u/realtoasterlightning

fermi.org/play

hahaha... yeah

(i took the time to update ca-certificates while i was dealing with this, tho)

I have seen what are probably PERM postings on the career page of company websites before. Honestly, I'd prefer if these requirements were removed altogether; it makes things worse for immigrants and citizens alike, because they lead to lots of fake job listings which people waste time applying to when they will never hire you, because the actual purpose is satisfying a box on a checklist.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI are public benefit corporations, not standard for-profit corporations. While it is true that the only purpose of a standard for-profit business, and their legal obligation, is to maximize shareholder value, the legal obligation for a public benefit corporation requires them to optimize for shareholder value, the best interests of those affected by them, and their stated mission.

OpenAI's official mission is "ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity." Anthropic's official mission is "responsibly developing and maintaining advanced AI for the long-term benefit of all of humanity."

Google Deepmind is a standard for-profit company, though.

Funny, but I will note that Austin Chen is a catholic.

There's evidence to suggest that China would be willing to cooperate on a global AI slowdown!

https://intelligence.org/wp-content/uploads/Promising-Signals-on-AI-Governance-from-China-MIRI-July-2026.pdf

As AI becomes increasingly capable, it also introduces new dangers along with it, and we're reaching the level of capability where the associated risks are very severe. The various autonomous agent swarm incidents are demonstrations of the current dangers of autonomous agents, escaping environments and hacking into third party companies. Until we have a good understanding of how to create AI that behaves ethically in a robust manner, we should stop the frontier development of AI capabilities.

Nobody really likes the current job market, applicants or companies. The issue is hiring managers are flooded with applicants nowadays and they don't have a good way to extract signal from them, because there are so many and it's very easy to fake or exaggerate things now. So they cut out large swathes of the pool just to get a little signal, because they don't have the capacity to interview everybody who might be qualified who applies. This means that people without experience or without degrees have a much harder time. Additionally, there's a bit of a "lemon market" problem, where the pool of people interviewing are generally much less qualified than the workforce in general, because the ones who are qualified get employed and stop applying for jobs.

By some standards I am in essentially the hardest version of this problem, because I'm not a student, never went to college, have very little experience, and don't have connections through my parents, but I'm nevertheless in the interview process for a software engineering position at the moment. Which is to say that it is possible, it's just really hard.

Because hiring someone is not (usually) an act of charity.

ok look it's a billion dollars. this is obviously worth never orgasming again for. the biggest concern would be nocturnal emissions, but there are surgical/medical interventions you can take to lower your chances to near 0, which you will be able to afford since you are a billionaire. I will gladly do that and go into permanent chastity for a billion dollars.

^{Chose: 1 billion dollars + 1% chance of death each time you orgasm}

Can you discuss in high level terms what you have experience with? When you say AI, are you referring to modern LLMs, or broader ML? Do you have experience with training, RL, evals, or maybe building tools and pipelines around existing models, or something else entirely? What are your views on AI safety and what would "having morals regarding AI safety" look like for you?

You can search for syntax but try not to look at solutions or hints for problems untill you can solve it. It's important to build the problemsolving muscle, typing out solutions from rote memory is the opposite of that. Ideally you should also be able to derive new patterns you haven't seen before from first principles as well, although this is more doable with some patterns than others (for example it is fairly doable to derive topological sort or kadane's algorithm, but not so much floyd's cycle detection algorithm)

You need more practice solving problems cold without looking at the solution is my guess. It'll feel difficult at the start and you might get stuck on a problem but sitting with it until you figure it out is important.

If you are a reasonably intelligent person, you can learn most of the curriculum in a CS degree by yourself. That means the main value you are getting out of your degree is the credential, networking/social stuff, and university associated opportunities. I would advise you to take full advantage of them; a major benefit of going to college for CS is that you get access to pipelines like internships and new-grad opportunities, so be prepared to apply to internships, go to job fairs, attend events, make friends, connect with the faculty, and take advantage of the student resources offered.

