21723

13 ms·

61.
by 21723 4y ago
Brutal, but not entirely false. There is something to be said for writing a book that people claim to have read, though.
62.
by 21723 4y ago
Semi-troll, semi-serious question. What keeps people from getting blurbs from people with common names that also belong to famous authors--such as Stephen King? I can't imagine it's illegal to get a blurb from Stephen A. King, sch
63.
by 21723 4y ago
I should say "are supposed to be* bestsellers. I have heard horror stories where someone gets a lead title package and the book still flops. Whether that's because of a bad book or just terrible luck, I don't know enough abou
64.
by 21723 4y ago
330 million people, plus 38 more in a neighboring country who speak the same language (and are, therefore, arguably part of the same market). Plus, people still buy books even if the readership rate is low. Mostly, though, it's our pop
65.
by 21723 4y ago
You can't compete against "New York" or "London" on locality terms. They just have so many more people in a small area; they're an implicit link farm. To build something up that can challenge the literary mains
66.
by 21723 4y ago
The biggest issue is that there are lots of writers and wannabe writers, but not very many readers in the US, not compared to other countries. (On the other hand, the US book market is huge, so we have that to our advantage.) And, for an ug
67.
by 21723 4y ago
This is just the beginning when it comes to the sausage-making that goes into "book buzz" (which is anything but organic, because the people who generate it don't actually read most of the books they're paid to talk abou
68.
by 21723 4y ago
But your point still holds truth, instead of lamenting masculinity (very few people care) perhaps "the left" should reorient itself to actually improve working conditions and most importantly wages. I largely agree. The left&#x2
69.
by 21723 4y ago
All these fields have that problem. There are people who are great at aping the signals (and even beating publication metrics) but really don't know anything. When they show up on a job, they get put into a PM (or actual management) ro
70.
by 21723 4y ago
This is because there isn't really much demand for genuinely innovative ML in the tech world. It's a third-circle nice-to-have, not part of the core business. It enables the business to say they invest in R&D (tax writeoffs, m
71.
by 21723 4y ago
They're paying for a mascot. It's a marketing expense. $1.2 million per year is nothing when one considers the increased ease of hiring young grunts who do the ugly but necessary work, and who do it well because they think that if
72.
by 21723 4y ago
In my view, AGI is farther away than fusion. We know how to do fusion. We know the physics behind it. We haven't yet figured out how to build profitable fusion plants, and we probably won't for a long time, if for no other reason
73.
by 21723 4y ago
If he's actual top talent as opposed to a poseur who's good at self-promotion, he should stay in academia for his own sake because he'll be crushed in the corporate world. Actual high IQ people get clobbered in corporate, whi
74.
by 21723 4y ago
AGI is very unlikely to happen within the next 50 years. Dangerous limited AI exists now and it's going to get worse. I don't worry about malevolent AI, because we don't even know what consciousness is, nor the limits of a (p
75.
by 21723 4y ago
AGI is very unlikely to happen within the next 50 years. Dangerous limited AI exists now and it's going to get worse. I don't worry about malevolent AI, because we don't even know what consciousness is, nor the limits of a (p
76.
by 21723 4y ago
Probably 99%. The people doing next-level stuff are largely being humored so the FAANGs can hire more early 20s grunts who think they're going to be working on ML (they won't be) or even given the time of day by leads on such proj
77.
by 21723 4y ago
As a middle-aged man who's been studying this stuff for a while, I'd like to throw in my observations. We are in a Masculine Crisis, and both men and women are suffering, because gender isn't zero-sum, and a society that dama
78.
by 21723 4y ago
Your analysis is wrong. The people with connections and serious money do not meaningfully compete against their own class (at least, they ensure that their intra-group competition does not benefit anyone outside their group). The people wit
79.
by 21723 4y ago
One of their AIs is the next YC partner--it will try to justify anything, no matter how disgusting. Q: I asked my assistant to lick my perineum and she said no, so I fired her, called everyone in Silicon Valley saying she was a bad worker a
80.
by 21723 4y ago
So then it's exactly class. The number of bargaining chips you have is approximately the number you are born with. Sure, there's some Brownian motion, but it's basically insubstantial except for lottery winners and lightning
81.
by 21723 4y ago
It's almost certainly exponential, but the rate of growth depends on a number of dynamic factors. Corrupt elites often shut growth down. It happened in China and Japan several times in the second millennium, and it's happening in
82.
by 21723 4y ago
Yeah, because fuck those workers who try to make a free market work for them once in a while. Don't they realize that market talk is only a way for their social class superiors to justify doing whatever they want, and that it isn'
83.
by 21723 4y ago
At this point, I'm surprised when other people are surprised that founders and investors work together to screw employees. "Work", in the corporate sense, is the same sort of exploitative, morally vacuous, might-makes-right d
84.
by 21723 4y ago
I don't know who he is. Should I?
85.
by 21723 4y ago
The real answer, of course, is social class. Marx was right. Investors are the bourgeoisie, and you're a proletarian whose survival needs are an exploitable resource. They don't follow the rules you do. Investors are like Ancient
86.
by 21723 4y ago
The long con of startups is that founders want you to think you're an investor--in truth, you are, because you're investing time, which ought to be more valuable than the money of people who have scads of it--and work like you&#x2
87.
by 21723 4y ago
If the investors had bought in, Episode 2 would have 60% of the investors either being made so miserable they quit, or fired "for performance" after 364 days of service ("cliff") so they get nothing--of course, even the
88.
by 21723 4y ago
I've seen this play out over and over in the corporate world--and, yes, the "educated" white-collar people are the worst; 90% of them are sheep. It's why these companies can continue to assert their own meritocracy. No o
89.
by 21723 4y ago
Recent successess of SpaceX, RocketLab etc. seem to have reinvigorated interest of the young engineering generation in space exploration to a degree unseen in the 1990s. Working on a Mars rocket is much cooler than working on user tracking
90.
by 21723 4y ago
Whatever Agile was, it's absolute garbage these days. It largely exists to hold developers maximally accountable to the business, at the expense of technical excellence or even maintenance, which can be expressed in its gun-language of

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