> [Major Major’s father's] specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county….
These things are common. For instance, we pay dockworkers to not work so that they would let us do containerization. When they say they're striking, half of those striking dockworkers wouldn't be working anyway. They're paid not to so that we could use containers. When US ports finally automate, it will be the same. The boss of that union wears a Rolex because he's good at extracting these concessions from us. So here's a variant for them:
> His specialty was containers, and he made a good thing out of not loading any. Ever since containerization came in, he was paid handsomely for every crate he did not touch. The more containers he did not load, the more money he was given, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on securing more seniority on the docks to increase the amount of cargo he did not handle. He worked without rest at not working the piers. On long evenings he lingered by the hiring hall and did not sling a single hook, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that no breakbulk cargo had somehow returned.
As much as I agree the longshoremen situation is "unappealing" from a policy perspective, it's not really a valid equivalence to compare a trade union trying to protect itself from being automated out of existence with a multinational corporation asking an historically corrupt government to let them use the $1bn that they were given for something other than its intended purpose.
Everyone always has a story to tell for why they deserve the Rolex and the other guy doesn’t. And nothing is equivalent except perhaps fundamental particles in each class. That’s the nature of reality.
I’m not this guy or that guy. I’m just a victim of both of them. And both of them are happy to conspire against me. So until they’re willing to give the rest of us Rolexes for sitting at home I don’t see much of a difference.
> The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Shit like this has been happening since the first colonists came to the US. On of the first thing the Massachusetts Bay Company did in the 1630s was subsidizing the Winthrop Salthouse for decades ... which never successfully produced salt. Another thing commonly done was the English government or charters would gift land and then turn right around and buy it back at market price.
Just look at it as America going back to the colonial ages and then everything that's happening makes sense. The bad news is that people were willing to put up with that for over 100 year so there's no guarantee anyone will do anything for a long time.
And yes, solar energy is not only greener (less CO2, less PM2.5), but also frees us from dependency on other countries. The future can be less centralized.
Some countries (Russia included) will lose their bargaining chip. Other countries (USA included) will lose the incentive to 'democratize' the Middle East.
China can't stop you from using solar panels you've already installed and you could manufacture new ones somewhere else.
Solar actually makes a lot of sense for a significant fraction of the grid. It's specifically excellent for electrifying transportation, because most cars are stationary at an office park during the majority of sunlight hours. Install chargers there and you solve the problem of people in apartments not having them at home and you don't have to worry about the intermittency because you're literally using it to charge batteries. Solar is cheaper at the cost of intermittency, so for the things where intermittency doesn't really matter it makes obvious sense.
When it sucks is when you need reliable power in winter at night. Which is what nuclear is good at. But then... you can use both, each one for the thing it's better at.
Solar panels are not gas. You don't burn them to make energy.
There is no dependency on solar panel manufacturers. Once you install a panel it's going to make electricity for the next 25 years. At least. After that you can recycle it and use it another 25 years.
Reactors on the other hand require fuel that is consumed. Unless you can mine it yourself, you're just trading an oil dependency for a uranium dependency.
PRC has spent the better part of the last two decades gobbling up the supply chains that feed into solar panel manufacturing. Suppose you and I, being experienced technologists and enterprising individuals, decided tomorrow that we were going to start a solar panel manufacturing company. Surely this will be a growing, potentially high margin business because demand will be high if we're electrifying everything because of the aforementioned energy crisis. We are going to run head first into a wall of raw materials supply that is controlled by ... China.
So my point is that if you want to flip the energy generation to "green" and solar on some aggressive timeline, you are going to be dependent on China to do so. There are very obvious geopolitical reasons for why this is a very dumb idea. One of the ways I gauge how serious someone is about moving energy generation in the United States to solar is if they are okay with opening up closed mines so we can produce the rare earths, here, that are needed to manufacture the panels themselves. If they're cool with that, great, let's get stared. If they aren't, then they're not serious and are bandwagoning.
