Yeah, the double standard... We are here on hacker news probably because our parents let us freely explore computers and the internet. "Screen time" wasn't even a concept. Most friends I talked to had really off-hands parents as well, parents were rarely involved or interested in what the kids were doing. Glad I didn't have overbearing parents who limited my technology use to the radio and LPs.
Interesting definition of "struggling", as in "managed to catch the largest booster rocket ever built with by snatching it mid air, and land the largest space ship in the ocean using a belly flop maneuver that everyone said was crazy and would never work".
I bet LLMs and world models will merge. World models essentially try to predict the future, with or without actions taken. LLMs with tokenized image input can also be made to predict the future image tokens. It's a very valuable supervised learning signal aside from pre-training and various forms of RL.
I like working on it and will definitely release it, just don't want to set myself up for disappointment later. Try to enjoy the process of creation instead. But, it could also be that it's something that has value for a few years, and maybe that's enough.
Leaving your job has a different sense of finality now. When time comes to look for a new job, will the job even exist anymore? Makes the risk calculus a bit different. Maybe there won't be mass unemployment, but even a modest increase in SWE unemployment could make it so much harder and more stressful to find a job.
My biggest problem right now is thanks to Claude I'm making much faster progress on my passion project and I'm working in a maniac state almost, but then I remind myself that it's probably meaningless because if things progress as they have, anyone can just copy what I've built, and if we get to AGI all bets are off anyway. Balancing these two moods is tough. Lots of sleepless nights lately. Thankfully I have a large financial cushion to fall back on, but then again the market could tank 50% this year and then even that wouldn't be much of a consolation. Can't be in cash either, opportunity cost too large.
I don't see how you can come to that conclusion if you've actually used e.g. Opus 4.6 on a hard problem. Either you're not using it, or you're not using it right. And I don't mean simple web dev stuff. In a few hours Claude built me a fairly accurate physics simulation for a game I've been working on. It searched for research papers, grabbed constants for the different materials, implemented the tests and the physics and... it worked. It would have taken me weeks. Yes, I guided it here and there, especially by telling it about various weird physics behavior that I observed, but I didn't write one line of code.
Cooling the planet is neither a technical nor financial problem. The problem is that environmentalists want this to be a moral issue. They already decided on the solution. If the solution is not environmental communism with them in power, they will not have it.
Interestingly, there seems to be more good will and amiable vibes between EU nationalities than within the US even. Even being enemies for a thousand years, I don't doubt that Swedish and Danish men would go to war for one another, or French and German. It's complicated yes, but the continent is more unified in spirit than it may seem to an outsider.
Trump not being a factor will help, but this whole ordeal shows that Europe cannot count on a reasonable person always being in power, and a single bad president can cause this level or mayhem. Even if the next administration backtracks on all this and apologizes profusely, it's too late.
Knowing and acting on it will have grave consequences though. The US's main allies will stop buying American military equipment for one, trade will go down and the largest economic block in the world will align itself closer to China (who does not directly threaten them with invasion). What a self own.
As a European who's been as continue to be against Chinese authoritarianism, I have to admit that China looks like the better partner going forward.
My problem is I have non-competes and clauses in my contract which makes it difficult to talk about and publish stuff that I might want to turn into a product. So I'm sort of in a catch 22. I want to talk about what I'm building but I can't, not until I can convince myself that I can turn it into something real and I can quit and focus on it, and that's difficult to do without ever putting it out there to see if people want it enough.
The US? My 2nd grader has one piece of homework per week, which takes about 10 minutes. If there was more I would tell the teacher to shove it. Instead I talk to my child. If he's interested we talk more about that, otherwise we switch to a topic that interests him. We've covered a lot of science, astronomy and math. Lately I've been telling him about primes, factorization and cryptography. I think our conversations lead to a love of learning and curiosity that is 100x more beneficial than a 50cm stack of homework...
These parents (who believe there is one path to future success) will be in for a rude awakening in the coming 10-20 years when all the traditional high-status career paths have dried up. Can they not see the writing on the wall? Not that I would ever be such a parent, but even if I was, there's no point in pressuring and forcing your kids into this lifestyle given the unpredictability of the future. My goal is just supporting and letting my kid do the things that interest them.
