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Are you selecting based on a holistic view of merit (projects, personality, capacity to grow in a role) or are you gating based on the same-old LeetCode brain teaser exams? In the latter case there is no shortage of H1B grinders who’ve spent every day for the past 6 months memorizing the puzzles to pass your screens, even if they say nothing about raw ability.

By the time a “qualified” candidate is sitting across from you, you have already created a sampling bias simply because the population of India and China are staggering compared to the US. Wow, there are so many eager candidates from India, we must have a labor shortage in the US!

Arguably someone at the center of the US political spectrum is right wing by any other standard. This is why someone like Zohran with policies that are otherwise fairly sensible and moderate gets painted as far left. Within that framing it seems that every policy position within the “center left” to the “far right” of US politics serves the same coalition. And any claims of American exceptionalism (we exist on our own political spectrum because we are special) just provides more control over that framing to the same dominant coalition.

I agree.

Seems like the only thing left to value will be social capital. If all forms of labor are free, the only thing that matters is how many people you know, what they think of you, whether they listen to you.

Americans are so silly. Resentful of being told to do anything for their own good or the good of others because of “individual liberty”, yet so willing to lick the boot of the police state and corrupt crony capitalists. Good news for you is that Elon went in and set the bureaucrats straight, so enjoy your diarrhea and glass in your food.

“Careless People” lays it out pretty well – you either need to make the right friends in college at an Ivy League or you need to be friends with someone else who did. If you made the mistake of not being born into a family that groomed you since birth for the ivy leagues then sorry, that ship has sailed already.

It’s not exactly a free choice when the built environment and infrastructure is designed around a single mode of transport. I can’t just “choose to cycle” when there are no bike paths, or “choose to walk” when things are spread out and separated by impassible freeways as to make it impossible. Look up the various ways the oil and automotive lobby has influenced city planning over the years – it might become a little more obvious who has the “free choice” here, and it’s not consumers.

> I rode across town in a self-driving Tesla the other day while giving orders to its AI system about how and where to go. That was a pretty sci-fi dream world experience. That's worth quite a bit of corruption.

This is why people hate nerds. Will not explain.

> Would you even want to work somewhere where you need to play a role and where they flip out when you say the wrong word you should've correctly guessed through mind reading?

This just sounds like a standard tech interview. Mind reading to find and perform the secret “signal”. Nobody flips out if you don’t find it, they just move on to one of the other 1,000 candidates for the role.

You seem to live in the real reality, and presumably people care about what you think there because it’s actually real. So why not enlighten us, help explain it to us deluded people? Or you can just be rude and vague.

What are the tells? Since COVID I’ve noticed that every new person I meet seems to harbor at least 1 or 2 oddball opinions. Conversation tends to veer into weirder places than it used to, creating a surreal sort of feeling of being in the world. I’ve felt that this is just a result of everyone being tuned by whatever personalized feed is amplifying or directing their base instincts.

What an odd thing to say to someone lamenting the passing of their friend. Maybe you should try some cardio.

I find this aggressively anti-intellectual, anti-expert strain of thought pretty concerning. Bureaucratic bullshit exists, for sure, but not every single system that requires credentials and expertise to navigate effectively is self-evidently bullshit. This attitude taken to its extreme creates deeply corrupt institutions that run entirely on nepotism, bribery, favors.

I’m not exactly making an argument for Soviet-style central planning. In a way, the system we have is its own form of central planning, except those with the power to do the planning are people like Zuckerberg, Musk, etc, and there is not even an illusion that they have any duty to serve anyone but their (also wealthy, but slightly less so) shareholders, participating in an increasingly irrational stock market.

The beauty of capitalism is that collective market forces determine the allocation of resources, but is that really what we have when certain individuals reach escape velocity of wealth and are no longer threatened by the natural selection of the market?

When you look at the eye-watering amount of money that Zuckerberg has spent on false starts in the past ~10 years, it makes you wonder whether capitalism truly does produce the most efficient allocation of resources.

Granted, a lot of that money created jobs for white collar workers, which feeds into other parts of the economy. But is it really more efficient to allocate those resources toward enriching a small group of Alexandr Wangs than allocating it toward projects like infrastructure, modernizing energy production, building housing, etc?

Parallel to that, I have to imagine Costco makes a lot of money off of impulse purchases, which are induced by uncertainty in the specific items they will have available, plus mutable store layouts.

Long ago in undergrad I took a retail marketing class and we did a field trip to Costco; the GM told us it was part of their policy to rearrange parts of the store occasionally so that you had to browse the entire place to check off your shopping list. This increases the likelihood that you stumble across new products. So it’s this combination of “best price/quality without decision fatigue” plus some impulse buying that works for them. The fact that they are figuring out the price/quality trade off for you up front probably also makes it easier to impulse buy with fewer regrets.

BYD has to me become an icon of US decline vs Chinese expansion. It’s just one example among many of China charting the way forward and innovating while the US recedes further into backward-looking, protectionist policy. See: US politicians on both sides trying to ban BYD imports rather than incentivizing stiffer competition from US automakers.