And I'm saying the US doesn't need to bother with rare earth mining as long as China is happy to export their panels. Buy as many as they sell. Build up a strategic panel reserve.
If they ever stop, use the reserve and gas plants to backstop. Spend the next 20 years developing domestic PV manufacturing capability, safe in the knowledge that your current panels are good for at least that long.
I'm not sure you understand much if you can seriously write
> Surely [PV manufacturing] will be a growing, potentially high margin business because demand will be high
I'm not aware of it being a high margin business now for any Chinese company, and that's with their aforementioned advantages in labor and mining. This is a product whose price has fallen 99% in the past 2 decades. What margin?
If you still want to re-open rare earth mines in the US knowing the economics, and you can follow American environmental and labor standards, then be my guest. It doesn't strike me as a lucrative opportunity but what do I know.
Sounds like moving to PV for electricity generation is a risky option, since maybe margins won't be so high if they're made here in the US and the economics just don't work for manufacturing from scratch. Perhaps we should consider other options, like the magic rocks we can find in the woods that get really hot when you hold them close together. This way, we can simplify our supply chains and have a reliable supply of energy that doesn't rely on a hostile geopolitical rival, and doesn't require the costly transition of the grid that we'd need to do if we went all in on PV.
This is a euphemism meant to convey how fortunate we are that civilization has advanced to the point where splitting the atom can but used to generate electricity. I'm sorry that it went over your head.
I encourage you - and anyone - to read the excellent book:
_The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ [1]
... and, in this case, to pay special attention to the multiple chapters describing in painful detail just what is involved in refining and extracting Uranium. As in, cubic acres of land mechanically and chemically processed to extract ounces of material ... which is then sent to enormous production facilities, at tremendous cost, only to begin the refinement process.
It is an incredibly long, dirty and energy intensive journey and I am not sure if the ledger of carbon expenses properly accounts for these steps.
I have spent a lot of time in areas that have been impacted by uranium extraction, including wandering around the four corners area and discovering old uranium mines.
Combined with seeing how the extractive energy industry has treated old wells, where they do everything in their power to abandon them and put the burden of cleanup and mainteance of that remediation onto the public, I simply have no faith that nuclear power is "safe" as long as it's private industry doing the work.
We should deliberately use a more expensive solution (nuclear) so that some people can make more money and that's somehow more "secure". You also haven't explained how electrification via nuclear won't need a "costly transition of the grid".
I'm not hearing much logic in anything you've said so far. I'm convinced you're ideologically opposed to PV and are debating in bad faith here.
Feels like PV boosters these days are just completely and totally unaware of where these things actually come from and who controls the material supply chain.
Your feelings are likely off - most people know that the materials used in solar panels are widely available across the globe and that China dominates the manufacturing process due to the US abdicating interest in manufacturing and renewables.
Solid comment - although rare earths are used in a minor way in the full Solar PV solution via inverters and other components.
Straight up Solar Panel grid arrays sans that stuff, it's 2,800 kg copper and 3,900 kg Silicon per MW and not much else directly (aluminium for framing, glass protection, can be added).
( Although lots of new copper (oxide ore, the most common) requires lots of new sulphur and the world has just lost 3.8 million tonnes of annual sulphur production by product from Qatar refineries )
Energy infrastructure has been targeted in the Iran-Israel-US conflict. Solar is just as liable as petroleum infrastructure has been. People think petroleum has some unique risk here. Really it is energy being targeted by military means. Doesn't matter how a nation or economy sources its energy, it will be a high value target.
Consider if the entire world was solar powered today. Iran targets solar plants in the gulf states instead. Gulf states target iran solar plants. Prices of panel materials surge just like oil prices surge today in response to the demand brought on to the supply chain. Maybe Iran wants to twist the knife, sends submarines to target solar supply chain networks directly either in shipping at sea or to be closer to shelling or missile striking mining or production facilities.