> our cultural and educational institutions—America’s soul—have succumbed to leftist rot
Sure, let's examine this. Do you disagree that most organisations are extremely dominated by the left? Something like 90% of people in academia, media, schools, (until recently) corporate leadership, various government institutions etc vote democrat. Do you disagree that in the past 20 years or so, the right has been heavily censored online and in the work place by the left? These are all facts, he is not wrong here. When one side has spent 20 years pushing out the other, taking over institutions, censoring them and calling them fascist/nazi, don't be surprised when they are viewed as the enemy.
I also know exactly what you're thinking, the reasoning you use to justify this:
1. It's not censorship, it's preventing disinformation and "hate". This argument doesn't hold when "disinformation" is political opinions of roughly 50% of the country
2. Academia and institutions lean left because Republicans are simply less intelligent than Democrats. "Truth has a liberal bias". You think kind of arrogance from the left is conductive to a good dialogue and friendly relations?
It's also just common sense. Everyone agrees that traits like height is heritable, but somehow whatever goes on inside the brain is not? The null hypothesis here is that it is heritable, and I see no proof whatsoever against that hypothesis. My personal experience raising my own kids and observing countless others confirms common sense. Your own child is not one data point, it's a million small data points, things you notice in what they're like as a baby, and how they develop over time. Only someone without kids would boil this down to a "single data point". I also deny that I have do anything to prove heritability, how about you prove the opposite? It's a conclusion that is so obvious to the impartial mind that to be confused about it is a sign of extreme ideological indoctrination. To deny heritability of personality and intelligence is to deny evolution itself.
I trust my own observations and my conclusion is that heritability is very strong. This is not a view that was imparted on me, quite the opposite. Growing up in a western country I was led to believe we are all blank slates, and I truly believed it. Once I started spending more time around the opposite sex some doubts started to emerge. Once I became a parent it became very apparent that this ideology had no basis in reality. Kids come with a personality, batteries included, and it's very easy to point out even individual behaviors that originate with either parent. Boys and girls are also very different on average. It's insane that we have somehow convinced ourselves that this is not the case, and I will surely be attacked by just pointing this out. I don't need twin studies to understand this basic fact, a fact that's been apparent to everyone throughout history, except for the past ~40 years in the west.
I've just reached lean FIRE, will try to go indie soon. Like you the ideas I have are pretty niche and not things that neatly fit into a B2B SaaS. But I'm hoping I can build at least some income to supplement my investments, doesn't have to be much.
Having nice gains early on fools you into thinking you're smarter than the market. That just makes your inevitable fall that much harder. Nobody made a lot of money on a stock and then thought to themself "I bet I was just lucky, I should probably stop now". Like everyone you will keep going until you lose out big.
Unfortunately a lesson I had to learn for myself. Hopefully I can pass it on to the next generation, but I fear they'll have to learn it for themselves too. Don't pick individual stocks people, buy broad index funds at most.
It's a potential commodity in that there is potentially no network effect stopping people from using any competitor that offers a cheaper ride, unlike how when you're an iPhone user you get locked into Apple's ecosystem. But then there's the thing where despite having had 18 years to catch up, nobody makes phones (including software) better than Apple.
One potential moat is just the amount of data from real drivers that Tesla use to train their models via imitation learning. If this turns out the be important and needed for a general solution (which I believe it will), then only companies that manufacture cars at scale can hope to compete. And at this point, only Chinese companies are forward looking enough to put the right hardware for self driving (and the ability to collect training data) into their cars by default. Tesla has the vertical integration that makes this whole thing much easier: they make the cars, the inference compute, the software AND the training clusters. Can you imagine GM or Ford building a GPU cluster for a couple of billion?
Laws that the EU passed in order to fine big tech one could argue. Just saying, you think Trump (and later Vance) will stand idly by? EU is a shell of its former self economically, there's not much we can do besides cozying up to an actual dictatorship (China) who literally shot thousands of students, turned them into pulp using tanks and flushed them down the drain. I know we all hate Trump, but the US is the better ally here still.