baron816

Statistics like CPI really aren’t meant to be used to track inflation over many decades. It’s really only meaningful over a handful of years, and only when we’re talking about the economy as a whole (not to use it to say any individual or group is better or worse off). A dollar today can buy many things it could not buy 100 years ago.

The price of gold is a completely useless measure of inflation. Governments have a long history of manipulating its price as a policy goal. Even today, governments buy and hold large quantities of gold.

This is inevitable with any boom/bust cycle. Employment in tech just can’t possibly grow exponentially forever.

If WSJ publishes an article about your job offer, don’t believe it’s a common occurrence.

I’m serious. The Matrix is a movie made for entertainment. If the plot of The Matrix were “people live in The Matrix and everyone is fine with that and nothing interesting happens”, then it would’ve been an awful movie.

Again, you’re not experiencing a mundane or perfect world. It would be like being in a video game or movie, if you wanted. Some people would experience the plot of The Matrix as any of the characters. Or you could travel around the galaxy solving mysteries and fighting evil as a Jedi Master. Or you could spend some time living a quiet pastoral life in the Shire with your hobbit friends. Or you could do it all over and over again experiencing the highs and lows each time.

My vision for an ASI future involves humans living in simulations that are optimized for human experience. That doesn’t mean we are just live in a paradise and are happy all the time. We’d experience dread and loss and fear, but it would ultimately lead to a deeply satisfying outcome. And we’d be able to choose to forget things, including whether we’re in a simulation so that it feels completely unmistakeable from base reality. You’d live indefinitely, experiencing trillions of lifespans where you get to explore the multiverse inside and out.

My solution to the alignment problem is that an ASI could just stick us in tubes deep in the Earth’s crust—it just needs to hijack our nervous system to input signals from the simulation. The ASI could have the whole rest of the planet, or it could move us to some far off moon in the outer solar system—I don’t care. It just needs to do two things for it’s creators—preserve lives and optimize for long term human experience.

See https://x.com/StatisticUrban/status/1901124382996791747

“The DoD has removed the article on Charles Roger's Medal of Honor. He served in Vietnam, and despite being wounded three times in battle, rallied his troops and led them to victory in defense of Support Base Rita. Nixon presented his Medal.

The url is changed to "deimedal"”

Peckish pups

Am I the only one who hopes my current job is my last job and AI will more or less wipe out software engineering as a profession by decade’s end?

I love my job, but I can’t see myself doing it for the rest of my life. I have greater ambitions than that, and what’s stopping me from pursuing them is that implementation of big things is really hard. If AI makes implementation much easier, then that makes pursuing those things really worthwhile.

I wouldn’t want it to fall victim to the same phenomenon as running clubs—people just use it for dating. Men need a space of their own.

I have an idea for an organization for getting building close connections among men:

The organization would connect men together and then those men with “chores” they could do within their neighborhood. Yeah, kind of like a free Task Rabbit.

But the idea is that the men go out on a mission together to help random people in their community, whether that’s helping someone move some furniture around, or hang some pictures, or maybe paint a bedroom, or pick up some food for someone that’s sick. The guys need an excuse to hang out together, but they’re helping people in the process. And maybe they can go grab a drink or lunch when they’re done. They get a sense of purpose and something to feel good about, as well as a companion for the day’s little journey.

I imagine people will read this and think this sounds idiotic, and that’s fine, but if you might want to explore this idea with me a little more, my email is in my profile.

What I keep telling people is, if it becomes possible for one person or a handful of people to build and maintain a Google scale company, and my job gets eliminated as a result, then I’m going to go out and build a Google scale company.

There’s an incredibly massive amount of stuff the world needs. You probably live in a rich country, but I doubt you are lacking for want. There are billionaires who want things that don’t exist yet. And, of course, there are billions of regular folks who want some of the basics.

So long as you can imagine a better world, there will be work for you to do. New tools like AGI will just make it more accessible for you to build your better future.

Yes, comparing to median household income is the right way to do this. CPI isn’t actually useful in this case.

There’s a big difference between tariffs on cars from China, and tariffs on all goods from Canada and Mexico. US car manufacturers produce and import lots and lots of intermediate goods from those two countries. Setting up tariffs on those two with the hope of reshoring the manufacturing is problematic because it takes time and capital to build those types of supply chains and also develop the expertise among workers to operate those factories efficiently. Those workers and that capital will need to be devoted to building yesterday’s car parts instead of tomorrow’s.

Preventing cars from being imported from China is still a problem too. American companies are going to innovate slower without the competition. We may see a day when Chinese cars are just miles ahead of American cars in terms of technology, efficiency, comfort, and price. At that point, people are going to be asking “why am I paying so much for this shitty car when much better alternatives are available? Whatever happened to capitalism in this country?” And once those protections are lifted, the car industry would face rapid, destabilizing collapse.

A slower, controlled collapse (not saying that would definitely happen) of the US car industry would mean those resources (the capital and labor) would be able to be put to more productive uses in this country. There’s a lot of stuff we want to build, like modular nuclear power plants, wind turbines, geothermal plants, AI data centers, prefab new housing, humanoid robots, or some other stuff I can’t even imagine. I personally think robotaxis/AV are going to put the entire worldwide car industry into near terminal decline anyway. We should try to pivot away from that industry as gracefully as we can.

