> For transparency, a single software engineer budget is $670K+.

Are you saying that the costs to employ a single software engineer is $670K+? If you mean something else then nvm.

Otherwise that's a ridiculous number to use unless you are specifically talking about places with the highest cost of living in the country where a mid-level dev starts at over $200K.

I am saying that. Salary + taxes + insurance + retirement + other benefits + support cost is around 670k. Salary eats up like 160k of that budget, though.

Please provide a breakdown.

I find this 4X of base salary implausibly high. 2X strikes me as closer to my reality at a large academic medical center.

I don't have a breakdown. It was a number cited to me from a manager. Downvotes are interesting.

Payroll taxes on $160k salary are $12,240. Employer contribution to health insurance is maybe $6k - $20k. Retirement maybe $5k. Still under $200k.

Heck of a lot of "support cost" to get to $670k

Your numbers make sense from what I've seen in private sector. And meet the common sense threshold as well.

Whether the numbers are either wrong or if that is truly what support costs look like at a university would be interesting to know.

> My concern is that, even if the exercise is only an amusing curiosity, many people will take the results more seriously than they should, and be inspired to apply the same methods to products and initiatives that adversely affect people's lives in real ways.

That will most definitely happen. We already have known for awhile that algorithmic methods have been applied "to products and initiatives that adversely affect people's lives in real ways", for awhile: https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/roots-of-unity/revie...

I guess the question is if LLMs for some reason will reinvigorate public sentiment / pressure for governing bodies to sincerely take up the ongoing responsibility of trying to lessen the unique harms that can be amplified by reckless implementation of algorithms.

The RES (Reddit Enhancement Suite) browser extension indirectly does this for me since it tracks the lifetime number of upvotes I give other users. So when I stumble upon a thread with a user with like +40 I know "This is someone whom I've repeatedly found to have good takes" (depending on the context).

It's subjective of course but at least it's transparently so.

I just think it's neat that it's kinda sorta a loose proxy for what you're talking about but done in arguably the simplest way possible.

I am not a Redditor, but RES sounds like it would increase the ‘echo-chamber’ effect, rather than improving one’s understanding of contributors’ calibration.

Echo chamber of rational, thoughtful and truthful speakers is what I’m looking for in Internet forums.

That’s what everyone living in an echo chamber (and especially one of their own creation) thinks they’re in.

"you're in an echo chamber" is one of the most frightfully overused opinions.

The expression is an echo chamber in and of itself; it is self-fulfilling prophecy.

I don't think I'm in any is my problem (HN is better than most, doesn't mean it's good in absolute terms...)

flat earth creationists would describe their colleagues the same way.

a group of them certainly is an echo chamber; why isn't your view?

He doesn't deny that his point of view forms an echo chamber.

"flat earth creationists would describe their colleagues the same way."

Actually they mostly don't. Lots of infighting over the real true answer .. (infinite flat earth, finite but with impassable ice walls, ..)

An echo chamber is a product of your own creation. If you're willing to upvote people who disagree with your and actively seek out opposite takes to be genuinely curious about, then you're probably not in an echo chamber.

The tools for controlling your feed are reducing on social media like Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, etc., but simply saying that you follow and respect the opinions of a select group doesn't necessarily mean you're forming an echo chamber.

This is different from something like flat earth/other conspiracy theories where when confronted with opposite evidence, they aren't likely to engage with it in good faith.

it depends on if you vote based on the quality of contribution to the discussion or based on how much you agree/disagree.

I don't think you can change user behavior like this.

You can give them a "venting sink" though. Instead of having a downvote button that just downvotes, have it pop up a little menu asking for a downvote reason, with "spam" and "disagree" as options. You could then weigh downvotes by which option was selected, along with an algorithm to discover "user honesty" based on whether their downvotes correlate with others or just with the people on their end of the political spectrum, a la Birdwatch.

You can't change it for other users, only for yourself, which is what the original comment about the extension said.

Echo chambers will always result on social media. I don't think you can come up with a format that will not result in consolidated blocs.

