One could take anything like a cell and split it into genes, molecules, atoms, sub-atomic wave functions (with infinite value range) and take time which can be split into another infinite entity say even within a finite interval. How does this analysis account for that?
I could split this object into 10^500 or 10^50^500^5000 etc., with imagination being the limit.
These values Id'd at whatever imaginable resolution are far from practically useful but at a cosmic scale, there is no telling what is a useful value?
So this framework seems to be more limiting because we define a resolution ?
>> Incidentally, San Francisco public schools had a combined admission rate of just under 20%, well below the state average. Mission had the highest rate (26.5%) and Balboa the lowest (15.4%). It may or may not be a coincidence that 90% (the most of any SF school) of the applicants from Balboa were Asian whereas only 25% (the fewest of any SF school) of the applicants from Mission were Asian.
In order to promote diversity of the freshman classroom the college needs to suppress merit to achieve their diversity targets?
The merit metric is just different than you expect it to be. The university wants students who rise to the top of their school.
The state champions all move on to the regional tournament even if 2nd and 3rd place in Illinois are better than 1st place in Ohio.
And I have to say, doing it this way is a fantastic way of breaking the "good school district" rat race when everyone piling on to a few really wealthy schools actually makes it more difficult to get in.
That is illegal in California public schools like this article focused on.
The truth is, UC San Diego admits students who didn't get into the more prestigious UCs like Berkeley, LA, etc. That's probably why you see data like this
Everyone knows that UC still practices AA, though not named as such. And UCSD doesn't just admit students who didn't get into UCLA and UCB. Students who get into the latter also get into UCSD. Some much lower-ranked UCs might not admit these students because they assume they'll not come (yield managing), but UCSD is close enough that some students might choose it, especially if they want to be near on the beach/in SD.
No, everyone does not know that and it's not true. UC have a much different demographic skew than private California schools which do practice AA (e.g. compare Berkeley and Stanford)
That is literally what Affirmative Action (DEI in school admissions) means.
Ignore merit, consider race.
These programs have only succeeded in making a large number of people accept that race is a valid way to screen people, at which point your goal is to win.
Sergey's challenge looks like is not in retiring early or with non-work.
We had a high performing co-worker who was scared witless after a lay-off episode and this was not because he was worried about lacking money or loss of prestige., but because he could not come to terms with the simple fact of facing the 9 am on a Monday morning with absolutely no expectations. It freaked so much to not feel the hustle and the adrenaline rush of experiencing the blues Monday morning!?
Another colleague used to drive up to the parking lot of their previous employer, post lay-off., so that he could feel normal., and he did this for well over 6 - 8 months. Pack bags, wave to his wife and family, drive up in his Porsche to the parking lot and I guess feel normal !?
I took a four-year break from work (2009–2013) and moved to India. The reasons were simple: some family health issues required downtime (though probably not as much as I ended up taking), and I could afford to do this in India in a way I couldn’t in the US. This happened to coincide with the market bottom, but I wasn’t laid off—it was entirely voluntary.
I didn’t experience an identity crisis for a single day. I didn’t feel insecure or anxious about not working. The only real friction came from my family.
One big difference was social life. In India, I was constantly meeting people—connections were easy and organic. In the US, maintaining a daytime social life felt much harder. Everyone is on a treadmill—insurance, income, careers—often not by choice. I know there are ways to build community here, but in India it just happened naturally.
My extended family struggled more than I did. Once it became clear the break wasn’t temporary, there was a kind of quiet depression around it. I initially framed it as “taking a breather” by doing an executive MBA, but the break never really ended.
What eventually brought me back wasn’t overt pressure, but practical limits: my spouse’s mental health, and the constraints of India’s education system for our partially disabled, special-ed child. Those realities mattered more than any career concern.
> One big difference was social life. In India, I was constantly meeting people—connections were easy and organic. In the US, maintaining a daytime social life felt much harder. Everyone is on a treadmill—insurance, income, careers—often not by choice. I know there are ways to build community here, but in India it just happened naturally.
The primary reason for this is the built environment we live in here in the United States. It's very difficult to organically build connections when you have to drive a car somewhere to have basic social interactions. Even some of the items you mention, like insurance and income are very much informed by the requirement to have a car to participate in society.
I don't know if it is build environment or cultural thing. In US showing up at friends, or neighbors unannounced and spend hour or two would be very odd if not downright impolite. But in India it is something everyone would do or at least used to do a 15-20 yrs back when I was there.
One simple reason I think is overall US is very rich so people just can have anything they need on their own and sharing small things which lead to more interaction is simply not needed.
It's a little of both but the built environment is the primary issue.