The world is all too easy to disrupt in the very same way it is being disrupted in terms of oil today, thanks to the asymmetries brought on by drone and missile warfare in this new era.
> Solar is just as liable as petroleum infrastructure has been.
Oil and gas infrastructure is full of choke points like pipelines, port facilities, storage facilities and large, concentrated refineries that supply entire country's worth of fuel. There is no central choke point in a solar based grid.
> Iran targets solar plants in the gulf states instead.
A drone exploding in a solar plant will take out what, a couple hundred solar panels? The rest will keep working once you blow the dust off.
You set one oil storage tank on fire and it takes care of everything else in its vicinity.
Not to mention solar can be truly decentralized. You can just buy a solar panel, plug it in your outlet and start generating electricity. You can turn every house into a solar power plant if you want and an enemy will have to bomb every house to get them offline.
> Maybe Iran wants to twist the knife, sends submarines to target solar supply chain networks directly either in shipping at sea or to be closer to shelling or missile striking mining or production facilities.
Iran will totally just go to war against china to prevent more solar panels from being made, yeah.
>There is no central choke point in a solar based grid.
The distribution becomes the target, not the generation. I agree with most of the other things you're saying, about how I can generate a small amount of electricity on my own if I buy a PV system. That's irrelevant, however.
Destroy oil supply and there is a crisis in 12h. Destroy solar supply and there's a crisis in... 20 years? It'd actually be much sooner but the point is that it's much less urgent that oil.
Sure but certainly you understand that's far more complex to do than taking out a single oil refinery next to your country that affects the whole work and is the only reason a country like Iran has any power at all?
As terrible as the human cost would be if Iran and the other Gulf states were to target each others' solar plants, it would be contained to tha region. India, and China, and America, and Africa, and Europe's PV would continue to generate electricity. Compared to what we have now, where a war in one part of the world makes energy expensive everywhere else.
Not to mention: PV generation is way more distributed than drilling oil and gas. Commercial PV generation facilities are smaller and more spread out. And even if the enemy bombs them all in a war, you can disconnect your rooftop solar panels from the grid and keep your house going. Do you have an oil well and refinery in your backyard?
I'll repeat it again: you don't burn solar panels to make energy. We need growing numbers of panels today because we're going solar. If the world were already at 100% solar then we wouldn't need nearly as much manufacturing or mining. We'd mostly just recycle old panels.
This is unlike fossil fuels. If you burn gas you will always need new gas. Forever.
>Do you have an oil well and refinery in your backyard?
Well, in the context of the US, we certainly do. And yet, our prices go up, because of course they would. In every domestic produced industry prices would go up if global supply were diminished. This is just how a globalized economy works. People assume a degree of economic isolation with solar that just isn't realistic with how the economy is structured today. It might have been realistic 100 years ago but today it is not.
And you bring up an excellent point with the globalized economy. Solar plants being bombed in a faraway country's war won't drive up the cost of your electricity because (most of the time) your electricity can't be exported. But oil can. If oil becomes expensive outside America, it becomes expensive within America. Even if America has its own oil.
No. Solar bought mostly from a foreign power only gives you a dependence for continuing to expand solar or (much less so) maintaining the solar already in your country over the 15-30 years it gradually breaks down / gets less efficient. Once you're at peak solar youre not that bad off even if embargoed. Meanwhile since oil highly inelastic, even relatively small portions of your supply being disrupted at any point means an almost instaneous increase in the price to do almost anything industrial or commercial in your country, as is shown by the current Hormuz crisis
It seems to me what you're arguing is that the government should incentivize the industry to produce solar panels domestically - as a strategic resource. Then you are both free from China and oil producing nations; and you get to create some domestic jobs in manufacturing.
> But China also owns the supply.
Well then, damn, we better get started making deals today?
Your plan to do absolutely nothing and continue losing forever with increasingly no way out seems utterly rediculous.
And how will renewables like solar and wind wirk with Class 8 trucks, shipping, aviation or process heat or as feedstock? How have they worked in Germany, which has shut down her nuclear plants and Russian hydrocarbons?
