dchftcs

> The ladder isn’t really taller. Most EMs end up clustered at the equivalent of L6/staff engineer. Promotions to senior manager and beyond are situational and rare. Meanwhile, my peers on the engineering ladder get promoted when ready, without needing to wait for the stars to align.

This sounds like an anecdote tainted with confirmation and survivorship bias. Most SWEs get stuck at senior (especially at Google), getting clustered at L6 is already a privilege relatively speaking. Promotions to L6 are not super rare but less than a majority get them. Promotion to a L7+ is a struggle, if you say most of your peers get there naturally maybe you discounted those who left because they can't get promoted, or you just didn't happen to make many friends with people below your job level ? Or, as a senior manager, are you really sure you see that more than half of the team you manage reach L6+ and a good number to L7 just by waiting?

Now I do agree that the EM path doesn't open as many doors as some old school people think (especially since high level ICs tend to lead in some way too), but at least promotion opportunities doesn't seem to be thinner for EM than IC.

My guess is that more than half of the world's scientific resources are spent on projects in bad faith, so I'm actually ok with legitimate scientists spending 100% more to justify their papers, if the extra work can be covered by the surplus resources saved by eliminating frauds. However, there are many reasons the proposed method is impractical.

>What hurts the most: I deleted my account. At some point it became undeleted. I don't have the ability, as far as I'm aware, to kill it. My profile lives on to enrich the people who betrayed the writers. Kind of sad, but it was all about engagement. Ad dollars.

This sounds horrific and ironic when Quora's founder is on the OpenAI board with a role to supposedly oversee ethics. But, after all he was the CTO of a company that pioneered putting tracking pixels everywhere, so this is just typical silicon valley stuff.

I think headsets are decent enough for virtual monitors, as in the resolution and latency are reasonable and head and hand tracking works just well enough. The software quality, HCI design and UI problems are bigger issues IMO, e.g. having a native multi tasking enviroment, proper mouse support, better gesture control over virtual monitors, better viewing of large surfaces based on eye tracking, voice controls.

Amazon burns and churns through employees, Google burns and churns through paying customers. Guess which one holds better in a bad labor market.

>What happened over the 8 years prior was hedge funds and banks had saddled up on Intel stock which was paying healthy dividends due to cost cutting and "coasting"

Not clear about what the role of activist hedge funds is here but Intel's top shareholders are mutual funds like Vanguard which are part of many people's retirement investments. If an activist hedge fund got to run the show, it means that they could get these passive shareholders on their side or to abstain. It would have meant those funds along with pension funds, who should have been in a place to push back against short term thinking, didn't push back. These funds should really be run much more competently given their outsized influence, but the incentives are not there.

0.5 per user per year by installs is significant for many apps, apart from apps from large companies, only subscription-based apps have the economics to justify this cost.

Egress costs are significant by the time you want to use your backup, around $1800 to download the 18TB, which is around 10 years of storage cost. If you assume 5 years of HDD data lifetime, you need to roughly triple that monthly cost, which is not too bad, but you can buy an enterprise 20TB drive per year for that cost. Personally I would only use AWS in a way that I would almost never have to pay for egress for the entire dataset except when my house gets burned, as a last-resort backup instead of a main one.

A significant portion of taxi fares go to the driver, as opposed to the maintenance of cars. There are other marginal benefits such as making the driver's seat available, eliminating the driver's commute and as well as the risk of criminal driver behaviour, that probably offsets some of the drawbacks of having one fewer human being dealing with rare, complex non-driving situations such as a pregnant woman having to give birth in the car.

The economic benefit is significant to companies building self-driving cars, good enough to pursue if the tech is within reach. But to your point it's indeed much less of an improvement compared to various historical automation technologies that create >10x incremental efficiency gains.

For othes you may have a point, I'm not sure what you mean about sexual freedom in Singapore. Singapore is culturally not that sexually open, which is largely a choice of the people, but people who don't want to adhere to the cultural norms appear to have plenty of options to exercise their power/freedom without facing legal repercussions. Maybe you confused it with Dubai?

Sexual freedom is a very weird point to make because many people, more men than women, cannot afford sex without material wealth. Sexual freedom for women also improves with material wealth because fewer women feel the need to trade off their freedom for money.

It's definitely not a kind of "freedom" that is easier to exercise in the general absence of material riches.

In cases where it matters, it's still a competitive advantage. Consumers don't care, maybe, but companies absolutely do, for their business-critical tools.

We can attempt to deduce the point from the comment. The only assertive statement that the comment it replied to was "close to" the stupidest, but not the stupidest.

One possible evidence for that sort of statement is presenting the actual comment that is the stupidest, but such evidence was not presented explicitly.

However, we can assume that the author intends the justification to be self-apparent; with this assumption, the best explanation is that their comment itself is the evidence they wish to present, ergo the actual stupidest comment.

It's a tough one because a PhD dissertation can be seen as a book.

It's not worthless; many people still want to like the product and would like the company to improve. Alas it seems to be a lost cause given what's discussed over the years, better move on and use the energy to support a browser focused on user experience that actually has a future.

There are ways where an employee that works 40 hours has less than half the impact than someone who works 60 hours. But plainly high quality code is not one of them. It works when you get a block of intense focus time and then go off to spend a lot of low-energy time in a breadth of business matters, including casually learning how to do your job better.

In the first year or so it often doesn't make an obvious difference, because you just seem to produce as much hard output as the others, but you have a faster exponential growth curve. The combined quality and quantity of your work can outpace others. If you're both talented and lucky, at some level of depth and breath you may become the best, help the company corner a market, at which point the impact of your labor becomes superlinear to your efforts, which makes the difference even more obvious.