We have neighbors - sometimes we need someone to grab a package, or we make too much food and we share, &c. or we run into each other walking to a restaurant or through the park. But this isn't the norm. We live in a neighborhood built before the introduction of cars, so homes are built a little bit closer together, but not too close, and we have mixed-use developments and a good level of density to support restaurants and other amenities.
You can't have spontaneous interactions like that easily in the United States because we build too much sprawl, visiting people or showing up to a bar requires a drive, and in the end you wind up just staying at home participating in surrogate activities like social media.
It really comes down solely to cars and car-only infrastructure that degrades our social interactions to an extreme extent.
-edit-
I do want to mention, at least when I was a kid/teenager I recall we used to show up to people's houses uninvited/unannounced too. But we did not talk to our neighbors. That was a weird thing. There are some cultural things here. But also even if we wanted to visit someone, well, gotta hop in the car. Maybe stop and get gas, and the next thing you know, eh it's too much effort. Might as way stay home. That's kind of how that works. The car-only model that is implemented in most of America, particularly the cities not so much rural areas, is a leading cause of cultural and social malaise I believe in the West.
I don’t think the built environment is that determinative. I live in a car-dependent suburb. Walk Score 2.
My neighbor knows the whole street. She knows the garbage men. It’s because she wants to. When I run into her outside, she chats. She walks her dog and chats with dog owners and anyone else she sees.
Easy relationships are available at the grocery store, post office, etc. I’ve been seeing some of the same people working at Costco for years. I don’t know them. It’s not the built environment. I’d need to take effort to build a relationship with them. My neighbor would. I’m simply not so inclined.
This is an incredibly important point - you could remove the car entirely, even make you dependent on others (as you're dependent - or were before self checkout - on the Costco clerk) - and you still would have the disconnect.
Hardship can force it more often, perhaps, but that is accidental and secondary.
In all the times I've traveled on forms of "mass transit" (airplanes, subways, trains) the only time I've ever really talked to someone was at the seat-together dining on a long-distance train. Otherwise you can sit next to someone for 20+ hours and never say much more than "excuse me" if you need to use the restroom.
(Another counter to this is kids, if you have kids and there are kids anywhere within screaming distance, they will find each other and immediately be best friends. Parents get dragged along - https://www.bluey.tv/watch/season-2/cafe/ )
It's absolutely the built environment. Your Costco example is a clear example. you drive to Costco, you walk in, grab generic packaged goods without needing to really talk to anyone, and then go to the checkout and use the automated kiosk to make your purchase.
There's no reason to have a human interaction, so why would you bother getting to know the cashier? You're never going to build a relationship with the cashier precisely because of the environmental structure.
Contrast that with walking down the street to a local store that one of your neighbors owns. I bet you would already have a relationship unless you chose not to. Why? Because you'd also see them at your kids birthday party, or you'd see them at the bark down the street, or out on a walk.
I made the choice at Costco to not build a relationship with anyone. There's a guy standing at the entrance checking memberships. I've seen him for years. I don't know him. I don't use the automated kiosk if I have several items. I see some of the cashiers for years. I'm cordial but I don't chat them up. One woman who has been there for years chats with me a bit; I'm cordial but don't reciprocate a ton.
There's a corporate supermarket owned by a Dutch multinational not far from me. I see some of the same employees there every week. One of them loves people and recognizes me. I could stand around and chat with him if I wanted. But I don't want to.
I made this choice. Someone who wants to build relationships chats with people. Folks like that chat with people at the grocery store, on the airplane, waiting in line, etc. Often it leads to nothing, occasionally it leads to something. But the point is, they practice it. I don't. The built environment is not stopping it. Not being in a "local store that one of your neighbors owns" has nothing to do with it either. Plenty of relationships are built in corporate chains.
I think this is fundamentally incorrect, and the way we live today and the problems we experience bear this out. It's not about individual choices you make to engage with a cashier at Costco, it's about the opportunities to engage and where they occur. You're still talking about a forced connection you have to decide to make at the checkout line, and ignoring that you never see that person again in a different context, like in your own neighborhood or at your local restaurant.
Socialization isn't a choice one makes, it's supposed to be organic. The fact that you have to choose and make decisions around interacting with other people proves my point.
> One simple reason I think is overall US is very rich so people just can have anything they need on their own and sharing small things which lead to more interaction is simply not needed.
That's a very interesting observation!
I have a theory that reducing "friction" is actually a net negative after a certain point, and US society is way past that point. But everybody keeps doing it, because they're myopically focused on little problems and don't see the big picture or down have a full understanding of all the alternatives.
People need external constraints, because those are the things that keep certain internal drives under control.
