rl1987

But you will be able to to have 3+ screens in your field of vision without needing a Mac...

macOS has a feature to have your dictated text transcribed [0]. Did you try that?

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-my/guide/mac-help/mh40584/mac

The supposed inability to find them is the very thing I question.

Shortage of devs is (was?) a very popular talking point, but is it really true? If each developer was so unique, special and valuable, would companies be laying them off now?

If the developers were so hard to find, wouldn't companies adjust their expectations and work with who they can find, instead of having them play Leetcode and other crazy games that have very little to do with day to day realities of work at the company?

When there's a famine, people don't complain that their T-bone steak is medium well done, they eat what little food they can find.

Scoot Pte Ltd: Scooties.

I don't know about Sam Altman specifically, but as technical people we are at risk of over-valuing technical work and under-valuing political work. Even in technical fields, political work (getting support of right people, integrating yourself in right communities, aligning incentives) is as (if not more) important as getting the code/math/circuitry right for someone to succeed. Being able to do political work really well would explain his success.

This is still better that bulk of one-sentence-per-paragraph garbage that is posted on LinkedIn by various self-proclaimed "thought leaders".

Not what I heard.

This makes no sense. You don't give equity to your clients, you give it to investors in exchange of their money. Do not confuse the two.

Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. As should be expected, you lost the lottery. Employees getting rich from startup equity is dependent on a number of low probability events happening and the remaining employees will most likely not be millionaires anytime soon.

You should just move on, in my opinion.

Do you really want to work for a quasi-criminal organisation?

The idea is merely a seed that may or may not grow into something bid. For a great tree to grow out of the seed, many things are needed (although a great tree cannot be grown out of seed of some random weed no matter how hard someone works on it).

Everyone has ideas, but just a small fraction of startup attempts are successful. There's so many ways things can fail in startup even if the product/service/SaaS concept was good. Quality execution is what makes or breaks a startup even if idea is mediocre.

One should not worry about copycats, as they will be some steps behind in building a product and will primarily be able to copy externally visible aspects of the business.

Chances are, someone somewhere had the very same idea and failed to become rich anyway.

You do nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Ghosting candidates after wasting their time is the norm in the industry and you should focus on other interview processes.

Do you really need FB and Twitter for marketing? I'm hearing that TikTok is far less saturated as a traffic channel. People say that this holds true both for organic and paid traffic.

Fiverr, but make sure to separate wheat from the chaff.

Does the ordinary company need professional Leetcode player that FAANGs are looking for? Or does it need someone who is about average on web development and willing to work for about average salary? Not every guy should aspire to date a supermodel and not every company should cargo-cult FAANG interview process.

One can say that aforementioned classes of problems are semantically, conceptually different from scalability, but they will inevitably come up when building something the scale of Twitter and will require mountains of technical work to deal with.

This is pretty much like saying that Dropbox can be trivially replicated with rsync(1) or that one can code Uber in a weekend. Perhaps you can do so at small scale for yourself and your friends. The essence of Twitter (or Dropbox, or Uber) is indeed quite simple.

However there's orders of magnitude more effort that goes into:

* Usability

* Performance

* Stability

* Security

* Localisation/internationalisation and accounting for cultural differences

* Monetisation - ads, payment platform integration, fighting fraud

* Fighting abuse, both automated and not

* ... and thousands of little things that will come up when building something big.

Think of this another way... Twitter would not employ literally thousands of employees if there was nothing for them to do. It is not a charity. I don't buy that building anything that can handle hundred of millions of users is simple.

Making a Twitter clone that could handle 10 users is indeed quite trivial. Making one that would handle 0.4M+ users is not.

I believe at some point the distinction was that smartphones have a separate application processor for user-facing stuff (GUI apps, graphical environment, higher-level network protocols) aside from broadband processor that dealt with signal processing and low-level network protocols. Might not be true anymore.

Just keep reading and watching stuff on regular basis. Think of it as information gym membership - you're losing it if you're not using it.

Another thing you can try is attending the webinars about something you want to know more about.

MS Playwright has a little tool that generates some starter code for you as it follows what you do on the browser.

O'Reilly Learning - $499/yr. for a large library of technical books, videos and a selection of webinars.

Hugo + Github + Netlify is my option for that.

Common wisdom is that startup equity is merely a bunch of lottery tickets due to odds being systematically against employees becoming rich from that, despite founders and upper management talking otherwise. Unsurprisingly, some people lost the lottery.

Fiverr is The marketplace for small scale one-off freelancing, not limited to software development. It has it's own problems, but I don't know anything else that fits your description better.

If the company is from the same first world country as you then you have a significant advantage of having cultural affinity to the people who are doing the hiring and that you might be working with if hired. Someone from overseas might be as good at programming as you and perhaps they would even adjust their working hours to match the company timezone, but they cannot completely replicate a shared cultural understanding that is needed for smooth collaboration.

Furthermore, if someone from cheap country is truly as good as someone from developed country at doing the same job then it is undesirable for them to sell their work too cheaply (let's ignore clickworkers here - we're talking about skilled knowledge work). If quality is there, they want to sell it at marginally lower price. Therefore global competition for skilled work does not necessarily cause race to the bottom - cost of labour will converge to some globally mediocre level long-term. It may go down in the first world, but will go up in cheaper places. Employers are likely to still find it worthwhile to pay more for local candidates work ceteris paribus due to cultural affinity advantage that is difficult to surpass for someone from abroad.

Consider Upwork. There's masses of people spamming the platform with incoherent ramblings about how good they are at doing something real cheap (and still struggling to get enough work), but on the other hand there are people making six figure yearly amounts. That would not be the case if global competition always made the price go down to third world levels.

Just say the amount you feel is fair to ask for what you can do and would the worthwhile for you.

Not at this point. I thought RSS is not really used anymore.

“In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.” - Marvin Minsky in 1970s.

GPT-3 is very far from the science fictional sentient AIs. It is merely a tool AI and using large language models such as GPT-3 will likely emerge as new kind of programming. It's a skill in itself, as GPT-3 can easily go off the rails if not kept in check by a human mind providing examples and instructions on what outputs it should generate. There's already a term for that: prompt engineering.

Society survived very massive changes - development of agriculture, industrialisation, emergence of information economy and was better off from these changes. If the Artificial General Intelligence eventually gets developed the world will adapt and benefit. Yes, things will change and some people will become unemployable, such as hunter-gatherers and farmers of the old times. But consider the big picture: the human society had adapted to some massive paradigm changes in its history and is likely to so in the future.

There is and was multiple meanings to the word. I can count at least 3 (in chronological order):

1. Open source hackers/hardcore systems programmers that culturally originated in MIT back in 60s (Tech Model Railroad Club, Free Software Foundation, Linux, Free/Open/Net BSD, GNU).

2. Security hackers.

2a. Blackhats: cyber criminals, radical take-no-prisoners hacktivists (90s Phrack, to some extent Defcon, LulzSec, hatefag faction of Anonymous).

2b. Whitehats: security engineers working in corporate settings (both on offensive and defensive sides of security), security consultants, bug bounty hunters (to some extents Defcon, Blackhat conference, NullCon, bug bounty platform communities (HackerOne, BugCrowd, Intigriti)).

2c. Grayhats: some combination/midpoint between the whitehats and blackhats.

3. Technical entrepreneurs (Y Combinator, Indie Hackers, Hacker News, MicroConf).