Another example: massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects. You occasionally see a heartwarming post: “California adds solar panels over a canal” and it just looks cute and kind of sad compared to the massive, ambitious, and technologically superior build out of Chinese renewables.

This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression. But anyone paying attention can quite clearly see that China is winning and the US is sacrificing their global superiority at the altar of fear, ignorance, and religious nationalism.

Yet more evidence of the rapid disassembly of the social contract and our collective ethics, aided of course by unregulated tech. If you work for – or are involved in the funding of – these unregulated gambling and insider trading platforms, you should be ashamed of yourself. Your greed and lack of concern for the health of the human world you live in is sickening. You can get bag after bag but it will never fill the void in your soul.

American exceptionalism is crazy. We do not always come out on top. Sometimes – quite frequently actually – we are dumb as shit, overplay our hand, and create more problems for ourselves than we solve. 4D chess is a myth.

The American dream in 2026, bundled up and served on an LLM-generated plate. Writing your own posts for real is low-value $5 an hour work. We all know the real meaning of life is “asymmetric upside.” Don’t do it because you love it or because it matters – do it for the upside. Zero introspection mindset.

Yikes, I guess American tendency for narcissism, cultural rot, and attention-seeking at all costs has fully permeated the global culture. This brat will probably be successful in life and that’s exactly why everything’s going to shit.

Psychedelic therapy is unlikely to ever become mainstream treatment for serious mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. In those cases, it’s significantly more likely to cause more problems than it solves. In general these new faddish psychedelic treatments are mostly effective for bougie mental illness – mild depression, anxiety, stress – but they do not belong in a treatment regimen for serious illness. There is a reason every psychedelic treatment study excludes participants with schizophrenia and bipolar.

ECT might seem barbaric and unsexy compared to dosing some psilocybin and listening to some ambient music in a cozy room, but that doesn’t reduce its clinical value for people with serious, treatment resistant disorders.

Near future being the key term here imo. The entire task I mentioned was not an engineering problem, but a communication issue. The two project owners could have just talked to each other about the design, then coded it correctly in the first pass, obviating the need for the code janitor. Once orgs adapt to this new workflow, they’ll replace the code janitors with much cheaper Claude credits.

It has made my job an awful slog, and my personal projects move faster.

At work, the devs up the chain now do everything with AI – not just coding – then task me with cleaning it up. It is painful and time consuming, the code base is a mess. In one case I had to merge a feature from one team into the main code base, but the feature was AI coded so it did not obey the API design of the main project. It also included a ton of stuff you don’t need in the first pass - a ton of error checking and hand-rolled parsing, etc, that I had to spend over a week unrolling so that I could trim it down and redesign it to work in the main codebase. It was a slog, and it also made me look bad because it took me forever compared to the team who originally churned it out almost instantly. AI tools are not good at this kind of design deconflicting task, so while it’s easy to get the initial concept out the gate almost instantly, you can’t just magically fit it into the bigger codebase without facing the technical debt you’ve generated.

In my personal projects, I get to experience a bit of the fun I think others are having. You can very quickly build out new features, explore new ideas, etc. You have to be thoughtful about the design because the codebase can get messy and hard to build on. Often I design the APIs and then have Claude critique them and implement them.

I think the future is bleak for people in my spot professionally – not junior, but also not leading the team. I think the middle will be hollowed out and replaced with principals who set direction, coordinate, and execute. A privileged few will be hired and developed to become leaders eventually (or strike gold with their own projects), but everyone in between is in trouble.

> In our shop, we have hundreds of agents working on various problems at any given time. Most of the code gets discarded. What we accept to merge are the good parts.

What you’ve described is an incredibly expensive and inefficient genetic algorithm with a human review as the fitness function. It’s not the flex you might think it is.

I look forward to the day we pull our heads out of the sand and stop excusing blatant corruption. It takes a naive view of the world to assume the Secretary of Commerce has access to the same limited information as you or I.

Let’s call all of this what it is: parasites leveraging their insider positions for profit. The ruling class is ripping the copper out of our walls and selling it for scrap while we all choose to look the other way.

While some of it is boosting the abnormal behaviors of people suffering from mental illness, I think you’re making a false equivalency. Mental illness is not required to be an asshole. In fact, most Twitter assholes are probably not mentally ill. They lack ethics, they crave attention, they don’t care about the consequences of their actions. They may as well just be a random teenager, an ignorant and inconsiderate adult, etc., with no mental illness but also no scruples. Don’t discount the banality of evil.

So why are we still telling ourselves this process is used to assess suitability for a job? Is it not just a hazing process? Maybe tech sucks because people who take the abuse or game the system outnumber the results oriented

So then the corps find a way to fire you for something other than AI displacement, replace you with AI anyway, and you’re on your own. Basically identical to firing someone in a clever way that avoids having to pay unemployment, which already happens quite frequently.

I don’t understand why taxation is so off limits to this crowd. We seem to live in a death cult where avoiding a slight inconvenience to 100 people is more important than providing a decent standard of living for the other 345 million people. You can invent whatever clever little solution you want in the meantime but eventually the chickens will come home to roost.