A New Year's letter to a young person

I am now in my mid 30’s but moving to a second tier city may be one of the best life choices.

I have a small sample but all my New York and SF friends are still single, living in apartments, and grinding at great innovative companies.

My friends in Seattle, Austin, Chicago, seem to have much chiller more fulfilling lives where they have families, real estate, weird funky interests and hobbies.

> A small number of cities, starting with San Francisco, Paris, London, and New York, are where almost everyone working and thinking about artificial intelligence is based. Go to these cities, or the closest approximation of them available to you, not just to work on these problems but to understand what possibilities may come your way.

The problem with this - it leads to group think - you end up being forced to conform.

There's a reason Warren Buffet left NY and went to Omaha.

likewise the best things usually come from the margins - the apple pc didn't come from people working at the best MicroPC companies but hipsters tinkering.

While the Twitter recommendation is strange, the assertion that we will suddenly have leisure time is demonstrably false. For decades each new technological advance was supposed to make it so we could work half as long because we could get twice as much done. That never happens. The cost of a person was never in how much they could produce but in how much they would demand to do so. If you can do twice as much, then your work product becomes half as valuable. Many of the throw away things we buy everyday are cheap only because their production is so heavily automated. If we still had to cook food in a conventional kitchen instead of warming up precooked food, or use a hammer and hand plane to build furniture, we would be paying far more than we do today. If anything, the people working those jobs are paid comparatively less now than before automation because it used to take skill to work those jobs but now anyone can do it. This is why the main advice of the article - do something that can't be automated and learn how to build the automation - is good advice.

>In the past, my answers were often based on a piece of advice I myself got from Bengt Holmstrom: “when in doubt, choose the job where you will learn more.”

Weird advice, How does anyone know what job you'd learn more at? Anyways, when I was a young person the only requirement I had for my first job was would they be willing to hire me.

all good, but why `5. install twitter`? > it's a huge time sink but everything happens there in the open.

... ok? i don't get why the tradeoff is worth it?