The current CTO of a publicly traded company had my entire engineering team rewrite an <anonymized internal tool>. Mind you, the current generation of the <anonymized internal tool> is completely fine, and in fact a massive improvement from our 1st and 2nd gen version. About a year into that completely useless project, the CTO lays off 2/3 of the team (including the original authors), reorgs another team into our team, and the latest gen <anonymized internal tool> is a complete pile of trash. I left the team a few months ago when I realized it wasn't worth the head ache of dealing with the terrible CTO, the literal human centipede which is the leadership chain, and the sales bro turned product manager.
while I agree with the sentiment, as an Indian, I hope this doesn't happen in India. countries which typically do this mechanical turk-like work typically don't raise themselves out of poverty (esp. Philippines, Indonesia, etc.). If anyone wants a specific example, I lead an aspect of web crawling for a FAANG and then other public companies. Over the last 10 years we heavily used those offshore teams, aforementioned, to do sanity checks/labeling, etc. Now, we have initiatives with GPT APIs which perform just as well for pennies on the dollar we spent offshore - and the offshore team that's been loyal for years? They're getting cut.
I know companies that operate in that space and they pay incredibly well, between $20 to $50/hour.
> GPT APIs which perform just as well
That's because they were also trained by exploiting third world groups, paying about $2/hour.
The problem here isn't offering work to developing countries, the problem here is major corporations squeezing them for every cent and not allowing it to be used as a means of getting out of poverty. And that's also why the workers end up performing half-assed work by using automated classifiers and faking their credentials. It's not hard to see where this goes for both.
if you don't think FAANGs (and most companies) participate in "exploitative business" you should find out how your iphone was made (hint: lots of exploited workers).
Never said it wasn't. Amazon's antics especially are well known. The point here is that data labelling itself isn't fundamentally exploitative, even when leveraging developing countries.
Most things in america are paid ads in disguise: these posts, blogs by mckinsey/bcg/big 4 accounting firms, news is often a paid ad/agenda in disguise. You're honestly better off spending time with your family and developing a small hobby.
~ musings from a late 30s guy
I'd argue that if you are really interested, you can follow a few academics and read up on their papers etc. Of course, that's a big undertaking but it's the only alternative I can think of given the incentives for pushing shit at us
I feel like this is equivocating a bit. Scientific papers exist to put forth an argument and change minds, yes. That’s the entire point of science as an endeavor. It’s not perfect, but if we’re going to define “marketing” as “anytime someone tries to convince me of anything”, I think we’re getting a tad reductionist.
if you want to get massively wealthy get a good CS education or just get business experience in the real world, these a16z blogs and podcasts are for what's appropriately been labeled Veblenian entrepreneurship, that is consuming entrepreneurship as a sort of cosplay lifestyle.
I'm an extremely strong believer that the sun has consciousness. I think there exists quantum processes that causes consciousness and that suns, gravitons, etc. all have it. I likely won't be alive to ever find out, but if someone does discover it, I hope a historian finds this thread :)
I am a strong believer that consciousness has a purpose. It is related to self-replication because consciousness necessitates evolution to come about, and evolution necessitates consciousness to keep the organism alive. They need each other. Evolution is the outer process, consciousness the inner process.
Celestial bodies lack the reason & means. Not to mention the slowness of light at cosmic distance. Any consciousness would need to be within a small light cone to operate at normal speeds.
I am a strong believer that humans only experience a limited amount of the full experience that is available with consciousness. We have no idea what perceived sensations a start might have. Maybe stars operate on a quantum level that we don't understand yet.
I am extremely skeptical about all things regarding consciousness, and nothing stated in this thread has done anything to reduce my skepticism. We barely know anything about human consciousness, I feel we are under qualified to speak with conviction about anything else's level of consciousness.
Pan-psychism does not work because so far everything we know that for sure has C also has some form of information processing. We know the brain is doing information processing, and living beings with brains that do this complex computations are the ones with C. While it might still not be a definitive proof or cause, it is a strong correlation, and there is no reason to think anything that is not doing complex computation is conscious.
As a parent, I'm equally ashamed. We're probably moving our family to europe/dubai in the next decade. The quality of my wife and my education abroad was substantially better than what we've experienced in "blue ribbon schools" in california.
I've seen something similar recently online, someone talking about wanting to visit a certain adjacent middle eastern country for a holiday, one with a fairly notorious public image in other regards. I'm assuming the advertising those countries are pushing play a big part in the mind share of people.
There are many reasons why one wouldn't want to live in Dubai.
I was stationed in Dubai for work for two years, I know the place very well.
Overall, I would say Dubai is very different than how it is portrayed in western media. Personally I find it amazing how much the place has grown in such a short time span.
But I have chosen to live in Switzerland(not my native country), a country more aligned with my personal values. Freedom for the individual, a strong democracy, a diverse culture, with people who genuinely care about the planet and their neighborhood.
But I do think a person grows when they are forced to live in cultures very different from their own.
I'm sure your wife and daughter(s), if you have any, will certainly love Dubai and the UAE in general. And Europe has its own set of problems, it's a good idea to look at it without rose tinted glasses.
My sister has lived in Dubai for about a decade and just had her daughter there. Some of the best IVF facilities in the world are in Dubai btw. Dubai has changed a lot over the past 20 years.
