At least in my experience, having worked in both Florida and California, that's more of a wash than people imagine it's going to be -- and more so than the "cost of living calculators" tend to demonstrate, at least if you're a renter.
I actually ran a few numbers based on current costs. If you're making $120K/yr in Florida and paying the average cost for a 1-bedroom rental in Tampa ($1,642/mo, as of April 2026 according to Apartments.com), your after-tax take home is $98 (24% federal tax bracket, no state tax) and you have $78.4K after rent. If you're making $180K/yr in California and paying the average cost for a 1-bedroom rental in San Jose ($2,705/mo), your after-tax take home is $130.5K (24% federal tax bracket, 9.3% CA state tax bracket) and you have $98K left after housing.
You can keep fiddling with the numbers, but in most cases, the premium for getting a tech job in Silicon Valley is sufficiently high that you really are making more in absolute dollars despite the higher cost of living.
That math breaks down if you have kids and need 4bdrm house commutable distance to work in good school district - prohibitively expensive in Bay Area and affordable on engineer salary in most tier 2 cities. If you do not have kids, Bay Area clearly wins, especially if you are ok with studio/1bdrm.
"This might feel counterintuitive" is precisely why the religious right has seized on transgender participation in athletics as a wedge issue. When they say "well, somebody who was born as a man obviously has a natural advantage over people born as women," it feels logical, right? The fact that it largely isn't supported by data rarely comes up, and when it does, it's easy to deflect with "maybe there's just not enough data yet" (which, of course, could just as easily be an argument against imposing such bans, but never mind).
It is infuriating how successful the "facts don't care about your feelings" crowd has been at pushing discriminatory legislation through in the last few years based largely on feelings rather than facts.
The classification has always been based on sociological conceptions and is still based on such after this change. There have always been outliers who are sociologically women, but don't have the biological makeup most women have.
That the criteria for admission are altered now to exclude some of them is motivated by anti-trans politics. Usually such rule changes are made when it becomes obvious that the old rules cause outcomes which go against the spirit of the sport. You cannot argue this here in good faith. There are not a lot of trans women competing and none have even won anything afaik.
I'm claiming that there were always women with outlier biology which is not at all easy to classify and not obvious at a glance.
People caring about this issue in sports now and changing the objective admission criteria to exclude them is a political phenomenon more than anything else.
The categories were created at a time when “sex” and “gender” were universally considered synonymous, but they were created for the purpose of sex segregation — were they not?
This issue genuinely confuses me — and I don’t seem alone in that. Re-defining words does not redefine categories or change the underlying motivation for creating categories in the first place.
I'm not trying to define away biology here. Although "sex" is surprisingly hard to nail down.
Rather, I'm arguing the underlying motivation for creating these categories was and is a sociological one. Why carve out womens sports, as opposed to short peoples sports, low testosterone sports (or other categories which would be similarly disadvantaged)?
The only reason people pay attention to sex here is sociological, i.e. because of gender. This implies that the admissions criteria do not automatically have to follow these strict biological lines -- and I see little reason to enforce them this strictly now. Why exclude trans people and why make yourself a headache trying to classify e.g. intersex people?
More of an aside: a society which fully accepted trans women as women would think looking at the biological markers you're looking at is complete nonsense. Suggesting trans women should be banned would be as ludicrous as suggesting all women with a specific gene which might increase your chances of winning should be banned.
We carved out women’s sports because otherwise there would be no biological women in competitive sports, and that was considered to be a significant enough exclusion of half the human population as to warrant such direct intercession.
Whether or not a similar case can be made for other categories does not have bearing on the case for sex categorization. Such claims can and should stand on their own merits.
You've posted this several times, and I think it represents a pretty narrow understanding of humans.
Like, gender clearly and obviously exists. Why do women wear make up and skirts, while men typically dont? Is there a biological need to do those things? Is that universal across all cultures?
Of course we have social norms for men and women. That set of norms is what gender is. Denying the idea that society expects different behaviors from men and women is frankly a pretty absurd take.
There's no such thing as gender separate from sex. There's the recognition of one's immutable, inherent, sex, and tacking social expectations on top of it, but never that one could choose, or "feel". Always derived, never a choice. And when people allowed cross-dressing, it was always clear it was fake, pretending, never true. But they allowed people to have their personal delusions.
The origin of this use of "gender" itself is due to the prudishness of English upper classes in pronouncing the word "sex", so they repurposed "gender" which is just the French word "genre" meaning "kind" or "category". Much more acceptable in polite company than something that can allude to a sexual act, fornication.