The main problem is that this difference in impact is primarily captured by the employer in most places. Employers are either oblivious to the difference or short change the better employees because they only have to pay everyone market rates, as outsiders are often in an even worse position to distinguish the quality of the two types of employees. Maybe you became L7 by making much more than 2x as much impact as an L6, but you only get maybe a 30% pay bump.

For that, accuracy seems to be a stronger limiting factor than speed.

And also if you care if it's sustainable.

>I respect his hustle but there is something about him in watching him speak live and in person that comes off as incredibly manipulative. He knows how to speak and pause in a way that gets the audience to laugh and gives soundbites. I am long OpenAI but I don’t trust Sam.

You can say the same thing about Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is a jerk for sure but a bad personality does not predict success or failure as much as you (or we) hope to. And what people say about your character is also overly dependent on results. Only time will tell whether Sam Altman will be considered a villain or a flawed hero in media.

>The board's mandate to act as a check and balance on OpenAI seems to be working as intended in this case

I'd argue it's not. If the board isn't able to steer the wheel without destroying OpenAI, they failed.

The premise of something like OpenAI is that they would be able to develop a competitive AI that can be useful for the masses, in a way that can be moderated by benevolent forces. If you do believe the safety of the entire human race is at stake here, then there's no space for naivete. Blowing things up is childish and taking an easy escape from the heavy responsibilities of navigating a difficult situation.

After this fiasco you should expect that much, much fewer resources will be spent on safe AI as opposed to maximizing profit. The dynamics between the board and the ex-CEO will make it much more difficult to establish an organization that can convince investors to pursue a less profitable path for the sake of humanity.

Anthropic doesn't even have a competitive product, and it will probably be much less attractive to investors after this.

I still see no justification for assuming that the board member's voice was not heard before the publication. There's zero evidence for it, while the priors ought to be favoring the contrary because she does wield a fairly material form of power. If more evidence does emerge, then we could revisit the premise.

She's a board member. Who had approximately 1/4 of the power to fire Sam, and she did eventually exert it. Why do you rather assume her voice was not heard?

Not sure about smart, but the word "nimble" can never be used to described anything about real estate.

I did some google searches like "letter B in German frequency". Of the languages I searched, German has the highest frequency of Bs (1.96%), the closest are English and Spanish (1.49%), many others are around 1%. So, true to its nature being a statistical token predictor.

It wasn't wasted, thank you for reading it so the rest of us don't.

Note I mention profit before distributing to equity holders. The highest prestige and therefore most profitable consulting companies are all partnerships.

Some highly profitable consulting companies that are partnerships have very high margins, if you don't include the profit sharing component of the pay of equity partners (but do include bonus and fixed salary). The primary public source I can point to is that many top law firms publish their margins to be >=50%.

As for McKinsey, according to Google, McKinsey has 10k consultants and 2700 partners. There are 30k employees, so I give you that the overhead rate is higher than law firms. But given how different pay is between partners and non-partners, and there is still a relatively large portion of partners compared to other employees, the margins, if calculated this way, is probably still pretty high.

Now is this the right way of considering profit margin? There are some good reasons to disagree with it. But in the same way people can like or dislike EBITDA. At least, it's like nobody discounts Larry and Sergey's cut from Google's profit.

In this context, I would argue it is indeed a good way, especially for the purposes of discussing the discrepancy between grunt pay and hourly charge. It tells us that a very large part of that discrepancy goes to equity partners (who aren't those doing the execution work), rather than "overhead" as it's being argued. This is very different from big-corp type public companies where, even though executive pay is a lot, the bulk of the pay goes to shareholders ans a large number of rank and file and moderately paid middle-managers, which I suspect to be closer to accenture's profile.

The most profitable consulting-type businesses have profit margins >=50%, before distributing profits to equity holders. But either way I'm not sure about your implicit assumption here that the profits should be comparable to the pay of the employees.

Back in the day I heard stories of how some of the better ACM ICPC world final participants turned out to be rather slow typers. But the idea was that they figured out what to do before they type, and their own clarity of thought allowed them to type correct code without having to backtrack. It helped that most of the time the solutions are pretty short.

I consider myself a pretty good problem solver of contest problems, but often I have to type code the same way people use pencil and paper to go through drafts, so I can't relate that well.

Holders can still band together as a single pot, like a fund which can count as only one investor.

This sounds like a loophole, and now that I think if it it probably is - VCs and stuff should not have been allowed to ask for money from pension funds without imposing at least some rules normally applied to public companies.

I'm incredulous that a linear algebra course taught by mathematics faculty didn't have a lot of theorem proving.

Maybe that would be the case if the intended audience is engineering students. But for mathematics students, it would literally be setting them up for failure; a student that can't handle or haven't seen much theorem-proving in linear algebra is not going to go very far in coursework elsewhere. Theorem proving is an integral part of mathematics, in stretching and expanding tools and concepts for your own use.

Maybe the courses are structured so that mathematics students normally go on to take a different course. In that case, GP's point would still have been valid - the LA courses you took were indeed ones planned for engineering, not for those pursuing mathematics degrees. At my alma mater, it was indeed the case that physics students and engineering students were exposed to a different set of course material for foundational courses like linear algebra and complex analysis.

Just like compiler theory, if you don't write compilers maybe it's not that useful and you shouldn't be spending too much time on it, but it would be presumptuous to say that delivering a full compiler course is a fundamentally incorrect approach, because somebody has to make that sausage.