"People in other places are not saints. You might get cheated, swindled, or taken advantage of. Paradoxically, the best way to avoid that is to give strangers your trust and treat them well. Being good to them brings out their good. If you are on your best behavior, they will be on their best behavior. And vice versa. To stay safe, smile. Be humble and minimize your ego. I don’t know why that works everywhere in the world—even places with “bad” reputations—but it does."
This just got me! Its so true. That's been my experience too.
I think we are applying the wrong model here. We should not try to force-fit an app store model. A more applicable model is that of a decentralized internet and intranet. As in the case of intra-net, even though there were no visible benefits to the end-user, it did help the business itself improve margins by making information broadly available. Then just like the internet I would see these AI optimisations to work with one another Ex: It's totally possible that a model from Amazon and DHL talk to each other to optimize package delivery given a constraint like a truck parked on a loading dock and unable to move.
#1 Just like the intranet there are a lot of productivity gains that firms like Tesla, Meta, Google and Amazon can gain internally by optimizing their own workflows. That in itself should justify the investment. Granted some of these optimisations will use their own chips instead of Nvidia, but Nvidia will get a lion-share of this.
#2. Then there are other verticals - pharma, oil and gas, logistics who can optimize their internal workflows to gain productivity. It just helps them improve their margins. No end user benefit may be realized and that’s fine.
#3. Nation states are buying GPUs too. Ex: Falcon2 was trained on a cluster owned by a middle eastern country. Nation states see something larger at stake here than just releasing an app. This does not have to even be a profitable endeavour.
This I think is confined to 21st century western world. Asia (India + China largely) on the other hand is seeing a reverse phenomenon where the next generation frequently end up being more wealthy than their parents and grandparents.
Thank you for bringing this clarity. And as an Indian citizen I am glad we took this step towards building an independent payments infrastructure, given how critical a payments clearance system is to the functioning of a modern economy.
I don't want other governments to hold us hostage through Visa's and Mastercard's where we are just one sanction away from economic meltdown. Just like what happened recently in Russia.
As a country we should be looking at securing other such critical support systems - Power control systems, Telecom hardware etc. That's the only way IMO to be truly independent!
> Which non-Western countries are competing on creativity?
As I see it, Asian economies like India, China, Japan, South Korea offer a reasonable competition to Western economies today.
1. Samsung is a very viable competitor to Apple in hand held + wearables creative space.
2. Indian fin-tech solutions IMO today are some of the best in the world. All I need is a phone to shop for things (from buying a car to paying for parking) and have not used a credit/debit card for a year now (I live in India). Same in Indian edu-tech space. A lot of kids have quit school and are learning at home. Full time. I have not seen this happen anywhere before.
3. Toyota's are way more reliable than BMW's, Audi's and Ford's.
4. TSMC vs Intel is another good example.
I foresee a lot of innovation happening in Asia right now to go global in this and next decade.
I am someone who has a masters degree and I have taken Distributed systems, Computer Architecture and Advanced Algorithms at Bradfield. In my experience, I would rate Bradfield better than a master degree for these reasons -
1. Was more relevant and practical. It was taught by people who have worked building real things in the real world.
2. Better ROI on time spent learning. In about 8 weeks (roughly 2 hours every week) and some self study I had the confidence to apply the learnings and continue learning more. Time comes at premium to me as I am working full time and have a family to take care of
3. Cheaper than a university course. It costs 2k USD roughly for a course.
During the same time, I also tried OMSCS from GATECH. I felt I got way more from these Bradfield's courses by spending less time and money than OMSCS as well. That said, its just me and YMMV.
Thank you for building it! This is super useful. I have always been frustrated with not having access to a clean calendar, given that I use mac os (for personal stuff) and windows (for work). Apple built-in calendar app and Outlook calendar for Windows are too clunky to use. cal -y is convenient if you have a terminal window open, which I often don't have . Most of the times when I need to do something with the dates I am on my browser and what you have built comes in handy.
+1. I was on H1B Visa for a decade (6 + 4). Worked at Amazon (AWS networking) for 5 of those years and changed jobs 4 times in those 10 years. I honestly loved working at Amazon, job was challenging, learnt so much because people around me were incredibly smart, and this job practically gave me a career. I moved back to India last year though and now given the cost of living here, I don't have to work if I don't want to for the rest of my life.
That's an interesting perspective. I have never found him arrogant. May be I have not watched the video clips or read tweets that you were exposed to. He does have a counter intuitive take on things, but don't think that come off as arrogance (to me). I have always appreciated the clarity of thinking he has on issues. The way he answers 5 "why"'s questions related to wealth and happiness amazes me. Have learnt so much from Naval's videos and tweets over the years.
Thats right. Majority of the problems here are from re-zoning agricultural land into an industrial one. If you build your manufacturing unit in an existing industrial area you can skip a lot of this type of paperwork.
> If there's a constant small probability of injury per item packed, then of course doing twice as much work per work day, will lead to twice as many injuries per employee per work day
This assumes injury-risk is a linear function of number of items packed. That's not true. Fatigue increases injury-risk - that is how tired you and your entire team is while performing the task. If the person sorting the packages up the line is tired and making mistakes, the person binning it is more prone to mistakes, leading to an injury. In summary, there is a "fatigue-threshold" after which injury-risk increases non-linearly (say exponentially) with every item packed.
This will also incentivize firms to consider running teams from countries like Ireland, Canada (less restricted on immigration) and India (labor rich). It's also a shot in the arm for remote "work from anywhere".
Higher the wage in US, greater the incentive for a firm to do these things.
Book - Range by David Epstein - covers this topic really well. The book shows how expanding into neighboring areas increases your performance in your chosen field itself.
I agree that is a concern with a US centric team. Imagine a globally distributed team - 3 engineers are in Asia pacific region, 2 in Europe and 2 in US. Everyone in the team is equally affected by timing constraints and language barriers, so it becomes more palatable. And in such a world even the notion of coming to US and working on an H1B visa does not exist.
This will fuel the "remote anywhere" trend that's already underway. If a H1b engineer in US suppresses wage growth, wait until the same engineer can do the work for 1/3rd the cost from his own country, especially when everyone in the team is remote.
This article feels like a vindication of sorts, for my own speed reading experience. Years ago, I read a book on speed reading, and just as we think everything that is in a book must be written by an expert, starting adopting the techniques without second guessing it. Blamed myself for not being smart enough for loosing comprehension when these techniques have obviously worked for everyone else. Reading this is somewhat liberating.
This just got me! Its so true. That's been my experience too.