Yeah not a joke. Straight from the W24 batch page... I'm sure these weren't even the most absurd.
246 karma · joined February 8, 2024
Not sure how you can believe this given all of his recent actions and the ever growing list of whistleblowers dropping out of OpenAI explicitly saying Safety is not taken seriously.
I mean just generally the ability to actually stop and reorient around working on safety seems incredibly non trivial. To say nothing of the race dynamic he has perpetuated, the other frontier companies are unlikely to do the same.
I'm sorry if your company got accepted into YC, better luck next time. At least you can hang out with the founders of... 100 AI-assisted Code Editors, 'The first Travel Credit Card for Gen Z', 'Starbucks memberships for restaurants', 'a video first food delivery app, tiktok meets doordash', and 'the operating system for vacation rentals'. Truly a staggering group of talent.
Those are all real companies in W24 btw...
Ah yes the 'genius' that just can't find anything useful to work on lol.
>Talent is recognized!? Sure, if you're living in one of about six tech hubs in the world and you're white or Asian and you're not too old and you're not a woman and you've graduated from a top 20% university
Actual geniuses generally have no problem getting into and graduating with honors from a top 50 University let alone the top 20%. Just because your mommy called you smart doesn't make it true...
>"Class" is right. These are class indicators more than talent indicators. Strengthening my point that people have warped views of what "talent" is. I
I'm sorry but if you research the IOI/IOM winners I think you'll find they are overwhelmingly low-middle to upper-middle class. Hardly the children of billionaires...
>Is that what you think talent is? Someone who grinds leetcode?
No but these are clear indicators OF talent. IF you are a genius programmer but you can't compete with ICPC winners or rank top of the world in Codeforces e.g. there is a serious argument to be made that you aren't in fact a genius programmer.
>That's my #2: "Work for a bank or fintech as a middleman trying to get that extra 0.01% rent on other people's labor". Those people aren't successful by any measure other than money. They are harming the world. They are a net negative. Good thing your parents hired a tutor for you to ace the Putnam, now you can help billionaire parasites suck more blood from the economy!
Even the biggest misanthrope in the world who actually thinks about this problem doesn't believe that Quants are net negative for the world lol.
None of the Putnam fellows I know were the children of billionaires nor did they have tutors lmao. They were on the team and practiced like hell to win. Again you just have a warped and incorrect view of reality.
>The quants at Jane Street are not "more expert" than the exploited game developers making five figures at Blizzard.
Game devs are generally good but it's incredibly obvious there is a skill gap between those two groups. To say otherwise is ignorant.
>The impression I'm getting from you is: you believe (1) money is the only possible measure of success, and (2) people who make more money are smarter and people who make less money are dumber. Those are both deeply wrong, both in the sense of "incorrect" and "disturbing".
Both completely wrong. You just aren't as smart as you think. Even if you were and you interviewed with my company or were raising money to start your own you would be a flat reject if you displayed even 10% of the attitude you show here.
You're just a fundamentally broken person. Your opinion of yourself is not based in reality. Your judgements of others are wrong. Your estimation of their motivations are flawed. You were the guy that got locked inside lockers in high school but you deserved it because you are an enormous pompous ass. You were the kid that stood up in lectures to deliver an unhinged incorrect rant when the Professor asked a question and the entire room groaned because you completely lack self awareness of your own lack of knowledge. Now you bitch and moan on the internet how no one in Petoskey recognizes your unmatched genius and they force you to work on the IT system for your local YMCA. You complain about losing the game when you never even attempted to play it. You're the overweight office worker who thinks he can play on an NBA team despite never making it past JV. You're no Ted Kaczynski, you're Al Bundy. You're just a C level player stuck in a bad LARP.
This is some kind of strawman. I'm confident that people who are against human cell cluster torture are also against primate torture. Or at least make the mental calculus required to justify it.
You have a fantastical view of what starting and running business entails
>And if they're not working for soul sucking corps on boring problems, what are they doing? Where are the fruits of their labor? Because the majority of the software coming out of these companies gets used by approximately nobody and then thrown away, and the majority of the rest is user-hostile trash.
You have some deep hatred for modern society or something. Maybe you should write a manifesto in your cabin in the woods.
>But you should realize that this is completely circular logic: you're assuming that everyone who is poor is dumb and everyone who has not found fulfillment in life is bad; everyone who is successful is skilled. That doesn't match reality. Like, at all.
In the specific domain of Software Engineering there is a clear path to success, talent is recognized and is almost always very well compensated. If you are a 'poor' software engineer I suspect it's not because the world just failed to recognize your genius. Sorry.
>As an internet stranger you have no reason to believe that I'm as good as I say.
Are you Grandmaster or above on Codeforces? Do you have IOI/IOM Medals? Did you win an ICPC Medal? Did you rank on the Putnam? Have you gotten job offers at Jane Street/HRT/Citadel/ETC? Are you Staff level or above at a FAANG? If you haven't done at least one of those how can you seriously think you are world class? There are lots of cracked people who have done Multiple! Are there people who have done none but are also world class? Yes! But they probably aren't crying about the shitty problems they work on or how poor and unsuccessful they are!
Say what you want about the morality of working for them, but almost no one is working 70 hours there and the true .1% engineers are making multiple $M per year so the tradeoff may be worth it.
>3. Work in a niche industry or a consulting firm doing interesting and important work, but always for one client at a time, having an extremely limited impact (and limited pay to match)
If you are just selling your labor as a butt in a seat then yes this is true. I know solo tech consultants making 200k/mo because they moved up in the meta chain and sell strategy to CTOs.
>4. Start my own business and work 90 hour weeks spending 95% of my time on organizational business things that I'm bad at, leaving virtually no hours for the thing I'm a phenomenal super-expert at.
This is just fantasy.
>'ve chosen #3, but I'm honestly sick of just continuing to just get better and better at software engineering and having it mean absolutely fuck-all. What's the point? Why would you ever bother becoming an expert?
I think you have a warped view of reality and frankly of the value of expertise. There are world class engineers all over the place making 7 figures a year very easily. They aren't working 80 hours a week, they aren't working for soul sucking corps on boring problems, etc. I suspect you also aren't accurately measuring your own skill relative to these people. At the minimum they aren't as cynical and defeatist as you and know how to market their abilities.