Kind of on brand for this site these days, tbh. A brand of anti social that believes disruption done for anything but monetary gain deserves extreme punishment, regardless of circumstance.
I think you're right, unfortunately. Looking at the causes and the current actions of the US government (and, other governments worldwide tbh), this looks like an almost deliberate attempt to create a new class divide and supply of low-education workers. A depression would cement this. If you aren't already rich by the time it really kicks off, you probably won't make it out.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
On the other hand, "Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
In the end, it doesn't matter whether these are incompetent or malicious people. These are people who are going to ruin a lot of lives around the world. The trick is, how do we get them out of power (in several countries) before they do too much damage?
What does this even mean? You literally say that you were working harder than your coworkers. Was your job under threat or something? This just sounds like an unhealthy case of imposter syndrome.
> But let's not gate-keep or be naive enough to understand that some kids will need to put that effort if they want to make a difference.
Sure, they'll make a difference for the founders/CEOs of these companies, who will walk away completely minted while their employees might pull enough out to get a house. IF the venture doesn't die before exit.
OP wanted to distance themselves as far from a bad economic environment as they could.
For people early in their careers, working hard is the best way to grow their future earnings and opportunities. They have too few skills, connections, and experience to differentiate otherwise.
Focusing only on the asymmetry between those with and without meaningful equity misses the point.
Not everyone is lucky enough to get equity from day one. The rest of us have (at most) a few critical points in our careers to do well enough such that we get a shot at meaningful equity at some point in the future.
For those from underprivileged backgrounds, they’re lucky to get even one chance in their careers for meaningful growth.
I certainly consider myself a skeptic in the current AI craze, but this entire piece (of which I find the technical criticisms interesting) just reads like attack on Altman/OpenAI.
Even if you want to make fun of the (alleged) snake oil salesmen of AGI, how are you not going after, like, Zuckerberg/Meta? At least Altman is using other peoples money.
So turning cafes into coworking spaces? They even use AirBnb as the base example, and we've seen how that's gone for cities around the world. This sounds tragic.
If you want people to just sit and eat - you're a restaurant.
If you want people to just order and leave - you're a food stall/truck.
Cafe's have always been the intermediate. A place to sit and read/discuss/write/work/hang out. While also occasionally going to the counter to buy small food or drinks.
If you're annoyed by this... don't run a cafe.
Simple & sane rules like "you have to order something to sit at a table" are hardly novel.
Even so, the economics may change over time. If the cafe's own expenses are going up, it has a difficult decision to raise prices (and lose business) or try to push through more business (and annoy customers).
I’m now imagining an art installation-tables designed so you can set a cup of coffee on them but any attempt to use a laptop will cause it to continually tip and rock while typing.
We’ve weaponized furniture against the homeless, why not against the laptop class?
The analogy is just that, an analogy. The Airbnb case can be tragic for some cities but for specific reasons that aren't going to affect cafés. I for one haven't seen anyone staying overnight and sleeping in a café.
The project could be catastrophic for cafes for unforeseen reasons, but those are surely not going to be the same as for Airbnb. You'd have to come up with a plausible threat scenario, otherwise your extrapolation of the analogy has no substance.
Commenters in this thread citing NPR as a reason that dollars shouldn't go towards helping kids learn how to count and not be antisocial is the kind of win right wing media could only dream about a decade or so ago.
Absolutely embarrassing for a site like this that claims to value education and democratizing it (and always jumps into threads about childrens education with all of their anecdotally built ideas, of course!) isn't condemning this.
I do find it tiring that tech oriented people still feel the need to denigrate people who are in the arts or athletes (tbh lumping them in with podcast grifters may be the greatest insult). Children can and should have a variety of role models.
Especially when we have seen over and over again that some youtubers (not pointing at any at this even specifically) have shown themselves to be of quite low character.
There are plenty of pro sports icons that have low character. Good character is not a qualification to put a ball through a goal, hole, hoop or elsewhere, in pro sports or on youtube.
I don't know any "tech oriented" people that put down anyone "in the arts", but most of them have no interest in sports. That doesn't mean they denigrate anyone in sports, but as for myself I do find humanity's fascination with putting balls into goals, holes, hoops and elsewhere a bit tiring, and I think it's a bit of a waste of humanity to put so much importance on putting balls into goals, holes, hoops or elsewhere, but we are all free to have our own opinions.
> I think it's a bit of a waste of humanity to put so much importance on putting balls into goals, holes, hoops or elsewhere
Sports can be seen as something of an improvement over more lethal forms of inter-group conflict.
