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sireat

The author is a very talented applied cryptographer with a very impressive resume (he is looking for new projects).

The following CV line stands out however:

Google: Software Engineer, Ads Review. June 2014– March 2016.

Angular / Java developer on the internal tool used by contractors to review Google ads for policy violations.

How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go?

I am not blaming the author as I would have done the same(and I imagine author was not told when hired that he'd be working on Java/Angular ad tool).

Again it is not that Java or Angular are bad per se, but working on ad CRUD seems completely orthogonal to author's talents.

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> How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go?

The sentiment is a bit older than ads. It goes:

" I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,"

Howl by Allen Ginsberg:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl

Some might consider your post to be off-topic or worse a "well, actually" interjection, I found it fascinating to learn the source of the "best minds of my generation" framing. Thanks.

I see no reason to think Ginsberg originated the phrase "best minds of a generation," but it doesn't appear cliche enough of a phrase to even have an etymology I could look up.

Yeah we shouldn't credit anyone for popularizing anything unless they were the absolute first to fathom the idea.

I can only claim to know the previous iteration. I'm sure the sentiment is actually as old as civilization its self.

I didn't say that. I didn't even suggest that he didn't create the term. I just said that there's no reason to assume, just because a phrase exists in famous work of art, that it is the origin or popularizer of the phrase. The person I was responding to said it was interesting to learn the origin of the phrase, except no one actually posted anything indicating it was the origin. It just contained it. Maybe it's the origin. I'd be interested in a good source for it. But the normal places I go to to get reliable etymologies (there are plenty of terrible sources for etymologies, unfortunately) don't have that phrase in there.

In other words, I was saying "that's a bad assumption, but I can't actually confirm or deny whether the conclusion is true."

I don't know where you or other people responding to me got the idea that I was saying anything other than exactly what I said. I'm not sure where the breakdown in meaning has occurred.

Come on. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/

First, that's a different, much more specific variation that is clearly from Howl. I have heard the phrase "the best minds of a generation" in old movies and books before, but they would have been around 1950 so maybe Howl came first. Second, your link isn't actually about the Howl quote anyway, which makes me suspicious that you didn't even read the link you posted. The link investigates a quote from 2011 that contains a play on the first line of Howl and investigates that quote, not Howl, nor the phrase which appears in Howl that we're discussing.

We are discussing the quotation from 2011. See the original comment upthread which reads 'How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go?'

The comment by DavidAdams to which you replied was thanking someone for mentioning the Ginsberg connection in relation to the topic under discussion, i.e. the 2011 'framing' which unambiguously draws on Ginsberg.

I think you're just making trouble, to be honest.

Fuckin' Moloch.

"Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most."- Ozzy Osbourne

Yeah, and it's why I left that job for something else.

Thank you for your work on PRTK. As a forensic practitioner during your time at AD, it was always an invaluable tool in my kit.

Glad to hear it!

Just wanted to say that was such a fantastic read. Incredible stuff. I aspire to be as talented in Applied crypto.

What's the best way to reach you? I know a few people who might be quite interested and interesting to work with.

metaweta@gmail.com

> How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go?

I think it goes something like the Open Source saying "that person doesn't owe anyone their intelligence to work on so-called important problems for free, just because it might be nice if they did".

Want smart people to solve important problems? Find a way to pay more for that, than for ads, or find a way they don't need to earn money to live at the standard they want.

Never going to happen. Look at other important jobs - doctors and nurses can have very low wages, while professional footballers earn millions. We all know which one is more important, but there's no way the medics will ever get paid comparably.

Some top doctors can earn at least nba coach level figures. Frontline workers testing people will never make that amount because the skill level is lower so more people can do the work. If everyone refused and only a handful of people were left they couldn't reproduce the same impact anyhow and the program would close instead of paying them millions. Together they have a big impact and one on one they have a big impact but a single first responder doesn't have the attention or connection of millions. Would you put a poster of Jill, Nurse 56 from Grandrapids who works in the covid wing cleaning sheets? Probably not, even though the job is extremely important.

>Some top doctors can earn at least nba coach level figures //

Ethically?

