laidoffamazon

I guarantee (as I have before and you’re well aware) every Yale 2017/2018 grad in CS (or likely any quantitative degree) out earns me and my public school undergrad from 2018 and likely has a multiple of my net worth if they decided to pursue private sector employment instead of academia (though exit opportunities for the academic track are pretty lucrative too)

As someone too inferior to get into one it sure doesn’t seem that way

I have some doubts about this, or at least what your definition of dirt poor is.

The ability required to get into an ivy is so significant I don’t see how someone could fail to make substantial sums if they wanted to.

BCG consultants and traders at Five Rings are very much not financially constrained after undergrad (about $100-200k difference between them but either way)

I want to improve my communication skills so I’d love pointers on this.

Where exactly did I imply that it was the cost of the degree that is the constraint? Everyone knows poor kids and even middle class kids don’t pay anything to go to elite schools. I simply don’t think that means they face financial constraints exiting undergrad (or during undergrad). Why would they when HRT is paying $500k for new grads?

There’s this weird belief that I should feel sorry for people that didn’t come from means but got into Yale or Brown or Stanford. Sorry, they’re just as alien and inrelatable to me as Jeff Bezos’ kids. These people are in an entirely different plane of existence and ability so I have a lot of trouble thinking they wouldn’t have unlimited opportunities exiting university that I can’t even dream of.

I don’t understand how someone coming out of Brown or Yale would have constraints coming out. Their degree is basically free, basically any degree can get them an analyst gig on Wall Street if they so choose, and at worst they can go down the law school path.

What about what I said made you think I said everyone there had a trust fund? I have a problem with homeless to Harvard as much as I have a problem with billionaires kids at Yale. Do you not understand this? How can I be more clear?

I hate everyone involved in this. It’s like a confluence of every type of perma-victim with immense privilege.

My assumption is most Ivy leaguers (specifically undergrads) generally have no monetary constraints after graduating so this very much reads to me as a bohemian “by choice” decision to be more interesting than an actual tragic story.

Sure. I had a lot of help from Claude Opus 4.5, but it was roughly:

- Using pyscenedetect to split each video on a per scene level

- Using the decord library https://github.com/dmlc/decord to pull frames from each scene at a particular sample rate (specific rate I don't have handy right now, but it was 1-2 per scene)

- Aggregating frames in batches of around 256 frames to be normalized for CLIP embedding on GPU (had to re-write the normalization process for this because the default library does it on CPU)

- Uploading the frames along with metadata (timestamp, etc) into a vector DB, in my case Qdrant running locally along with a screenclip of the frame itself for debugging.

I'm bottlenecked by GPU compute so I also started experimenting with using Modal for the embedding work too, but then vacation ended :) Might pick it up again in a few weeks. I'd like to be able to have a temporal-aware and potentially enriched search so that I can say "Seek to the scene in Oppenheimer where Rami Malek testifies" and be able to get a timestamped clip from the movie.

I split per scene using pyscenedetect and sampled from each. Distance is via cosine similarity- I fed it into qdrant

It’s not difficult to hack this together with CLIP. I did this with about a tenth of my movie collection last week with a GTX 1080 - though it lacks temporal understanding so you have to do the scene analysis yourself

The 701 did run XP, even came pre installed with it on some models in later 2007!

I have a weird sense that this is a way to get his kids that are technical into a family business without having them work at a company that isn't considered prestigious

UIUC and Perdue are not lesser known than MIT. Big state schools are roughly as known they just don’t have the same signal for being a superhuman.

From one of the publishers she worked with - https://www.halfmystic.com/blog/you-are-believed

Also I’m 99% sure she had another job full time before this

It was supposed to be out years ago! She got a substantial advance but presumably delayed it due to the plagiarism scandal

Elaborate on this. Is it not sad when a UIUC Or Perdue grad can’t get a compiler engineer job out of undergrad? What does it mean to be cooked?

For those unaware or may find her name familar, Rona is known for her plagiarism scandal. She blocks anyone on Twitter who asks about it or the book she got a substantial advance for but didn’t publish after this scandal came to light. She seems to have walked away from it - this utter elite impunity makes me sick.

https://www.halfmystic.com/blog/you-are-believed

Not what happened, not in the same universe

We’ve gone from CCP control of the media spigot to pro-US regime billionaires controlling it. One step forward and another step back.

A shocking number of people are simply unaware (or worse, don’t care) that the current regime pardoned a thousand insurrectionists either while being nakedly corrupt to the point of taking cash in CAVA bags. The attention simply isn’t there.

Wait, are you saying Course 6 is still the most common major? And thus still has the most direct path to making $500k a year out of undergrad?

Of course, MechE's frequently also work at these companies or in finance too...

> because you can't hang with the IMO kids

Maybe that's true. I'm sympathetic to the fact that these people aren't even interesting enough to be around. But then I see articles like this [0] sympathizing (?) with elite students that don't end up going into public service while still canonizing them and then I fall back into depression

[0] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/09/elite-ivy-leagu...

> I went to an elite school and have friends that make much less even than $150k.

They're doing so by choice to do PhDs or go into public service. They (as in, the ones in quantitative majors and many even outside of it) _also_ had the choice to make several multiples of what I made by working at Jane Street or HRT or Citadel or now OpenAI and Anthropic.

I didn't have the choice. Nobody is selecting me for anything, I don't have the optionality of doing just anything. I took the best offer I got at a company that most elite school students would consider to be beneath them (Amazon).

Anyways, I'd also bet you make multiples of what I make now too as someone with a higher level if you're an SWE or adjacent.

This is not bragging to literally anybody that went to an Ivy+ school for CS ~10 years ago. A $15m+ net worth is their standard for success. Hell, it's their standard for _average_.

Yes. I live in a city with two Ivy+ institutions and graduates from many more. They're all the same, except some are better at faking it than others.

And why wouldn't they? Why wouldn't they think people like me are lazy and genetically predisposed to be stupid? I didn't make $500k out of undergrad. HRT or OpenAI isn't going to recruit me anytime soon. My net worth isn't $12m at 29, it's a tenth that.

Whenever I ask what the difference between them and their infinite success and potential is and people like me they never have an answer. They're always so confused.

Is it? Seems like the elite schools probably should be knocked down a few pegs but the state schools shouldn't.

I've asked people at MIT this repeatedly. They all say they came to MIT for the peer group. Peer group = people that are not _like me_. They shut up quick when I challenge them on that point though, or ask what the difference between them and me is. Even the non-assholes sometimes genuinely don't realize there's an entire parallel world beneath them with zero privilege or respect that made $150k out of undergrad instead of $500k.