Reddit's current structure very much produces an echo chamber with only one main prevailing view. If everyone used an extension like this I would expect it to increase overall diversity of opinion on the site, as things that conflict with the main echo chamber view could still thrive in their own communities rather than getting downvoted with the actual spam.

Hacker News structure is identical though. Topics invite different demographics and downvotes suppress unpopular opinions. The front page shows most up voted stories. It's the same system.

HN's moderation and ranking is better. But there's definitely an echo chamber effect here too.

HN has some built-in ways to reduce this, like not allowing everyone to downvote everything.

More than having exact same system but with any random reader voting ? I'd say as long as you don't do "I disagree therefore I downvote" it would probably be more accurate than having essentially same voting system driven by randoms like reddit/HN already does

That assumes your upvotes in the past were a good proxy for being correct today. You could have both been wrong.

To be clear...prior to this recent explosive interest in LLMs, this was already true. Snowden was over 10 years ago.

We can't start clutching our pearls now as if programmatic mass surveillance hasn't been running on all cylinders for over 20 years.

Don't get me wrong, we should absolutely care about this, everyone should. I'm just saying any vague gestures at imminent privacy-doom thanks to LLMs is liable to be doing some big favors of inadvertently sanitizing the history of prior (and still) egregious privacy offenders.

I'm just suggesting more "Yes and" and less "pearl clutching" is all.

Who, exactly, is the "we" who you see "pearl clutching" instead of "yes and-ing"?

I personally don't think belief in an afterlife should be necessary to believe it's worthwhile to not be shitty to people.

"What goes around comes around" suffices for me.

Call it "ethics", call it "maximizing outcomes for all involved stakeholders", call it "karma", "good business", or "kindness"...whatever you call it, I don't think it's difficult to find your own personal justification for it if you want to.

> "What goes around comes around" suffices for me.

As you say. Best wishes, in any case.

Yup. I'm starting to wonder if the startup space has a pretty big blind spot not realizing that how easy it is to build mostly/semi functioning software is not a unique advantage...

I left an AI startup to do tech consulting. What do I do? Build custom AI systems for clients. (Specifically clients that decided against going with startups' solutions.) Sometimes I build it for them, but I prefer to work with their own devs to teach them how to build it.

Fast forward 3+ years and we're going to see more everyday SMBs hiring a dev to just build them the stuff in-house that they were stuck paying vendors for. It won't happen everywhere. Painful enough problems and worthwhile enough solutions probably won't see much of a shift.

But startups that think the market will lap up whatever they have to offer as long as it looks and sounds slick may be in for a rude surprise.

Of course it still makes sense to have a startup. Not because you will ever find a decent enough market. But if you are well connected enough you can find a VC and play with other people’s money for awhile.

You aren’t doing it to get customers, it’s for investors and maybe a decent acquisition

> Fast forward 3+ years and we're going to see more everyday SMBs hiring a dev to just build them the stuff in-house

I don't see this happening. Businesses generally want familiar tools that work reliably with predictable support patterns.

This is pretty cool. I like using snippets to run little scripts I have in the terminal (I use Alfred a lot on macOS). And right now I just manually do LLM requests in the scripts if needed, but I'd actually rather have a small library of prompts and then be able to pipe inputs and outputs between different scripts. This seems pretty perfect for that.

I wasn't aware of the whole ".prompt" format, but it makes a lot of sense.

Very neat. These are the kinds of tools I love to see. Functional and useful, not trying to be "the next big thing".

added some examples using runprompt in blog post:

"Chain Prompts Like Unix Tools with Dotprompt"

https://pythonic.ninja/blog/2025-11-27-dotprompt-unix-pipes/

Great article, thanks.

"One-liner code review from staged changes" - love this example.

It's State Capitalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism

We already know distillation works pretty well. So definitely would make sense Opus 4.5 is effectively smaller (like someone else said, could be via MoE or some other technique too).

We know the big labs are chasing efficiency cans where they can.

Yup, I've realized similar. "You are what you eat" and also "You are what you think". But like you said, it's not about scrutinizing every single thing you think/eat but more about recognizing patterns and seeing if those patterns are aligned with your own values.