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Just out of curiosity, what is the reasonable range of pay for an engineer of your caliber in the UK?

hmm it depends really, I go below and above my "market rate"

I've come to learn that your salary as an engineer is more directly tied to your company's success rather than your personal outcomes as an engineer.

I've seen people padding buttons for £700/day working for large brands

I've seen people train open weight models for £350/day trying to ship an MVP.

The last permanent role I negotiated had a TC of £160,000/year. I'm open to go down to £90,000/year or even less for the right opportunity

As for contract work, my last 3 projects were £600/day, £700/day and £550/day. Again, I can go down for something stable.


> The last permanent role I negotiated had a TC of £160,000/year.

If you want that £160k+/year, you might as well either go to a quant firm like Citadel or Jane Street (But there is a 0% chance it will be remote) or build your own startup.

> I'm open to go down to £90,000/year or even less for the right opportunity

£90k is not bad, but not the best either, but anything higher than 120k in the UK means you lose 45% of that.

But the risk is that someone else will go even lower than your offer until the role can be done internally by another person using an AI agent.

The point is, most businesses that are non-quant and non-big tech, non-big AI do not want to pay the extortionate level of taxes in the UK and it makes SWEs in the UK look very expensive and the jobs + office move off-shore.


> But the risk is that someone else will go even lower than your offer until the role can be done internally by another person using an AI agent.

I have assessed various AI models & agents. I don't think I can be replaced by them, so I feel safe on that end.

That being said, I don't think my potential employers fully understand that.

> The point is, most businesses that are non-quant and non-big tech, non-big AI do not want to pay the extortionate level of taxes in the UK and it makes SWEs in the UK look very expensive and the jobs + office move off-shore.

Yes, this is where contract work came particularly handy. But the government made a big deal about taking them offshore due to IR35 pushing them out


By forcing oil to be bought with dollars, the USD was pegged to oil demand, especially from developing nations whose consumption was growing.

Also SWIFT being a means of control of movement of funds.


> forcing oil to be bought with dollars, the USD was pegged to oil demand, especially from developing nations whose consumption was growing

If you give me one source, I'll break down why this is wrong.

(In case there isn't one, the U.S. dollar was never pegged to oil demand [whatever that means]. And nothing about petrodollar recycling thought about developing nations for one second.)


Hasn’t all recent oil purchases been settled using USD. My understanding is that most countries buy US treasuries to maintain US credit ratings and to settle global trade debts.

> Hasn’t all recent oil purchases been settled using USD

No. I’ve traded and settled oil in British pounds from a desk at a bank in New York.

> most countries buy US treasuries to maintain US credit ratings and to settle global trade debts

No to the first, partly to the second. Holding Treasuries doesn’t affect creditworthiness. That said, Treasuries are a universal collateral, so some lenders may require Treasuries be held in reserve for their safety (usually in a third-country bank).

The main reason countries buy Treasuries is for reserves. These are maintained so they can defend their currency. They need dollars to do this if their country trades in and/or finances with dollars. (If they trade in or finance with yuan, they should hold yuan bonds, which they can quickly turn into yuan to sell into the market to buy back their currency, thereby stabilizing it.)


Copy and paste are handled by applications and the OS shell Any program is free to define the formats it is willing to copy or paste - like mime types.

Software sucks, not because its bad, but because people wont implement things


This article (and entire book) actually posits that US will remain the primary producer and consumer of copium worldwide and thus the #1


Maybe I'm really dumb, but it should be obvious that replacing a section of rope in one knot with another, is intuitively not going to simply "add the unknotting numbers"


And yet it almost always works. There were no known counterexamples where it failed until this was published.


Yup. I've had lots of intuitions for things, only to discover there was a very non-intuitive theorem conclusively proving my intuition wrong.

So much of math and physics is discovering these beautiful, surprisingly non-intuitive things.

And this fits right in that pattern -- it seems intuitive that it wouldn't be true, but nobody's been able to find a counterexample. So it's yet another counterintuitive result that math is built on. Not proven, but statistically robust.

Which is what makes it great when somebody does ten years of work in simulating knots so a counterexample can be found.

Which doesn't even confirm the original intuition, because there are still so many cases where the rule holds. Whereas our intuition would have assumed a counterexample would have been easy to find, and it wasn't.


I'm with the OP on this one. Intuitively (to me, anyway) I wouldn't expect it to work in general.

I'm surprised it took so long to find a counterexample, but it doesn't surprise me at all to hear it doesn't work.


Mine too, but this is not very interesting, although our intuition was right, it was almost certainly right for the wrong reasons.


Agreed, this is the real takeaway for those who think it’s unsurprising: they simply haven’t understood why it is surprising.


Definitely!

My understanding of knot theory is limited to having watched a few YouTube videos and reading the first introductory chapters of a book. A neat topic, but not one I'm going to dig too deeply into.


If that is the case the counterexample is the sort of thing a stubborn cynical and amateur mathematician (and programmer) may have found.


May I humbly request you to join the dwitter.net community?


You're the second person to mention dwitter.net, now I feel like I have to... Got a busy week coming up but when I have more downtime I'll join and share!


This is why Stallman is so vehement on GPLv3

Commercial entities will always exploit your work - you need to force them to give back, they will never do the positive sum game by default


What everyone secretly knows but won't say because it has funding


Wow - I cant think anyone would spend such a long time on how everyone but themselves is wrong.

It started out interesting, but was simply a long rambling text where there seems to be no point


Wow the silver bullet is finally here. Rewrite everything with AI :D


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