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I tried to read the research when it was posted on Reddit a few days ago, but it’s all AI slop. The person who uploaded it admitted that they just had Claude go out and explore their hypotheses, but they didn’t even spend the time trying to get the real documents into Claude. Claude identified documents it wanted but couldn’t access them, so it just proposed hypothetical connections.

The research has a lot of these:

> LIMITATION: Direct PDF downloads returned 403 errors. ProPublica Schedule I viewer loads data dynamically (JavaScript), preventing extraction via WebFetch. The 2024 public disclosure copy on sixteenthirtyfund.org was also blocked.

> Tech Transparency Project report: The article "Inside Meta's Spin Machine on Kids and Social Media" at techtransparencyproject.org likely contains detailed ConnectSafely/Meta funding analysis but was blocked (403)

So the “research” isn’t some groundbreaking discoveries by a Redditor. It’s an afternoon worth of Claude Code slop where they couldn’t even take the time to get the real documents into the local workspace so Claude Code could access them. It’s now getting repeated by sites like Theo gadgetreview.com because the people posting to these sites aren’t reading the report either.


Meta spent $2B to buy anti-privacy laws.

The article is referring to the total time including delays. It isn’t saying that PR review literally takes 5 hours of work. It’s saying you have to wait about half a day for someone else to review it.

Which is a thing that depend very much on team culture. In my team it is perhaps 15 min for smaller fixes to get signoff. There is a virtuous feedback loop here - smaller PRs give faster reviews, but also more frequent PRs, which give more frequent times to actually check if there is something new to review.

If I'm deep in coding flow the last thing I'm going to do is immediately jump on to someone else's PR. Half a day to a day sounds about right from when the PR is submitted to actually getting the green light

Does your team just context switch all the time? That sounds like a terrible place to work.

Similar in my team and I don't feel like there's much context switching. With around 8 engineers there's usually at least one person not in the middle of something who can spare a few minutes.

How can everyone be familiar with everybody else's work?

Usually at most 2-3 engineer have enough context to fully understand what your code is doing.


Step therapy is required in countries with universal healthcare, too.

It can actually be harder to get access to new therapies in countries with universal healthcare because they’re more uniform and strict in what they allow.

For a relatable example: The UK just raised the age of eligibility for COVID vaccines all the way up to 75 years old: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/health/covid-russian-roulette-... Contrast this with the US where COVID vaccine coverage is a basic expectation of health insurance for all ages. And that’s for a simple, cheap medicine without step therapy! It doesn’t matter if your doctor thinks you need it, the rules are set from the top.


> the US where COVID vaccine coverage is a basic expectation of health insurance for all ages

That wasn't a sure thing this past year and there's always a risk it won't be next year. (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/fact-checking-rfk-jr-s-c...)


> Step therapy is required in countries with universal healthcare, too.

This is something Americans with strong opinions about healthcare but little time spent researching it never seem to know.


To be honest, given the issues with the NHS, the UK isn't the best example to use for a "universal healthcare" system these days.

Worth noting that "eligibility for COVID vaccines" is for "free at the point of delivery" NHS treatment - you can still get it elsewhere at any age. Boots (a major chain of pharmacies) do it for £98:

https://www.boots.com/online/pharmacy-services/covid-19-vacc...


Sorry but this not actually true.

THe most appropriate treatment is required, not "step therapy". For antibiotics this makes sense, as last mile, powerful antibiotics need to be used sparingly.

The same with cancer, it'll be treated according to the requirements of the cancer, with guidance from nice about the most effective therapy.

Is it perfect? no.

Does it lead to mistakes? yes.

It is better than american style insurance denying care based entirely on price? 100%


It can be harder, but it's specific to the country/system. Here it Taiwan you can walk into any clinic with stock and get a (NHI covered) vaccine any time.

There are other things to complain about of course, but the rules for what's covered ate generally logical. Non-covered medication is affordable to, which helps.


Yes, but core count and clock speed of a nearly 10 year old CPU are meaningless when comparing to current processors.

Comparing CPUs by clock speed doesn’t work. New CPUs are do more work per clock cycle.

A 9800X3D is twice as fast as your 9900K in benchmarks like GeekBench, despite having similar clock speed and the same core count.

If you could downclock the AMD part to 2.5GHz as an experiment it would still beat your 5GHz 9900K.


The AirPods lineup is actually reasonably popular on audiophile forums.

You’re comparing their top-end luxury product from one category to their entry-level basic product from another category.

Premium products usually have higher margins.


Exactly.

If you want Apple-quality headphones to go with your MacBook Neo, the USB-C Earpods are $19:

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/myqy3am/a/earpods-usb-c


The US is a wealthier country and wages are higher here than Japan.

The median equivalised household disposable income of a US household is over twice that of a household in Japan.

This is one of many reasons why it’s so misleading to compare prices across countries in a vacuum. All of the people doing the work for those education, transportation, and other services and all of their inputs aren’t going to work for Japan-equivalent pay when they’re living in the United States.


Jason Evans worked for Facebook for almost two decades, starting in 2009 - https://jasone.github.io/2025/06/12/jemalloc-postmortem/

He's doing just fine. If you're looking for a story about a FAANG company not paying engineers well for their work, this isn't it.


> Remember that exec tech salaries are extreme outliers.

It's the combination of tech and big or fast growing companies.

People who operate in FAANG or Silicon Valley bubbles (or who spend too much time on Blind) can lose track of what salaries look like in the rest of the world.

I often share Buffer's open salary page because their compensation is actually pretty normal from all of the data I've seen and hiring I've done: https://buffer.com/salaries

Every time it gets posted there are comments from people aghast that the software engineers "only" make $200K and in disbelief that the CEO's salary is "only" $300K.


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