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Most of us do need to work for a living. Researching for the sake of research, and learning purely because one is interested in the subject is nice and all, but it is a luxury few can afford.

I think it is beneficial for everyone that the money angle for PhD is openly discussed and made public. This way, the correct audience (those who don't need to work for a living, i.e. born rich) might be attracted instead of burning out middle/lower class youth with dreams.

...Or steps can be taken to change PhD programs. Which does not seem likely.

I would say the debate currently going on is less about "running code on your own machine" and more about "making sure the thing your are replacing at least a portion of your labor force with is at least somewhat dependable and those who benefit from the replacement are still responsible".

I would argue it is a problem that can't be solved by means of insurance.

Right, last offer I got required 7 (non-HR) steps over a 4-month period, where around a dozen technical people got involved.

I don't/won't cheat, as I am a rather anxious person who can't really handle "covert ops". But at this point I totally understand those who do.

Yeah but if there is no requirement/barrier of entry to do a job; it becomes, pretty much by definition, a minimum wage job.

Is this the great future the AI promises? Almost everyone working for minimum wage while a few tech oligarch rules over all?

Exactly. The whole goal is to remove the "skill premium" from the labor markets, as far as I can tell.

So I would argue that this whole thing is a net negative. We are spending tons of energy for net negative gains.

I don't come here to "consume high quality content". I come here to engage in discussions with often tech-oriented yet quite diverse set of people. The distinction I think is quite an important one.

In my opinion Karpathy's generated answer was followed up by an insightful, actual comment so it is fine; as long as such things are the exception and not the rule.

Badmouthing bullshit practices of a company is also a part of the agency here.

E.g. Yes, I hate that McDonalds (like tons of other companies) is incessantly bugging me and quite blatantly trying to upsell me. As a result, I rarely go to such places anymore. So they lose my business. But I will also complain out loud. This is part of the deal with bullshitting your customer base. This is part of my agency. Losing me as a customer, as well as getting badmouthed left and right is the cost of extracting that 3 additional cents from me. Now the company also has a choice.

Economic immigrant in Germany here. And most of my friends are also skilled -economic- migrants (mostly doctors/engineers/scientists) as well. Maybe I can draw a picture. There are a number of reasons, but I would say the biggest one is this: while I am told things are a lot worse than it was, the situation here is still a lot better than it is in my home country. I also have no hope for my home country; while I think Germany will probably get better eventually.

Now, for the alternatives; emigrating to US is rather challenging with all the H1B shenanigans going on, while my friends who has moved to Canada all eventually came to hate their lives and moved to other places. If you don't speak the local language, there are not many jobs in a lot of the European countries. Japan is not really welcoming to immigrants, and Australia is seen as too remote. This leaves you with few choices in the first world; Britain, Netherlands, and Germany. I got the first job offer from Germany, so I am here. Quite a few of my friends were thinking along similar lines, so they are scattered across these three countries.

>But the new AI training methods are currently, at least imho, not a violation of copyright - not any more than a human eye viewing it (which you've implicitly given permission to do so, by putting it up on the internet).

I don't understand how that matters. I thought that the whole idea of copyright and licences was that the holder of the rights can decide what is ok to do with the content and what is not. If the holder of the rights does not agree to a certain kind of use, what else is there to discuss?

It sure does not matter if I think that downloading a torrent is not any more pirating than borrowing a media from my friend.

I am not familiar with the US law, but I don't really understand how is the whole "start as a nonprofit, become a for profit once your product turns out to be profitable" thing legal. It looks like a complete scam to me. And while I don't like Elon at all, I think he and other earlier donors have a very strong case here.

It is not strange at all, a very big motivation of spending billions in AI research is basically to remove what is called "skill premium" from the labor market. That "skill premium" was usually how people got richer than their fathers.

> Much of the US like Huston and Miami is extremely lacking in public transit, and will likely never build the infrastructure.

I am not trying to be a contrarian here, but I fail to see how that is an answer. I feel like what you say boils down to "since we are not solving the problem at hand in a good way, we decided to solve it in a worse way".

> ~50% of your fare goes to the driver.

Yet these ride-hailing companies who receive whatever is remaining after the meager pay of the rider and other costs only recently started to make actual profits. And even though it feels like the prices for customers increased a lot over the years, these companies are not exactly printing money.

I feel like at this point someone needs to take a step back and think about the general vision and overall goals of this whole fully automated ride-hailing service thing.

I mean, what is the exact problem that's being solved here? I don't mean "problem" like "solving the technical problem of making a car move autonomously in a chaotic city" sense. I mean what is the need that's being addressed here, exactly?

Ride-hailing workers were already often working for less than minimum wage. They were also handling most of the maintenance and customer relations aspects of the work, for basically free. Are these sexy cutting edge tech firms with eye-watering budgets and even more eye-watering valuations really going after whatever these people were making?

If the problem is efficiently moving people around in a city; well to be honest I find this premise a bit ridiculous. Call me a European, but I find the idea that moving 1-2 people in private vehicles on roads being superior than public transit -preferably on rail- simply absurd.

Is the idea of living and moving around in a city full of autonomous vehicles actually appealing to anyone? I personally find the whole idea completely disgusting for a number of reasons.

What is the goal here? Am I missing a grand vision? What is there to get excited for? Sorry if this post has been a rant-y one. I feel like I am really missing the point of most of these things.

My expectation would be that unfortunately after a certain point it would stop being a refugee crisis and start being a border enforcement crisis. I personally expect things to get quite ugly once the temp difference hits a more significant value.

