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Why would you shrink the team rather than become 20x more productive as a whole?

Users don't want changes that rapidly. There's not enough people on the product team to design 20x more features. 20x more features means 400x more cross-team coordination. There's only positive marginal ROI for maybe 1.5-2x even if development is very cheap.

Either way can work. It depends on what the rest of the business needs.

You can achieve a lot on the $30 plan.

I use Claude every day for everything, it's amazing value for money.

Give it a specific task with the context it needs, that's what I find works well, then iterate from there. I just copy paste, nothing fancy.


You just copy paste as in you copy paste all the necessary context and the results. You don't give it access to your codebase for read or write, correct?


> You don't give it access to your codebase for read or write, correct?

I'm sure you can derive some benefit without doing that, but you're not going to see much of a speedup if you're still copy/pasting and manually prompting after each change. If anybody is copy/pasting and saying "I don't get it", yeah you don't.


Exactly, copy paste related code and files. Give it some background ontext on what it is you're doing and then tell it what you'd like it to do.


What do you mean by copy paste? I use copy paste in non-agentic workflows.


Yeah, copy paste for non-agentic workflows. I'm keeping things extremely simple.


Stock trading can be quite lucrative if it's a good match. Have a look at Qullamaggie on YouTube.

> Edit, I say this as someone that has been learning to trade the last 6 months. To be completely transparent I've actually overall lost money doing this, but have also brought my account back up from having halved to almost break even a couple times now and can definitely see the possibility of doing very well. If I was better at following instructions I would 100% be profitable. The YouTuber I mentioned doesn't sell any courses.

> Edit 2, screw you guys for the downvotes. I'm sharing something I've found useful. You don't have to buy into the idea, but there are some people who do very well off of trading. Hence "if it's a match"


Stock "trading" is statistically against the odds. "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" was published nearly 50 years ago and remains generally true. No YouTuber or perfect instruction following would make you 100% likely to be profitable.

The most profitable (and effort efficient way) is to routinely invest in a broad basket of stocks over a long period. Ie Voo and Hold.


Yes generally speaking, statistically most people will not beat the index.

Does it follow then that no-one is beating the index consistently?

Of course there are people who are not a statistic. Maybe not everyone is made for it, but that doesn't mean noone is out there beating the market.

Maybe its hard if you're a hedge fund, but I'm talking about individuals with relatively small accounts.


The EMH is provably false.

Moreover if you can get an edge that is even 2-3% over a coin flip all you need is risk management to make money.

Not understanding this is how you go broke. I traded for a number of years and did well. It was not hard to regularly beat the market, especially in futures and options.


How about options trading?


I've seen people on tiktok that exclusively trade options. It's not something I've looked into but my take after 6 months is that you basically find an approach that works for you, whether that be trading stocks, commodities, options etc and the time-scale that you trade.

Personally I like to do primarily tech stocks and mix it up doing swing trading (holding multiple days) with a bit of scalping as well (buy / sells over minutes).

At first I lost a lot of money scalping but now I seem to have a much higher success rate - you start to notice certain patterns in the way stocks move if you watch the charts long enough, and I've been learning to have more conviction in my positions.


Maybe algotrading is the answer


Yes, I might consider doing this but need to consistently feel confident doing it manually first. I did set up a docker instance to connect to my broker, so perhaps a goal for this year!


I'm not downvoting you, but I think you are probably getting downvoted because "Stock trading can be quite lucrative" is statistically just not true. Even professional financial advisors almost never beat the market [0]. Only hedge funds that pay for huge amounts of priveledged financial information do, and even then not always.

Here's a good video that makes a case for this. Even if you don't agree, you might find some of the points he makes interesting. But tl;dr, he argues that index funds basically always outperform other methods, so one should primarily invest in things like that.

[0] https://youtu.be/T71ibcZAX3I?si=5kEkLoUhHDkajlyy


Statistically speaking, we typically end up with a bell curve right?

So who's on the ends of the bell curve?


No offense intended, just speaking by the numbers you shared above, but it sounds like you are at the lower end of the bell curve. Most day traders are, largely because they don't have access to priveledged information like the datasets that hedge funds buy. If they make better bets than you do, then they literally take your money. Those aren't good odds.


I'm at the lower end in the same way that a junior dev is at the lower end of the salary band. This is to be expected for anyone just starting out.

You're assuming that you need privileged information that is not available, but what I'm trading is basically the big player moves - indicated by movement volume in a stock.

You don't need all the info, there are emergent patterns that result for stocks that make big moves over time.

