Speedrunning a career at the expense of living the rest of your life just seems psychotic to me.
101 karma · joined March 7, 2025
Speedrunning a career at the expense of living the rest of your life just seems psychotic to me.
I'm not suggesting that every country should have genetic purity tests and policies on the level of Israel, just that we should understand that policies affect what kinds of people are more likely to be produced.
The way I think about it; 10-20% of known pregnancies (and a larger number of all pregnancies) end in miscarriage, the majority of which are due to genetic errors and chromosomal abnormalities that, unfortunately, mean the fetus wasn't viable to begin with.
While some genetic defects don't kill the baby in the womb, the resulting baby is not healthy and will never be self-sufficient. Terminating these pregnancies lets the couple try again and gives the chance for another, healthy baby to come into the world, and possibly more because they won't have the burden of a many-orders-of-magnitude more difficult and perpetually child to raise.
What you're describing is a dead simple hobby project that could be completed by a complete novice in less than a week before the advent of LLMs.
It's like saying "I'm absolutely blown away by microwaves, I can have a meal hot and ready in just a few minutes with no effort or understanding. I think all culinary schools should have a curriculum that teaches people how to use microwaves effectively."
Maybe the goal of education should be giving people a foundation that they can build on, not make them an expert in something that a low skill ceiling and diminishing returns.
This is more likely to be the end of the American empire than an actual change in Iran.
It's kind of up to what you're filtering for, and how much you trust the candidate at that part of the process, and how you follow up after hiring.
* Can be completed in 30 minutes by a skilled programmer
* Has clear evaluation criteria, both objective and subjective
* Has multiple approaches that require making different tradeoffs
And of course, only give it to some candidates where the result will be make-or-break.
As someone who took one of these broad take-home assignments my last time looking for a job, I failed a the assignment for a job I was overqualified for because I was told I wasn't able to divine what parts of the extremely broad assignment I would be graded on.
I doubt I will be in a position where I get a job that isn't a referral for the rest of my career, but it really turned me off of these kinds of assignments, both taking and giving them.
Whether for better or worse that depends on one's own interpretation and the technology itself. On one extreme you have people who reject all technology after a certain point in time, with rare exceptions thoroughly considered (the Amish). On the other you have people who see technology as the goal, even if it comes at the expense of the genocide of the human race.