It's like when food was scarce it made sense to gorge yourself on calorie rich things and avoid physical effort unless absolutely necessary. Now that food is abundant and it's actually possible to nearly completely eliminate physical activity, we have an obesity epidemic, because those drives no longer hit external limits and are now out of control.
If you can afford it, why get back? Now after a dozen years I am bored of my 9-5 but running the race to make my FIRE numbers plus provide some cushion for my son with disabilities but if I had a choice I would quit again ( but I am much older now )
I took a career break and was weirded out by the question of "how do I introduce myself?". So used to saying "Hi, I'm Marcus, I'm IT Director of <business>" that suddenly having nothing to say there was strange. When people asked "what do you do?" I had no good answer, and that felt like I had no good identity.
I guess for Sergey Brin it's a little different, he will always be "Founder of Google" even if he leaves Google.
But that "work as identity" may still be a problem. For a lot of us, what we do is who we are, and so not having any work to do is like not having an identity.
You're describing my father. Now that he's retired his lack of hobbies is really catching up to him. His only hobby has been working and I've noted this about him since I was an adolescent and decided then as something I would not emulate.
A few times I've quit a FAANG job with no plan for after other than to wander, and both times the lack of professional competition meant not just coasting horizontally but that I was actually lowering myself somehow. Hard to explain, and I don't fully understand it.
I also noticed most people, especially women, determine your value by your 'right now'. While intentionally unemployed I'd answer truthfully and with a smile, 'I'm unemployed!' which visibly confused people.
> So used to saying "Hi, I'm Marcus, I'm IT Director of <business>" [..]
Risking a stereotype.
In my experience from traveling the world it's a tell-tale sign for being from a culture heavily influenced by the Protestant work ethic. Introduce yourself like that in Spain, Italy, or Brazil and you'll get strange looks.
On the flip side, I've found that people who do not define themselves through their work primarily often do so through family. My younger self is certainly guilty of giving someone a strange look when within the first five minutes of meeting them, they told me whose cousin they were.
In a business/formal context it would be normal to introduce yourself like this in the countries you've mentioned.
Do people introduce themselves like that in informal contexts in the USA? If so that's indeed a bit weird, and more a topic you would start talking about for small talk or if someone asked about it.
I would find it strange if someone introduced themselves to me with their business title. I sometimes ask "what do you do for a living?" as small talk, but that's solicited.
Even when it's solicited, I think it's weird. I don't tell people what I do for a living when I introduce myself. And when they ask, I tell them I'm an exotic dancer. It's a silly joke (since I'm a fat 50 year old) that tends to break the ice and lighten up the conversation. In general, I think small-talking about what you do for a living is not really interesting to people, and just allows them to silently put you somewhere on their mental totem pole of importance. Better to talk about actual interests.
I've also lived on a small island where on first meeting, two locals will work out how they're related. I guess similar to the cousin thing.
In the city I currently live in, it's fairly normal for locals to ask where another local went to school within 5 mins of meeting them, because that establishes an identity here.
Correct. If you said your title in Spain, you'll get a strange look and someone might respond with "why would you tell me that?". No one there cares what you do for work.
Not very common as the intro, but pretty common around here (bay area) to get asked that pretty soon after the intro. I don't like it, and I wished people didn't focus so much on it though.
First time I was in San Francisco and someone introduced themselves like that, going even beyond, was indeed a super weird experience being a brazilian.
For some people, their work/job is just such a big part of their identity, that for them this is a problem. That is I guess the point the person you were replying to was trying to make.
It's also not really weird for a job to become such a big part of your identity, when people spend most of their time at work or at home thinking about their work.
A couple years ago a friend of mine mentioned that he had known another mutual friend of ours for many years, much longer than I would have guessed. I asked him "what does he do?" and he thought for a moment before saying "you know ... I have no idea, it has never come up".
I don't know if this is acceptable in the US, but I always found it distasteful when people ask about your job 30 seconds into meeting you. I think it's much more polite to talk about generic stuff until jobs or skills come up naturally. Sometimes, they just never do, and that's fine. Need to know!
>For some people, their work/job is just such a big part of their identity, that for them this is a problem.
That's only 1/2 of the dynamic. People also like to assign an identity to others.
For example, if I say, "I'm semi-retired." ... the follow-up question is always "Oh, so what did you do before that?" ... which is polite coded-speak for, "Did you inherit money or what work did you do for money that put you in the position to do that?"
People are naturally curious about your rough level of success, wealth, expertise, etc. Having a "no identity" stance isn't really a satisfactory answer for many listeners. They want to know more.
EDIT to replies: I do understand the harmless "small talk" aspect. I should've added more to re-emphasize the "people assigning identity" aspect.
