I don't think about controlling cost because I price my time at US$40/h and virtually all models are cheaper than that (with the exception of o1 or Gemini 2.5 pro).
If I spend $2 instead of $0.50 on a session but I had to spend 6 minutes thinking about context, I haven't gained any money.
If your expectation is to produce the same amount of output, you could argue when paying for AI tools, you're choosing to spend money to gain free time.
4 hours coding project X or 3 hours and a short hike with your partner / friends etc
If what I'm doing doesn't have a positive expected value, the correct move isn't to use inferior dev tooling to save money, it's to stop working on it entirely.
> This notion that the entire world should be safe for children by default, and that anything and everything adult should be vilified and locked up, is toxic as all get-out and builds shame into the human animal over something required for the perpetuation of the species.
The world should be safe for kids because kids are the future of our society. When the world isn't safe, families won't have kids and society will start to decline. Maybe that means giving up some of the privileges you have. That's the cost of our future.
The typical student that wants to learn and gain skills self-teaches online.
The reason why I am getting a degree in computer engineering is because I need it to get a job, because a degree is supposed to filter out people who don't understand how to write code at any level. I'm essentially paying for someone to grade my tests and assignments. Honestly, I think most of my courses are too easy and I'm not getting good value on the filtering side.
Most of the lecture materials I pay for are plagiarized from open courses. Sometimes I find the original course. Typically my professor refactors stuff to make it less clear or add false information.
If I was at a top-tier university, I might be getting knowledge I couldn't get elsewhere. But at my school the professors pretend to teach and the students pretend to learn.
The learning materials are all online, but realistically, very few students are going to work full-time 9 months per year for 4 years doing assignments by themselves, without weekly deadlines and friends to cheer them on. If you're going to put in all that time, you might as well get the degree.
And as the article points out, the time itself is what dominates the total cost--not tuition.
> I'm essentially paying for someone to grade my tests and assignments
ever considered something like WGU if that's the case? Cheap, can be finished as fast as you want, and would likely get you past HR screening at the rate of a mid-tier uni
Yea that’s not gonna work, you have to export it for it to become part of your shell’s environment and be passed down to subprocesses.
You could however wrap the export variable and codex command in a script and just call that. This way the variable would only be part of that script’s environment.
"The vast majority of chicken processed in the United States is not chilled in chlorine and hasn't been for quite a few years," says Dianna Bourassa, an applied poultry microbiologist at Auburn University, "So that's not the issue."
I like how this was the origin of the "virgin/Chad memes". Some guy kept spamming a meme about the "virgin walk" to make people feel self-conscious, and then someone made a joke response called the "Chad stride". Years later, those two are inseparable in popular culture.
Despite listing all presently known bats, the majority of "list of chiropterans" byte count is code that generates references to the IUCN Red List, not actual text. Most of Wikipedia's longest articles are code.
So I would say skill at GPU assembly is in-demand for the elite tier of GPU performance work. Not necessarily writing much of it (though see [1] for an example, this is the kernel of multisplit as used in Nvidia's Onesweep implementation), but definitely in being able to read it so you can understand what the compiled code is actually doing. I'll also cite as evidence of that the incredible work of the engineers on Nanite. They describe writing the core of the microtriangle software renderer in HLSL but analyzing the assembler output to optimize down to the cycle level, as described in their "deep dive into Nanite virtualized geometry" talk (timestamp points to the reference to instruction-level micro-optimization).
In games only one console vendor allows you to write shaders in asm, though it is not very productive, especially with RDNA. Reading the compiler output is a good-to-have skill however, for teasing the compiler into better register usage, reducing divergency, identifying problematic folded math, and debugging live GPU hangs.
In China and other places where you want to squeeze all the performance from gpus of a generation or two ago. But it's not a portable skill set (Google won't hire you) so be careful of what you wish for...
What could go wrong?
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