Ok, so it was not a hallucination. But still, this guy’s source: “I made it up”.

It might as well have been written by AI. An article about a Twitter comment thread is the laziest, most useless form of “journalism” I can think of. Making something up at least requires some imagination.

I know Forbes is not known for its journalistic integrity, but this is some real garbage here. Where’s the “viral social media thread”? I tried to search for it, and couldn’t find anything. There’s nothing on the guy’s Twitter or LinkedIn.

“Many software engineers at major tech firms are making between $200,000 and $300,000 dollars annually while pushing as few as "two code changes a month."” What’s the source on this? Who is even being quoted?

Is this whole article an AI hallucination?

Every one I’ve seen has a wrap for this reason

The other part is that companies are much more willing to hire people if they know they can get rid of them if either that person ends up sucking or business starts to fall off.

I believe it’s the case that in some places, bureaucrats can basically just say “no” if you decide to lay people off. Why would you want to hire people in the first place if there were a risk of that happening, especially if you have the option to hire people in a different country?

The thing you always need to keep in mind about CPI is that it’s a weighted average for the ENTIRE COUNTRY. Like, retirees in Florida who own their own homes have a very different relationship with prices than young renters in NYC. It really only makes sense to use CPI and other inflation figures when you’re talking about the whole country.

Now if only they could figure out how to allow charging the Magic Mouse while it’s being used. I guess that technology is still years away.

*saving rate

I’ve been thinking: drone subs that could sit at the bottom of the ocean and then surface to fire anti-ship missiles. Essentially this https://youtu.be/hMBICD5rgY0?si=IXalKjfvs0pSL5B6

Imagine launching hundreds of these from the US or Japan and then they just camp at the bottom of the East China Sea. If tensions escalate, they can migrate towards the Taiwan Strait. And then, emerge potentially just hundreds of meters away from corvettes and landing vessels, fire off their missiles and then submerge.

I’ve been watching a lot of these war game simulations https://youtu.be/vSnbbifpiLw?si=d-ymKHwfnwdKoGOL. They have a lot of limitations to them, and they’re engineered to be entertaining first and foremost (it is YouTube), but they can be very informative too about the state of naval warfare. Some things I’ve learned from watching these:

1) Shooting down anti-ship missiles is very doable, even hypersonic and stealth missiles. A naval carrier group is pretty much invulnerable to any single weapon that exists today. However, they do have a limit to how many defensive SAMs they can carry. So firing hundreds of anti-ship missiles will overwhelm their defenses and eventually sink that $15 billion carrier with 4,000 people on board. 2) The British Navy’s upcoming strategy seems to be using large numbers of small anti-ship missiles that use AI to target critical systems of the ships they target (rather than just trying to sink the ship). This actually looks like it should be really effective since they can disable enemy ships or at least exhaust the defenders’ defenses before firing ship-killers at them.

Another thing I want to note: we really really really don’t want to go to war with China, and China doesn’t want that either. I think China would only try to take Taiwan if they knew two things: 1) they could take and hold Taiwan 2) they could exact such a heavy toll on American forces trying to defend Taiwan that the US would not want to get involved. Taking Taiwan is probably not worth it if the US fights. China needs to convince the US it’s not worth defending Taiwan. It is a form of Prisoner’s Dilemma.

When you do this kind of stuff, you make American companies less competitive as a whole. If GM can get as good software for cheaper by outsourcing (granted, they almost certain cannot), then they should do it because that might help save tens of thousands of other jobs within the company and broader economy. The government should not generally be in the business of telling companies how to build software.

Overconfidence. I had built some cool stuff, but I didn’t know much I didn’t know. So having interviews where I wouldn’t get any feedback left me in the dark about how far off I was.

I’ve always had sterling reviews as long as I’ve been in a job. I’ll leave it to you to wonder how much of that is competence and how much is successfully pretending to be competent.

I went through a bootcamp at the end of 2014, then spent the next three years unable to get a job in tech. I didn’t have a paycheck for those three years.

Triplebyte was my last ditch effort. I failed the online test the first time I took it, came back and then failed their interview. Came back again, got five in person interviews in the Bay Area. Didn’t get offers on the first four (one place even kicked me out halfway through the set of interviews). But I managed to get an offer from the last company, which I then spent the next four years at.

Had I not gone through Triplebyte, I probably would’ve given up on working in tech. Instead, I’m an L5 at Google.

But the advantage to being blocked all the time is that you can then go find other places to add value. Having impact outside of your small team is huge when it comes to performance reviews and promotions, especially if it’s self driven. But you can’t do that kind of stuff if you have other high priority work in your teams backlog that you can freely pick up.

Downvotes…I was being genuine here. I’m looking for buddies to hang out with.

> Dressing well is like 95% about being in shape

Not at all. Check out https://x.com/dieworkwear. He talks extensively about this.

Hell, I’ll do this for free. If any guys here living in SF want some help dressing better (and want to hang out), fill out the form below and I’ll get back to you.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScGeTKSIZh0rhCceGE0...

Bottled water has always been a disaster. I have to wonder how much underinvestment there’s been in municipal water infrastructure because rich people just buy expensive bottled water that’s been shipped from all over the world.