'm still searching. Spain situation is very similar last time I ran the numbers.
Definitely no fucking way I'm helping anyone build a cloud provider (a cash cow considering the margins in there) for such pay. If I want to sell my soul to the devil, the one across the pond is gonna give me twice as many bucks for it.
2k for a rent in Paris gets you nice places if you have the time to spend to look for it. Cooking your own food at home definitely makes a huge difference every month.
As a SRE, I got 65k in Nantes before I quit, and I've never had to think about any single expense at all, not once (having kids, house, dog, car, garden). That would still have been quite confortable in Paris (swapping the house for a smaller flat, and without the car/dog/garden though).
As an American these numbers are super depressing, haha. Big city US vs Europe cost of living & wages are almost like an order of magnitude different at this point.
Big house & garden 30min from Manhattan center in practice does not even exist due to the sprawl and poor transit here.
As crazy as this sounds, 65k is the wage paid here now to a doorman/concierge at the type of apartment building an NYC SRE/SWE lives in.
If you want big house & garden that looks like the listings at your link, they are maybe 45-60min commute and 2x the price.
Dining out in NYC ends up like 2X+ as expensive as London/Paris or 4X+ Madrid due to labor/real estate costs. Maybe worse, I just looked up Michelin star 5 course menus in Paris and these are like regular Thursday night 2 course dinner prices in NYC.
So in many ways we collect a much higher gross wage here to then spend it all for a lower quality of life.
> But you still won't get with 170k in the Bay Area, what you get in Paris, Madrid, Nantes or Barcelona with 80k.
Note the 170k eur is in Spain -- not the bay area. I compared salaries of Google in Spain to the average salary of a senior SWE in Spain. The point isn't that the big tech pay more in the bay area compared to Spain. The point is the big tech companies pay more in Spain compared to other Spanish companies.
And 170k eur in Spain is much more than 80k eur in Spain.
Again, by focusing solely on the salary you're missing the bigger picture. I know y'all are conditioned to just focusing on the salary, but there is so much more to life.
While this sounds like great philosophical advice, in practice big salaries do attract employees regardless. If you want to solve the "brain drain to American companies" problem, ignoring the fact that they pay better isn't likely to help.
I don't think I am. Spanish employees of Google benefit just as much from Spanish employment law as Jose's Web Dev Shop. It's the purest comparison considering it's within the exact same country.
I upvoted you. That’s absolutely true for other roles as well. Like hardware design engineers. At US company in Germany one gets real salary. At German big company one will make 2/3 of that salary. People are not stupid, why choose fraction of the salary when one can take it all. There are outliers, but majority will want to work for more than less money.
If they can get top talent for half the salary they won't suddenly start paying more.
There is only one solution: EU governments heavily subsidize those European cloud providers which enables them to offer top salaries and therefore attract top talent.
It would also help not taxing those incomes at 60%.
Every time I look at a permanent role in Europe, if I didn't already close the tab based on the offered salary, I plug the number into a take-home calculator and then I close the tab for sure.
Rinse and repeat with every model since.
There also ARE intrinsic limits to LLMs, I'm not sure why you deny them?
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