buriram

No, my argument is that models from China cannot be blindly trusted, because of the regulatory and political constraints all Chinese companies must conform to. If your argument is "I don't care about where LLM models came from, as long as they do my job", then any self-hosted GPT OSS model would suffice.

"The Chinese just want to make money and beat America. They don't have evil goals so they're not evil people."

They straight up censored Kylian Mbappe a few days ago for cracking a joke about Mao Zedong. And very much all the models developed by China would have to conform with Chinese government's viewpoint, including censorship and such. Do you truly believe that they are not evil, or they will not ever be evil?

Care to elaborate why "they are led by evil people", and what AI companies are "not led by evil people"?

No thank you. I worked in multiple startups and they inherited the worst cancers of big tech: moving slowly, decisions by committees, leveling (in one startup, the founder decided to have six engineering levels in a company with less than 10 engineers). Compound with low pay and erratic behavior of founders, I had seen more than enough.

They did. You just haven’t heard of them yet, most of them are very much in stealth mode.

Sure, then tell me what's the alternative?

* Product design / product engineering / full stack engineering are totally killed by AI. I can clone Tailwind and integrate in my repo in 30 minutes with Claude Code, good riddance.

* System design is very much about "who can bullshit more and better", a literal description of practicing something that you would never do during your day to day work.

* Startups are full of nonsenses from VC like "you are ex-Googler, here's $10M for you to build internal dashboard". Then you get the likes of Retool with a bunch of salesreps who try to justify their existence by selling you stuffs you never want and never use in your life outside work. If you work there as "founding engineer", I wish you good luck.

* AI/ML (NeuRIPS) are 60k papers, most of them AI generated and AI reviewed. Yeah, good luck sorting through those noises.

Then tell me, my friend, what's the alternative? Maybe it's easier to spin up a trading bot and trade how many times Trump mention X, Y, Z.

To me, product management and product engineering are the corporate bootlicker. You spend all day long adjusting the pixels, taking tickets from customers who ask for things like "why is button red not green", "why this list is not sorted alphabetically", or "I want this field 30px higher, not lower".

And by the way, you fought through all of that for a $15k-20k ARR contract. Never again, thank you.

Oh, and the PMs are just drones sitting in a room doing nothing but talks and herding the engineers like chicken, and try to claim credits for all the work engineers do. Never met a competent PM in my life.

Because they do Leetcode interview and the day to day work is to solve Leetcode problems.

Now tell me where else can I find such a company having that?

I only care about competitive programming and solve algorithm problem. Nothing else matter: I don't care about product, frontend, security, data pipeline, bla bla nonsense.

And by the way, $400k+ salary in cash and RSU please. No stock options, thank you.

I haven’t watched the video, but likely it hasn’t answered a question: why math? Why not physics, neuroscience, philosophy or history? People claim math is both philosophical and art, but is that a sufficiently good reason to pursue math as opposed to other careers?

A lot of arguments seem to try to cling to the “old” way of doing math: staring at the blackboard for hours, wrestling with papers and papers of equations, and do forth. Well, chess players went through a similar transition period: carrying books of openings and such, to chess database, to chess engine and now AI. And at no point I hear chess players complaining that we have to study chess the old way.

A corner stone of Economics is Game Theory and Prisoner's Dilemma. You can choose not to do things for profit, but other people will.

In my first class of Software Engineering, I was taught that software is designed for changes. Even if software the fully deterministic, it interfaces with a world that is constantly changing: requirements change, customers change, political systems change.

I don't understand. Why is this the onus of scientists and PhDs to review whatever results OpenAI had dumped out? If OpenAI had produced incomprehensible papers, surely any journals would just reject it, or demand the author to do a complete rewrite? Unless we are talking about a race to solve problems, which PhDs are afraid that they had been scooped up on?

Yes, and startups do exactly that. Check out Etched https://www.etched.com/ where they made a Transformer specific GPU (basically a form of ASIC) where they bet that transformers would be the dominant GPU architecture for running AI / LLM workload.

Pulling up the ladder is very common among any kind of society, profession and immigration policies. And people advocate for it all the time.

With vibe coding and AI, it's now trivial to build your own betting client that no longer relies on all the Kalshi frontend and dark patterns and stuffs.

If people still trade on the apps and lose money, then isn't that their problems?

I watch a lot of South American soccer recently, and what is the first ad they shove on you on the stadiums? Betting companies, of course! Paraguay, Colombia, Uruguay, Peru, you name it.

Good luck getting all these countries banning gambling companies too. (Maybe Brazil did with Lula, but still).

Similar HFT and quants, they are elite in a very specialized niche: aerodynamics and CFD. The rest is extremely outdated.

Keep in mind that when James Volwes become the team principal of Williams in 2023, he was horrified to realize Williams operated everything in Excel spreadsheet, and to track the progress of how parts are made, they emailed Excel spreadsheet to each other (and remember, we are talking about a car with 100k parts). And the first thing he did was to onboard Atlassian / Jira and redesigned the process of communication / car production from the basics.

What was your conclusion, after taking the 2024 elections into account?

But if you are an aspiring and ambitious founder in Silicon Valley, which side would you take? The Glided Age mentality, or the Progressive Age mentality? The VC playbook made it very clear that the role of startups, or at least the very successful startup, is explosive growth, expanding quickly, capturing a monopoly and its distribution. Even if you are thinking otherwise, soon you'll face the reality of Silicon Valley's VC growth machine.

In other words, the aspiring founders look at Google, Facebook, Tesla, etc. and think "how can I become one of them", not "how can I be different from them"? If you can find me examples of successful startups that think fundamentally different from those big techs, I'm very happy to be wrong and be corrected here.

But who are "we"? The society, the government, the regulator, or the consumer?

I don't see any of such entity would solve that problem. The government and regulator are in OpenAI and Anthropic's pocket, and I don't trust them a single bit on coming up with regulations. The consumers don't care; they just need something smart and cheap. And the society doesn't work either: each person is too busy fighting for their own survival rather than changing the system.

I have read the opening chapters of the book, and honestly I had to put it down after reading 20 percent of the book. I just don't see any new information that I had already known (rightwing effect, propaganda, Fox/Breitbait nonsense, bla bla).

I used to believe Trump winning the 2016 election was a product of rightwing propaganda and fringe theory, but with the 2024 election, I had to revise my belief. What if this is the mainstream mindset of Americans all along, and Trump simply tried to capitalize on that?

To enhance the status quo you don’t need LLMs, you need people who care.

If your salary is 40k euros with no advancement in career and keep being threatened you would be replaced with AI, I highly doubt anyone would care.

no. humans can be held accountable and learn from their mistakes. they can be taught where they went wrong.

As an individual, yes. As a population, no. They elected a conman twice and would rather burn down the country rather than changing their view.