I'm gonna be the annoying guy who points out the obvious thats being repeated again and again for the last 50 years...
For transport, trains! Trains of different sizes, shapes and designs, solve most of the transport issues. The fact that western countries are behind on this doesnt mean it's too late to start.
For heat, better insulation and heat pumps do wonders!
For feedstock maybe feeding animals is simply bot the way we should move forward.
And I say all this as a person who drives a gas car 70 miles every day, lives in an old house with bad insulation and eat meat several times a week
By feedstock, I mean the hydrocarbons that are required for the bulk chemicals, fertilizers, plastics, rubbers, detergents, pharmaceuticals etc. that we take for granted.
Class 8 trucks are solved. Volvo, Freightliner and Tesla all make electric semis. They're not a large percentage of the installed base yet but there is nothing that needs to be invented, only adopted, and the latter will pick up as the battery costs continue to decline.
Chemical feedstocks are only a small percentage of the petroleum market. The large majority is fuel. If you stop burning it there is plenty of supply and you're not worried about whether you can get any from Iran.
Not only are electric trucks are unprofitable, it means you switch your dependency from Middle-Eastern fossil fuels to Chinese rare earths. At least we can make biofuels from sugarcane
You can also process rare earth concentrates on your own soil, there's no need to offshore that to China and Malaysia other than "No waste ponds in my Backyard".
You don’t burn your batteries though. You build them once and then use them for 20 years. They will just keep working when the next war erupts on the other side of the planet.
Half of the "heavy duty vehicles" (which I believe is roughly similar to the classification you are using) sold in China in December were electric. Between rapidly improving batteries and maturing technology for swapping batteries as a refuelling strategy electrification of trucks is the obvious and inevitable future. They are simply cheaper to operate.
Good for the Chinese. The rest of us do not have the upfront capital to purchase these trucks. And there is still the matter of fertilizer, concrete, bulk chemicals etc. And solar panels. There is a very good reason why solar psnel factories (like JinkoSolar run off coal or hydro and not solar power.
That's one of the wonderful things about automotive infrastructure. You can make gradual incremental changes and slowly improve the entire system. It may not be fast enough or cheap enough, but you can still make it happen.
> The rest of us do not have the upfront capital to purchase these trucks.
We can afford what we can do. We don't need to do what we can afford. If we wanted to build and deploy electric trucks enmasse like China then we could do it, regardless of upfront capital.
> The rest of us do not have the upfront capital to purchase these trucks.
Isn't this the purpose of a loan? You have a truck with a higher purchase price that adds ~$2000/month to your loan payment but then you save ~$3000/month in diesel.
And you're saving a lot more than that in diesel when it's $5/gallon.
> The rest of us do not have the upfront capital to purchase these trucks.
You don't need any upfront capital. Do it when the trucks become due for refurbishment a truck. Then it's almost a no-brainier, as its cheaper convert it to an EV: https://www.januselectric.com.au/
We don't know that. Beijing might have been investing in them as insurance against its not being able to get enough diesel fuel to run an all-diesel fleet of trucks, so countries that are self-sufficient in oil shouldn't just blindly imitate Beijing's move.
We know that because we know how much they cost, how much they cost to operate, and the same for diesel trucks. The technology here isn't a bunch of state secrets.
Here you're just repeating the assertion I called into question ("they are simply cheaper to operate") -- or more precisely you are implying it. Does your not repeating it outright mean you mean to slowly distance yourself from it?
If you have evidence that there is a fleet of electric trucks anywhere (big enough to make a dent in China's transport needs) whose actual total cost proved to be less than a fleet of diesels doing the same work would have cost, then share it. If all you have to offer is words to the effect that "an examination of the relevant technologies by any competent analyst will of course find that the battery-powered fleet would be cheaper", then I repeat my assertion.
