They have power, but it’s not actually legal. Congress has mandated funds for this array, the administration wants to cripple it beyond repair before any legal action can catch up.

And unfortunately SCOTUS made it harder for private groups to sue over impounding. And seems to argue only the GAOs comptroller can sue under the impoundments control act (ICA). GAO is the part of Congress that investigates when executive branch isn’t enforcing the law / spending funds. But have themselves limited ability to enforce anything.

It’s another post watergate reform eroded by Trump II. The ICA was created to stop these sorts of impoundments that happens with Nixon and earlier.

Notably members of Congress are working to pause the dismantling

https://apnews.com/article/ocean-observatories-initiative-tr...

Do NOT have an expectation that this is “normal” income. You’ll probably end up destroying your integrity or doing tons of BS work just to do anything to maintain that level of income.

Expect the norm to be a startup, non tech company, or some other non FAANG big tech corp.

Zuck IMO doesn’t have the halo Musk has where there’s results mixed in with the BS. And Meta doesn’t seem to have a good track record of developing new products.

Is a rage bait machine currently at / near its peak of usage still an interesting investment in 2026?

Look at their big growth areas. They acquired instagram and WhatsApp. Threads seems successful(?) but is an extension of instagram.

Mostly they’ve just gotten better at weaponizing rage bait. Which I’d argue, long term, will be a losing strategy.

If this were a healthy culture, with all the people working there, Zuck would have promoted far more interesting internal experiment to full blown products. That just doesn’t seem to happen there.

So there’s really not a lot of growth areas for them? Their biggest growth seems to have been acquisitions, not new features.

Maybe data labeling is like RTO - an intentional way to force attrition.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48558045

Points: 668

# Comments: 616

I’d love it if model providers just let old models run and let us pay less, but the deprecation makes me want to look into local models.

That’s still an economy as it works to distribute limited resources (human time) at a bare minimum.

The main difference comes down to networking. Frustrating for me, because I see what’s she’s doing wrong, but can’t lecture her on a style that doesn’t come natural to her.

Basically I don’t ever apply for jobs, yet I find work. She applies through the normal path and never gets called for an interview.

What’s my magic trick? Nothing really slimy, or even pushy, but 100% focused on informal relationships instead of formal channels of work.

I just spend a lot of time connecting with colleagues, catching up with them, and just trying to be friends. I’m not trying to milk them for work. The lunch I have isn’t transactional. We literally barely talk about work.

But because we enjoy hanging out, we find ways to work together. We brainstorm about each others careers. We just both want to be helpful. Opportunities pop up naturally to collaborate and I’ve never wanted for work.

I don’t know how to teach that. It’s somewhat about my temperament. It’s a skill developed over decades.

Still I strongly recommend you practice it. Or at least just try to hang out and make friends with colleagues. The rest comes naturally.

Almost certainly the roles my wife is applying for are not actually open roles, they’re roles made with someone in mind. Or filled by someone better at the relational side than the technical skills.

My knee-jerk is to find it disappointing. But maybe I’m missing some nuance. And I don’t have the same negative reaction to AI coding.

But if you’re going to ask me to read a blog article, I don’t quite enjoy it when it’s not in your own words. I want to be in conversation with you, not you intermediated through an LLM.

While I don’t particularly care about a bit of LLM spellchecking or copy editing. I’d rather have human language warts and all than perfect AI-speak.

That’s the rant. But what am I missing?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47974256

Points: 5

# Comments: 7

I’d rather not carry the cost of learning it’s not enforceable.

California bans anything that is effectively a non compete.

And if it’s open source under Apache/MIT license I could care less about people getting snippets from my code.

Companies don’t really need non-competes anymore. Some companies take an extremely broad interpretation of IP confidentiality, where they consider doing any work in the industry during your lifetime an inevitable confidentiality violation. They argue it would be impossible for you to work elsewhere in this industry during your entire career without violating confidentiality with the technical and business instincts you bring to that domain. It doesn’t require conscious violation on your part (they argue).

So beware and read your employment agreement carefully.

More here https://www.promarket.org/2024/02/08/confidentiality-agreeme...

And this is the insane legal doctrine behind this

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inevitable_disclosure

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44338562

Points: 416

# Comments: 255

All these other agencies are small potatoes.

It’s not clear that reorganizing US foreign aid agencies is in violation of statute. As I understand it statute allocate $X to US foreign aid. And instructs the State dept to organize this aid.

The EO to pause all payments was challenged in court and halted

A lot of bad crap has happened, and I disagree with what DOGE is doing, but it’s not a coup.