What does FTE stand for?:

> From what I can tell, there have been about 4 FTE from Google over this period

It stands for "Full Time Equivalent".

It's a measure of time spent working on something, to standardise comparisons of work capacity and acknowledge that it's not always full time, especially when aggregating the time from different people. One full time person = 1 FTE.

For example if you work 20 hours a week on project A and 20 hours on project B, then project A will count your contribution as 0.5 FTE while you're assigned to that project.

If you also have two other people working on it full timee, and a project manager working 1 day a week on it, then project A will count the contribution from all three of you as 2.7 FTE. (2.7 = 0.5 + 2 + 0.2).

In the Google context, “FTE” actually stands for “Full-Time Employee”, as opposed to “TVC” = “Temp/Vendor/Contractor”.

Full Time Employee

Is this a codeword for "not contractor"? I heard that at google contractors are second class citizens.

>at google contractors are second class citizens

This is the case at many companies to avoid contractors being considered employees.

Yes, but that is usually more relating to pay/benefits. At google (from what I heard) contractors are put on the bad projects, maintenance work or support functions. As in there is a big separation between work done by full-time employees and contractors in most teams.

I think FTE is mostly used as a 'unit'. E.g. if two people work on something 50% of the time, you get one "FTE-equivalent", as there is roughly one full-time employee of effort put in.

Though in this context it just seems to be the number of people working on the code on a consistent basis.

FTE can mean either:

* “Full Time Employee” (which can itself mean “not a part-timer” in a place that employs both, or “not a temp/contractor” [in which case the “full-time” really means “regular/permanent”]) or

* “Full Time Equivalent” (a budgeting unit equal to either a full time worker or a combination of part time workers with the same aggregate [usually weekly] hours as constitute the standard for full-time in the system being used.)

Yeah, 1 FTE just equals 40 work-hours.

FTE is a TLA.

Out of interest, do you have any specific examples of this?

Nvidia “invested” up to $100B in OpenAI. OpenAI uses much/most of that money to buy NVidia chips.

The MS Azure deal is of the same nature. MS “invests” into OpenAI who then buys Azure services for the investment. OpenAI evaluation is increased and the musical chairs will continue for another round.

I've tried Neovim, but still use VSCode because everything either works out of the box or takes 2 clicks to install an extension for and things like drag and drop into the file explorer or the remote extension make it really quick to use.

The only other real GUI contender I've seen is Jetbrains's IDEs (the free educational plan is great) but having seperate IDEs for different languages gets a bit annoying if you have multi language projects (e.g. a Rust backend hosting a Typescript frontend)

See https://herecomesthemoon.net/2025/06/i-like-helix/, Helix is a very different experience from neovim, and basically everything works out of the box with no configs or setup required.

It's quite impressive how everything just works and how easy onboarding is.

You don't really need the different IDEs. For example, you can install the Rust plugin and the TypeScript plugin in IntelliJ Ultimate, without needing RustRover and WebStorm.

Does CLion not contain the JS tools? The other have them.

Not completely related, but do you know if hardware kickstarters typically have any IP protection? I'm surprised there haven't been any cases of large companies creating patents for ideas from kickstarter at least that I've seen

One cannot (or at least, one is not supposed to be able to) patent someone else's invention.

Public use of an idea still prevents someone else from patenting it.

Sounds like You're conflating sale of a product prior to filing with "prior art"

Slightly old but interesting https://blog.equinix.com/blog/2024/09/19/how-data-centers-us...

There's actually section in the Wikipedia page that explicitly says DeepSeek was trained on it

They're not redacted. If you zoom in you'll just see a very large number of stacked names which is ironic (I thought the same for a second)

I noticed you can create custom chips using Verilog which I will definitely try at some point. Seems like it could be a pretty useful tool to learn/test designs in.