I was not in fact repeating the prior assertions. I was explaining why we know they are cheaper to operate. Because we know the costs of both them and the alternative. No fancy deductions needed where we're arguing "well electricity is cheaper than diesel but we don't know how much they use" or something.
I am certainly not backing down from the claim that "they are simply cheaper to operate". That is an absolutely trivial claim that is entirely obvious to anyone even remotely familiar with numbers in this space.
I would note I was discussing trucks that swap batteries - and thus the "paying drivers to wait around while trucks recharge" step doesn't exist. I'll also note all the other costs you are listing are capital costs not operational ones. Broadly speaking for most uses we appear to have crossed the threshold where the total cost of ownership is lower for most tasks, but for some niches (like "ice road shipping") I doubt the buildout is worth it (yet).
To attach some rough numbers, TCO of PRC electric truck (which cost 2x diesel) went from paying for itself in 4-5 years at $60 barrels to 2 years at $100. Diesel increase to $150, it pays for itself in 1 year.
OK, then can you name one deployed fleet of trucks anywhere that uses swappable batteries?
According to an unreliable source that gives fast answers to my questions, U.S. freight companies spent approximately $32 billion to $36 billion on new diesel Class 8 trucks in 2025.
Now are we to believe that these companies and their investors are foolish? That they didn't do calculations and consult experts before spending this money?
Are we to assign more weight to comments here on HN assuring us that electric trucks are cheaper in total cost of ownership than diesel trucks? -- comments that cost the writers nothing but a few minutes of time?
Countries dependent on the Persian Gulf's remaining open to international shipping trade shouldn't just blindly copy U.S. freight companies here: for those countries, any extra cost for an electric fleet might be worth the peace of mind of knowing they will always be able to deliver food, medicine and other essentials to their populations. France for example takes all aspects of its national security seriously and relies almost completely on imports for any fossil fuels it uses. In response it is electrifying as much of its economy as practical (and continuing to invest heavily in nuclear electricity production and renewables).
Many major close loop operations, i.e. mines, heavy industrial clusters, ports where trucks stay on location with ~100% utilization rates have been electric for a few years now, trial started in ~2020. Started with something like 10 pilot cities, now standardized around CATL #75 pack and been mass rollout last few years, there are literally 1,000s of fleets running on battery swap now. Goal is something like 80% of highway freight done by swap stations by 2030.
>Now are we to believe that these companies and their investors are foolish? That they didn't do calculations and consult experts before spending this money?
Or you know smart investors/planners making peace with stupid US energy policy the precludes freight electrification which is vastly more economical if there was state capacity to deploy it economically.
> maturing technology for swapping batteries as a refuelling strategy
This seems like a non-problem to begin with. There are electric semis with a 500 mile range, which at 60 MPH is over 8 hours of driving, i.e. the legal maximum in most places. The same trucks can also add 300 miles of range in 30 minutes, which adds five hours of driving in the time it takes for a typical lunch break. Why do you even need to swap the batteries?
The irony of the TBL quotes there being the entire problem with the semantic web is the ontological tarpit that results due to the excessive expressive power of a general triple store.
Well, I’d argue that many things in the semweb are not expressive enough and lead to the misunderstandings we have.
People think, for instance, that RDFS and OWL are meant to SHACL people into bad an over engineered ontologies. The problem is these standards add facts and don’t subtract facts. At risk of sounding like ChatGPT: it’s a data transformation system not a validation system.
That is, you’re supposed to use RDFS to say something like
The point of the namespace system is not to harass you, it is to be able to suck in data from unlimited sources and transform it. Trouble is it can’t do the simple math required to do that for real, like
?s :lengthInFeet ?o -> ?s :lengthInInches 12*?o .
Because if you were trying OWL-style reasoning over arithmetic you would run into Kurt Gödel kinds of problems. Meanwhile you can’t subtract facts that fail validation, you can’t subtract facts that you just don’t need in the next round of processing. It would have made sense to promote SHACL first instead of OWL because garbage-in-garbage out, you are not going to reason successfully unless you have clean data… but what the hell do I know, I’m just an applications programmer who models business processes enough to automate them.
