MathYouF

I already made clear my reasoning:

> demonstrating expertise in a field where being wrong is easy to prove. I find expertise in a highly technical field trains one to filter their thoughts for demonstrable accuracy.

Your litany of past posts with a tone of incredulity at the people you reply to, as well as being a good example of having few posts on topics of technical complexity, make me not interested in engaging with you further, as it seems more like it struck a personal chord with you and that you're not discussing the merits of this observation in good faith.

It would be interesting to pair this with something like MaskRCNN or something which does semantic masking, and then be able to choose the compression levels of different masks.

And what is the SoTA for biological intelligence? While not exactly this, it seems to be pretty similar (even between members of the same species).

Snark aside, with a few nuances, you're mostly correct.

> It’s hard for great engineers to move into management because they like being deeply focused on challenging technical problems, not hopping in and out of a dozen meetings every day.

That's why they often don't.

So which type of engineers do find it easy or desirable to move into management?

I've found as well that once I get really going on a tough problem, it may consume my life for the next several days in a row, it'll be all I do or think about. I wish I knew how people turn it off after a few hours a day and think about anything else.

Just as an aside I'd like to mention that if the CTO shopping on the job and not reviewing any of your work is the worst employment experience you've ever had, you should count yourself as lucky still. It's certainly not a great environment, but nothing you've mentioned so far sounds tragically awful, just mildly disappointing. It's a workers market right now, you could easily leave to find an environment with more engaged coworkers if you wanted.

Culture shock isn't the only thing that factors into quality of life though. There's a lot of places in the US you could go that you might dislike living in but wouldn't necessarily introduce a significant culture shock compared to a foreign country.

Just wanted to point out that out, as I've lived in Asia and Eastern Europe and despite the greater culture shock in the former, still preferred it as a long term residence. One's personal preferences and expectations for life can affect that a lot.

I was born and partially raised in Columbus and Ohio in general. I defintiely left for the coast as soon as I could get a job that allowed it. So there's at least certain people they're describing the motivations of correctly.

That said, there are many who are happy to live there. I do wonder how many young and truly brilliant engineers are on that list, but maybe their presence won't be required on site? It's not an exciting place to be young and dynamic when compared to the big cities on the coasts.

The quality of life though, especially for someone raising a family and looking to build their nest egg, is great. Fresh air, relatively low crime, nice large yards and people with good Midwestern family values (might not be the "values" someone from San Fransisco would prioritize though).

Here's one I frequented semi-regularly when I lived in Tokyo. It is also maybe one of the most iconic game centers, being in Akihabara right outside the metro station with a large "SEGA" sign. Super not sketchy, mostly normal and mostly young people, no smokers, several women, even people there as couples.

SEGA Akihabara Building 3 +81 3-5297-3601 https://maps.app.goo.gl/S9PTNg7Yn29Wfcee9

I really think the OP was actually describing what in English we would call casinos (pachinkos) rather than arcades (game centers).

Unless I'm missing something, she seems to be a student, possibly estranged from her family since 17, having spent the last year of her adolescence in foster care, so it's plausible that she is currently poor, and needing of a scholarship to afford further education.

We don't know any more details from this article, and there is a big difference between having grown up poor verses being currently poor, as ones early life can give them a huge advantage, but this might not be as clear cut of a case of "rich kid blatantly lies to get opportunity" as it may seem.

Slightly off topic, but could you go into a bit more detail on this artifact? I thought an artifact was something like a trained model, but you said it was "written" in Scala then Java, which makes me think I don't understand the meaning, and the word on Google has very broad definitions.

For others, who are interested in good faith conversations about the problem with people applying to work they call "bs jobs", the point is finding work you as an individual consider meaningful, and learning the skills to do them.

Those who tell you you're "not saving the world" and therefore your work is bs and therefore you should be as disillusioned and cynical as they are, if it's say delivering food, are also complaining that they can't get a bs job as well so they can get money so that you can deliver food to them. It's entitlement, plain and simple. Their main attack is to tell others their work is also meaningless while demanding still the outputs of that "meaningless" labor.

One issue is that you may pay ten people 1MM annually to write your software, but the productivity distribution is likely not only non-equal but also non-linearly so.

Those at the top of the productivity distribution are the more likely to be able to find new employment, so you may be losing more than a tenth of your development output by going that route, and finding a replacement for that type of employee may be much more costly and difficult than average.

Sounds fair, not everyone is everyone else's cup of tea, I have my preferences and you have yours. I have read the "comic" at this point and the cynical attitude towards work without requisite personal effort to apply only to meaningful jobs and invest in learning the skills for them is as I'd expected from the headline.