Fortunately tech oriented folks have invented "e-sports", which are competitions based on pressing keys on a keyboard or buttons on a game controller, and possibly moving and clicking a mouse in order to affect pixels on a screen.
Games and game-like systems provide many benefits:
Simulations are particularly valuable because they allow you to test out strategies for risky activities (wars, investments or business ventures, gambling, etc.) without actual risk.
Twitch/reflex games like first-person shooters can improve eye-hand coordination. It's a fun recreational and social activity that can also help surgeons make fewer mistakes.
Narrative games are largely a modern form of storytelling, one of humanity's oldest and most important cultural practices.
Social games can build connection and teamwork; cozy games can facilitate relaxation; construction games can facilitate creative expression and spatial reasoning....
The reason people like games is because they are fun; but the reason games are fun is that they engage - and often challenge - the abilities that we use to interact with the real world.
> As often as OpenAI is maligned in the press, everyone I met there is actually trying to do the right thing.
I appreciate where the author is coming from, but I would have just left this part out. If there is anything I've learned during my time in tech (ESPECIALLY in the Bay Area) it's that the people you didn't meet are absolutely angling to do the wrong thing(TM).
I've been in circles with very rich and somewhat influential tech people and it's a lot of talk about helping others, but somehow beneath the veneer of the talk of helping others you notice that many of them are just ripping people off, doing coke and engaging in self-centered spiritual practices (especially crypto people).
I also don't trust that people within the system can assess if what they're doing is good or not. I've talked with higher ups in fashion companies who genuinely believe their company is actually doing so much great work for the environment when they basically invented fast-fashion. I've felt it first hand personally how my mind slowly warped itself into believing that ad-tech isn't so bad for the world when I worked for an ad-tech company, and only after leaving did I realize how wrong I was.
I agree. I've met some very wealthy people before and when you're outside of the bubble you start to see how $$$ helps a lot to justify anything you do as helping people. A lot of wealthy people will say "look I contribute to this cause!" as an indulgence in the religious sense to "counteract" much of what they do in their day to day or the raison d'etre of their work.
It's weird to say, but some people simply are not tuned in to the long term ramifications of their work. The "fuck you I got mine" mentality is even at play in many outwardly appearing progressive communities where short term gain is a moral imperative above doing good.
> I've felt it first hand personally how my mind slowly warped itself into believing that ad-tech isn't so bad for the world when I worked for an ad-tech company, and only after leaving did I realize how wrong I was.
You should write a book about that. Did you start seeing adblockers as immoral? I've heard ad-dependent people literally claiming that.
Yes. We already know that Altman parties with extremists like Yarvin and Thiel and donates millions to far-right political causes. I’m afraid the org is rotten at its core. If only the coup had succeeded.
And it's not just about some people doing good and others doing bad. Individual employees all doing the "right thing" can still be collectively steered in the wrong direction by higher ups. I'd say this describes the entirety of big tech.
When your work provides lunch in a variety of different cafeterias all neatly designed to look like standalone restaurants, directly across from which is an on-campus bank that will assist you with all of your financial needs before you take your company-operated Uber-equivalent to the next building over and have your meeting either in that building's ballpit, or on the tree-covered rooftop that - for some reason - has foxes on top, it's easy to focus only on the tiny "good" thing you're working on and not the steaming hot pile of garbage that the executives at your company are focused on but would rather you not see.
Edit: And that's to say nothing of the very generous pay...
I think the last few years (probably longer, it's just more pronounced now) have shown us the social impact of lowering the time kids spend together, particularly at school. This person thinks that they've hacked the system, but in reality this all could have been achieved in most high quality school systems in the US (they say they were socialized into the "college rat race" so I assume they were in an area where this was the case). Kids in Maryland and Virginia public school systems are regularly in community college classes by senior year.
Amusingly, they have other pro-natalism writing where they argue for social reintegration. What a mess.
Although they don't explicitly mention it much I it doesn't seem like they missed out on socializing.
> barring one final class I took online the following summer while I was couch-surfing in San Francisco with random internet friends.
> I soon moved to Cambridge in a group house I started with some friends from the Bay
Some people do seem to have the capacity to take on class loads like this person described while still managing a social life. The university I went to essentially requires engineering students to take more than 5 classes a semester and some of them were incredibly social.
While I agree this person frames it like they've hacked the system by doing something they're not the first to do it's definitely uncommon to have a masters degree by 21.
The story earlier was jumping the gun before the decision had dropped, either way. When reading it earlier kept thinking there was no official news yet, no real substance to it, as we'd have to have another one when the news actually dropped.