Similarly the problem of ordered collections has never been dealt with properly in that world. PostgreSQL, N1QL and other post-relational and document DB languages can write queries involving ordered collections easily. I can write rather unobvious queries by hand to handle a lot of cases (wrote a paper about it) but I can’t cover all the cases and I know back in the day I could write SPAQL queries much better than the average RDF postdoc or professor.
As for underengineering, Dublin Core came out when I worked at a research library and it just doesn’t come close in capability to MARC from 1970. Larry Masinter over at Adobe had to hack the standard to handle ordered collections because… the authors of a paper sure as hell care what order you write their names in. And it is all like that: RDF standards neglect basic requirements that they need to be useful and then all the complex/complicated stuff really stands out. If you could get the basics done maybe people would use them but they don’t.
These pieces of advice are useful. However, they don't touch the bottleneck: mental health. And no, it is not "like any other demanding job". A PhD hits on two fronts - one is "all or nothing". If you spend years and still haven't submitted your dissertation, it is a career-ending failure. The other is its tie to one's identity. You put sweat, blood, and tears into your research, only to be rejected at a journal or conference because the result is "technically correct but not significant enough". Sure, there are similar parts in other careers - from talking with people, it works a bit similarly in medicine (when it comes to "all or nothing") and art (when it comes to this identity).
If people fail, it is mostly because they burn out. If they succeed, it is not unlikely that they will need to heal their burnout wounds anyway.
I am sure Karpathy's experience is different. But most people starting their PhDs are not Karpathy.
The peer review paper requirement puts you in a situation where if your topic of research happen to not be interesting for the reviewers (that you have no control over), you can be a talented student that worked very hard and still fail due to being out of time after multiple successive rejections.
Your supervisor may not understand this until it’s too late, and you may not have the ability to judge your adviser's ability to do so until you are committed.
The main problem is that you were raised in a school system where if you show up, study and do your assignments you are pretty much guaranteed to succeed sooner or later. A PhD is not like that.
Too many people stay in academia out of inertia and being comfortable with the "school" mode of existence and are afraid of the broad wide world and the decisions involved. They finish their masters and liked the classes and the thesis topic and so they stay.
But as you said, a PhD is quite different than all schooling before that. And that's good. A PhD is supposed to signify that you contributed new scientific value as judged by the expert international community, not just your teacher. Of course there are many wrinkles on this story like sloppy knee-jerk reviews etc.
But anything in life where you "just show up" and fulfill some explicit assignments tends not to be very valuable. If just showing up and doing what someone else decided for you is enough for a thing, that thing will lose value very soon. Similarly if you make sure almost everyone can do it, it won't have value, but will become a participation trophy.
But nothing in real life work like that. School is fake. You don't get a job just by showing up or having a diploma. Nobody will fall in love and start a relationship/family with you for showing up and fulfilling some list of criteria. Nobody will fund your startup or strike a business deal with your company because you showed up and did some assigned tasks.
In almost all aspects of life being proactive and exercising agency will get you much further than the teacher's pet mindset that school instills. And unfortunately rather than selecting for it, the PhD selects against such agency again because it's the safe option and people who are ready for an adventure usually dislike the academic environment. Not all of couse, I obviously don't mean every single person fits this. But in my experience this explains part of the mismatch in expectations and reality for the "I was a good student so a PhD felt natural" people. Not those come into the PhD with a well thought out plan, and knowing exactly why they want to pursue it, the upsides and downsides etc.
I recently dated a DMA in her 30s, and while incredibly talented and respected within her field, she had no experience sharing a life with someone else. As selfish and unfair as she said she felt, she wasn't wasn't ever willing to compromise.
I'm not new to dating educated professionals, and it seems to be an unfortunate recurrence balancing being torn between wanting a partner and family and worrying that any misstep could jeopardize their career or cost them opportunity.
