iRideUnicornz

One also has to take into account other revenue streams that Youtubers will often have. Most channels nowadays will start up a Patreon account once they get a core following, and even a monthly dollar per Patron is more than all the adclicks that viewer would give. Merchandising is also big (1 T-shirt > 1000s of views), and bigger channels (100k+) can get a decent amount of revenue through sponsorship where they give in-video advertisements (like what Squarespace and a lot of VPNs do).

After the instability of Youtube's ad platform this past year ("Adpocalypse 1, 2 and 3"), many on the platform have given up on the idea of depending solely on adclicks as it's just too risky to leave your future to the discretion of a black box algorithm.

By Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Not calling Nat stupid here (he probably knows his craft better than I ever will in my life), but I don't really think he's lying maliciously.

He most likely means the age at which he opened his first IDE and wrote hello world, probably guided by some sort of basic "learn to code" website/book. A developer should be someone well-versed enough in their respective platform that, given requirements for a project, is able to implement those requirements in desired fashion, while also dealing with all the problems associated with such an undertaking (ie bugs, optimizations, etc). It is often confused with programmer though, and programmer is a much more loose term that can refer to someone who made 1 line of hello world to someone who makes software that flies an airplane, and I assume that would have been the more accurate wording in this case.

I agree, the blurb describes in detail what a "Pals Battalion" is, but not why it was actually problematic for the communities from which that battalion originated from.

Basically, large groups of young men from the same community (hundreds to thousands), would all join up patriotically into the same battalion. After all, if they were going to join a war, they might as well join together with those that they know and already have bonds with. Unfortunately, the unintended consequences were those same entire battalions could be wiped out in a single day (like at the Somme), and now you had a community losing nearly all of it's young men at the exact same time, with hundreds of families in the same area now missing a son at the exact same time. As one would expect, the effects of this would be devastating mentally, and demographically enough so as to destroy smaller communities that had sent the majority of their sons and now no longer had fathers for the next generation.

I don't think they value social rights that much less than we do (although it seems local Chinese people seem to tolerate government power more than we do). People who come over from China, especially to work in Silicon Valley, tend to be the more open-minded of the bunch, and people I've talked to from China have told me that they're aware of those "problems" but don't view them too negatively as it's just the cost of running an efficient country.

They do, however, feel very disillusioned with a lot of the current progressive environment. It's less to do with not agreeing with those values, and more to do with disapproval with how we in the West express our dissatisfaction - we're quick to take to the streets, protest on social media, and believe anything our echo chambers tell us, hence where the Chinese insult "white left" comes from, referring to people who are overly emotional and sensitive about things.

China and Asia, in general, has a very conservative "keep it to yourself, fix it yourself" attitude when it comes to problems, which can be very toxic. But this current NA attitude of blaming others and expecting the world to change to accommodate you is incredibly frustrating to the coworkers I talked to, and with the current political environment magnifying this problem to incredible levels some of those same coworkers felt that if they didn't participate in these politics (gender, race, religion, etc) then it would reflect negatively on them, but their opinions differed enough (ie only 2 genders) that they would be crucified if they said anything. It wasn't surprising to hear from some of them that they considered going back to China sometimes.

This is purely anecdotal, but some of the most prominent notifications FB sends me is when someone who's been inactive for a while posts something. For example, I had one friend who posts maybe once or twice a year, and I would always be notified if that person posted something new, like when he suddenly posted an album of his recent vacation to Europe.

With that being said, the FB algorithm beast is far too complex to figure out by guessing, so experiences like the one being outlined in this twitter post are probably all too common.

As nice of a story it makes, those people are the exceptions. For the vast overwhelming majority of the population, secondary -> post-secondary -> graduate studies (last one optional) is the best path to "success". Those people who are able to succeed even after dropping out are the types of people who, even if they were enrolled in a small, no-name community college, would still be able to succeed, not because of their education but rather because of their personality and drive.

I think the reason for this level of abstraction isn't just due to the difficulty in understanding what we do, but rather the _intangibility_ of what we do. When we talk about magic, we describe a system that is intangible to the uncultured. While everyone is capable of seeing the result, the non-magically adept are incapable of seeing the 'systems' that magic is based on (ie the "flow of mana" or the "rewriting of logic"). The same can be said about programming. Everyone is able to use the products and results we put out, but to understand the "process" is something else entirely.

When an engineer makes something, they are making a _physical_ object by essentially designing and putting _physical_ parts together. Obviously, there's a LOT of math, simulations and design principles that they do as well, but the layman doesn't need to know that - they just see someone who creates parts to build bigger things. A doctor uses his tools and knowledge to _physically_ manipulate the body and fixes physical problems in the body. No layman will ever perform a heart transplant, but they can understand the concept of taking another heart, moving it and connecting the blood vessels and nerve. What does a programmer do? We put together a line of text that somehow represent electricity that is somehow filtered through microscopic parts, resulting in a machine capable of emulating human speech? What?

And now we're getting into quantum computing and cryptocurrency - things that require a massive wealth of knowledge across many fields to fully grasp, and also neural networks and machine learning - things that programmers understand the intended behavior of, but is impossible to perfectly understand their oftentimes random-seeming behavior. It's not a stretch to say that we're reaching a point in time where technology has essentially become like magic.

This is a really well-written article. It's clear, concise and sticks to the point, not drowning the reader in anecdotes and unrelated analogies. I've thought these same thoughts myself when explaining automation and how it would affect their lives to my parents, and was met with mostly indifference not because they were stubborn but because they simply couldn't wrap their heads around the idea that a computer (which, when they were growing up as teens, weren't even capable of doing things like e-mails) could ever fully replace them, people who studied for years to master and certify their respective jobs. This article describes that experience in a truly creative and interesting way.

I've always thought of life as being a series of opportunities, and depending on how you live your life and how lucky you are, that number differs.

Having opportunities is very different from success though; the successful are those who are smart, clever and quick enough to realize that the opportunity exists, and are diligent enough to actually realize that opportunity. After all, isn't Y-combinator quite literally an incubator of those who have noticed an opportunity and chosen to pursue it?