Once I reply to the followup question with "Oh, I used to do consulting for finance" what then happens is others then introduce me as "And this is jasode -- he was a consultant for X". My ex-consultant life that I last did over 15 years ago is now part of a tagline/subheading associated with my name even though I never intended it.
The point is other people have this irresistible urge to "fill in the blank" with an identity -- especially an identity that is tied to how one earned money. I'm not complaining about this and it's just an observation of what humans naturally do.
It's also a low risk topic that can generate lots of follow up questions. It's regular small talk. Also, people here seem to downplay it, but doesn't it tell you a lot about a person what they do roughly half of their waking time? What they chose to do with their life? Sure, you're not your job or your career, but it's also a very normal part about getting to know someone and I'm not sure equating it to some way of gauging success levels is necessarily to right way to think about it.
>It's regular small talk. Also, people here seem to downplay it, but doesn't it tell you a lot about a person what they do roughly half of their waking time? What they chose to do with their life?
Having a natural ebb & flow to conversation is all true but that's not the issue. Let me restate it differently.
It's ok and natural to ask what people do/did for work. It's also natural to respond and share what was a significant aspect of their life.
The meta-observation is: others then like to compress whatever life narrative they hear into a "shorthand" or "identity" -- even if the recipient never intended it to be his/her identity. Several parent comments mention "their work being their identity is the problem". My point is that the identity we get tagged with is often outside of our control and we didn't create the problem of work being our identity.
My neighbors know me as the "ex-consultant". For that identity to change, I'd have to do something new that was significant enough to override that ... such as... get into another career, open a restaurant, become founder of a startup, etc.
How does one have "no identity related to their job"? Sometimes you can't unless one wants to be evasive about what one does to earn money.
> My neighbors know me as the "ex-consultant" … How does one have "no identity related to their job"?
The obvious answer is to have some other identifier that supersedes the job. Do you have some other interest or hobby that you spend your time doing? That you talk about all the time?
People get associated with their job because it’s probably the thing they spend the most time on and it’s also a common topic of conversation. If every time someone asked you about your job you said, “it’s good” and steered the conversation into a story about your latest epic ski trip, you’d probably be the “guy who skis” instead of the “ex-consultant”.
Situations like this work as a filter of sorts (If you’re so obsessed with measuring relative status/prestige that you want to reduce me to a job title, we’re probably not going to be friends?).
The fact that you’re neighbors with these people changes things. Maybe it’s a wedge into a Socratic discussion about how work isn’t and has never been your identity, where you come to some new and better mutual understanding.
But yeah it’s challenging. If people are so accustomed to viewing about themselves and others thru the conventional status/hierarchical lens… sometimes they can’t understand that it’s a lens and not reality.
You can often politely dodge probing questions about your employment. When someone, for the purpose of small talk, asks me what I do for a living I just say I'm an exotic dancer or a runway model. It's funny and breaks the ice a little. Then I'll ask them about their watch or something. If they insist "no, really, what do you do for a living??" I'll politely say I work with computers and again try to move on. Very rarely I'll get someone who won't drop it "come on, WHAT COMPANY???" and at that point I know they're really not interested in talking--they just want to stack rank me in terms of importance or salary or whatever and I politely dip.
In modern life, yes. I wonder if it was such a low risk topic as we moved towards the past? For example the fear of the stranger is something that is very common in past writing across a number of cultures. If you met a stranger and they said they were a soldier it would have different ramifications than if they said they were a baker. Also in smaller social groups that required the work of everyone to survive it was a way of measuring the resources available in said group.
It is not just about assigning identity to others.
I am probing for topics of mutual interest, or topics that make other people passionate, to learn more about them generally.
In some people, this is completely orthogonal to their careers, but most of the time, there is an overlap. Like, I haven't yet met a railway engineer who wasn't a raging railway nerd at the same time.
> People are naturally curious about your rough level of success, wealth, expertise, etc.
I definitely find this more true in some cultures. e.g. silicon valley, it seems people want to know where you're at on the "hierarchy". Many parts of Asia too, you get treated differently if you're a low level worker, regular worker, executive etc.
Well, the "I'm Marcus" part is saying "I would like you to call me Marcus" I guess.
You're right, it is easy to say. But there's an identity and professional pride and all sorts of stuff wrapped up in the job title that isn't so easy to let go of.
It also leads on to questions like "and what are you doing now?" which get to "I'm lazing around doing nothing because my mental health took a hammering while I was IT Director", and so on. It's all so much easier and tidier with the job title.
