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Sure. But I think the notion is that a huge group of people also had that same level funding and privilege, but did nothing with it.

Like why did these guys neighbors not end up billionaire. Or the other people in their class or school.

While they may have had some money it’s not like they took fathers 500 billion and turned it in to a nice 200 billion for them self.

They clearly did something different out of the very large common group they belonged to.


> They clearly did something different

Survivorship bias that results from looking back at the winners. If we asked 1000 people to flip a coin 10 times, probability says one will end up flipping heads 10 times in a row. Looking only backwards after the fact, what did he do different? Is he just a better coin flipper?

There is likely a person in their 20s right now who in 40 years we will look back on because they founded the world's first $100T company. Who is it? If we knew it was deterministic and that some "thing they did" caused success, we would all just do that thing.


I think the point is, most people don't even flip the coin, you're making a false equivalence.

Realistically most people don't get many opportunities to flip the coin

Then many who do get that chance choose not to, they choose a less risky path

It is very few people who even can attempt to flip the coin ten times

And "the 1%" can flip it as many times as they want until it lands on heads 10 times in a row


Instead of coin flipping, I look at it like a baseball game:

Most people are never even given an at-bat. They're born without money/opportunity (on the bench), and they will have to stay on the bench for life.

Some working / middle class people get one or two at-bats. They swing and maybe hit the home run, but maybe instead have a safe base hit or they strike out. That was their chance. Afterwards they're out of money/opportunity.

The top 0.1% or so get as many at-bats as they want. Their parents own the team and the ballpark so they just keep swinging until they get their home run, and then spend the rest of the game talking about how life is a meritocracy, and you succeed by being the best.


How quickly we forget being teenagers and young adults.

Computers, and knowledge in general, is the the most accessible it’s ever been, in the history of mankind.

So you’re claiming that the trillions of dollars that have been spent trying to uplift the youth of yesteryear were a complete an utter waste?

Or has social media been the somma Huxley was talking about all along?

Nothing stops anyone from reading and learning, having hope for the future, and pursuing it. WhatsApp had a staff of like 15-25 people. Linux wa started by some dork with an idea and a lot of time.

Treating the world like victims that need protecting isn’t the play.


> So you’re claiming that the trillions of dollars that have been spent trying to uplift the youth of yesteryear were a complete an utter waste

Well, take a look around?

The youth cannot buy homes. They aren't starting families. The wealth gap between the older and younger generations is enormous

Do you really think we have been successful in "uplifting the youth"?


https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43849966

That’s me, asking the same thing.


Most people don’t want to end up in debt in the likely case that the coin-flipping doesn’t succeed.

There is only but so much room in the capital ecosystem for billionaires, even when you factor in creation of wealth through resource-extraction and refinement or labor.

We hear much from the Jobs and Gates of society, and little from the other garage-folk who just didn't make it: they ran out of time, ran out of steam, ran out of funding, or were doing something that would have worked great and made them billionaires if Apple hadn't hit the market three months sooner than them.

Billionaires in garages are a confirmation-bias story.


Random chance, and maybe a little skill.

Don't forget connections

Having well connected parents and family is huge, and a big part of why a lot of these people are so wildly successful


That's how Elizabeth Holmes went from a rando Stanford drop out to a "billionaire"

Her father was head of a Federal govt agency at one point and a VP at Enron (I know, I know).

Also, a direct descendant of the Fleischmann yeast family.

Her mother also had worked as a Congressional aide.


Yah. But I would think the permissions would be a OS level thing that can’t be bypassed simply because Google also wrote the app.

Google Photos is not a mobile app. Google Photos is a SaaS webapp that happens to have a companion app for Android. Whatever OS-level settings affect the Android app itself, they have no bearing on what Google Photos the SaaS can or cannot do.

it's very easy to imagine the scenario where this happens.

Those photos may have already been uploaded to google's web servers (from my understanding, this happens with google photos by default?), from which a preview has been generated. The permission is at the android app level, and is requested at some point to ensure that the permission model is respected from the POV of the user. I can imagine the permission request being out of sync!


What OS? The one Google wrote, underlying these services?

I don’t think we will have a lack of people who explore and know beyond others how to things.

LLMs will make people productive. But it will at the same time elevate those with real skill and passion to create good software. In the meantime there will be some maker confusion, and some engineers who are mediocre might find them selfs in demand like top end engineers. But over the time companies and markets will realize and top dollar will go to those select engineers who know how to do things with and without LLMs.

Lots of people are afraid of LLMs and think it is the end of the software engineer. It is and it is not. It’s the end of the “CLI engineer” or the “Front end engineer” and all those specializations that were attempt to require less skill to pay less. But the systems engineers who know how computers work, can take all week long describing what happens when you press enter on a keyboard at google.com will only be pressed into higher demand. This is because the single skill “engineer” wont really be a thing.

tldr; LLMs wont kill software engineering its a reset, it will cull those who chose such a path on a rubric only because it paid well.


I think it’s more weird that the person being a “sitting judge” is any party of the equation. At the end of the day judges are just people. I would be more worried about a system that proceeded differently because they were a judge.

A judge who's literally in the middle of an official hearing is absolutely a special case.

I would hope it’s not.

I would like for cops to be more humane in arresting people and stop going to place of work to grab people in front of their coworkers. But this seems like just as rude when they go to a “regular” person’s office in the middle of the day and arrest them.