As a kid I lived in Qatar and Oman in the 80s (born in Scotland but my dad worked in oil and gas), so I have experience with gulf states of the sort maybe you're thinking of in your mind. Yes - those places were often not great places to be a woman. But 2024 Dubai is a much different place. I visited my sister in 2022 when I had to travel to Abu Dhabi for work, and for the first time Dubai seemed like a place where I could imagine living on a long term basis.
The sankey diagrams here are interesting, and a trend I haven't experienced, but have seen mentioned on /r/cscareerquestions quite frequently. As a Cal grad, cold applications have always worked for me, but it seems OP and newer grads are having a tougher time. I'm curious if Cal/top university grads are getting the recycling bin from cold applications as well (I also have 15+ yoe now, but it's never been an issue).
Also for new grads, the best advice I can give you: join a fortune 500 company. Startups are extremely cut throat and volatile, esp. in this environment where everything is under scrutiny, interest rates are high, etc. If you can get into a FAANG, Pintrest, xyz and climb the ladder, it's likely better than being taken advantage of at a startup - which I've seen more often times than not.
It's the year. I had cold applications too and worked in 2022. And I wasn't a UC Berkeley graduate which I believe is very well-know Computer Science school.
> Also for new grads, the best advice I can give you: join a fortune 500 company.
I think the problem is not that the new grads are not applying. They simply are not getting a chance. It's not a matter of choosing between F500 and startups.
fun fact for the older HN community: The CSU system has a distance learning system (esp. SJSU), if you're interested in learning something new for fun - it's a great resource. I've used it over the last couple of years and am contemplating getting a masters from here as well.
Are CSUs academic powerhouses? No. Are they still great for learning upper division physics, chemistry, and math at an affordable price? Absolutely.
Another fun fact, having worked for CSU extended education. The extended education department is entirely self-funded (which is why credits cost more), and receives grants from the state. Thus, they are the only department in the school that has money. Guess who the best teachers want to work for...
It is like a little private school, within the system.
crypto in and of itself is a really cool and valuable tool. the hype bubble around it and subsequent power/environmental consequences are not good - but the tech is cool and should be appreciated. blockchain is also a great tool for the right usecases (distributed ledger)
the hype bubble around it and subsequent power/environmental consequences [...]
The energy consumption is not the result of anything, it is a fundamental design element. [1] To reach a meaningful consensus, you have to give all participating users equal or at least similar voting power. But Bitcoin does not want a central database of users which opens the door for Sybil attacks - you can just invent an essentially unlimited number of users out of thin air and have them vote the way you want. The solution to this problem in case of Bitcoin is to tie votes to computing resources for calculating hashes. While you can invent users out of thin, you can not invent computing power out of thin air. This gives each user voting power in proportion to the amount of money they are willing to invest in computing resources. Not really equal voting power for all users but close enough in practice. If miners would not burn enormous amounts of energy, anyone could come along and influence or alter the transaction history or just mine empty blocks and with that block all transactions.
[1] For Bitcoin and similar proof of work systems, there are alternatives.
You can't understand why people want to be free from the shackles of government issued money? Arguments can reasonably be made about the viability of crypto, the stability and how useful it actually is, but it should be crystal clear why many people are desperate for mediums of exchange and stores of value outside of the government-controlled medium (crypto, gold or otherwise).
That governments can't control access to cryptocurrencies and gold is the biggest fantasy that crypto rubes believe. That people in developed countries don't want governments to control money to claw it back from fraudsters is the second biggest fantasy.
>That governments can't control access to cryptocurrencies and gold is the biggest fantasy that crypto rubes believe.
Cryptocurrencies are math. Governments cannot control math, as much as authoritarians wish they could.
>That people in developed countries don't want governments to control money to claw it back from fraudsters is the second biggest fantasy.
The assumption that most people in developed countries want government to "control money" is delusional at best. There are certainly many people in developed countries who want the government to control money, control speech, control political discourse and control everything else - but there are just as many who oppose all of that.
Governments can't stop you doing maths, but they can make it very difficult to either do it at scale, or convert your maths back into government issued currency.
> Cryptocurrencies are math. Governments cannot control math, as much as authoritarians wish they could.
And there's the misconception. Trading government money for cryptocurrency is subject to regulation. Do you think you can hack the President's communication and send it to Putin because it's math? Do you think you can set the interest rate on a loan to 500% because it's math?
> The assumption that most people in developed countries want government to "control money" is delusional at best.
How strange then that every single developed democracy has implemented it. I must have just imagined the entire field of tort law and people clamoring for relief from the courts.
You are trying to retcon the reason why (e.g.) Bitcoin was created in the first place:
> Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non- reversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party.
What's strange about it? The creator of Bitcoin could not predict that volatility. The inflation of fiat currency is one major reason why crypto exists. Bitcoin has a 21 million BTC supply limit. That's the point.
However even with the volatility, it's way more stable than the Venezuelan currency. Crypto is widely used in Venezuela.
Congrats! My career has also revolved around PDF generation (once for federal compliance at large companies, second for scrubbing data from PDFs for HIPAA compliance and then generating a new pdf based on the scrubbed data). I think I've seen your tool around, I ended up creating a workflow that generated LateX scripts then converted them to pdfs, and the second a python library. The most difficult aspect for our tools was formatting - the pdfs were generally 60-100 pages and tables could show up anywhere and break the page/formatting. Quite curious to see how your company will grow, good luck!
