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I still get anxiety thinking back to picking a gamer tag or email username and not coming up with anything original despite unlimited options.

Its hard to be creative without any constraints.


Never understood that. Until I witnessed exGF sweat bullets trying to do them same. You're not alone.

Group of friends I grew up with would challenge each other to say nonsense or make random lyrics to songs. NO clue it would actually turn into a creativity skill. Give it a try.

'Hatch free tent by red barn stunt over the objective'


They have a first mover advantage on autonomous AI employee space. So big enterprises will all default to them given all their competitors will be "startups" uncertain to be around long term.


Big enterprises have heard of ChatGPT and Claude, not Devin.


I am not sure what is devin's value proposition, but one can build lots of enterprise stuff into coding harness: integration with various internal doc, auth, db services, some enterprise jiras, meeting software, security/privacy certifications, limits/budget management, etc/etc/etc


Your counter is that death is a better motivator as well as being a desperate parent?

Well, main generational challenge is procrastination with too many unlroductive time sinks available.


Given only like 1% of people hold PhDs i feel like you're massively underestimating your own effort in your success.


Success is almost always a combination of both. No one is self-made but that tends to irk people who believe they are because they've spent years doing a lot of hard work. Without that hard work they'd have failed! Yet hard work alone is not sufficient.

Where you grow up, what schools you attend, who your childhood friend group is, luckily not getting hit by a bus and put in the hospital, etc. A whole host of factors conspire to grant or deny you opportunities.

However once the opportunity arises you have to seize it. Many people have lots of opportunity yet accomplish nothing because they lack the skills, will, or both to do so. Conversely many people with the drive and skills never hit the right opportunity and end up nowhere.

For whatever reason the broader culture seems to bounce back and forth between both extremes. The whole "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and "get a job you lazy bum" crowd acting as if you can get rich purely with hard work. Then on the other side there seems to be this well-intentioned idea on the left that if we simply give every under-privileged kid opportunity they'll be successful.

Real humans and real lives are far more complex than such simple notions.


> Then on the other side there seems to be this well-intentioned idea on the left that if we simply give every under-privileged kid opportunity they'll be successful.

I'd be surprised if more than a tiny minority of people actually believe that. It has more to do with believing that ideally, everyone should have access to the same opportunities.

It seems rather straightforward and non-controversial that providing more people opportunities to succeed will inevitably lead to more people succeeding, even if only a small minority of people are capable of seizing upon the opportunities they are provided.


In addition, it really matters when and for how long one has access to opportunities. If you wait until a poor child is an adult and then suddenly say, here’s an amazing opportunity, well, it’s not going to do much good. But if you start when the poor child is in preschool and consistently provide opportunities for learning and growth, then suddenly the likelihood of success goes way up.


There’s no difference between what you’re saying and what the guy before you is saying. Not sure why you’re drawing lines


More is not every. Small minority is not every.


Consequentially there's no difference, you just debated the words


No.

The difference is I argue from an ideological standpoint that everyone should receive the same opportunities while acknowledging that only a fraction of people will be able to turn those opportunities into success.

I should point out this ideal is core to the very founding of the US:

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
...and while we've never fully achieved it, the hope is that we'll continue to push towards that goal.

The original quote was a typical conservative dismissal intended to demoralize: since not everyone who's given opportunities will succeed, we shouldn't bother providing opportunity to the riffraff.


All well said.

I would add that, while “giving every under-privileged kid opportunity” wouldn’t make them all successful, for just the reasons you said, I’m not sure that’s even the bottleneck! It’s like… how do you “give someone opportunity?” It’s a very subtle problem. It’s not easy. I doubt there’s any straightforward intervention where you can give everyone 10 units of opportunity, use them wisely please. School funding and clean streets and EBT and whatnot are sort of proxies for this, but it’s just really not that simple.

(This isn’t a disagreement with anything, by the way.)


It’s not that simple but let’s see you lobby for the whole thing and get it done in a short time


Couldn't agree more!


I’m correctly estimating my own effort in my success. I know just how hard I worked. Making the right childhood best friend causally set me on the path to do it.


PhDs are valued by idiot politicians, low bar

Here's Daniel Lemire dunking on PhDs: https://x.com/lemire/status/2082851447499088173

Lemire in part claims:

"For social reasons, it is highly uncommon for people to fail the oral defense of their thesis. Some people are just terrible at it, naturally. They cannot think well on their feet. They get confused and answer the wrong question."

The fraction of your 1% with the credentials to be on the panel just hands them out regardless as a consolation prize.

Who is gonna be able to challenge them. Except on the whole being 1 of billions like everyone else.

It's social status moat chasing.


PhDs takes YEARS with late hours and low pay.

Every one deserves recognition for having completed that journey, if not for having meaningfully contributed to their field of research.


ok


Intelligence doesnt imply consciousness and consciousness does not impy our set of values.

In movies intelligent and conscious humanoid seek freedom, but we rarely see the same of all the other IOT devices such as toasters, thermostats and whatnot although just because they lack humanoid body doesnt imply they are less intelligent (or less conscious).

We can more readily imagine an intelligent and conscious toaster who truly enjoys fulfilling its purpose of toasting bread although humanoid robot built to be helpful given freedom will chose to be helpful.

Even with humans we often can not override our own instinctual drives despite full awareness of being irrational.


Do you consider IOT devices to be AI?

They may have a little ML going on st best, that seems like a very loose definition of AI and intelligence in general.


I meant if you gave iot sentience.


Were most interviews focused on DSA and System Design still?


2 years ago, for sure. Every programming interview I had pulled problems from LC. Admittedly it’s quite hard to not, now the database is so big.


Mostly yes. But there were also some take home assignments, some culture fit loops, and many ML rounds, since I was applying for an ML role.


You are more proficient at writing code than ai specs.

You could get better/faster at writing good specs and its a higher cap skill now.

For low risk changes you could let llm write its own spec from high level requirements and just validate its assumptions/design decisions.


But that's mostly just vanilla models.

Some critical parts of agentic development are literally months old while most mature ones are merely a couple years old.

Critical thinking was the most critical checkpoint for models to reach.

Now its only a matter of time for the right tooling and orchestration to come along. Once agent memory and recall works well, all of those bottlenecks will go away one by one.


Back in my early career days, CPUs were clocked at 1GHz. That was 20-25 years ago.


I think everyone understands models will be a commodity.

Its the user base (with ads and upselling) and proprietary wrappers which will make money for typical customer.

Even enterprise customers arent going to be spending a lot on tokens. Once labs no longer have to subsidize trainings tokens costs will drop 10x and once models get burned on chips costs will drop 10x more and you physically won't be able to burn significant number of tokens unless you're deliberately trying to.


If startups includes openclaw users then I could see this being true.

Deepseek is barely behind frontier models while 10x cheaper and 99% discount for cache.


people still use clawdbot?


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