Compared to trying for hours to get him to sleep, or dealing with the sheer panic we felt when we had to have him rushed to the hospital, a poopy diaper is nothing.

All I was saying here was that tax breaks wouldn't impact revenue since revenue is reported before taxes, operating costs and anything else.

Have you wondered why this is the case? How do you think they increased impressions so much at their scale? How they did this despite losing 20M users?

To put it clearly, AI at every part of the pipeline: writing software, product features/experiments, A/B testing them, and pushing them out to users. Even before you get to something like LLM driven recommendations, you can virtually entirely automate the process of finding more "engagement alpha" with AI.

Edit: Also, historically Meta has been growing revenue by 30 to 50 percent for the last decade. With the only exception being 2022 and 2023. So it's not like recent performance is an outlier.

"Our guiding principle is to make as much money as possible at the expense of absolutely everything and everyone on the planet"

Of course, you could paste that into basically any corps mission statement or values page and it wouldn't be out of place.

A while back I just started leaning in. I write a lot of Python at work, and anytime I have to use a library that's relies on asyncio, I just write the entire damn app as an asynchronous one. Makes function coloring a non-issue. If I'm in a situation where the two have to coexist, the async runtime gets its own thread and communication back and forth is handled at specific boundaries.

There's no "inherently synchronous structure", at least not in Javascript. The nature is synchronous, asynchronous is an illusion built on top of it. Which is why you can easily block an "asynchronous" program:

  while (true) {} 

JavaScript execution is synchronous on a single call stack. That's why they added Workers which is different to async.

Rust's Tokio and co are also blocking. You need threads to get something that's not an inherently synchronous with merely a facade or cooperative asychronicity.

I have to use Python as as an example since I don't have much experience with JavaScript, but when you're using asyncio, that's single threaded non-blocking IO (asynchronous). Each use of "await" yields execution back to the event loop, and it can can schedule some other task to run. Tasks can run asynchronously, but no in parallel.

When you use the multiprocess library you are actually creating new threads that run in parallel (I'm ignoring the threading library because it just muddies the water). That's also asynchronous execution.

I don't know the semantics as well in JavaScript, but I'm sure the principle is the same. At certain points you can yield to the runtime and it will schedule other pending tasks to execute while the current one is pending.

My point was that mistake I see people make (in Python) is they think of their program in blocking terms by default. So they get this frustrating coloring problem because they are trying to shoehorn in non-blocking calls. If instead you design the application from the start with asyncio in mind, it makes things much simpler.

Sure, but my comment was not about parallelism compared to asynchronous, but about the idea that Javascript is above the "blocking first mindset".

Javascript depends on a blocking (single-threaded, run-to-completion) backend. The asynchronicity on top of this blocking layer is an abstraction based on cooperative yielding.

Whereas e.g. Erlang's asynchronicity is part of the runtime model itself.

My point, coming from Python, was that whenever I can I write the entire application as an asyncio app, which cuts down on the function coloring problem. That doesn't mean you don't have to be careful, it's super easy to accidentally block the event loop.

You can make any async system synchronous. It's much harder to mske a sync sydtem asynchronous. (Misquoting from something Erlang-related).

There are many cases when I don't care if a function call is asynchronous. I'm happy to wait for the result. Yet too many systems tell me I can't, for no good reason.

Yes, having to rewrite literally all of your code because you need to use an async function somewhere is an issue.

An even bigger issue is that now you have two (incompatible!) versions of literally every library dependency.

I was talking about when writing from scratch.

I'm not saying they aren't profitable. I don't know, but it's definitely not a given.

We know how much was spent by Xai too.

You can wait for Godot if you wish.

I'm trying to help my parents now their at retirement age and am seeing first hand what not planning for your future looks like. They hit retirement with nothing but a small social security check every month. Not even enough to cover rent in most places.

I don't know how much you have in your 401k, but it will be worth literally hundreds of thousands more if you pull it out when you retire. You aren't just paying the penalties now, you're paying for potentially decades of compounding.

But if by some tragedy you don't die young, your older self is gonna be pissed at younger you for costing him hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This is one of the all time greatest examples of "lying with facts". It's technically correct, the IRS absolutely singled out a bunch of non-profits due to administrative fowl ups, but trying to say Obama "targeted" the Tea Party intentionally was so hilariously stupid I'm amazed anyone bought it.