I use a new Ryzen based mini PC instead of Mac mini, but the reasoning is the same. For the amount of compute/memory it pays for itself in less than a year, and the lower latency for ssh/dev servers is nice too.
Hi Kenton! I was the recent grad you handed this web app off to after you built it, so I expanded Jeff Dean Facts so that anyone could create and rate facts about anyone at Google :). There were a ton of team in-jokes added before I stopped working on it - O(5k) IIRC! :)
This web app was also how I learned the pain of maintaining a live web service with a lot of ever-changing dependencies. How I sighed when the AppEngine version changed and I had to fix things again...
I handed it off again before I left Google but I have no memory of who that was to unfortunately :(.
I just searched Moma, and your note about it going down is the most recent update on this front. Interestingly though, it looks like Moma itself has a custom SERP renderer for Jeff Dean facts that came up when I searched. The example fact that came up was hilarious, but I guess I shouldn't share it on public HN.
Compare this car to the Toyota RAV4 PHEV which in some ways is simpler than a gas powered RAV4 (no alternator, no transmission) but maintains the same ease of maintainability and cheap parts availability as the base RAV4 (makes sense, they sold >4M of them).
PHEVs are complicated tech so I figured I would choose one with a proven design (Prius -> Prius Prime -> RAV4 Prime).
I don't know Tai Lopez and he seems like an asshole based on his public persona but I think you'd be surprised by the number of (especially first generation) millionaires who will negotiate over pennies. The easiest way to have a lot of money is to earn a lot and not spend a lot.
A friend is in commercial real estate. If you own office or warehouse space, he finds you a company to rent the space, and help negotiate the deal. Then after the deal is done, the (very wealthy) building owner often will try to re-negotiate down the agreed to fee, or say he'll pay it in four years. The guy works for 6 months getting the deal done, is supposed to get like $25K, then the wealthy building owner says he'll give him $10K and will pay over 4 years. Crazy business.
Earning a lot does the heavy lifting here (and rent of various kinds does the heavily lifting of that in turn). It's far, far easier to be "frugal" in % of your income when your income is high.
People like this Tai guy pay a premium for screwing people over, they pretty clearly could have made more money, more safely, if they didn't love the feeling of getting one up on you. That explains their attitude better than some virtue of frugality.
Having money allows you to spend time elsewhere, like cherry picking desperate employees. I know temp agencies that have it as the whole business model. If you aren't desperate you don't fit.
I have a more nuanced take here. For low performing or junior employees, remote work was generally a terrible thing that led to less productivity (and more managerial overhead). For strongly performing employees with obligations at home, there were many who preferred working at home.
I fall more into the latter camp (at least I hope so) and, given I've only worked in nice offices with catered lunches, gyms, video games, offsites, etc, I enjoy a 3 day hybrid schedule works best for me.
Then COVID hit and everyone got a taste of it. Including the folks who discovered they could get paid to stay home and play video games and jackin' off during work hours.
In a way you could say this group ruined it for everyone. But that's usually how these things go.
The hammer comes down on everyone because otherwise it leads to uncomfortable questions like "why does HE get to work from home and I don't?" and people getting doctor's notes claiming they're autistic and can't be around people and that's why they can't ever see the inside of an office.
I'm sorry to take a belligerent tone, but this is total revisionism. People have always slacked off and bringing them into the office doesn't change that.
Maybe I'm an old greybeard as someone with more than five years experience in the workforce, but don't you remember before COVID? People screwed around all the time! On coffee breaks or smoke breaks or extended meetings or late lunches or ping-pong tables or just browsing Facebook on their desks.
I remember the pre COVID times and people messed around, but they were available. You could actually find them in the building if they were just playing ping pong or something. In the remote world it can be very difficult to reach somebody.
I prefer remote work, but not everybody is good at it and it can ruin it for everybody.
> play video games and jackin' off during work hours.
Most of the hardest working remote people I've known, and I've worked remote at over 5 companies across two decades, often don't work standard hours. I honestly don't see the problem with someone gaming at 2pm if they're also making sure shit gets deployed at midnight.
I also have found that anytime I show up in an actual office it's hilarious how little work actually happens.
The people who get nothing done remote, also tend to get nothing done in an office they just create the illusion of it.
> The people who get nothing done remote, also tend to get nothing done in an office they just create the illusion of it.
Maybe, maybe not but it surely create cost on people to come to office. Just as example person can't just use whole Friday / monday for starting, finishing weekend travel while claiming as working.
For business even if they can't monitor person whole day at work, getting them to workplace and checking status face to face is something better than nothing.
Even when I was working in an office I would sometimes take 2 to 3hours bicycle rides at lunch time because it was the best moment to be doing sport outdoors in winter.
I would just make sure I had no scheduled meeting and had people in my team available. Sometimes I would do it to make up for extra time outside of office hours. This also allowed some of my coworkers to leave earlier because they knew I would stay longer to do my regular shift.
If there's a need for "core business hours" those can be established. My most recent company was evenly distributed around the globe so needing someone at 2pm PST is not much different than needing someone at 12am PST.
The vast majority of companies I've worked at remote have a strong async culture and are better for it. With some obvious exceptions, if you need a response in 15 minutes there's something wrong with your planning.
If people are slacking off at home, they’re gonna slack off at work too. This notion that a low performing employee will suddenly perform better in the office is a myth that needs to die.
Times are changing. A couple of years back people would not only work from home but angrily demand that employers need to share all that office cost saving with employees who are working remotely.
Editing notes on the content - the content of this blog post is clearly AI-enhanced (emdash) which is ok but the tone is not. It's super flowery and oversold - example "It was a shift from a single laser to a powerful floodlight."
My process is to dictate and word vomit all of my thoughts to AI (in this case Gemini 2.5 Pro) and then refine from there. I know there's some amount of "smells like AI" in the writing, but at this point I don't think it takes away from the lessons shared.
That said, maybe it's worth it to modify things so there is less "AI sounding" verbiage. Don't want folks to write it off as "AI Slop" because of certain phrases. TBD!
Once you know you're being tricked it doesn't matter how good the trick is, for me at least. I'd rather have a less coherent, typo ridden, but genuine text than this.
How is it a trick to have AI organize my thoughts? It's all an accurate recount of my learnings and my experience doing what I said I did in the post. What trick is there?
No matter how much you actually wrote it feels like you dumped a list of bullet points to an llm and prompted "make it an SEO optimised blog post, I'm supposed to be interested in this topic so use appropriate words"
Yes you’re right, it’s AI enhanced to the point of sounding not like an engineer authentically trying to communicate with other engineers.
However it’s also the direction given to the AI enhancement - it’s steered toward buzzword/hype style.
“I managed a swarm of AI agents…”? How about instead just “I ran multiple instances of Claude Code and the results seem promising”? No swarms necessary.
No mention of product prototyping products e.g. vercel v0 or Firebase Studio. Those to me seem like clear 0->1 wins, especially vercel with their hosting/marketplace integrating well with AI-driven development.