I personally turned down a lucrative "bs" job after college to do work I considered meaningful, and was nearly homeless many times for the several years I worked on it. I now have the skills from those years of refusing to do "bs" work and instead focusing on work I personally considered meaningful, even when the few who offered employment doing it then wouldn't hire me. The comic doesn't seem to demonstrate them having done anything but trying to "get in" on the easy money from "bs" jobs and being disappointed they can't.

Seeing from your profile you seem to be trying your best to help create meaningful and balanced work lives for people, I hope you continue to succeed in helping people do so!

I admit I had only read the title:

"I have sent hundreds of applications, competing with thousands for yet another ‘bullshit job’. And like many, I’ve had enough"

and seen it was a lengthy comic.

I have now taken the time to read the entire comic. My advice for this person hasn't changed substantially. They seem to have few rare and marketable skills, just a lifetime of employment in what they consider "BS" jobs, and are now wondering why they aren't receiving responses from companies looking for skilled workers to do meaningful jobs.

It still reeks of the exact kind of self inflicted cynicism that I wouldn't want to have in a coworker. I'm happy to discuss specifics though if there's a nuance in it you think my advice missed.

I'm currently hiring for two roles for Three.js developers for my company to be my teammates (hit me up if you're intersted btw!).

We work very hard and care a lot about our project. A person I took over the project from didn't and it showed, they probably considered it a "bullshit" job.

The author of this article is applying to roles they consider "bullshit" jobs and is wondering why no one is hiring. Maybe it's because the people hiring also don't consider the work to be bs, but rather, very important, and would rather, like me, work extra hours every day just to avoid being around a coworker who thinks that way about the thing they (are paid to) spend half of their conscious life doing.

Stop applying for roles you think are BS and maybe you'll see people a lot more intersted in hiring you. If you lack the skills to be hired for work you consider meaningful, that's due to your own life choices up to this point, and you should start working to fix that right now.

I can't relate at all. The progress in artificial intelligence in all categories is fascinating and is in the modern day what electricity was at the turn of the century, during the time of Tesla and Edisson. It is not even fully understood how some state of the art AI achievements actually work to achieve the results, and what it has been able to solve in terms of previously unsolvable problems in computation has been fascinating.

The rapid consumerizaton of AR/VR tech is also pretty amazing given what the expected timeline for it was back in say 2015, when everyone was connected to a $2000 computer with wires and two sensors to play the one or two demos available.

A person's view of the world is usually just a rorschach test for their personal life. If you think the tech industry is slow/useless/uninnovative at the moment it likely just means you aren't personally doing the interesting work. You could change that by spending time learning the interesting tech and switching jobs to it, but the cynicism isn't relatable for those of us who deliberately work on interesting problems and continue to learn new and complex new things, rather than collect easy paychecks for boring work (they chose to do) then complain that life isn't exciting enough.

> signed by the author

With their encrypted keys I presume? A few more steps and you'll have reinvented cryptograpgic ledgers.

> But now that the learning curve is flattening, I feel the weight of not having enough creative freedom to write something up quickly or try different designs

This sounds like the real problem, more than anything.

Perhaps it's a sign that the code reviews have done their job, and you've been trained well enough to become a code reviewer yourself.

It might benefit you to start asking for more authority to be discussing these new design ideas with whoever is in charge, and see what they have to say.

If you really think you know well enough to architect things on your own or improve architectural decisions, you should assert that belief and ask for opportunities to test it.

I wonder how these companies we all work for manage to pay our salaries by selling anything if nothing we build contributes to the needs of peoples families.

After all, as you say, people are only buying things to benefit their families, so how do they manage to be parted with their money on what you posit to be useless frivolities produced by the tech industry?

Some people avoid the dilemma by only interviewing candidates from prestigious CS programs and with previous employment at famous companies, locking out those without the "right" credentials.

If you're going to demand that you be treated as an honest estimator of your own abilities beyond doubt don't be surprised if that ends up eliminating opportunities for people who are trying to break into the field without those credentials that put their abilities at a near certainty.

Asking a doctor who had completed their 12 years of medical school and residency basic biology questions would be a bit absurd.

Asking someone who claims to be a doctor of natural medicine the same might yield you more than half unable to answer.

Since there is no 12 year stringent accreditation process for being a software engineer, I'm not sure why this is a good comparison. There are many people who don't know so many basics of CS who have finished degrees, bootcamps, or have been employed in those roles for years.

Doctors simply aren't able to get accreditation or employment with the same ease as software developers.

They call it a con because it involves instilling "confidence" in others.

High sale prices are one way to inspire confidence in others.

Whether that person thinks the sale price is a legitimate indication of value, or they think at least someone else down the line will believe that, is not always clear. Because of the nature of crypto anonymity, there's always at least some percent chance any given sale is a legitimate transaction between two unique and non-colluding parties, and vice versa.