The argument is that if they notify the accused beforehand they may flee. But I don’t buy this as many people will likely turn themselves in if notified. I’m guessing an ai could predict with 99% accuracy people who will self surrender and save everyone embarrassment (and money).


The discussion is about ICE arresting a sitting judge on a bogus political premise ... it has nothing to do with what you're talking about.

I’m talking about the reason why ICE was unable to arrest the suspect that is the nominal reason the FBI arrested this judge.

It seems as if the facts that the suspect was in the judge’s court and then not arrested by ICE at that point aren’t contested. And that seems like a weird thing to happen.


ICE did (and therefore were able to) arrest the person they wanted to arrest.

"And that seems like a weird thing to happen."

Um, no, because there are other things--the actual charges filed against the judge--that are contested.


I do t think a sitting judge means what you think it means.

A sitting judge is a sitting judge even when they are at home sleeping.


[flagged]


Nothing in the article even remotely supports your claim ... which isn't even relevant.

Judges are "just people" that make up the only one of three branches of government that seems interested in maintaining a system of checks and balances.

Our system has already proceeded differently based on peoples' statuses. Dozens of lawsuits were canned or dropped due to this election.

This makes absolutely zero sense. She was arrested because of her actions (or rather, alleged inaction) in court, as a judge.

She is not "just a person" in this case.

I'm struggling with the dishonesty on grand display by some of the comments in this thread.


She ... her ... She

You're right. Bad habits are bad. Thanks!

Wasn't the judge female?

You're misinterpreting our comments because you aren't aware that they originally used male pronouns and then fixed it when they saw my comment.

"I would be more worried about a system that proceeded differently because they were a president"

She would not have been arrested if she wasn't a sitting judge on a case involving an allegedly undocumented person. This is all about the Trump administration's ideology and whipping boy.

I did the same thing. My mom was pissed I took it apart.

I was disappointed with how it worked as well. The motor was reused in a different project later, there was no hope in me putting this one back together.


I have always had the opposite problem.

In grade school had to go to all these classes during recess to get different pencils, pens, grips, wiring methods.

The reason was my hand could not keep up with my thoughts. So the result was skipped words, and merging of two words and all these other things.

I am still poor at spelling, but the solution was typing. Once I started typing well my grades went up and I no longer found doing the work a chore.


Presumably, thinking about difficult math and CS problems goes slower than thinking about random literary topics or whatever.

lol!

> suggests handwriting may be irreplaceable when it comes to learning.

> For the typing condition, participants typed the same words on a keyboard using only their right index finger.

So they tested exactly nothing useful.

Give it up Mrs. Smith, the keyboard won.

In seriousness, I would always expect pressing a single button to require less brain power than drawing a complex line, even more so if the subjects have been in the digital world for the last 10 years.

Just from a pure mechanical motion finger movement of a single key being pressed at a time is far less than most of the full hand engagement wiring requires.

The study might have been better if the types used a full keyboard with both hands, but I suspect they always know the results would not be worthy to write home about.

But even they were. The task of transcribing is not all that engaging. Maybe I would have reserve brain power to do the task.

You will also have to convince me that what is measured, brain connectivity, is a metric we care about and has any real impact beyond being a fun trick.


>>For the typing condition, participants typed the same words on a keyboard using only their right index finger.

>The study might have been better if the types used a full keyboard with both hands

Agreed. This reminds me of solving Rubik's cubes, where solvers employ "fingertricks" like using index finger followed by middle finger to do a U2 (two turns of the "up" face) more quickly. Similarly people often minimize "regrips" and "cube rotations" (changing which side is facing you) to improve efficiency and get times down. What it also does is result in a more specific and consistent set of motions that I think are easier to remember and execute. People will also talk about algorithms being "in their hands" to differentiate between being able to spew out the notation vs actually doing it. I've found that for several algorithms I've memorized, if I don't do them at a natural (fast) speed and the usual positioning, I can forget the moves and lose track of what I'm doing. If I had to do every turn using my whole right hand, slowly, I suspect I would struggle a lot.


Dude. It’s easy. Just do in person on site interview.

Done.


This.


This doesn't work for remote jobs, unless you accept the overhead of flying candidates over.


So you would rather pay the overhead of getting somebody on your team who can’t do the job?

And that is not working out…

What we have instead is a nation straddled with debt and useless degrees. While the counties like China do “theirs world” work produce smarter and more capable workforce all while doing the mundane work too.

I think your view also vastly underestimates the number of not so smart people that exist in America. This is no knock on them, but people in tech bubbles get to walk around in a society where the average person they interact with has a far above average IQ. So for those who don’t balance red/black trees and find shortest paths with dijkstra's algorithm need jobs too.

On top of that you forgot something I am sure you have yelled many times, diversity. Remember when it was a strength? It’s not good for any nation to be completely void of entire industries. Having factories next to the tech will germinate the thinking minds with new problems to solve.

But even more to the point. China is doing amazing things, and they were we let do the manufacturing. So we always have a strong evidence that letting others might not be the best idea.


Seems on par with Americas founding fathers…

Keep status quo should never be the goal. Politics aside you got to mix things up and potentially break things before figuring out what needs to be done to move things along on stale bloated projects, one could say the us government, and that was not even consider a political view just 10 years ago.


The status quo was working.

Randomly breaking things does not work for government policy.


Reviewing drugs for safety and efficacy is a stale bloated project?


Actually not at all like how the founding fathers went about it


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