Sounds really sad. I am not a director of anything, I probably make almost nothing compared to you, and yet I know who I am outside of my job. I have friends who value who I am, regardless of my job or even between jobs. I would not trade places with you for all the money in the world. I would not have any use for all that money then.
I found that outside of CA, this is asked a lot less often. In CA people ask that so they can mentally rank you as worth their time or not. Elsewhere, people ask you how your weekend went, or how your family is. One of the awesome parts of moving to Austin was not hearing that as the first question as much.
> I found that outside of CA, this is asked a lot less often.
I moved to California a few years ago from the Least Coast (insert shaka, surfer, wave emojis here) and had multiple other out-of-towners in the same situation as me say the exact opposite at a party. They all were adamant that they had yet to hear "what do you do [for a living]?" since they'd moved as they did ad nauseum when they lived on the other side of the country.
I've not noticed either way. My pet theory is that people hear this frequently if their social and professional lives bleed into each other which they do if one lives in a town dominated by a specific industry or profession. Those moving westward during COVID and remote work suddenly had to contend with this much less.
Never hear that question either. I don’t ask it either. I’ve actually been pretty successful but asking that question seems to rank someone on a scale that does not reflect their amazing contributions to society.
I ask because a) I'm interested in the same way that a child is in what people's jobs are and b) it gives me a frame of reference for interacting with them conversationally vis a vis common ground.
Wealth signaling still seems to me to be done primarily by conspicuous consumption and expensive hobbies.
I really don't like getting asked what I do for a living. I exchange labour for money somewhere out of necessity, what's at all interesting about that? What I do in my free time is who I am, and that's much more interesting to talk about, to me.
I don’t like getting asked what I do for hobbies. The real answer I want to give is “none of your business”, but I’m polite enough to never say that, so it gets awkward.
Getting asked what I do for a living is totally fine. It’s on my website, the whole world can find out if they bother to search. I’ll save you a search.
The point is people are different. Not everyone wants to share their private interests with you, especially if you just met. What you consider interesting conversation, well, for some of us it’s just intrusive. I also don’t care what you like to do 99% of the time. I’ve been socially forced to sit through way too many of these “interesting conversations”.
Could we be thinking about different social situations? I’m not turning to people on the bus and asking what their hobbies are. And it’s not my first question of people visiting my office happy hour.
If you’re at my home for dinner, I hope anyone that still feels this way does answer “the details of my private life are none of your business” when I’m trying to get to know them as a friend, so I know never to waste another good meal on them.
I sometimes joke and say that I type for a living, not entirely untrue. But I've found that sometimes people are offended if I answer their question evasively
Same! I love the pregnant pause after "What do you do..." as they start to mentally draw up their usual work spiel before adding the "...for fun" to flip the conversation around and actually get their brain thinking and exploring beyond the standard conversation flows.
If you ever get to talk to people who are more than laborers trading time for dollars, it is great fun. When dollars are just one of the many rewards from their career (where a person spends like 80% of their life energy), you get to hear a lot of passion, learning and growth. It really is a whole different way to live.
After a decade, "founder of X that I no longer work at" is considered a lame answer. People want to know what you are doing now, not your highest claim to status of your entire life.
When I lived in the bay area for a few years, everybody would tell you where they worked, and if you didn't tell them, they'd ask. Since moving to Portland, I've definitely noticed that people are much more interested in what you do during your leisure time.
Hoo boy, this is definitely a weird one to navigate, especially if you have a weird set of roles. It takes time to settle various threads and figure out how to address this.
> So used to saying "Hi, I'm Marcus, I'm IT Director of <business>"
Tech bros would mock Finance bros who would open a conversation with anyone who would listen with "Hi, I'm Marcus, I work at Goldman Sachs" and yet here we are now ...
Seriously. There are so many opportunities to give back to society. One does not need formal employment to be fulfilled.
I will say in Sergey Brin’s case, he had the unique opportunity to go back to work with the best and brightest without any friction, and nobody could tell him “hey maybe your credentials don’t quite stack up high enough for this department yeah?”
But for the rest of us, there’s FOSS, there’s computer repair, home automation, day trading a small fraction of your wealth, volunteer work at hospitals and libraries, gig work apps like taskrabbit…
If you are bored after being away from work for even a month, I’m not sure I could be friends with you.
I left Google to build an open source project a long time ago. A big part of the appeal was being able to have something to work on that's truly mine. Sergey already has something that's his and it's called Google. So I think he belongs there.
I think it's difficult for a normal brain to live with the low impact of another project while you created Google. Also, the speed of a personal developer is nothing compared with the speed of a software engineering area or company. You can easily feel like a turtle even working on an interesting project.
A mentally healthy person wants to be helpful. They want to be seen as helpful and they expect others around them to be helpful as well. This is the foundation of "pro-social" behavior: I benefit the group as much or more than the group benefits me.
