You can collect water from a roof with solar panels just as well as from a roof without them.

Whoosh!

First-grader (raising hand): Why is Meta called "Meta"?
Zuckerberg: I don't want to talk about it

Yeah, I'd expect that most of the eligible people have TCO in the mid-six figures to low seven figures, with salaries $250-500k, annual bonus $50-100kk+ and equity another $250-500k. Since offers need to be at least six months' pay (preferably more) to really make sense for someone who wasn't already about to leave anyway, the number has to be quite a bit higher than $100k.

Google has offered a couple of rounds of voluntary separation plans (though they didn't age-gate them), but the offers weren't very good. They were great if someone happened to already be in the process of leaving, or just about to retire, but otherwise not so much.

In 2025, the offer was (from memory) 12 weeks of pay plus two weeks per year with the company. I had 14 years, so that would have been 40 weeks for me... which sounds pretty good until you realize that the package was salary only. At big tech companies salary is only about 40% of compensation, 20% is annual bonus and the other 40% is equity (these are approximations; details vary from person to person, but it's roughly in this ballpark). So, effectively, it wasn't 40 weeks of pay, it was 16 weeks. Basically, the offer should be read as 4.8 weeks plus 0.8 weeks per year of tenure. Not nothing, but not nearly enough to motivate me to give up a job until I had another one lined up.

And, of course, they set the offer acceptance timeline too short for people to hear the announcement, find another job, then accept the package. Finding someone to interview you for a job is easy -- I get several recruiters pings every week. But finding a good fit, going through the multiple rounds of interviews and negotiating an offer takes a while.

For someone with less seniority, the structure was even worse. And I hear the 2026 offer was weaker yet; same two weeks per year, but with a smaller base (6 weeks instead of 12, IIRC?).

Anyway, for the sake of the microsofties who are eligible, I hope they get a better offer than I did.

(I ended up leaving Google anyway, so in hindsight I should have taken the money. I landed the new gig in July, and I'd have separated and gotten the payout in May. But at my stage of life I'm not interested in taking risks, so there was no way I was jumping without another job lined up.)

Bullshit.

Just a quick followup: I've also talked to a number of Trump supporters who blithely dismiss his rampant corruption, saying they don't really care because it doesn't affect them. I think they're facially wrong on this, but the impacts are often subtle and indirect. The example of island nation power generation, though, demonstrates what happens if you allow corruption to be endemic: People are paying 50 cents per kWh rather than 10 cents, and the only reason is corruption. And these aren't, by and large, people who don't care about 35 cents/kWh difference. That's a lot of money to them.

It is absolutely true -- and completely insane -- that basically all island nations are diesel-powered. Most of these countries have sun like 300 days of the year, and while they don't have a lot of available land, they can and definitely should be covering their rooftops with solar panels. That would not only make them less reliant on fossil fuels, it would also make their electricity dramatically cheaper. They'll still need the diesel generators at night, but power consumption is lower at night and diesel generators are great at load-following.

I've talked to locals in a half-dozen different island nations about how strange it is that they aren't deploying a lot of solar, given how cheap it is and how much sun they have, and in every case I got the same story: Corruption. Someone associated with government has a monopoly on the import of diesel for power production and arranges for the government to take various actions to block the deployment of solar, even by individuals. The mechanisms vary -- sometimes it's blocking financing, sometimes banning grid-tie inverters, sometimes refusing building permits, etc. -- but the real motivation is very consistent: Maintaining diesel consumption to benefit some wealthy individuals.

It did... which we shouldn't take as a reason to stop improving, but as encouragement that we actually can make things better.

That's true of all criminals; the Trumps aren't exceptional in that regard. The news is pretty careful to add that hedge around all reports of criminal activity until the perpetrator is convicted. For example, when discussing the business record fraud that Trump used to attempt to hide his payoff of Stormy Daniels, the news no longer uses the word "alleged" because he was convicted of all 34 felonies.

Interesting, though the article says that Cursor says it's only about 1/4 Kimi.

What inconvenience? I've taken my EVs on thousands of miles of road trips, at least 10k miles, probably closing in on 20k, and it has never been an inconvenience. The opposite, actually, because it's generally quite a bit cheaper.

But the reason to focus on daily driving is because it's a fundamentally different problem than road-tripping, and it's the dominant use of automobiles. This is true even for ICEVs though in that case the difference is more subtle -- for ICEV road tripping you tend to stop at different kinds of gas stations, though you're still stopping at gas stations. In the future what will happen is that the highway stations will still exist as charging stations (and there may be a few more of them), while the vast majority of the in-town stations will disappear because when you drive an EV you generally only need fast charging while on a trip. I think we'll still have a few in-town stations, for those cases when you need a quick boost from 10% to 50%, which only takes a few minutes; very comparable to a gas station stop, actually.

If (yes, that's an if) Starship is successful, it will bring launch costs down to a level that completely changes how we approach space. Assuming other companies don't manage to match the feat (another big if), this could indeed make SpaceX worth trillions.

Will it? Tough to say. If SpaceX does an IPO I'll probably buy some, but I won't invest my whole retirement fund.

I think the Composer model is from Cursor, in-house.

Over 8 hours, that's 40 kWh, which equates to around 160 miles. I think the percentage of Americans who drive 160 miles per day, on average, is a lot less than 10%. If everyone could arrange for 5 kW charging at home, there would be very, very few people who couldn't easily switch to an EV.

Even an L1 charger (15A @ 120V = ~1.8 kW) would provide enough for most peoples' daily driving. With 8 hours of charging, that's like 50 miles of range. Some days will be heavier, but if your car has 300 miles of range you can stand a few consecutive heavier-than-normal days, and if there's an L3 charger around for emergency charges on the quite rare occasion they're required, it would be fine. And because cars charge fastest when the batteries are low, those emergency charging stops could be very quick -- 5-10 minutes, just like a gas station stop.

I actually commuted for a few years in an EV with only an L1 charger at home. It was fine.

Absolutely.