The "tacking social expectations on top" is the part that is gender!
There's no biological foundation for wearing a sari, hijab, miniskirt, etc. Those are social expectations for women, or part of the role women fill in society.
It's a wholly different concept than biological sex. My penis does not make it impossible to wear eyeliner. But society has a social expectation that I do not. It's not a sex characteristic, it's a gender characteristic.
You might believe gender is immutable. I'm not going to argue that with you. But denying the idea that humans have both characteristics derived from biology (sex) and from societal expectations (gender) is simply objectively incorrect.
> It's not a sex characteristic, it's a gender characteristic.
They're one and the same.
> But denying the idea that humans have both characteristics derived from biology (sex) and from societal expectations (gender) is simply objectively incorrect.
I don't deny the existence of social expectations (you severely misread what I wrote), but those expectations were deriving from the recognition of the objective truth of one's sex. They were never a matter of one's "internal feelings", they were an extension of one's sex.
You seem to be partly arguing from a position of ignorance.
The trans-ness some people experience is extremely general and durable, far more consistent with the explanation that they innately are their gender somehow[^1], than with choice or psychosis. Some people feel pressured by this to, despite all the societal dis-incentives, medically transition. They then are not only their gender in behavior and reported experience, but also physically (with the exception of some hard-to-change stuff such as fertility).
We usually handle such general, durable "personal delusions" by accepting them. If I studied some math for years, can do said math and am employed at my local university doing mathematics, I am a mathematician. I do not have delusions of being a mathematician. If I move to, say Germany, and after years speak the language, have children there, participate in the local culture, and have a citicenship I am now German. Only the most backward people would say I have delusions of being German. Although, this cultural rigidity of course exists, I do not see it as desirable. An advanced society should accept and accomodate its outliers instead of steamrolling over them and making them suffer.
[^1]: Afaik currently a neuroscientific explanation is not forthcoming
> And those people are given the escape hatch of "transness" which is a lie politely allowed by society which gives people the delusion of trying to be what they cannot ever be.
I'm arguing that it ought not to be a polite lie if there are people whose mental makeup is better suited to a gender expression not corresponding to their sex, who then inhabit that different role in everyday life.
I frankly don't get your assertion that this cannot happen, as there exist people for whom this is reality right now (in part because they are simply not easily identifyable as trans).
> young people are mutilating themselves and crippling themselves irreversibly by using hormones
My understanding is that the worst side-effect of using hormones is infertility, while surgery comes with more risks.
Anyway, it's about trading off mental anguish against possible complications of medical intervention. Where is the problem here? People do cosmetic surgeries for similar, if not more vain, reasons.
> when doctors try to treat these people correctly, according to their true nature (sex), trans activists have attacked the doctors calling it "misgendering"
Trying to ignore the reality that ones body is different in medical contexts would be indeed harmful. If this kind of activism exists, I do not condone it. I imagine that treating a trans person does not boil down to treating them like a cis person of their sex however, as hormone replacement causes a bunch of differences.
> I'm arguing that it ought not to be a polite lie
A lie is defined in terms of it not being the truth, not in terms of effects on someone. Those effects are entirely irrelevant.
> My understanding is that the worst side-effect of using hormones is infertility, while surgery comes with more risks.
Men getting oestrogens are getting osteoporosis in their 20's and 30's.
> Anyway, it's about trading off mental anguish against possible complications of medical intervention.
It's not even doing that in most cases, because the self-loathing that caused people to look for the "transness" escape hatch turns out to have outside causes and won't go away.
It's not pretty, but both Pages and Numbers are pretty powerful in their modern incarnations. If you actually need Microsoft Office, then you need it, but a lot of people who don't think they could get away with just Apple's freebies probably could.
(Disclosure: I write 99% of my stuff in Emacs now, so I'm not going to go that far out on a limb for iWork. It's just that it's the best "Works"-style suite that I've used.)
I also like Apple's office suite, the problem is network effects. I'd even argue most people don't actually need MS Office. The amount of people using PowerQuery, VBA, etc. is probably less than 2% of users.
The problem is, because everyone else (in business) already has and uses office, if you want to collaborate, that's what you have to use. Open file formats didn't win out in the end.
This is absolutely the problem - with the added issue of platform support.
I’m the only Mac user in our company of 15, which means I’m also the only person that can open a .pages file. Anyone can read a .docx, and if authored in word it will actually look the same on both computers.
Is it 2% who author content using those tools, or are you also including anyone who might need to open and use a spreadsheet using one of those technologies?