Tying your identity to the place where you're helpful and where that help is appreciated and acknowledged isn't mental illness.
But this person was laid off. His help was (apparently) not appreciated, and he's not helping anyone by sitting alone in his car on the parking lot.
Do you think it is healthy behavior to go to a parking lot at 0900 every day and do nothing because you mentally cannot face the idea of not going to an office?
That's just your take. We don't know where he sat in the team, so we can assume the idea that he wasn't appreciated by his teammates as incorrect. He didn't make the cut based on unknown metrics from upper management, but they have their own reasons for doing things.
Getting in to the parking lot of the old office sounds way healthier than not making it out of bed at all.
What a weird dichotomy. It's not between "sitting in your old employers' parking lot" and "lying in bed all day", it's between "sitting in your old employers' parking lot" and "learning new skills", "finding a new job", "discovering new hobbies", "spending more time with your loved ones" or almost anything else.
Instead he chose to sit alone in a parking lot so he could feel "normal". Feeling compelled to do a specific action (excluding things like breathing) just to feel normal has a name, and that name is "addiction". It is not usually considered a good thing.
He didn't just drive there and sit in the car for a week or so either, which could be a shock reaction or wanting to keep the routine going whilst looking for the next thing to do... He was doing this for 6-8 months. It reveals a lot about a "rational" crowd.
They could go anywhere though - why not go to a coffee shop at 9 with a laptop or on a morning hike? I agree sitting in bed depressed would be bad but it seems like avoiding the issue to specifically sit in the parking lot of an old employer.
At minimum I think it would be healthier to tie part of your identify to an aspect of your career you enjoy rather than a specific employer itself.
You've cherry-picked a situation where there is an obvious social norm being broken. A better example would be going to the park and sitting on the bench you used to sit on with your ex. I agree with GP that this is healthier than lying despondent in bed.
Coping mechanisms are complex and diverse. The individual in question lost a major source of meaning-making in their life and was struggling to cope with that loss. I don't believe this is any less healthy than other common responses, which range from societal withdrawal to substance abuse.
I hear what you're saying, but routines, especially long-lived, are difficult to break/change. It's normal to have phantom limbs when they are cut off.
Depends on the shareholder. At Sergey Brin's level, that shareholder value shapes the future of humanity, a legacy affecting many more people and will last far longer than spending time with single, or even double digit number of children.
I can't really tell what you're trying to say, do you really think the shareholder value of Google is positively aligned with the future of humanity?
As in: If Google builds a really good AI and makes a lot of money from that, this will be a net positive for the world?
I recently rewatched a Tested Q&A where Adam Savage discussed his post-Mythbusters life; his framing of that duality was very similar: https://youtu.be/2tZ0EGJIgD8?t=322.
It aligns with a common design principle: constraints often make a problem space easier to navigate. I suspect life is similar. Having limited time creates a "specialness" that is easily lost when you suddenly have an infinite amount of time at your disposal.
It's not THAT bad for me, but I really can't take vacation days for "nothing". I struggle if I don't have plans and work really forces one to have some structure. If you need the structure and don't have any plans post lay-off, I can believe the struggle to "let go" and do something better.
I am guessing if you have been doing this daily for a couple decades then the neurodivergence is not going through this. I assume any normal person will find it hard to not do any kind of work and if you spent 20 years of your life doing tech, how useful are in the "real" world. Unless you have been doing handy work on the sides, spoiler alert: not much.
When you define yourself solely by work, you lose your entire identity when you retire. Most people don't have hobbies, so work is literally the one thing they have in their lives.
This is why people should have an opportunity to semi-retire when they are still young. A year or two. United States safety net does not really allow that unless you are loaded already.
It's very helpful to zoom out and do LIFE for a change. I got laid off three years ago, started my own project. Didn't take off, but also two mini-mes showed up during that time, and I am infinitely grateful that I could punt on work and just be there.
Hashtag blessed and all. That backrent I owe now, well, that's a bitch.
It's really interesting that my comment here where I said that employment can inflict brain damage got flagged even though previous comment described behavior that would be obviously significant clinical symptom if it was caused by anything else as it is irrational and detrimental.
Wasn't sergey forced out for hitting on employees? It seems pretty reasonable for him to be unhappy with a forced retirement and ultimately unwind it now that meeto is pretty much over.
Isn't this sort of defense a weak argument by the courts. If your abstraction is to override a well known common usage/function of a term, then the abstraction doesn't hold much water?
The fact that we now have to write cook book about cook books kind of masks the reality that there is something that could be genuinely wrong about this entire paradigm.