I am not a lawyer or anything, but how is that legal? If simply opting out of the legal system is an option, why does it exist?

As another Turkish person, I find the resemblence between this election and the one we had a year ago rather uncanny.

- election between rightist strongman vs. boring guy whose most important selling point is not being the other guy. Also a somewhat controversial candidacy.

- Deep divide between coastal lines vs. the rest; educated and the rest.

- Polls not being confident on either candidate, but the strongman gets mire votes than expected.

Etc. etc. I find it rather strange. (I do enjoy the memes on the Turkish social media though)

>But another way to look at it is it gives small and vulnerable companies a chance to survive (with different laws and taxes applying to the initial nonprofit).

I feel like this is quite a slippery slope, though. Should we also give small companies a right to violate trademarks? Copyright? Kill people? These could also give them a chance to compete against big players.

> Can you spot the constituencies that have outsized voting impact?

I suppose people who has to eat and stay warm. I get what you mean, but it still is a good blow-softener in my opinion. Even if farmers get some benefits for no reason.

> Broad based carbon taxes are the correct solution, but they're also the reason Trudeau is going to lose the next election.

Well we are not living in a perfect world. I am not familiar with Canada and Trudeau's political opponents, but still. If a "solution" triggers a kneejerk reaction, cutting its own life short; and causing nutjob demagogues to rise, which leads to much greater harm than it prevented in the first place, how is it the correct solution?

To me, this seems like the way to reduce the carbon emissions the least, while pissing off the largest possible voter base. Also making the least fortunate suffer the most. Brilliant move, slowly clapping here.

Make a few decisions like this in a few years and voila, you get pissed off masses who won't suffer any more taxes or cancelled bbq dinners for your "libtard agenda" and another Trump-like fellow will rise. Meanwhile no one taxes private jets or yachts for carbon emissions. I guess their costs are not "externalized".

Coming from another angle, this might not be a "problem" when you consider the greater scheme of things.

Being able to obtain assets, when you don't have any is a relatively new thing, historically speaking. One could also say that we were living in a brave new world of opportunities and growth for a few centuries. And now we are returning to the historical norm. One thing that all the examples you listed is that they could be seen as "late game" economies.

I might be totally wrong, though. This is just another angle.

Exactly! In my opinion, one of the implications of this fact is that you cannot make trades like "I am sacrificing x now, so you will buy me a house/whatever when I am older" with your unborn children.

Kudos to you if you appreciate the moves your parents made in their lives and you have achieved a working relationship with your parents.

But I don't think this is a fair expectation from the parents' side, at all. As a child, you did not ask to be burdened with this. If this is a contract, it was signed not by you, but by your parents unilaterally.

That may or may not be a fair point; admittedly I can not see the future, but you could say the same for everything. Including things like "the solutions in search of a problem".

What is for sure is that currently I cannot see how it is solving any real, painful problems.

>What I always wonder is what is the end-goal of the current AI movement? What's the point of it all?

I also share this view. I would also argue that this is not even about the productivity. I mean, I don't think the currently automated parts were ever the bottlenecks in any good products.

There are already more stuff being produced every year from a single publisher that is more than I can consume. And most of it is just shit. Think of Ubisoft games. They are already churning out a few new games every year, each of them chock full of beautiful assets in a very boring world, with an extremely repetitive shitty gameplay. And now with AI they can produce even more beautiful assets with even more shitty gameplay and even more boring worlds, I guess.

Artists were already mostly a starving bunch (meaning the supply was already higher than the demand), good writers (and other auteurs) with strong vision were what was rare. And now, as humanity, we decided to divert some of the best engineering talent to automate the former? Why though, what is the point, really?

I don't know when was the last time I really felt bored. I am sure I am not alone in that. What is the point of exponentially increasing the content production rate? I am really struggling to understand the appeal here.

While I agree with you on the principle, I would not blame anyone who lies in such a BS market to be honest.

If for a person, the choice is between not being able to pay rent because they had 6 years of experience in a given stack instead of 8, vs. exaggerating in their cv, I dont think it is reasonable to expect complete honesty.

Also we all know most of the companies are often very dishonest, so why should we expect complete honesty from the workers?

I am not the original commenter, but the way I see it, this is mainly about two things;

1) Your lack of any sort of leverage. This means the potential employers will try to take advantage of your situation, and it will take some time to find an employer who does not.

2) Prejudice against those who were laid-off.

Hmmm. Does it help, though? I mean is there any actual evidence that it works? I tend to be a bit sceptical when it comes to "innovations" in the education field, so I am also trying to be mindful of my own bias here, but so far I was not able to make sense of things that I have seen, or got a glimpse of any deeper intuition. And I went to grad school for applied maths. Maybe I am too old? Or maybe I already got the intuition they were trying to convey? Or maybe I was not exposed to this stuff enough to say? Could be any of these I guess.

> just a slightly obtuse word problem

Heh, I was imagining it was about overlapping arrangements that are divided equally or something. So is it really just asking for 6? In that case yes, its not really insane, just questionably worded.

As someone who is from outside the US, and only occasionally exposed to common core via hatred on reddit, hn, etc., I would like to ask: what is the deal with it? I am kind of having trouble understanding what exactly it is.

The examples I see about it are usually extremely simple to the point of having no information or testing ability, and others are just batshit insane like your example.

I also agree that it is a bubble, but I feel like it is more of a "dotcom" type of bubble rather than crypto/NFT type of bubble, if it makes any sense.