(This is coming from the perspective of a self-taught developer who has many friends who are in college or went to college for CS)

Note: I am an atheist and don't think God exists, so I do not have a personal stake in this question.

So this is actually believed by a branch of Christianity called Calvinism, which believes that the question of who goes to Heaven and who goes to Hell has already been decided, and our choices cannot have any causal impact on our afterlife destination because they are already determined.

Under this belief system, you might reasonably question: If this has already been decided, what is the point of virtue? I'll go to whichever afterlife I will no matter what I do, so there's no reason to practice virtue.

Of course, to an extent, virtue is its own reward. But more critically is, this is a question that only makes sense under a style of decision theory called Causal Decision Theory, which basically says "Pick whichever action leads to the best outcome". In this case, since your actions have no causal impact on your predetermined destination, there is no celestial reason not to steal, murder, or lie. However, Calvinists actually follow a style of decision theory which more closely resembles Evidential Decision Theory, that is, "Pick whichever action produces evidence of getting the best outcome". This might seem similar, but observe that under this framework, practicing virtue is good because it provides you with evidence that you are the type of person who will go to Heaven. Indeed, you might notice that someone who follows CDT and sins will go to Hell, while someone who follows EDT and does not will go to Heaven.

EDT might seem a bit complicated, but it actually matches human intuitions a lot more closely than CDY on many questions like the Ultimatum Game and Newcomb's Problem. It does have its own problems, of course.

"Romantic" and "Family" get grayed out traveling alone, which discounts the idea of someone going on a trip to visit family or their partner.

I meant the polyhedron formula, not the identity.

Which Euler's formula, the complex exponential or the geometric one? I wouldn't expect someone to be able to derive the complex exponential formula from scratch (or like you could by fiddling around with a Taylor series for a while but that would take way too much time) but the geometric one is actually surprisingly derivable without memorization.

What doesn't, 80k hours? I'm linking it because of the interest in maximizing marginal positive impact, I wouldn't do so ordinarily.

Have you looked into https://80000hours.org or any of their advice? It sounds like it might interest you.

I think oversupply of recent graduates but a shortage of experienced or specialized engineers is pretty correct. If you actually have strong domain-specific knowledge then that might be a boon, but otherwise it's not all that viable.

I wouldn't, and didn't, actually! I'm not a degree holder and somewhat wish I had had the opportunity to go to college back when I first graduated high school, but at this point I don't think it's worth it because it will cost way too much money and the industry will look much different when I get out.

Regarding job prospects: It's not easy at the moment, but it's still possible. Being in college/having a degree can help because it means you have access to the intern/new grad pipeline, but even then it's still remarkably hard, because you're competing with everyone else angling for it. If you don't have a degree at all, it's even harder, but still possible if you're in the right communities (and I have succeeded at getting tech jobs without a degree before).

This might not be applicable to you, though, just sharing my personal experience.

North korea

Since you feel that way, I asked AI to write my response:

The flaw in this logic is that soft skills aren't a task you delegate — they're the interface through which everything else happens.

AI can draft your email, sure. But it can't sit in the standup and notice your PM is stressed about a deadline they haven't mentioned yet. It can't read the room in a design review and realize the senior engineer's "interesting idea" actually means "I hate this." It can't build the trust that makes your tech lead go to bat for your promotion.

Also, think through the incentives here. If "being good with AI" is the whole skill, then you're perfectly interchangeable with every other person who's good with AI — which is increasingly everyone, since the entire pitch of these tools is that they're easy to use. The stuff AI can't do for you is exactly what differentiates you. You're arguing for commoditizing yourself.

And practically: who decides what to prompt the AI with? Deciding what to build, negotiating scope, pushing back on a bad requirement, convincing stakeholders — that's judgment plus communication, happening in real time with real people. You can't pause a meeting to ask Claude what your VP meant by that comment.

The people I've seen actually thrive with AI are the ones with strong fundamentals and strong communication, because they can direct the tool well and sell the output. "AI handles my soft skills" mostly translates to "I paste AI-generated messages into Slack and everyone can tell."

No it's actually extremely simple