beforeolives

I've read some of the cryptocurrency subreddits recently and it has been absolutely fascinating. The degree of group cognitive dissonance is something else.

So if it's a scam but everyone knows that it is, you think there is no risk?

> it’s a currency not a stock.

It's a digital asset that you buy with dollars (or equivalent). If your position benefits from the price in dollars increasing, then you're long.

This thinking only holds if you feel positively about who you currently are and your place in life right now. If you don't, then these "what if" questions can be a lot more appealing.

I genuinely gave up after two unsuccessful clicks. It probably says something about my personality or current state of mind.

> Jobs are handing out more money with more flexibility than ever seen before.

I'm in the UK and not seeing any of this.

I don't think that my point is getting across because you're focusing on the people that you have most commonly observed in the environment around you. Sure - people can work harder, most of us are average and we don't need to get close to our limits in our jobs. That's not who I'm talking about. I'm talking the extreme outliers on the lower end of the intelligence distribution. Those are the people for whom the innate intelligence limit is low, by definition.

People with IQ below 75 can be classified as having a mental disability. That's just under 5% of the population. Do you think those people can take your advice and just put in more effort? What about the people who score just above that threshold? Do you think they could do your job only if they had better teachers? I don't think they could.

We all have natural limitations - it's much better to recognise that some people's limitations are holding them back so much that they can't function normally in modern society. That seems healthier to me than pretending that people just need to apply themselves more.

> In my own perhaps limited experience, I've never really encountered anyone who is simply incapable of deep thought / critical thinking.

I don't know how we're defining deep thought and critical thinking but it's important to recognise that people have limitations to their intellect and for some people that ceiling is very low. If we assume that you have some kind of software job since you're on HN - there are many people out there whose brains don't have the computational power to do your job. And for a subset of those people keeping any job would be a challenge. That's not something that they control or that anyone can change. If human intelligence is continuous and somewhat symmetrical, for every outlier that you meet on the high end of intelligence there is someone out there who can barely function in modern society (or maybe they can't).

Aren't you sharing that key with anyone that you transact with?

No, it's not the same at all. Tether is not a bank. Banks are audited and bank deposits are insured. Banks can't print money unilaterally. Tether doesn't have the same regulations apply to it.

> It's also hard to call a 0% interest, zero return token, a ponzi scheme.

Much easier if we mention that only 3-4% of the entire Tether supply is backed by actual dollars.

Maybe we have very different experiences and perspectives. If you're healthy and things are going well, then stability and routine look like something boring that maybe even takes away from the quality of your life. If you're struggling to function and having a normal day is an achievement on its own, then things look a lot different.

When I clicked on this post I was thinking of timelines like 1-2 years but 10 years is a long time to have something on the back burner. Do you really need to keep up? Do you want to have engineering as a hobby in some way?

As someone who is depressed, founding a company is very low on the list of things I would like to do.

Reasons:

- it's practically impossible for me to be excited about any business/software idea/project/opportunity

- depression diminishes my productivity which is extremely important for a founder

- the instability from building a company creates a negative feedback loop with one's depression

I need stability and routine; I need to put in a lot of effort just to have a normal life and keep a job. Running a company becomes almost impossible in those circumstances.

> I talk about my mental health to anyone who will listen, and also try to those who won’t. I don’t launch into the story of my life and whole disease history but I need everyone to understand that depression is something that affects every aspect of my life.

I can't relate to this at all. Maybe it's a big difference in personality, culture or place in life, but the last thing I want to do is to openly share things that are very personal with people that I barely know.

> Maybe, and this is a fat maybe, Greek symbols could make the odd write-once math or scientific code easier to read.

The Julia community has been trying really hard to convince people that this is a good idea and I'm still not on board with it.

The whole video would have been better if he had built an argument from the ground up instead of starting with the idea that Tether is a scam and laying so many attempts at humor and irony on top of it.

Or at least it would have been clearer and more educational; I haven't seen his videos before and maybe other people watch him for entertainment.

It's not even created by financial people. If you watch the coffeezilla video that some other people in this thread linked to, you'll see that the people behind Tether have backgrounds in various types of fraud.

Also, this affects the entire cryptocurrency market. If you own any cryptocurrency, you're exposed to risk from Tether's collapse even if you hold no Tether yourself.

Is there a mechanism for Tether to collapse on its own or does the collapse have to necessarily come from regulation? If the SEC do nothing about this, can Tether keep printing forever?

I can't agree that it's equally well.

I think there are a couple of points here:

- We are always comparing to human consciousness and we don't understand consciousness in humans well enough.

- You can always retain some form of solipsism and be sceptical of any consciousness outside of your own.

But with these things in mind, there are vast differences in the ways AI systems can exhibit consciousness (whether that's real or not).

With IBM's materials I genuinely can't tell how much is real working technology and how much is salesmanship and hype. Can anyone with more expertise comment on the current state of quantum computing and whether any of it is exaggerated?

No. My phone is really useful.

Why do you want to quit in the first place? Are you finding it difficult to quit because it's inconvenient or because of some behavioral pattern that you want to eliminate? If it's the former, I wouldn't bother with it - you're just making your life harder for no benefit.

In general I think that the benefits of quitting stuff (social media, entertainment, devices etc) are really exaggerated in some circles. Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism was very popular, there was also the whole concept about dopamine fasting and similar ideas - I really think that we have very little evidence to back those claims and it's become a kind of broscience in which people are sharing what works personally for them as fact, or misattributing effects and relationships and are very susceptible to confirmation bias.

I don't zoom in and out but now I keep some sites on 110% zoom all the time.

For some reason my vision has considerably deteriorated over the past year. Once noticeably in the first couple of months of the pandemic and then I had another significant change for the worse in the past couple of months.

Might be more accurate to say that population has grown since living conditions have gotten better.

The nutrition point is so difficult to evaluate - a lot of personal variation, many anecdotes, few good scientific studies, a lot of subjectivity and misattribution, people getting fired up online and turning it into ideology... it's very difficult to figure out what's true and what actually works for you.

Even if it's true, you'll need an equal hiring wave on the other side of the equation. It's not like people are stopping work altogether.

Technology could be enough if we have had clean solutions that are cheaper than the alternatives.

> If you are bitching about recruiters then you are not the CTO or development manager who is paying them and working with them and wants them to succeed.

This implies that you only care about the experience of the people who are paying you. Which might be honest but if it's true, it shouldn't be a surprise that so many candidates have negative experiences with recruiters.

Never ever? I wouldn't mention it in the resignation letter like in the OP but it's been very natural for managers and colleagues to ask where I'm going next and I've been happy to share. I also ask colleagues who are leaving where they're going next and I never saw it as a problem. Then again, I've worked with mostly reasonable people.

- having calls for the sole purpose of getting my name in their pipeline with no intention to actually help me find a job

- ghosting

- asking for my current salary

- asking for my desired salary for a job that I know very little about

- not sharing the actual salary range for the position we're discussing