blahblarblar

I get all that, it’s a fun philosophical widget to ponder over. But out here in the real world it has value to me because I can sell it for more than I paid. I’ve taken profits and converted it into real goods for myself. I am aware it could go to zero and I’ve hedged my risk appropriately.

I don’t care what you say it’s worth, I care what people willing to buy it will pay.

My crypto is still worth more than I paid for it.

Monks understand that sentience is not connected to language and reasoning. “You are not your thoughts, you are the observer” language and reasoning are just the mechanism we use to express this experience. We only believe other humans when they describe sentience because they are equipped with the same hardware as us. In fact, monks meditate to avoid thinking in order to increase their consciousness. Thinking is viewed as a distraction from consciousness.

In this sense, a very intelligent sounding language model provides no evidence of sentience. We have to understand what sentience actually is to establish a machine is sentient.

We were making too much stuff. Banks decided we needed to buy less stuff so they made less money. Now the leftover stuff will sit because we won’t make enough money for ourselves to buy it. We’ll adjust by reducing how much stuff we make so there’s no extra stuff to sit. Once that happens the economy will not be bad anymore and then we’ll make more money to buy stuff that doesn’t exist so we can start making more stuff…

It seems so strange, you’d think there’d be no shortage of problems to go around.

Great example of how the market doesn’t really care about the how, just the what.

My comment maybe came off as a criticism for academics but I was speaking from experience with my own struggle disentangling my ego from academia. I still wanted to think of myself as a physicist and it handicapped my career progress and made me unhappy. Letting go of that was key.

I did the same thing. It wasn’t conscious, it was more that they lived in a completely different world from where I went. We couldn’t really relate as much anymore. Like we now had very different approaches to life. Academy moves so slow. When I check up on people I’m just shocked at how little has changed with them.

It’s definitely partially academia that does this. When you are a grad student you are paid so poorly and worked so hard it is difficult to build a substantial identity outside of being an academic. Academia is good at marketing itself as a noble cause that imbues very high status if you can ever “make it” so quiting is giving up on that lofty dream. Where in industry it is definitely “not cool” if you build your identity around your job. That creates a helpful firewall that pushes people to develop something outside their work.

It’s not that they weren’t paying attention. It’s more that academics egos can’t handle the loss to their identity of not being an academic anymore.

Return on capital for flipping bits has been much higher than physical. SWEs are paid far more than material scientists and I think the latter is much harder.

Astounding the lengths people will go to avoid having to provide a real good or service.

Tech work doesn’t feel like something you can have a life long career in. It’s stressful and there’s ageism. Tech workers are mentally amortizing their productive tech life-span over their whole life and then comp doesn’t look as high.

In a bull market it’s too hard to tell if you are a genius or taking a random walk on a rising tide. Most think they are the former.

I wish this applied to fire trucks. I’ve been woken up too many times by a fire truck blasting their horn at 2am when there’s no traffic in the street, waking up 200+ people in the process.

Dude, you ok? That’s a lot of hate to be carrying around all the time, can’t be all that fun.

You should not lower your standards, rather adjust them to the context. Know when high standards are appropriate and when you should lower your standards.

Sounds like this Amazon app you worked on just isn’t very important. I’m sure someone tried to get more resources to clean it up. But they couldn’t convince the higher ups of its business value. You could try to be a hero and rescue it. But, without a solid business case showing a causal link to business impact your efforts will go mostly unappreciated.

Try volunteering to teach some college courses on an entry level technical subject. It'll help develop some empathy for why not everyone can code. For me it was physics. I was optimistic. I thought I could teach anyone physics. After investing many hours in some of the lower ranking students I realized my mistake. Not everyone has the kind of process oriented thought processes needed to think about math or coding. Nobody knows how to teach it. All technical subjects assume you can think in this manner because they don’t know how to teach it.

Anyone talented at something thinks everyone is like them. Some singers think this too, they’ll say all you have to do is X, Y and Z and you’ll be a great singer like me, easy!

Central anything + smart home = miserable experience. If my router is having a sketchy connection I should never be blocked from turning my lights on, or have one random light in a scene fail to turn on. Someone needs to take the plunge and make the smart home a resilient mesh network that will work even in a zombie apocalypse.

If we discover room temperature superconductors this might be in the cards. Lots of exotic stuff becomes possible then but no one knows if it’s possible to have room temperature superconductors.

When I was in neuroscience I came to the same conclusion. People just keep trying new ways to do information processing which is really easy and fun. Solving the biology and material science problems are fucking hard and high risk, as in, if you try you’ll probably fail. It’s going to be a very long time before these things are solved. Not to criticize because I’m also too cowardly to try tackling those problems for the aforementioned reasons.

Did they fix strings?

Dirty Tesla used to track these stats in his testing and gave up because “it’s not changing”