In the areas that few people go to, it isn't actually enforced.

The Nepalese government just introduces this rule every few years in response to a missing trekker in the guise of safety.

As we migrated to newer models (gemini-3.0 and the o4-mini models) we again found it performed even better with x00k tokens. Our system prompt grew to about 20k tokens and the bots were able to handle it perfectly. Our issue became time to first token with large context, rather than the bot quality.

The ultra large 1m+ llama models were reported to be ineffective at >1m context. But at this point, it becomes so cost prohibitive to use anyway.

I am continuing to have success using Cursor's Auto model, and GPT-5.1 with extremely long conversations. I use different chats for different problems moreso for my own compartmentalisation of thoughts, rather than as a necessity for the bot.

The opposite is true now. The context windows are enormous, and the bots are able to stay on task extremely well. They're able to utilize any previous context you've provided as part of the conversation for the new task, which improves their performance.

The new pattern I am using is a master chat that I only ever change if I am doing something entirely different

Not only does this algorithm exist, but we're using it to communicate right now!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_congestion_control

I definitely took an uncharitable reading, but man am I tired of being told big tech is neutral. I will continue to be cynical and I will continue to gnash my teeth at anyone who tells me otherwise.

I'm also not really asking that people leave these roles - everyone has their own path to take. Just that they don't make posts dismissing criticism of these structures as silly cynicism. Or else they will have to contend with me writing a comment disgreeing with them.

I don't live in the US. But if I did, and I was capable enough to be a successful software engineer, I would try to work for an organisation that was not implicated in abhorrent behaviour. If I was to work for one, I would not attempt to dismiss criticisms of it as cynicism.

The organisation he works for is implicated in surveillance, monopoly exploitation, and current military action involving particularly unpopular wars. No one forced him into this role - he could have made less money elsewhere but decided not to. He has decided to be a cog in a larger, poorly functioning machine, and is handsomely rewarded for it. This sacrifice is, for many, a worthwhile trade.

If you don't want to engage with the moral ramifications of your profession, you are generally socially allowed to do so, provided the profession is above board. Unfortunately, you cannot then write a post trying to defend your position, saying that what I do is good, actually, meanwhile cashing your high 6-7 figure check. This is incoherent.

It is financially profitable to be a political actor within a decaying monopolist apparatus, but I don't need to accept that it's also a pathway to a well-lived life.

The nash equilibrium in a buyer-seller market like the employer-employee relationship is for both sides to defect. Humans don't behave optimally, because they aren't pure rational creatures, they are imbued with some socialisation and cultural memory. So humans try to treat with these organisations as though they are other humans, and will respond to good-will with good-will, but this is not rewarded, and ultimately they change their behaviour in response to a poor environment.

Capital does behave short term optimally. Optimal economic behaviour is to betray the person opposite you, and violate and exploit the commons until the commons collapses entirely, like what we see today. At some points in the past, capital has been subdued by a human operator who will apply courtesy and social norms to prevent these ugly actions, but capital has now become too intelligent to bother with this, and the result is a sequence of increasingly insane and inhuman processes, such as what we see here with the job market.

The author then postulates some guidance for how to survive in organisations more generally, working above these strange social structures largely unique to silicon valley. It wasn't the purpose of the article, but I wish he was a bit more critical of these structures in general.

I think the writing style the LLM produces is an artistic decision made by committee prioritizing for inoffensiveness - what a coincidence that it comes out sounding like LinkedIn slop.

I don't really see any innate reason an LLM couldn't write well - it's an active decision by its creators to tell it not to.

In Australia, we went through a similar journey where fiber to everyone's home was planned and then politically destroyed. Except this happened in 2010 and has been a significant factor in our inability to retain a technical edge.

Instead the author posited a point about pluralizing nouns.

This is the Californian ideology - do not engage with fucking anything at all, because we're all getting rich off pluralizing nouns.

We have a similar experience where it's shocking how much users prefer the chat interface.