roncesvalles

Every public statement out of a CEO's mouth is marketing. It would literally be violating fiduciary duty to be saying anything else.

Of all the frontier labs, Anthropic has been the most creative in its marketing. I really, really don't put it beyond them for this to be one big crazy stunt.

Besides, when has the US government been known to do things like this proactively? The phone call came from inside the house.

CRIPSR was a game-changer for genetics research. A lot of gene knockout studies use CRISPR. However, it was always weirdly overhyped for clinical use from the beginning and this was obvious to anyone with a genetics background.

The public in general doesn't have a good understanding of basic genetics and I blame high school science curriculums for not covering it well enough. Too much time is wasted on Mendelian genetics without covering the Central Dogma.

You basically cannot "edit" your somatic DNA in a meaningful wholesale way since every single cell in your body has a copy of the DNA, and it's a foolish endeavor. What you can conceivably edit to good effect is your germline DNA, stem cell DNA, or modify mRNA expression (e.g. retinoids; yes putting retinol/adapalene cream on your face is "gene therapy"), or introduce foreign mRNA for your translation machinery to co-opt (e.g. mRNA vaccines).

Most (serious) separatist movements that appear religiously/ideologically motivated on the surface have a lesser known but critical ethnoracial exceptionalism myth that underpins them (e.g. Kashmir).

Again, I don't consider de-colonization movements to be separatism. A rough criteria would be that you must be physically contiguous to the state that you're trying to separate from.

Also heed my second criteria: a people who perceive themselves to be inferior to the majority group will never, ever develop ambitions of separatism. It usually goes like: "we're better than these other guys but they keep us under their thumbs, hence we want our own country."

Every company where I've worked at as a SWE openly rewarded "engineering complexity" as a criteria for getting promoted, which I've always found to be absurd because complexity can always be manufactured (both of the problem and the solution).

I wouldn't define independence from colonial rule as separatism.

That's wholly the wrong perspective. The equivalent of "craftsmanship" in software would be how the shoe is designed, not its manufacturing. Software developers produce unique intellectual property. They don't manufacture units of software. Similar to book authors or musicians (not on tour).

There is no equivalent of unit manufacturing in software since it's just copying around bits.

"Craftsmanship", then, in the context of software just means how much you give a shit about designing something good. That's not going anywhere unless we get to a point where even the quality of the software that we use ceases to matter, and there is nothing to indicate we're moving in that direction.

Separatism is born of a sense of ethnoracial exceptionalism:

1) we're a genealogically different ethnic group from the rest of the country

2) we're better than the major ethnic group of the rest of the country

Both bits are absolutely essential. I can't recall a single instance of a separatist movement based on purely political differences gaining serious ground, Alberta included.

AI slop. Prompter probably prompted "don't make it sound like AI slop". But one can still make it out.

>Office buildings in Denmark also tend to have much better sunlight by design.

Just on this note, you don't make vitamin D if you're indoors even if there's direct sun hitting your skin, because commercial glass filters out UVB.

>because all real problems are political

I don't think that's true at all. A lot of problems are purely technical. Once someone figures out the technical part, you realize the politically savvy people waiting on the sidelines for a solution were always a dime a dozen.

Imposter syndrome is extremely common and a lot of people in high-paying tech jobs don't believe they can get something just like this elsewhere.

Also, Meta interviews are generally not regarded as too difficult, which further fuels the imposter syndrome (everyone has a sense that they're overpaid considering how easy it is to get in). I almost suspect this is a deliberate strategy.

>I build production-ready TypeScript and Python systems that integrate LLMs into real workflows, with particular focus on RAG, agent orchestration

On a tangent, roughly nobody needs this skill. I don't know why some people think "LLM integration" is some kind of deep career specialization that's in high demand. Any ordinary generalist SWE can integrate LLMs into an application. It's literally just calling an API and doing some string concat.

When people say "AI skills" are in huge demand in the SWE world, it refers to being able to leverage LLMs to improve the speed of your regular software development, not literal AI integration. Don't brand yourself as an "AI engineer" unless you're targeting clueless seed-round founders or are a literal MLE; the bulk of the jobs aren't here.

>they will do what they are told and they are usually told “make this as cheap as possible” by whoever is paying the bills

It's more complicated than this. Historically, Chinese manufacturing has been notorious for quietly undermining the quality of the product to improve their margins over time, in a way that the commissioning brand doesn't notice. If a Chinese manufacturer quotes you a price too good to be true, they're probably quoting you at-cost and will build in their margin later, once the orders start flowing in.

The problem is that a lot of employees across the corporate world are engaged in malicious compliance with regard to AI usage.