Not every stock that matches one of these patterns will be a winner, but you can base a strategy around this that allows you to have enough success, especially when you combine this with other attributes of the stock (and market conditions) at the particular point in time.

I'm openly aware that so far I'm in the negative. However most of this is due to me not having sold when instructed to (holding onto "favourite" stocks). Very close to break even currently, so no harm done after 6 months playing in the market.


If you're into the gym and cooking, consider getting a cast iron frying pan.

Not only great for cooking, but it can also help with wrist strength - you may need to ease into lifting the pan with a single hand.


I've got a wok (I make mapo tofu every now and then) and definitely agree!


Anyone care to give their take on Quantum Computing?

Does it have practical application? Are we actually progressing towards something or are research papers just a way to get the next grant in order to continue playing with Quantum?


I posted this as a submission that didn't really garner interest but from the cryptanalysis angle it is a boondoggle, here's a video of Peter Gutmann presenting his take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa4Ok7WNFHY


Awesome, thanks for that! That does confirm some of my suspicions...

He lives just a few hours from me as well.


Quantum makes the fusion folks look fast


Likely will work but it doesn't have a "killer app" yet so less funding than needed.

My understanding is that programming it is like building a house of cards so that when it falls the pile at the end is an answer. Very different way of thinking and there's no nice abstraction layers.

Needs more reliability and and something equivalent to a compiler and C programming.


> the main known applications of quantum computers remain (1) the simulation of quantum physics and chemistry themselves, (2) breaking a lot of currently deployed cryptography, and (3) eventually, achieving some modest benefits for optimization, machine learning, and other areas (but it will probably be a while before those modest benefits win out in practice).

...

> 2025 was clearly a year that met or exceeded my expectations on hardware, with multiple platforms now boasting >99.9% fidelity two-qubit gates, at or above the theoretical threshold for fault-tolerance. This year updated me in favor of taking more seriously the aggressive pronouncements—the “roadmaps”—of Google, Quantinuum, QuEra, PsiQuantum, and other companies about where they could be in 2028 or 2029.

...

> at some point, the people doing detailed estimates of how many physical qubits and gates it’ll take to break actually deployed cryptosystems using Shor’s algorithm are going to stop publishing those estimates, if for no other reason than the risk of giving too much information to adversaries. Indeed, for all we know, that point may have been passed already. This is the clearest warning that I can offer in public right now about the urgency of migrating to post-quantum cryptosystems, a process that I’m grateful is already underway.

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9425


I'm skeptical. Wake me when they can factor a number bigger than 31.


Do the rats enjoy it and if so, will the rats teach other rats how to play?

This could give a whole new meaning to "the rat race"


Perhaps there are some people like you say that are grandiose narcissists and ALSO some people that are genuinely smarter than most others in the room and can see the obvious through the fog.

I think the frustration they're experiencing is more likely to do with a lack of control over their environment (including the lack of ability to control others).


Anyone who thinks they’re genuinely smarter than everyone else is almost certainly unable to self-reflect and understand others’ strengths well.


I wish we could pin down not only the model but also the way the UI works as well.

Last week Claude seemed to have a shift in the way it works. The way it summarises and outputs its results is different. For me it's gotten worse. Slower, worse results, more confusing narrowing down what actually changed etc etc.

Long story short, I wish I was able to checkpoint the entire system and just revert to how it was previously. I feel like it had gotten to a stage where I felt pretty satisfied, and whatever got changed ... I just want it reverted!


I agree, much slower and worse output. It is substantially worse now than it was weeks ago.

It spends a lot of time coming up with “UI options” (Select 1, 2 or 3 with a TUI interface) for me to consider when it could just ask me what I want, not come up with a 5 layer flow chart of possibilities.

Overall I think it is just Anthropic tweaking things to reduce costs.

I am paying for a Max subscription but I am going to reevaluate other options.


You can install or using a specific version of claude by pinning it.

Like `npx @anthropic-ai/claude-code@2.0.14` or `npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code@2.0.14`


Claude Code is distinct from the Claude models.


He's probably right that no-one else can do what he can, because competent Devs aren't going to work for a company that operates like this.

If you have to build something because "Devs are too busy working on other things", then you're just bad at prioritising tasks.

If your team "can't do what I can" then you're bad at hiring.

I don't mind if a CTO works on a bug ticket, but make it part of the usual process, not hero driven development. Otherwise, what's even the point of having a process in the first place?!


Given their names I'd say they're too busy optimising primes...


Take your damned upvote, and go away.


Hmm do the winds favor an even/odd cycle of votes..


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