> I'm not new to dating educated professionals, and it seems to be an unfortunate recurrence balancing being torn between wanting a partner and family and worrying that any misstep could jeopardize their career or cost them opportunity.
There exist a large number of very smart people who are not that career-obsessed (the traits that you need for a fast career are rather different from "highly smart").
I consider it to be likely that you value character traits that made the partner predestinied for a successful career, but don't like the fact that because of this, they are often obsessed about their career.
> But anything in life where you "just show up" and fulfill some explicit assignments tends not to be very valuable.
Including paramedic or trauma surgeon, where the explicit assignment is to stabilize the human being in front of you?
Or how about plumber, to stop water where it shouldn't be, making it come out faucets and go down drains where it should? Had furnace issues when we switched it on in October, the HVAC technicians made the magic box generate warm air: his explicit assignment was 'make the house warm' and he showed up and did that.
Depends on your goals. Even as a plumber you have to think about what's worth what, how you specialize, and what the price is. Even as a doctor you may be under appreciated and the explicit goal is not so explicit all the time and sometimes curing the patient requires inventiveness and not only following a script or a textbook. The patients survival is often not purely a cookie cutter application of rules as it works in school.
And in some sense we can make the PhD requirements explicit too: prove that you are able to provide valuable and novel contributions to the scientific community as recognized by them. But it's not box ticking. But so is becoming an especially appreciated and respected doctor in your city. It's not just don't kill too many patients and you're golden.
If you want a mediocre run of the mill PhD it's not super hard. It is hard, but not super hard if you have academic aptitude. You can do something incremental and follow the trends, and eventually some venue will publish it. Not many will read it though and you won't become a leading voice though. There are many incremental paper that help many average PhD students get their degrees.
There are plenty of other non academic fields where you have to work hard and long hours, such as finance or law firms. You can choose less demanding alternatives too but they are less prestigious. Of course finance pays better.
I think the problem is that people want to treat a scientific career as both a regular job and also as something of a pop star personal brand type of thing, and they only want the upside of both.
There are many problems with academia, power balance etc of course. It's not unlike problems for aspiring movie stars or in other somewhat isolated bubbles within society like in sports or the theater scene, or how kitchens work in high end restaurants etc etc. If you want to become an acclaimed top expert in a subfield, it's not easy. And humans are going to do their human things around such opportunities for status advancements.
That's way too far from the article in question and I don't think it helps to discuss them together. Now if you propose that sciences and humanities should be brought more into conversation I can get on board but it's not easy because both sides approach it from a high horse attitude.
In practice these PhDs use the same label but have diverged a long time ago and their cultures, expectations and problems are quite different. As a STEM person, I also don't exactly understand what gets you a humanities PhD. I assume something like coming up with a new interpretation of a text, event or intellectual movement, connecting dots together in new ways that appears insightful to other scholars. But it's probably different in history, literature or other branches of the humanities as well. As I understand novelty is always part of it, as is significance in some way. You need to defend some kind of novel thought of yours, in a thesis.
> The main problem is that you were raised in a school system where if you show up, study and do your assignments you are pretty much guaranteed to succeed sooner or later. A PhD is not like that.
It was not my case and bold of you to assume so. I had peer-reviewed publications before I even applied for PhD.
While I do know some people who expected PhD to be "more classes with more difficult assignments", the mast majority of PhDs I know had nothing to do with mentality you described.
Sorry, my choice of word was not great, I was not targeting you in specific, but the way the education system works prior to a PhD in general.
I’m aware the experience will not be the same everywhere as PhD programs can be quite different, but many students that asked me if they should do a PhD are surprised when I tell them it’s not just up to the university or their advisors that they will get their degree and even more surprised when I tell them how early they have to start submitting their papers.
Even though I was well warned by my seniors, I admit that I also had this misconception to some degree.
This is very true especially nowadays. You typically need several publications to even start a PhD in competitive fields like AI, so people are familiar with the system already.