Why are even experts unsure about whats the right way to do something or even if its possible to do something at all, for anything non-trivial? Why so much hesitancy, if this is the panacea? If we are so sure then why not use the AI itself to come up with a proven paradigm?
Radioactivity was discovered before nuclear engineering existed. We had phenomena first and only later the math, tooling, and guardrails. LLMs are in that phase. They are powerful stochastic compressors with weak theory. No stable abstractions yet. Objectives shift, data drifts, evals leak, and context windows make behavior path dependent. That is why experts hedge.
“Cookbooks about cookbooks” are what a field does while it searches for invariants. Until we get reliable primitives and specs, we trade in patterns and anti-patterns. Asking the AI to “prove the paradigm” assumes it can generate guarantees it does not possess. It can explore the design space and surface candidates. It cannot grant correctness without an external oracle.
So treat vibe-engineering like heuristic optimization. Tight loops. Narrow scopes. Strong evals. Log everything. When we find the invariants, the cookbooks shrink and the compilers arrive.
We’re in the alchemist phase. If I’m being charitable, the medieval stone mason phase.
One thing worth pointing out is that the pre-engineering building large structures phase lasted a long time, and building collapses killed a lot of people while we tried to work out the theory.
Also it wasn’t really the stone masons who worked out the theory, and many of them were resistant to it.
While alchemy was mostly para-religious wishful thinking, stone masonry has a lot in common with what I want to express: it‘s the tinkering that is accessible to everyone who can lay their hands onto the tools. But I still think the age of nuclear revolution is a better comparison due to a couple of reasons, most importantly the number of very fast feedback loops. While it might have taken years to even build a new idea from stone, and another couple of years to see if it’s stable over time, we see multi-layered systems of both fast and slow feedback loops in AI-driven software development: academic science, open source communities, huge companies, startups, customers, established code review and code quality tools and standards (e.g. static analysis), feedback from multiple AI-models, activities of regulatory bodies, etc. pp. - the more interactions there are between the elements and subsystems, the better a system becomes at doing the trial-and-error-style tinkering that leads to stable results. In this regard, we’re way ahead of the nuclear revolution, let alone stone masonry.
The inherently chaotic nature of system makes stable results very difficult. Combine that with the non deterministic nature of all the major production models. Then you have the fact that new models are coming out every few months, and we have no objective metrics for measuring software quality.
Oh and benchmarks for functional performance measurement tend to leak into training data.
Put all those together and I’d bet half of my retirement accounts that the we’re still in the reading chicken entrails phase 20 years from now.
It reminds me of a quote from Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. It goes something like, "For distributed systems, we're trying to create a reliable system out of a set of unreliable components." In a similar fashion, we're trying to get reliable results from an unreliable process (i.e. prompting LLMs to do what we ask).
The difficulties of working with distributed systems are well known but it took a lot of research to get there. The uncertain part is whether research will help overcome the issues of using LLMs, or whether we're really just gambling (in the literal sense) at scale.
LLMs are literal gambling - you get them to work right once and they are magical - then you end up chasing that high by tweaking the model and instructions the rest of the time.
Or you put them to work with strong test suites and get stuff done. I am in bed. I have Claude fixing complex compiler bugs right now. It has "earned" that privilege by proving it can make good enough fixes, systematically removing actual, real bugs in reasonable ways by being given an immutable test suite and detailed instructions of the approach to follow.
There's no gambling involved. The results need to be checked, but the test suite is good enough it is hard for it to get away with something too stupid, and it's already demonstrated it knows x86 assembly much better than me.
Probably not. I have lots of experience with assembly in general, but not so much with x86. But the changes work and passes extensive tests, and some of them would be complex on any platform. I'm sure there will be cleanups and refinements needed, but I do know asm well enough to say that the fixes aren't horrific by any means - they're likely to be suboptimal, but supoptimal beats crashing or not compiling at all any day.
Just don't give it write access, and rig it up so that you gate success on a file generated by running the test suite separate from the agent that it can't influence. It can tell me it has fixed things as much as it like, but until the tests actually passes it will just get told the problem still exists, to document the approach it tested and to document that it didn't work, and try again.
Absolutely true re: ton of linting rules. In Ruby for example, Claude has a tendency to do horrific stuff like using instance_variable_get("@somevar") to avoid lack of accessors, instead of figuring out why there isn't an accessor, or adding one... A lot can even be achieved with pretty ad hoc hooks that don't do full linting but greps for things that are suspicious, and inject "questions" about whether X is really the appropriate way to do it, given rule Y in [some ruleset].