Sure everything from plastic surgeons to heart specialists. Not everyone has to be a doctor to the stars or go on shark tank to make millions. Does your local walkin clinic doctor make that? No, but would make 500k before expensives.

"You want doctors and researchers to be paid more than football players? Just find a way to make them more lucrative than ads."

It's a rather reductive and defeatist view. There's nothing more harmful than looking at a specific state of affairs and going "eh, that's just the way the world works", as if our current economic system was an immutable law of nature.

I don't know how you get from "find a way to change things" to reading "the current state is immutable", but I meant exactly the opposite, it's changeable and dynamic and changing.

The brightest minds are working on ad-tech, not as an immutable law of nature, but because that's where the incentives are, and if the parent commenter wants that to change, whining about how the OP isn't more charitable won't solve it, like whining that open source developers don't work on what users want instead of what they want won't change it; If it's all about incentives, we [1] should look towards finding a way to incentivise the more desired outcome.

[1] parent commenter alone, or society generally.

OP actually did a lot of bright minded work on the side of the Ads stuff.

This is the tragic thing I think. There are some really cool things that I want to work on but very few people paying for it. Awesome doesn't necessarily mean valuable.

>Want smart people to solve important problems? Find a way to pay more for that, than for ads, or find a way they don't need to earn money to live at the standard they want.

This is essentially the Nuremburg Defense, but it's "just following money" rather than "just following orders".

Unless we reach some magical Utopia, we will always have the choice between making money through ethical or unethical means, with the former being beneficial to society, and latter being more lucrative to the individual.

Getting paid $300k / year to work on CRUD apps seems pretty nice to me.

Working in easy or boring stuff for a lot of money is nice if you need it, but miserable if you're an intrinsically motivated person.

One can exercise motivation outside of work.

It’s hard to do when you get home with 0 brain power left after working for 8-10 hours straight doing mind-numbing work

Even more so if you're already at home.

But if you are over qualified your effort is lower. Working at a startup I felt I had nothing left in the tank compared to corporate job that I could checkout easily at the end of the day go home and write more code.

No doubt, that's how most people do it. But ideally you don't want your life to be one of hating most of what you're doing and then just compensating for it in a way that keeps the feedback loop working.

Why be unhappy for 8+ hours a day? Life is short enough as it is, sacrificing 1/4 of it seems rather silly to me unless you have to.

Being bored for 10 hours a day when you have the capability to do so much really is terrible. Couldn't agree with you more.

Having worked in startups for most of my career, I see a lot of engineers who yo-yo between high paid, boring jobs in FAANG-esque companies and burnout-inducing early stage gigs.

Which is a really weird situation when you think about it! This gives credence to the theory I've heard that corporate jobs are "unsustainable" in that they will only hire "smart" people, but actively make their employees dumber.

Whether that's the particular mechanism or not, I think this bears investigation.

I love working at startups and hated working at a large company. You learn 10x more in a fast paced environment where you get a chance to work on a little bit of everything and talking to partners and investors compared to a large scale company where you’re tweaking a small area of the company. Startups are obviously not for everyone and I know plenty of people that prefer the corporate environment either because they like the stability, hours, or the salary.

I'm kind of in this situation now, and it doesn't feel super great to be sort of trapped in a golden handcuffs kind of situation. The effect would be less intense if it weren't an entirely mental exercise.

I have two thoughts:

1) I generally take the higher paying gigs but mostly so I can accelerate retirement 2) Even in the crappiness of high paying jobs (I often think I'm essentially being bribed to put up with all the BS) I can generally maneuver myself into doing interesting work. It takes about 1.5 years of concerted effort, but once I understand how stuff works, I can generally start nudging stuff in the right direction, and can eventually find some form of fulfillment amongst the BS.

I'm only commenting on 1, not on the rest of your comment:

> I generally take the higher paying gigs but mostly so I can accelerate retirement

My problem with this outlook is that sacrificing my current well-being for increased future well-being is risky. I don't know how long I will live or what my health will be like. I have to make the best of the time I have now (without sacrificing too much future well-being, of course!)

Not that I don't do the same, just, it feels risky, on its own. I think the rest of your comment is super important for this reason.