EU doesn't have the scale. There are probably more SWEs in one little town in the Bay Area than entire European countries.

Also, many European devs simply move to the US. Immigration is the primary means by which the arbitrage disappears.

Outsourcing of knowledge workers didn't work out because at large enough scales, the geographic arbitrage disappeared. Companies mostly always got what they paid for.

The determinant of success was only whether the task needed American-tier labor or could make do with sub-American quality labor.

Why do you think of knowledge workers as a fungible commodity?

What makes you think the people who used to build (or would have built) software will switch into the industry of "knowing that the thing was the right thing to build", as opposed to something cooler like surgery, city planning or experimental physics? The roles within a tech company are not the only jobs in the world.

There is some insight to his post. If you're very intelligent, there are many points in your life that steer you away from starting your own company. If at any point the best option you have is to start a company, you were probably not a very good student or employee.

This is largely my experience as well. The Bay Area wannabe startup crowd is brimming with idiots, people dumber than your dumbest colleague at work. Unbelievable amounts of Dunning-Kruger.

The actual grind filters out most of them, of course, but if you concede that some businesses are basically luck then some number of those idiots will make it.

>He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn’t even read the AI’s answer. He just took a screenshot and forwarded it to me.

This should be grounds for firing someone.

Also, can we normalize calling layoffs "firings" because that's exactly what they are?

You weren't "laid off", you were fired, because the company doesn't need you anymore. Calling it a "layoff" exonerates the company, as if it was something unfortunate and outside their control.

It seems more like they're positioning for the quantum spinoff to achieve meme stock status.

>In most cases, LLMs can get you 80-95% of the way

On a tangent, this often gets misinterpreted as "LLMs reduce the time it takes to do the thing by 80-95%". That's not what it means.

Exactly. Also, keep in mind that CEOs have both a personal monetary incentive and a fiduciary duty to do what's in the best interest of their company.

It is batshit insane to me that these days we put a microphone to CEOs, ask them to predict the future, and believe it. The only correct answer that they can say into that microphone is whatever is beneficial to their company, nothing less or more.

You're conflating Mexican border hoppers with skilled immigrants.

I'm absolutely opposed to illegal immigration and have a more extreme position on how to deal with it than most Americans.

What I'm irked by are Trump's attacks on legal immigration and the general worsening of the environment. ICE's kidnappings, the 100k H-1B fee, and the recent Green Card thing have deeply eroded America's attractiveness to legal immigrants.

I think when MAGA came after H-1Bs, it became pretty clear that it's not about law and order, it's just a race thing.

And if you want to go gloves off, I'll just say it: the main problem in America is that its 3 major ethnic groups are infected by anti-intellectualism and slothfulness, whereas the Chinese and various other cultures are not. The direct benefit from skilled immigration is so that we can increase the ratio of people who actually value education and hard work vs the failing old stock Americans whose broccoli-headed kids dream of becoming YouTube influencers instead of astronauts.

1. The 2nd-best basketweaver will die in obscurity.

2. The MacArthur Grant, while obviously greatly commendable as an achievement, is monetarily worth less than what the 10,000th Meta engineer makes in one or two years.

>Like there was something in the American DNA that was lacking in China and innovation would always need to happen here.

There is (was): attracting the best minds around the world to a free and stable society. Trump voters threw it all away because they couldn't stand non-whites coming to America and doing better than old stock Americans.

I've come to learn that "do only what only you can do" is not great advice at all. It's leagues better to be the 10,000th-best SWE at Meta than the world's best basketweaver. Often doing something super unique is an excuse for shying away from mainstream competition.

Depends on how you use them. I'm a detail-obsessed perfectionist. I believe these qualities are what have enabled me to produce better software than most people. I use LLMs the way I can without violating these principles.

Not really. Solipsism means only you're (certain to be) conscious. It's an epistemological thing.

I'm making a purely biological conjecture motivated by some observations. I believe some humans are definitely conscious (including of course myself, if you take my word), but that some might not be. The conscious experience may just be a phenotypic variant, like having blue eyes, eidetic memory or dyslexia.

Consider also some recent research that shows that our consciousness is only observational and gives us an illusion of control. The actual decision-making is done a split second before we perceive to have done it. That means it might be totally optional.

Consider also that we know some living creatures to definitely not have a mind for example plants, and some creatures deemed highly unlikely to have a mind such as fish and insects. And yet they "operate" just fine. Somewhere in ecology there's a boundary and yet it's not apparent just by observing behavior.

I have a corollary hypothesis which is that only young people are actually conscious. One day you go to bed and your mind never wakes up, but your body keeps on living the automaton till you actually die.

(also if you're wondering, I don't think the boundary is along racial lines)