patrick.net

I recently hired a marketing consultant. She is a long time business guru(?). She does everything from drawing up business plans to raising capital. She showed me a company she raised $30,000,000 for. The site brings buyers and sellers of chemicals together. She considers it an SAAS.

Tenpoundbass says

SAAS catchy buzz words, can you list one example of what you think a Software as a Service would be so marketable without a customer.

I don't think I understand your question but, why would anyone build an SAAS if they didn't think there would be any customers for it?

There's a lot of things that you can only do using C and C variants or a dll wrapper exposing APIs from that object made with those libraries.
I ran into this wall using C# and an employee from a partner firm, was using Ruby and Python. We were trying to create TIFF files, with Lab values.
The graphics libraries in .net writes a bitmap file, that format is worked out during saving, then creating that graphic format. But they all start out as a Bitmap for the most part. Which the three segment tuple you pass for each pixel of the file, only has 0 to 255 values. Lab values use Shorts. with are -128 to +127.
No matter how hard I tried there was no way to save the image with those values. I even tried making my own Tiff generator using an incomplete codebase that managed to save every other file format but gave up on the Tiff section. I managed to get it working but the colors were way off from the intended result. Lab colors are about true color matching regardless of computer to computer color adjustments. Finally found a image maker wrapper dll made in C, that worked. But it still nagged me that C# couldn't do it. I managed to track down some C code that would do it, but when I followed the refactored code from the C code in C#. And was doing essentially the same logic. I still could not save an image with negative values. Which is required for the -127 to 127 range. My -88.7.-6 would turn into 0.7.0.

Java is pretty much useless, and C# blows it away in spades. Java doesn't anything near that rich and robust as Generics.

Javascript is the universal client side language. Very much needed but the creeping into server side logic, which requires a parser to digest the data. Is pointless and overkill.

9 out of 10 startups do not make money. Business skills I guess are orthogonal to engineering even though they look trivial.

Tenpoundbass says

SAAS catchy buzz words, can you list one example of what you think a Software as a Service would be so marketable without a customer.

Almost any industry could, and does, benefit from some type of SAAS. Isn't Uber an SAAS? How about OpenTable or Door Dash etc. They aren't just Adobe anymore.

Have you tried Rust? It compiles into the same code that C does. Last month I made a shared c-lib with it a co-worker loads using JNI. I will never go back to C/C++.

Blue says

9 out of 10 startups do not make money. Business skills I guess are orthogonal to engineering even though they look trivial.

GNL says

Maybe coders aren't business people?

I worked a lot of sales jobs when I was a kid and have run multiple RE side businesses. I pick biotechs to work for based on their business prospects (some having panned out well others not so much, it's a difficult space with a lot of overhead) and software dev just came naturally due to the fact that I'm a molecular biologist. DNA is code.

I've seen your posts, I'm sure you're honest and all and also correct but too many companies use it to fuck customers for an extra $ so no thanks.

GNL says

Adobe

Claimed to own the rights to any image created by its software the past year if I recall lol.

ITechBrosWon says

Only solution is $300k base salary and $25k per year government fee for having H1B.

Or make the first $300K of salary expense non-deductible for the company.

There are definitely some unscrupulous companies out there. There are 3 successful companies I know of in the RE space where customer service is almost non existent. Seems crazy to not have at least satisfactory customer service.

Maga_Chaos_Monkey says

GNL says

Adobe

Claimed to own the rights to any image created by its software the past year if I recall lol.

Wow. Maybe the Faber pencil company can claim ownership of sketches made with their product.

Maga_Chaos_Monkey says

This is why corporate American needs H-1B; nobody puts a gun to corporate America's head and forces them to hire H-1B's; no one force State Department to give visas to H-1B's.

gabbar says

Maga_Chaos_Monkey says

This is why corporate American needs H-1B; nobody puts a gun to corporate America's head and forces them to hire H-1B's; no one force State Department to give visas to H-1B's.

It’s the odd accounting of ESG. To qualify for BlackRock/Vanguard’s standards of investment, a company must take on a quota of diversity, competent or not. They’d rather take on H1B diversity than domestic diversity, as Indian engineers can be good. In aggregate, though, these policies pull companies like Intel and Boeing backward.

Outlaw ESG as a requirement for investment bank largesse. This would subtract the real financial incentive behind H1B. And remove Blackrock from such position of influence. They were created from the bailouts of 2009 and Geithner’s PPP idea. They took in Maiden Lane and the failed Fannie Mae (etc) mortgages, were made whole by Fed’s “QE”, and became the behemoth they are. They’re a govt creation, a Frankenstein, and should have nothing to do with forced policy.

Maga_Chaos_Monkey says

Have you tried Rust? It compiles into the same code that C does. Last month I made a shared c-lib with it a co-worker loads using JNI. I will never go back to C/C++.