It's a tricky balance to strike. I used to think that you should just work if it's available to you, but now I'm much more inclined to work so you can afford to not work in the near-term rather than only at the hypothetical end. If you can afford to be laid off or quit and just willingly chill and do whatever for a while, that's a good option to take.

Absolutely. I’m painfully aware that I didn’t offer any solution either, because it is a balance that everyone must find for themselves. The main thing I was trying to get across is that sacrificing now for a reward in the possibly distant (relatively speaking) future is too risky for me since I don’t know what the future holds (and given how many people I know who have died young makes me reluctant to take for granted that I would reach retirement age (even early))

The sentiment is certainly shared.

Well, that's how it is, and that's how it's been for decades.

Entire industries are taking the "best and the brightest", and wasting them on some of the most menial jobs imaginable.

If you already do this every day for 1/10th of that compensation with no way out, the misery and boredom are already the norm.

That's a part of my point. The compensation is arbitrary past a certain point where your actual needs are met, unless you're driven by the stuff you exchange the money for. For myself, it's evident even in the post necessity phase where I know I still need to bank some cash to be able to assume some future volatility, but am not in the market for anything out of my reach to buy, so the money stops having tangible value.

> so the money stops having tangible value

I couldn’t agree with this sentiment more. My current job isn’t the highest paying job I’ve ever had (or could currently get). But the value in what I’m learning and exposed to keeps increasing over time. I am not the smartest person in the room and super happy about that

wait what?! where are you getting these numbers from?

levels.fyi.

Unlikely OP earned only $300K/yr

I should move to USA.

Reads the news

I will stay where I live.

(It was probably a lot more than that)

(Who knew you have to pay top dollar for talented people)

This kind of story is pretty standard at Google:

1. Hire the best of the best, typically PhD level.

2. Assign them to random crap project that have precious little to do with their specialty and strengths.

3. Assume that if they were smart enough to earn a PhD on topic X, they'll learn quickly how to do work on Y, even if X and Y are completely unrelated.

I've seen some CS and math PhD grads being employed for software engineering roles where all that mattered was knowing framework X by heart, memorizing GoF patterns, TDD, DDD, SOLID, clean code and all what uncle Bob was preaching in the '90s and early 2000.

I think both CS and software engineering have their own importance but they are not the same. It's better to hire the right person for the job.

Looks like the Google job was relaxing enough to complete a PhD in Computer Science in 2015 at the same time.

Had to squeeze in th PhD after

> Biosimilarity, LLC: Partner. February 2013–May 2014.

Developed a decentralized massively scalable database based on the π-calculus and a secure distributed social network

Actually, being involved in ad tech can get you involved in some really cool tech. It's an incredibly fast-paced industry, lots of parallels to HFT.

And yes, everyone in the industry knows that ads don't work, you have all the ad blockers, etc.

Why work on something that you know doesn't work and makes the world worse?

Some people are absolutely OK with that. Some people, it bothers deeply. Same about weapons work, or other engineering tasks of various applicable moralities. We all have to make our choices. I know I've worked on things of minimal value, just because I needed to pay for life. I've switched to other things when able.

There's nothing unfairly wrong with Google Ads. It's the trackers that are bad.

And who do you think makes the trackers?

> lots of parallels to HFT.

Including the fact that it might make its practitioners rich, while creating nothing of social value.

In the case of ads, arguably negative social value.

Connecting people to goods and services they may want or need in a targeted way that tries to make them more relevant seems positive if anything to me.

Great, So when do we start?

I would love to see ads that are only relevant to my life instead of penis pills.

I'm seeing lots of good ads for local business on instagram at the moment, e.g. local bars doing home delivery.

Good thing we have search engines. If I want to find a good or service, I'll go look up reviews or the like. Ads only serve to sell me things that I don't need, in the vast majority of cases. I think it's fair to say that making people want more stuff is socially negative.

> making people want more stuff is socially negative

I don't really think so in the general case. Personally I've eaten a lot of food I found out about from ads and wouldn't have known I wanted otherwise, and I'm glad iit happened.

If you want to try new foods, that's cool, I do too. Read local food reviews.

But if ads convince you to try 47 different restaurants and that otherwise you would have been perfectly happy to eat at home, then the ads did a disservice to society.