Your point is valid in many ways. The picture can be a little brighter. The PhD path does not have to be an all or nothing.
1. You can hedge your bets by submitting your work to various conferences of various qualities (without going 3rd-tier, you can bet across 1st-tier and 2nd-tier)
2. You can spend time choosing the professor and the topic before going all in
3. You can seek advice and social interactions within your research group, departement and school
None of this is a silver bullet, but it compounds in the right direction.
PhD programs are very different. The environment Karpathy describes is fairly similar to what I saw as a math PhD in a good school, but not an ivy. My theoretical physics PhD friends had the same setup as I had, but experimentals lived in a different world, long hours in the lab every day, including weekends.
My advisor was well established, tenured prof with a number of students. I had to teach, but the effort was light. We taught large, basic courses that are boring for tenured profs. We usually requested the same 1-2 classes to teach and after the first round had all the materials (homework, quizzes, etc.) and could teach on autopilot. University gave us undergrad graders to grade assignments but I never used them since I wanted to see what my students wrote. Which is a testament that the load was light; if I was drowning I would use all free help I could.
But there was a cult of academia. "Get an academic job or you are a loser" mentality was prevalent. My advisor was disappointed, but OK when I decided to go into industry after PhD, but a friend's (Physics PhD from Harvard, CEO of a profitable startup now) advisor does not talk to him anymore because he did not stay in academia.
And I only realized long after finishing my PhD how incredibly lonely PhD path is. You live in your bubble for years, with minimal interactions outside a few other folks at the same grad school. Stipend was enough for basic living, but not much else. No good vacations, ski trips with friends, etc. And a few somewhat creepy characters that grow in this lifestyle. This is all surmountable, but the mental toughness required is certainly something to keep in mind. I did not have that mental toughness, but was an introvert, which helped a lot. But looking back I see that I also could have gone off the rails. My 2c.
It depends highly on the field. In history, sure. The point of getting a history PhD is to become a history professor, and you can't do that if you don't get the PhD, and meanwhile history PhDs don't meaningfully open up any other job prospects, so attempting and failing to get a PhD provides negative value.
In CS and many engineering disciplines, there is a long history of people dropping out of PhDs and landing in industry. The industry is therefore much more accustomed to, and therefore accommodating to, people taking this path. Whether it's a maximally efficient use of time is another question, but it's certainly not wasted effort.
But I do agree that it's stressful nonetheless because it still feels like a failure even if it is not actually in reality. I wrote about this when I put down my own PhD journey here [1]. In particular after the control replication (2017) paper, I very nearly quit out of academia entirely despite it being my biggest contribution to the field by far.
Eh. It's different, but framing it as uniquely challenging seems silly. There are very few other jobs where you don't need to deliver any specific, measurable results for months or years. And your "career-ending" outcome is that you go and get a cozy industry job in the same field because you already have a degree. Now, you might have a difficulty adjusting to that because they will want you to get stuff done.
I spend much more time refactoring that creating features (though, it is getting better with each model). My go-to approach is to use Claude Code Opus 4.6 for writing and Gemini 3.1 Pro for cleaning up. I feel that doing it just one-stage is rarely enough.
A lot of prompts about finding the right level of abstraction, DRY, etc.
I would add that I love emails when they are written as emails (i.e. at least one coherent paragraph).
Email, as a medium, prompts us to think (at least for a few seconds), not "generate human tokens". Sure, we may feel being "communicative" or "productive" while chatting or Slack, but (in my experience) it is not always the case.
RSS is just one element of the ecosystem - the input.
I envision that the filtering mechanism CAN use any rules - hand-written, heuristics, old-school machine learning, LLMs. Just with a key difference - you are the one controlling it. No hidden tricks to make you "engaged" (read: addicted) or "sold".
If you feel it is too much politics, you reduce it. If too little - add. If you want less clickbaits and intellectual fast food, you filter it. Etc, etc.
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
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