Rusts language is brutally cumbersome, I think it's more of a fad. Nonetheless if you are up for wrestling with the borrow checker you can code incredibly lean and fast libraries, it will definitely have its place, but prob stay niche.

mell says

Rusts language is brutally cumbersome, I think it's more of a fad. Nonetheless if you are up for wrestling with the borrow checker you can code incredibly lean and fast libraries, it will definitely have its place, but prob stay niche.

I like to call it the autistic step child of prog languages but find it pretty easy nowadays. Some people describe C/C++ learning curve like a mountain and Rust like a wall. But once you break through that wall...

The compiler is very opinionated. There are also way more well tested libs in C/++ because that has been around a lot longer. It's definitely speed I'm going for when I use it.

I have a new manager that hates it that wants everything re-written in python as parallelized services. He thinks that will make up for the speed lol... Not gonna work, needs to be compiled or customers will have much more than enough time for a smoke break while they wait for their web-browser to finish loading.

They've back tracked but:

Maga_Chaos_Monkey says

I have a new manager that hates it that wants everything re-written in python as parallelized services. He thinks that will make up for the speed lol... Not gonna work, needs to be compiled or customers will have much more than enough time for a smoke break while they wait for their web-browser to finish loading.

Every coder should be language agnostic but python is hard for me to accept, it's great for kids to learn coding but for adults it's a pita, unfortunately it became super popular with the rise of AI due to the popularity of its libraries, tensorflow etc. Java is the king of reliability and hence the king of banking, some of the best large projects/libraries are written in Java for a reason. Oracle actually did a great job advancing it, graalvm and project Loom (best threading), once project Valhalla finishes reified generics it will be decidedly better than C#, Kotlin and Scala again, though not having native async/await sucks. But for most everyday application Javascript or Typescript is simply the fastest way to get the job done (and big plus for native async/await), unless you need multithreading or extreme speed. Never warmed up to Go either (poor language overall) but it's extremely fast and simple as well and will also keep it's place.

I used to do a lot of website load testing and was shocked at how much python sucked and how incredibly fast javascript is on a server (node.js)

So I switched from writing load tests in python to writing them in javascript and was easily able to generate more than 10x the load with javascript on the same load generation hardware.

mell says

Java is the king of reliability and hence the king of banking, some of the best large projects/libraries are written in Java for a reason.

Our new platform team management is moving to Java, thus I am delivering bioinformatic clibs to them so they can load in JNI (until cough services). The refrain from the other bioinformaticians when they learned of this event was something along the line of, "90s again!?", where much like AI bioinformatics moved heavily to python about 16 years ago.

One half of our brain is stuck in biology so you've got to cut us some slack!

Maga_Chaos_Monkey says

mell says

Java is the king of reliability and hence the king of banking, some of the best large projects/libraries are written in Java for a reason.

Our new platform team management is moving to Java, thus I am delivering bioinformatic clibs to them so they can load in JNI (until cough services). The refrain from the other bioinformaticians when they learned of this event was something along the line of, "90s again!?", where much like AI bioinformatics moved heavily to python about 16 years ago.

One half of our brain is stuck in biology so you've got to cut us some slack!

I really like the idea of providing JNI libraries through Rust instead of C/C++, hope I get to try it one day if time permits. Currently I'm focused on automated trading algos, using Javascript and websockets (love the Tradier API first brokerage, hope they make it).

What's strange is, if you apply to same jobs as us citizen, there is no reply. Who can you ask why they hire h1b over local talent. Can you send email to hr and ask to justify what unique talent h1b had?

There is some benefit to stealing some really smart phds, not only they help innovate local companies, they also do brain drain other countries. If e.g. 100 start up were in other country, us would lose out on those profits.

Amazon, google, tesla... so many have h1b.

KgK one says

What's strange is, if you apply to same jobs as us citizen, there is no reply. Who can you ask why they hire h1b over local talent. Can you send email to hr and ask to justify what unique talent h1b had?

There is some benefit to stealing some really smart phds, not only they help innovate local companies, they also do brain drain other countries. If e.g. 100 start up were in other country, us would lose out on those profits.

Amazon, google, tesla... so many have h1b.

You actually can challenge any job posting that says they sponsor h1b visa. Just apply as US citizen and I believe they need to answer you in detail why you are not a fit. They are challenged rarely but if more US citizens would do so it could make a difference

Some job postings and their interviews are fake to have a record to fulfill existing H1B employees paperwork!

mell says

You actually can challenge any job posting that says they sponsor h1b visa.

Disney fired scores of workers and had those workers train their H1-B replacements or lose their final bonus.

Blue says

Some job postings and their interviews are fake to have a record to fulfill existing H1B employees paperwork!

Fake ads and interviews is a part of so-called RIR process.