Relatively nobody goes out of their way for local food reviews. If advertising was suddenly banned I feel like people would end up much less likely to try anything new and life would be more stagnant overall. New businesses would struggle to attract customers and everyone would gravitate to McDonald's and Wal Mart even more than they already do.

I disagree. I and I lot of people I know go out of our ways for local food reviews, and word of mouth is also incredibly powerful.

And you must remember that for every local food ad there are 300 ads for McDonalds or Walmart, and they are just as effective, altough likely for another demographic.

Same for HFT

I'm starting to consider any company whose revenue primarily comes from ads to be immoral. It's the business of hijacking people's minds. Part of this means stimulating the worst aspects of thinking: addiction, fear, pain, all that ads seek to satisfy.

You open a business. You sell something or offer a service. Day one is "let people know that I exist". Pretty much every form this take is advertising. No business live without making its customers aware of it.

It's not immoral in specializing on how to advertise. It's immoral to overstep some boundaries when doing it.

Disclosure: I worked in a company whose primary revenue was selling tools to create ads.

Discovery is a problem that can be solved in a million other methods. If (hypothetically, somehow) ads were outlawed from existence tomorrow, a thriving industry of independent reviewers would instantly pop up to serve the need of product discovery.

Painting the advertising industry as "humble startup putting up a sign in the downtown square" is also disingenuous. Most advertisements you see are done by big corporations. What's the excuse of Coca-Cola or McDonalds to plaster the streets with psychologically-crafted pictures of their unhealthy products, then?

> If (hypothetically, somehow) ads were outlawed from existence tomorrow, a thriving industry of independent reviewers would instantly pop up to serve the need of product discovery.

Hardly. You buy a domain name, put something on it and then what, wait for an independent reviewer to monitor the registrars? And that review would be discovered how?

> Painting the advertising industry as "humble startup putting up a sign in the downtown square" is also disingenuous. Most advertisements you see are done by big corporations. What's the excuse of Coca-Cola or McDonalds to plaster the streets with psychologically-crafted pictures of their unhealthy products, then?

I have no idea how did you reach that conclusion from what I wrote.

"If (hypothetically, somehow) ads were outlawed from existence tomorrow, a thriving industry of independent reviewers would instantly pop up to serve the need of product discovery."

By "independent reviewers", you mean bought youtube influencers, right? Because that's what's often happening in industries where external reviews plays a big role.

I don't think there is any way to get rid of ads from society, as you say. I don't think ads were that big of a problem historically. The problem is that the recent (20ish years) era where the fast response of internet ads (a click on the ad immediately tell you it worked), compared to a tv ad (you wait a month to infer ad effectiveness from the revenue numbers), has enabled rapid A/B testing of ad design.

What that means is that ad design is rapidly iterated upon to maximize revenue of the company [1]. We also know from first principles that ads can have negative influences on people (making people dissatisfied with their bodies or lives, or making them engage in medically harmful behavior like smoking etc etc.). Now, there is very little legal regulation of what can be in an ad, except that factual statements in the ad are true; and ad creators rarely self-regulate.

So you have one variable A=product revenue. You have another variable B=negative psychological impact on viewers of ads. The ad optimization process only optimizes A, and places almost no constraints on B while doing so. Guess what? A significant percentage of ads end up with both high A and B.

This is the problem. I am not proposing any solutions, but the problem exists.

[1]. Also the techniques learned from internet ads are applied to tv, print and billboard ads.

You're absolutely correct, but leave it to "the market" and it will drill through your very self if it finds a dime at the bottom.

I understand and agree with your point but I think this site overvalues CS graduates by a lot. There are bright minds everywhere, doing math, physics, literature, medicine, law and a long etc. That "some" minds, because of greed/need-to-subsistence or whatever the reason choose that path is a shame but hardly a loss in the great scheme of things. Most intellectual pursuits are already fiercely competitive as it is.

You might want to read OPs's CV before dismissing his brightness

Sometimes you have no choices than working on something not fitting your skills.

Imagine those with a university degree working at McDonald's serving menus

Wasn't Einstein a patent clerk? Can't imagine working on glue code at Google is all that bad.

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