It's not "the end" yet. Many governments and sufficiently motivated orgs are switching to ODF - it's only over for proprietary file formats that pretend they can stand toe-to-toe with docx. By eschewing open formats you're making all the mistakes of .docx with none of the upsides of the network effect.
Also, (1) the image is dithered, ha ha, and (2) The image on the page https://daringfireball.net/2020/05/dithering is an 863K PNG. (Which I bet we could still get down to a smaller size, granted.) It took me a bit to figure out what you're looking at -- the Dithering site on passport.online, where the cover art is inexplicably 3000x3000 pixels. I'm too tired to come up with a good crack about how that explains what I don't like about Ben Thompson, but I bet it's there.
"For all my bitching, I'd still recommend it" has been my take since I got it sometime last year. It's kind of remarkable -- the ads are absolute trash and the apps, while not bad, are a little weird in hard-to-define ways other than "Apple used to do better at this whole UI thing". But if you want just a handful of the paywalled publications it unlocks for you, it's a great deal.
I think it would be more accurate to say that Bluesky is like pre-Musk Twitter because the moderation teams at both Bluesky and Original Twitter are primarily trying to remove/suppress posts that they consider to be illegal, violent, overt harassment, etc.; they weren't politically motivated. I am sure some conservatives will read this and be like BUT BUT BUT BUT -- but sorry, there have been a lot of studies done on this topic over the last fifteen years and change, and they've consistently found that conservative posts tend to outperform liberal posts on most social media, including Facebook and Twitter, and that the anecdotes suggesting the opposite tend to focus on posts that were moderated for being violent and/or overt harassment. Conservatives don't want to hear that "their side" gets moderated more often because they have proportionately more assholes that invite moderation, but as well-known Person In Need Of Moderation Ben Shapiro so aptly put it, facts don't care about your feelings.
So why did Bluesky end up proportionately more leftist (which is absolutely true)? Because while the moderation team at X may still remove/suppress posts that are illegal, X has, at a corporate level, very explicitly chosen a political side in a way that no other major social media company has. Bluesky's CEO has not, to the best of my knowledge, been promoting liberal conspiracy theories, hyping posts attacking conservatives, or joining the government to radically reshape it in ways that anyone even moderately right-of-center would find horrifying. When I read HN, it seems like those who still love Twitter/X seriously downplay how much of an effect Elon Musk's transformation into a loud, forceful reactionary -- and his insistence on making sure that Twitter/X reflects that transformation in the posts that it actively promotes to its users -- has had on its audience composition. Yes, I know there are still lots of people on Twitter who aren't Musk fans, aren't particularly political, might even be left-of-center, but his behavior has actively driven a lot of people off it.
tl;dr: Bluesky didn't actively choose to become left-of-center; Twitter actively chose to become far right, and those who were bothered by that but still wanted to be on social media largely ended up on Bluesky.
> Have you used AI to write documentation for software?
Hi. I have edited AI-generated first drafts of documentation -- in the last few months, so we are not talking about old and moldy models -- and describing the performance as "extremely well" is exceedingly generous. Large language models write documentation the same way they do all tasks, i.e., through statistical computation of the most likely output. So, in no particular order:
- AI-authored documentation is not aware of your house style guide. (No, giving it your style guide will not help.)
- AI-authored documentation will not match your house voice. (No, saying "please write this in the voice of the other documentation in this repo" will not help.)
- The generated documentation will tend to be extremely generic and repetitive, often effectively duplicating other work in your documentation repo.
- Internal links to other pages will often be incorrect.
- Summaries will often be superfluous.
- It will love "here is a common problem and here is how to fix it" sections, whether or not that's appropriate for the kind of document it's writing. (It won't distinguish reliably between tutorial documentation, reference documentation, and cookbook articles.)
- The common problems it tells you how to fix are sometimes imagined and frequently not actually problems worth documenting.
- It's subject to unnecessary digression, e.g., while writing a high-level overview of how to accomplish a task, it will mention that using version control is a good idea, then detour for a hundred lines giving you a quick introduction to Git.
As for using AI "to generate deep research reports by scouring the internet", that sounds like an incredibly fraught idea. LLMs are not doing searches, they are doing statistical computation of likely results. In practice the results of that computation and a web search frequently line up, but "frequently" is not good enough for "deep research": the fewer points of reference for a complex query there are in an LLM's training corpus, the more likely it is to generate a bullshit answer delivered with a veneer of absolute confidence. Perhaps you can make the case that that's still a good place to start, but it is absolutely not something to rely on.
>LLMs are not doing searches, they are doing statistical computation of likely results.