I actually found in my case that is just self inertia in not wanting to break through cognitive plateaus. The AI helped you with a breakthrough hence the magic, but you also did something right in your constructing of the context in the conversation with the AI; ie. you did thought and biomechanical[1] work. Now the dazzle of the AI's output makes you forget the work you still need to do, and the next time you prompt you get lazy, or you want much more, for much less.
[1] (moving your eyes, hands, hearing with your ears. etc)
LLMs are cargo cult generating machines. I’m not denying they can be useful for some tasks, but the amount of superstitions caused by these chaotic, random, black boxes is unreal.
The whole damn industry is deep in sunk cost fallacy. There is no use case and no sign of a use case that justifies the absolutely unbelievable expenditure that has been made on this technology. Everyone is desperate to find something, but they're just slapping more guardrails on hoping everything doesn't fall apart.
And just for clarity, I'm not saying they aren't useful at all. I'm saying modest productivity improvement aren't worth the absolutely insane resources that have been poured into this.
I share the same skepticism, but I have more patience to watch an emerging technology advance and forgiving as experts come to a consensus while communicating openly.
Mostly agree but with one big exception. The real issue seems to be that the figuring out part is happening a bit too late. A bit like burn a few hundred billion dollars [0] first ask questions later!?
Is it fair to categorize that it is a pyramid like scheme but with a twist at the top where there are a few (more than a one) genuine wins and winners?
No, it's more like a winner take all market, where a few winners will capture most of the value, and those who sit on the sidelines until everything is figured out are left fighting over the scraps.
* PCs (how are Altair and Commodore doing? also Apple ultimately lost the desktop battle until they managed to attack it from the iPod and iPhone angle)
* search engines (Altavista, Excite, etc)
* social networks (Friendster, MySpace, Orkut)
* smartphones (Nokia, all Windows CE devices, Blackberry, etc)
The list is endless. First mover advantage is strong but overrated. Apple has been building a huge business based on watching what others do and building a better product market fit.
Yes, exactly! These are all examples of markets where a handful of winners (or sometimes only one) have emerged by investing large amounts of money in developing the technology, leaving everyone else behind.
I'm not sure, why must it be so? In cell-phones we have Apple and Android-phones. In OSes we have Linux, Windows, and Apple.
In search-engines we used to have just Google. But what would be the reason to assume that AI must similarly coalesce to a single winner-take-all? And now AI agents are much providing an alternative to Google.
>I'm not sure, why must it be so? In cell-phones...
And then described a bunch of winners in a winner take all market.
Do you see many people trying to revive any of the apple/android alternatives or starting a new one?
Such a market doesn't have to end up in a monopoly that gets broken up.
Plenty of rather sticky duopolies or otherwise severely consolidated markets and the like out there.
> why not use the AI itself to come up with a proven paradigm?
Because AI can only imitate the language it has seen. If there are no texts in its training materials about what is the best way to use multiple coding agents at the same time, then AI knows very little about that subject matter.
AI only knows what humans know, but it knows much more than any single human.
We don't know "what is the best way to use multiple coding agents" until we or somebody else does some experiments and records the findings. Buit AI is not there yet to be able to do such actual experiments itself.
I'm sorry, but the whole stochastic parrot thing is so thoroughly debunked at this point that we should stop repeating it as if it's some kind of rare wisdom.
AlphaGo showed that even pre-LLM models could generate brand new approaches to winning a game that human experts had never seen before, and didn't exist in any training material.
With a little thought and experimentation, it's pretty easy to show that LLMs can reason about concepts that do not exist in its training corpus.
You could invent a tiny DSL with brand-new, never-seen-before tokens, give two worked examples, then ask it to evaluate a gnarlier expression. If it solves it, it inferred and executed rules you just made up for the first time.
Or you could drop in docs for a new, never-seen-before API and ask it to decide when and why to call which tool, run the calls, and revise after errors. If it composes a working plan and improves from feedback, that’s reasoning about procedures that weren’t in the corpus.
You're implicitly disparaging non-LLM models at the same time as implying that LLMs are an evolution of the state of the art (in machine learning). Assuming AGI is the target (and it's not clear if we can even define it yet), LLM's or something like them, will be but one aspect. Using the example AlphaGo to laud the abilities and potential of LLM's is not warranted. They are different.
>AlphaGo showed that even pre-LLM models could generate brand new approaches to winning a game that human experts had never seen before, and didn't exist in any training material.
AlphaGo is an entirely different kind of algorithm.
I could split this object into 10^500 or 10^50^500^5000 etc., with imagination being the limit.
These values Id'd at whatever imaginable resolution are far from practically useful but at a cosmic scale, there is no telling what is a useful value?
So this framework seems to be more limiting because we define a resolution ?