I also looked at getting a flip phone but decided it wasn't really viable. Realistically you need to have an iOS or Android phone, because even if you don't need it /most/ of the time, you do need it sometimes.
The trick is to find ways to carry it with you less.
I'm interested in seeing how long I can make it. I have gotten up and left restaurants in the past when they had nothing but QR code menus. I'm sure I'll face some insurmountable obstacle at some point (e.g. on vacation in a foreign country with no laptop, and need to access a website to book tickets or find information on my phone) but I'm curious how often events like that come up and if I'd have the self-discipline to just re-disable the browser after.
There are definitely lots of things you need a smartphone for today, but fortunately few enough that it's practical to not have a smartphone with you most of the time, even if you own one.
Hopefully if enough people go phoneless, society will adapt to require smartphones less often.
Fortunately, so far, there is nothing that I need to do that I actually have to have a smartphone for. Hopefully that will remain true for a long while.
Apple Intelligence can be entirely disabled, I did it on both my iPhone and my Mac and it hasn't bothered me about it since.
Actually Apple seems decent with storing personal information on-device, or at least giving the user options to control it. As shown in my pi-hole, my Apple devices send way less requests to tracking and data harvesting domains compared to Microsoft and Google/Android products.
New Public (https://newpublic.org) | Senior+ Software Engineer | REMOTE (US, Canada) | Full-time | 160-175k
We are working with a consortium of public broadcasters around the world to create a publicly-owned public-interest online space that helps people with different viewpoints understand each other and relate to each other. This project has a lot of momentum behind it, particularly as recent political changes in the US are getting countries interested in the idea of digital sovereignty.
Our partners have a combined regular audience that collectively includes a substantial fraction of the western world, so if we get the product to a good enough state that they can promote it aggressively, it has the potential to be one of the biggest and most important platforms in the world.
The New Public dev team currently consists of me, Rob Ennals (ex Google, Meta, Quora), Blaine Cook (created Twitter), and Daniel Bachhuber (ran Wordpress.com), so it's a fun team to be on. We also have very strong experienced Designers and PMs.
Particularly interested in people with experience working on social products, experience being a core developer of a large product with lots of external contributors, or a deep interest in helping people with different viewpoints relate to each other.
I was asked to give a talk on how to make the most out of OpenAI's new Codex coding agent, and it turned into a blog post.
Codex works best when you have a really clean code base, with thorough tests, and well documented best practices. Getting your code base into that kind of shape might seem like a lot of work, but Codex is already great at the kind of mundane tasks needed to get your code into a state where Codex can work well.
Codex has also changed how I think about software engineering. With previous AI tools, I used them to help me write the code, but now my job is to mentor a team of AI agents as they write the code.
Even if you don't write code, it's important to understand what it's like to use Codex, because this kind of "manage a team of AI agents to do your job" is likely the future of all human work.
New Public (https://newpublic.org) | Open Source Developer | REMOTE | Full time $140-$160k
We are working with a consortium of public broadcasters around the world to create a publicly-owned public-interest online space. This project has a lot of momentum behind it, particularly as recent political changes in the US are getting countries interested in the idea of digital sovereignty.
We have lots of people wanting to get involved in the project, and so we plan to open the project up to anyone to contribute, whether they be public media, private media, institutions, universities, or enthusiasts. To make that work well, we want to hire an open source engineer who can manage contributions, create training materials, do refactoring, manage forums, and do all the other things necessary to nurture a healthy open source community.
Particularly interested in people with experience maintaining Open Source projects and working with outside contributors.
If your advisor is one of the stars of their field, then probably more than one of their grad students will be professors. If not, then probably none of them will.
This is more accurate. The productive fraction of professors still follow the Pareto principle or 80/20 rule. And even then, these professors aggregate into the elite institutions making it even more skewed.
To get an academic position, you need to have a star advisor either for your degree or postdoc.
I think it was The Atlantic a few years back that ran the numbers on professors and their PhD alma maters. But I can't find the article, so please accept my bad recollection.
Essentially, in nearly all of the humanities, if you did not go to a top 10 PhD program, you had a 0% chance of getting tenure. Not 'like' a 0% chance, an actual 0%. There are no professors at all, anywhere in the US, in nearly all the humanities departments that did not go to a top 10 school. The distribution followed a power law, of course.
However, most universities have PhD programs that will accept students.
The hubris (?) is just amazing to me. Both on the students and the advisors sides. Like, guys, what are we doing here? This isn't STEM, there's like no difference in the job market between a humanities PhD and a BA.
I've known some English PhDs. They were more focused on self-education rather than external rewards. Many of them were training to become high school teachers eventually, and they knew it. They saw no hurry to begin that career.
In my experience the best approach is to first try to solve the problem without having read the prior work, then read the prior work, then improve your approach based on the prior work.
If you read the prior work too early to you get locked into existing mindsets. If you never read it then you miss important things you didn’t thought of.
Even if your approach is less good than the prior work (the normal case) you gain important insights into why the state of the art approach is better by comparing it with what you came up with.
A decade ago I read this same advice in "The Curmudgeon's Guide to Practicing Law": spend at least a little time trying to solve the problem before you look to how other's have solved it. One benefit is that occasionally you may stumble on a better method. But the more common benefits is that it helps develop your problem-solving skills and it primes you to understand and appreciate existing solutions.
Then you’re very unlikely to come up with a novel approach. It’s very difficult to not let reading “state of the art” research put up big guardrails in your mind about what’s possible.
All of the impressive breakthroughs I saw in academia in the CS side were from people who bothered very little with reading everything related in literature. At most it would be some gut checks of abstracts or a poll of other researchers to make sure an approach wasn’t well explored but that’s about it.
The people who did mostly irrelevant incremental work were the ones who were literature experts in their field. Dedicating all of that time to reading others’ work puts blinders on both your possible approaches as well as how the problems are even defined.
Worst case: you don't have a fresh perspective, but you have learned something and you can try plenty of other problems.
There's also a fair chance of finding possibilities that are "obviously" implicit in the prior work but haven't yet been pursued, or even noticed, by anyone.
> If you read the prior work too early to you get locked into existing mindsets.
I agree, though in some cases coming up with your own ideas first can result in you becoming attached to them, because they are your own. It is unlikely for this to happen if you read the prior work first.
Though I think overall reading the prior work later is probably still a good idea, but with the intention not to become too impressed with whatever you come up before.
I think part of the issue is that the people who want simple non-SUVs are the people who mostly buy used cars.
The majority of people buy their cars used, but the car makers make the cars they can sell to the minority who buy new cars - and they have very different tastes. New car buyers like gadgets and they like SUVs.
The trick is to find ways to carry it with you less.