This was true of ChatGPT in 2022, but any modern platform that advertises a "deep research" feature provides its LLMs with tools to actually do a web search, pull the results it finds into context and cite them in the generated text.
That's not at all been my experience. My experience has been one of constant amazement (and still surprise) when it catches nuances in behavior from just reading the code.
I'm sure there are many variables across our experiences. But I know I'm not imagining what I'm seeing, so I'm bullish on the idea of an AI-curated encyclopedia, whether Elon Musk is involved or not.
Teslas have the wrong sense-gear, coupled with immense randomness. Pesky pedestrians. Waymo seems to be doing quite well in comparison. Regardless, a cat isn't a dog, and real-world navigation isn't posting on Facebook.
It would be better to make a direct point, such as "It will never be flawless". That's not really a problem here, it only need be flawless most of the time.
My point was more just that assigning a year to "no way to ever tell" seems as fraught as assigning a year to virtually any technological achievement we haven't seen yet. :) My strong suspicion is that by 2030, LLMs will be everywhere in a real sense, but the output quality won't be materially better than we have now -- the LLMs will simply be much more efficient and less resource-intensive (and, perhaps, the training corpuses in common use will be less full of legal minefields than the current batch). I could absolutely be wrong, but I don't think so.
While I understand that, I can't help but compare this to Mac hardware rather than software. There was a years-long stretch when it seemed like they'd really seriously lost the plot: the butterfly keyboard, the Touch Bar, the "trashcan" Mac, heat issues across the line. There was a real case to be made for abandoning Macs based on hardware issues alone (and I'm sure some folks did, and hopefully they're happy for it).
Then came Apple Silicon. And at least in my eyes, Apple hardware is the best it's been in a really long time.
There are some definite trainwrecks in the current state of Liquid Glass (especially on the Mac), and there have been other dubious choices and mounting bugs made over the last few years. But I've used both Windows 11 and a recent Linux distribution (Fedora, via Asahi Linux, running KDE Plasma), and while I like the latter it's just not enough to make me give up what I like on the Mac in terms of Mac-only applications and little life-bettering affordances I've internalized over the years I've been here. Yes, if the trajectory they're on now in software continues, I'll have to re-evaluate that -- but their hardware took a real turn for the better after Jony Ive and some of his deputies left. Alan Dye and some of his deputies left earlier this year, and I'm not going to count the new team out before giving them a chance to prove themselves.
It's a good point. I hated that butterfly keyboard, and the Touch Bar was an utterly useless gimmick for me. And they realised that and rolled it back (and added ports again!).
They do eventually listen to their customers. Let's hope it doesn't take as long for these changes to get rolled back.
I'm kinda stuck with Mac at work. I don't mind it, but I run Linux on all my personal computers and find that is way better.
I wonder how much connect there is between those in charge of hardware and those in charge of working software. It would be one thing if the software had a design direction, we all hated it, but it was implemented to its logical conclusion and pure stupid bugs weren't left to linger for years. That would be a matter of difference in taste and vision.
But I wonder if they have the ability to execute... anything, anymore. It's starting to look a little like Windows, which in a totally shameless and burlesque fashion has 3 or 4 design paradigms at the same time, jumbled together in a big stew.
It does feel like the decision making is internal-politics-driven rather than customer-satisfaction-driven, for both Mac and Windows now. Senseless changes that have little in common with other changes.
We've had this for decades with Windows, and internal leaks confirming that it's all to do with turf wars between departmental heads.
As you say, it's an indication that Apple are going down the same road, and are unable to actually execute a vision anymore.
I mean, you can take your iPad back to Apple and have them replace the battery, you know. For my current one (a "4th generation" Air) that'd be $120, which is not cheap, but it's cheaper than replacing it for $700 and a lot less stressful than trying to replace the battery myself.
(Having said that, I'm not ruling out replacing it, but I don't think I'll be inclined to do that until they stop updating its version of iPadOS.)
I actually ran a few numbers based on current costs. If you're making $120K/yr in Florida and paying the average cost for a 1-bedroom rental in Tampa ($1,642/mo, as of April 2026 according to Apartments.com), your after-tax take home is $98 (24% federal tax bracket, no state tax) and you have $78.4K after rent. If you're making $180K/yr in California and paying the average cost for a 1-bedroom rental in San Jose ($2,705/mo), your after-tax take home is $130.5K (24% federal tax bracket, 9.3% CA state tax bracket) and you have $98K left after housing.
You can keep fiddling with the numbers, but in most cases, the premium for getting a tech job in Silicon Valley is sufficiently high that you really are making more in absolute dollars despite the higher cost of living.
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