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-great-christmas-h1b-war-of-2024

This unexpected collision with political reality knocked the tech CEOs right on their asses, where they sat with halos of little dollar signs orbiting their concussed heads as they blinked in bewilderment that anyone could oppose capitalist meritocracy. ...

America’s culture of valourizing the prom queen over the valedictorian, the jock over the nerd, of spending their childhood doing things other than homework-maxing, is why Americans are so clueless when it comes to engineering, and that general inbred Yankee don’t-know-how is why they’re forced, with tears of regret in their eyes, to recruit H1Bs from the degree mills of the subcontinent, at 60% of the wages an American would be paid for the ‘equivalent’ (i.e., of incomparably superior quality) work. ...

The chuds don’t care because, for the chuds, this is not a matter of ‘economics’, of Big Line Go Up. It is a question of their homeland, what is happening to it, and whether they even get to have one. It is about being ethnically replaced. It is about being relentlessly undercut by the cheap labour of bargain-basement aliens, whose presence en masse makes it harder to get a job, depresses the wages of what jobs you can get, and inflates the cost of housing. It is about being expected to work twice as hard as your grandfather for half the standard of living. It is about decades of affirmative action policies which have frustrated young white men at every step of their lives, from being treated like defective girls in elementary school, to being made to affirm that their ancestors were genocidal racists in high school, to being deprioritized for admissions, scholarships, internships, and mentoring in college, to being discriminated against in hiring and passed over for promotions in the workplace, all while being expected to clap like trained seals for their own dispossession while being gaslit that that they are not being dispossessed and if they’re having problems it must be their fault because they just suck and clearly the women and the immigrants are just better than them. ...

The tech CEOs are morally retarded: like the blind or the deaf or perhaps most tragically of all like my cousin who was born without a sense of smell, they cannot parse arguments that arise from the evidence of the senses they do not possess. The sense of having a homeland, a place in which you belong, in which you can be surrounded by people like you, whom you can understand implicitly, is full of unquantifiable intangibles that cannot be exported to .csv. ...

Long and bitter experience has demonstrated time after time that small concessions invariably become the camel’s nose of demographic change. From the 1965 immigration act that Americans were promised would not alter the country’s demographics to Reagan’s amnesty for illegal immigrants that categorically did not lead to either E-Verify or a closed border, Americans have been lied to time and again on this question. ...

When tech CEOs tried to argue that there are vast economic benefits from all of the innovation that their elite human capital would bring to the US, people pointed out that what they really meant was ‘indentured workers who can’t change jobs and are employed at well below market rates’.




Others pointed out that the supposed shortage of skilled engineers is belied by years of tech layoffs.

Other anons spammed screenshots from the federal H1B database showing case after case of H1Bs being brought in as janitors, cooks, secretaries, administrative assistants, 7-11 cashiers, even pickleball coaches, along of course with every entry-level intern position you can think of. This is very familiar to Canadians, who were told we were getting doctors and engineers, when what we actually got were Tim Horton’s workers, Uber drivers, truckers tikka masala (who cannot drive and have turned our highways into death traps), and real estate scams.

It turns out, for example, that despite being capped at around 85,000 per year, applications for ten times this number are routinely approved1. Since we have been assured that the H1B program is only bringing in the top 0.01% of the best and brightest of the planet’s elite human capital, we come to the remarkable conclusion that the Earth contains an incredible eight billion software engineers. Who knew? The analysis also finds that H1Bs are paid well below market rates, are predominantly concentrated in entry and mid-level positions in a tech sector which has been undergoing rounds of mass layoffs (with financial services as the runners up), and that while most of the companies using them are household names (Google, IBM, Amazon) quite a
large number are awarded to Indian-run ‘consulting’ firms such as Cognizant or Tata which exist solely to profit off of the skim from labour arbitrage. ...

The immigration debate changed this week, not only in the US, but everywhere in the English-speaking world, and I think that change will be permanent.

For years now the immigration debate has circled almost exclusively around undocumented, irregular migration: border-jumping illegals in the US, asylum seeking sub-Saharans and Arabs in Europe. Supporters of irregular migration usually invoke humanitarian concerns – the poor children are fleeing war, or crushing poverty, or climate change, or whatever – while opponents contrast this with the humanitarian interests of the natives, whom the “humanitarians”’ guests have a tendency to rape, assault, rob, murder, and otherwise terrorize, occasionally with actual terrorism, most recently less than two weeks ago at the Magdeburg Christmas market. ...

Legal immigration is on the table now as a topic of discussion. Cutting it off entirely is inside the Overton Window. In fact, judging by sentiment on X, a total immigration moratorium is a broadly popular stance.