YouTube, Facebook, TikTok already do convert things like hearts into money. The terms by which they do are very arbitrary and seemingly opaque to me, an outsider of that. One undeniable benefit of web3 would be the possibly for immutable and transparent rules for compensation (whether those would be enacted for any given platform is unclear).

Speaking from my personal fields of work, AI (computer vision & generative), AR, and VR, I'd say we've made tremendous progress since 2011.

I'd be really curious to hear someone in those fields justify thinking otherwise.

I'd dare to say the progress in AI from 1981-2011 (Watson, CNN's, Chess) was less than the progress from 2011-2021 (StyleGAN, GPT-3, AlphaGO).

As for VR, if you had told someone in 2011 that there would even be a mainstream company making VR in 2021 they might not believe you. Instead, many major companies are building VR and AR glasses, and the leading market one has inside-out tracking, hand tracking, done from an onboard processor, for only the inflation adjusted cost of a Nintendo 3DS at that time.

As far as I can tell all social media companies (FB, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit) receive a lot of dislike in general as being a source of societal ills.

I think people just don't like having a mirror held up to the very negative parts of human nature.

Social media as an industry may be joining tobacco, oil, "wall street" finance, gambling, and weapons as one where if your employment is involved in it, some people in some way will feel you're profiting from exploiting society and making it worse.

I personally don't think Facebook does anything wrong aside from being a normal social media company.

But any social media that wants to be "successful" in terms of revenue and usage will have to exploit vulnerabilities in human nature like our increased interest in negative rhetoric about "out-groups". Any of the other companies in the stigmatised industries will either have to exploit human nature to be successful or be regulated such that their competitors can't do the same (like with tobacco advertising being heavily regulated). Regulation of social media seems to be the only real solution for society if we aren't happy with the status quo.

As an aside, I think if people can be so easily misled with "fake news" and radicalised along partisan lines, the issue lies with the U.S. education system and culture rather than the site that simply hosts the content.

At what point do people have to take responsibility for their own reaction to a world full of misinformation and tactics that seek to exploit them? If anyone reading this wants to post happy stories and accurate information on Facebook all day there's nothing stopping you, so why won't that fix the problem? Because of the issues with the users themselves.

I've personally stopped using Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, ect. because I've seen the harmful effects it has on my psyche. If consumers aren't smart enough to recognize that and willingly give it up, the issue is with the individuals who lack the education, cultural standards, and willpower to do so, and Facebook is not responsible for how 300+ million Americans were raised and educated such that they can't consume media healthily.

I'm pretty sure during an interview once someone made a very similar joke when I'd written using Rust syntax instead of Javascript. I thought it was funny and thanked them for tactfully pointing out my syntax errors and confirmed I had been writing Rust a lot recently.

The only other choices for the interviewer are to bluntly say "you missed using semicolons" or to not say anything and be left to wonder if the person knows how to really write in C. The author of this post seems to think even considering any other choice than the last is rude since "whiteboard code doesn't compile so semicolons are syntactic sugar".

But if it does matter, baking in some understanding of the charitable reasons why (that the interviewee is proficient at multiple languages, especially in the popular ones at Apple like Swift) is actually the nicest thing the interviewer could have done.

The post author seems to me hostile to being corrected. Given that every code review I've been in requires being corrected dozens of times about errors large and small, I wouldn't want to have to deal with their uncharitable attitude towards feedback from coworkers/collaborators.

The main problem computation on the world's slowest most expensive computer solves is lack of trust in doing it on any other computer. The increased cost and decreased speed is worth it in some use cases for the increased insurance against the pre-determined computation not being run correctly or at all (making a payout based on certain data, usually outcomes of events, like for insurance or gambling).

I would guess you have a lot more social skills than machine learning skills in an absolute sense, it's just that in a relative sense you're a lot better than the average person at machine learning and a lot worse at socialising, this is because for many humans, socialising is one of the few skills they spend any significant effort in mastering.

The amount of brain mass you have dedicated to socialising is still significantly more than the amount dedicated to ML. The rest of the advice in the thread can help you improve your skill in socialising, but just know that in a world where than skill is very popular and many have been working almost exclusively on it since a young age, you're unlikely to achieve relatively high skill levels compared to others. You should figure out which social goals you even want to achieve first.

If everyone lived with their siblings in the same house they grew up in, we wouldn't have a problem.

As is, people have children who occupy a cumulative more houses with or without others than their parents/grandparents did, and there's not more land being made. So that's why the old land and what's on it go up in value.

Basically, the increasing population (demand) is the cause of an asset increasing in value despite not increasing in quality.

One can make policies which reduces the number people who wish to use homes in the domestic market of a given country if they want to prevent that from happening without expanding the supply massively instead, that may lead to other negative externalities though based on which method is chosen (birth limits, immigration controls, ect.).