mk67

Stakes are too low, so people start fighting over the most meaningless things in my experience.

I'm seeing a lot of visual snow with bright backgrounds, which is very annoying. Makes it close to impossible to focus.

My 2017/18 civic (not sure which one was the production year) already has all these systems, i.e. adaptive cruise control keeping distance, auto braking before impact, automatic lane-keeping > 70 km/h and rumble warnings.

> "When you're the second-smartest species on the planet, you might not get to participate in the most important decisions."

I'd argue we are already in that state since a long time with the AIs being corporations (and to a lesser degree governments).

Seems interesting as it runs counter to the "common knowledge" that fine-tuning large LMs needs a lot of data and RLHF for good results.

Not that the absolute results are extremely strong, most likely I'd suspect as the base model is just not competitive to GPT4 atm, but the relative results seem very impactful. Maybe fine-tuning a large LM for specific tasks is more practical than thought before?

No, definitely one of the major reasons for me as well.

Very interesting anecdote. Is there a conclusion to the story?

Nobody forces you to live like that. I'm 39 and not one point hits the mark for me. :D

While true that it's harder to get social connections it's far from impossible; in the end you just need to go out and meet new people doing things alone sometimes. On the other hand I have much more money, thus can actually travel when/how I want, compared to my 20s, and could probably quit my job in the next decade, if I want to.

Overall it's different to some degree, but in sum I'd say I enjoy life much more than in my 20s nowadays. Doubt that changes until I start to get sick(er) in my 50s/60s.

That sounds more like "petite bourgeoisie" than actual middle class. I know there was a lot of effort to redefine the term, but imo median income has little to do with it. If you live paycheck to paycheck you aren't even petite bourgeoisie.

No idea why you think median income has any relevance here. You could of course define "middle class" like that, but that is not the actual meaning of the term. I think in Western societies your middle class is at best 10% of people nowadays.

And just to add: I think this widespread redefinition of what middle class is not an accident. It seems quite effective, if you think 50k USD is middle class in the US. It wouldn't even be middle class in most of poorer Europe. The idea of term is completely unrelated to relative income, but rather a different social status; that isn't the case if you live paycheck to paycheck. And this redefinition is happening to obscure the fact that a large part of our population in the West had a loss in living standards over the last decades.

Wouldn't really call it middle class if a lower five digit sum is a major inconvenience. Probably the problem is more that there is not much middle class left nowadays and most people are lower class.

Yep, with proper enterprise agreements in place. Using this as of now.

Really a shame if anyone is fooled by this. It's just monopolistic behavior camouflaged as virtue signaling.

Ah, yes. Single-minded tech guys' take on art. Not sure what to comment here, but art has nearly nothing to do with replicating a photograph/"rendering". Photorealistic art doesn't count as art to me at all.

No, it needs to be public to some degree (i.e. "disturb the public peace"):

    § 130 Incitement to hatred (1985, Revised 1992, 2002, 2005, 2015)[38][39]

    (1) Whosoever, in a manner capable of disturbing the public peace:

        incites hatred against a national, racial, religious group or a group defined by their ethnic origins, against segments of the population or individuals because of their belonging to one of the aforementioned groups or segments of the population or calls for violent or arbitrary measures against them; or
        assaults the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning an aforementioned group, segments of the population or individuals because of their belonging to one of the aforementioned groups or segments of the population, or defaming segments of the population,

    shall be liable to imprisonment from three months to five years.[38][39]

    […]

    (3) Whosoever publicly or in a meeting approves of, denies or downplays an act committed under the rule of National Socialism of the kind indicated in section 6 (1) of the Code of International Criminal Law, in a manner capable of disturbing the public peace shall be liable to imprisonment not exceeding five years or a fine.[38][39]

    (4) Whoever publicly or in a meeting disturbs the public peace in a manner which violates the dignity of the victims by approving of, glorifying or justifying National Socialist tyranny and arbitrary rule incurs a penalty of imprisonment for a term not exceeding three years or a fine.[38][39]

Nothing as long as the funding is transparent. What Wikipedia is doing is borderline fraudulent as most people would assume your donation is largely used for keeping Wikipedia running.

Gilbert Strang's "Introduction to Linear Algebra" made it all click for me. I read it at the beginning of PhD studies and in a few weeks it all made more sense than during all of my Master's studies before.

Coincidentally to this question, he will live stream his final lecture on Monday: https://grinfeld.org/strang/

I was amazed reading that, as I wasn't aware he even lectured anymore. And after googling a bit and finding out he is already 88 years old, I was even more amazed. What an amazing human being, probably many thousands of people in the sciences and engineering owe quite a bit to his life's work.

Damn, that sounds insane. Is the UK the only country in the world with this? What is the reason?

Funnily, at least in Europe, it's very dynamic the other way. Rarely heard of an employer refusing someone to go to 50-80%.

I agree, of course, that tech people are closer to the worker class than the capitalist class and there are many common interests.

On the other hand, as long as you manage your finances sanely, even in Europe you can reach a FIRE state (maybe not 100% retirement, but very close to it) in your 40s without too many issues.

If someone in tech is close to bankruptcy, due to missing a couple of paychecks, I really have a hard time to understand how they accomplished that. Of course, that may be different, if you just started your career.

Nevertheless, I know exactly 0 blue-collar workers (and I know quite a few) that could do FIRE in their 40s, and with sane financial management decouple themselves from the whole runmill in like 2-3 decades.

How can you count yourself as working class? Even outside top US salaries most of us could probably take several years off the job without any huge issues due to savings/investments.

I mean of course we are providing labor for money, but this is very different than a blue-collar worker living paycheck to paycheck doing hard manual work.

e.g. not legal in Germany

Sorry, I wasn't aware. Would it maybe be possible to merge the threads?

Well, I live in Germany and that's less than 1 month income for me. Which is pretty common for a senior+ engineer/data scientist. Not for a single person with a technical degree 7k would be 2-3 months income, lol.