As a Canadian, I’m thrilled to see this. Illegal immigration has never been much of a problem in Canada. There’s a small amount of it, either coming across the land border with the US or, more often, via visa overstays, but it’s really a rounding error. The vast majority of the immigration into Canada has been entirely legal: permanent residencies, new citizens, student visas, and temporary foreign workers have collectively summed to well over a million new arrivals, every year, for years now, and before that they were coming over at the rate of hundreds of thousands a year – roughly one percent of the population annually – for decades.

And it has been a disaster. ...

Falling per capita GDP has occurred alongside one of the worst real estate bubbles on the planet, effectively pricing young Canadians out of the property market, and yes, that’s largely because of the massive increase in demand for housing. ...

Canada is a country on the edge of collapse, and it is entirely due to mass immigration.

There is a pattern here. One can point to the failure of mass immigration to pay off in economic growth in other countries. Great Britain and its long malaise is an obvious case in point. Australia has pursued a similar policy to Canada’s, with similarly dire results. In Denmark a recent study demonstrated that non-white immigrants are net lifetime tax burdens.




... One by one, all of the economic arguments in favour of mass migration from the third world to Western countries have been dismantled, leaving the pro-foreign labour side sputtering to a deeply unsympathetic mob about how their business model requires them to close off entry-level employment opportunities while under-investing in education and training at home, eating the seed corn of future prosperity in order to fatten the stock portfolios of foreign-born executives, and that this is what is called ‘America winning’. ...

Economics and legality are distractions, chaff thrown up by one side or the other to keep attention away from the primal psychological forces that are actually at work:

The territory of one people being given to others.

In particular, the white peoples of the world being displaced and disinherited, as their lands, their institutions, and their infrastructure are taken from them lot by lot and job by job by colonizers from the global south.

That is, in the end, what it comes down to.

Some are doing this out of pure short-sighted greed. Others are animated by barely-concealed ethnic resentment. Both of these motivations are ignoble and ugly, and the people of America – and increasingly, the rest of the world’s besieged white peoples – are done with all of it. You don’t get to spit in our faces and tell us it’s raining. ...

COVID was probably the last great hurrah of the legacy institutions as consensus-makers. They bullied and manipulated the world into lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and all the rest of their destructive and unnecessary nonsense, and along the way a critical mass of the populace simply developed herd immunity to the mind viruses the media specializes in spreading. Sometime during COVID, amidst all the official censorship and the rising elite panic of ‘disinformation’, it started to feel like the legacy media was reacting to the social networks, with the latter increasingly driving the news cycle, deciding what would be discussed and what the frame of that discussion would be. Now, we’ve entered a time in which the legacy media simply doesn’t matter. ...

Grievances have been articulated, but not addressed. Moreover, just closing down the H1B program isn’t really sufficient – it’s almost certainly true that there really is something of a skills shortage. Decades of systematic neglect of America’s human capital has discouraged many otherwise promising young men from even bothering to develop their skills. After all, what’s the point if the jobs are just going to be allocated on the basis of identity markers? ...

My humble suggestion is that peace can be made for the low, low price of a billion dollars. Maybe a few billion. That’s a ballpark figure, about what I would imagine it would cost to set up a national network of training campuses designed to teach young Americans the skills they need for employment in artificial intelligence, aerospace, automation, 3D manufacturing, and whatever other emerging industries the tech sector is hoping to get rich on.

Why new institutions? Well, because the existing ones are weighed down by decades of affirmative action. They’re rotted out through and through by gay race communism. Both administration and professoriate are lousy with ideological fanatics. By all means, purge them, but this will be a long and gruelling process. Easier to just start fresh, with instructors who aren’t ideological and actually know what they’re doing, inside an organizational culture that’s laser-focused on merit, with a remit to scour the country for talent, develop that talent, and then – via direct connections to the corporate sector – provide a pipeline straight from high school, through engineering boot camp, to well-paid entry-level positions.

DOGEWontAmountToShit says

Lol, what is that, like 17 seconds of Apple revenue?

A real penalty has to HURT and hurt a fucking lot.

$25 billion would be a good starting fine for Apple. Just for starters, and to double every time they fuck up again.

preed says

We need to get this fixed during Trump's second term.

Trump just said he's all in on flooding the country with H1-Bs. He insulted all American tech workers in the process.

DOGEWontAmountToShit says

Agreeing with Sanders has never been on my bingo card, but he's right on this one.

Now, let's talk about the ever-increasing offshoring of jobs. Engineering, QA, IT, finance, and customer service. Most goes to India, Mexico, and China. Chinese workers all report to the CCP and code is often stolen. I guess India seemed like a more secure bet. It takes at least 3 Indian employees for every good American, and years of training (with US training their replacements), but I guess the corporate overlords are good with that. Customers have become numb to daily patch releases and products that don't work.

preed says

Agreeing with Sanders has never been on my bingo card, but he's right on this one.

Same here. And I posted this for the same reason.

Michael Moore was right about the 2016 election, too.