Others have talked very well about the concept of self, so I won't. I just wanted to add that we feel like there should be some meaning to our lives, make an impact that will be remembered for a long time. Sure, fine things to pursue but it's good to do so dispassionately keeping in mind that far greater achievers are not generally remembered. From the top of mind, I don't know who invented the safety pin or stickers or tshirts or ruled notebooks.
I take comfort in participating in this huge system of life and death and in knowing that billions have lived ordinary lives and died. I don't dye my hair and don't ignore signs of aging. I'm happy to grow older and retire and reduce my needs and spend more time with friends and family and when I die I'll join the legion of billions of decent, hardworking, perfectly ordinary people. It's a fine group to be part of.
I would say don't let the hype bring you down. A very large general solution can never suit every single use-case that exists out there. In fact, you should think about bringing in an LLM-based solution as well. If you can't beat them, join them.
Show your customers where traditional ML beats LLMs hands down.
People are using LLMs as a hammer for everything. That hype will die down.
Find out how to run unit tests in your project and then find interesting unit tests to run. Set break points preferably at some launch points of your code and debug through unit tests. The process will take you through relevant parts of the code, the decisions being made etc.
This method has also worked for me when building features in a large codebase. Write a unit test first and then keep checking where the code breaks and fix those until your test succeeds. This is effectively TDD. Note that you might have to refactor the code for better design but it gets you started towards understanding the flow.
People that do not work in tech do not follow tech news closely. They are happy to use Facebook for the social features it offers. They wouldn't have heard of problems with Cambridge Analytica, hearings in the Senate, tech over-reach etc. I can imagine it is fulfilling to work for Facebook because regular users like Facebook.
If someone cares to fix problems with social media, then it makes sense to do it from inside as well as outside.
I agree you did not mention tech. That was my secondary observation regarding the overall issue.
Your original comment reads:
> African Americans are 13% of the US Population. Isn't it reasonable to aspire to have at least 13% of African American staff (proportionally adjusted per state/city populations)?
Your thought experiment does not apply here because it assumes the same percentage of every population desires the same career. That need not reflect what we see in the real world. What if 50% of one race and 10% of another desires a specific career, the outcomes will reflect those numbers.
Again, you are ignoring the statement regarding people's interests and who they consider role models and what they consider as rewarding. In a world of equal opportunities, humans are still the variables, they will choose what they like. If there is a systemic problem that prohibits a certain race from reaching their aspirations, that is abominable and should be cut out.
The tech population need not reflect a similar proportion ever. It depends on people's individual interests, who different cultures follow as role models etc.
This question somehow only arises in tech. No one cares about making races equitable in other industries as much. What about farming? Or similar proportion of dentists, farmers, chess players?
It's not reasonable to use the general population as the reference. Should NBA players' races reflect the general population's? There are better references like the number of African Americans graduating with computer science degrees. And if that number is low, that's the one to boost.
No one has talked about An Artist of the Floating World here. I'll try without giving too much away and taking away the potential enjoyment of someone who could read it in future.
So much of what we read, fact and fiction, stands on the foundation of an omniscient first- or third-person narrator. We do not even think of questioning what the narrator tells us. Even mystery or suspense stories only hide a secret with the protagonist "peeling an onion" to find answers progressively. Deceptive incidents, the doubts of the detective, inconsequential objects, descriptions of crime scenes serve to distract us and we know we are being distracted and it is part of the game.
But unreliable narrators are a different beast altogether. As the story progresses, there are hints of doubt created in our minds regarding description of events, feelings of characters, gaps in some story lines which we hope will be reconciled later (and which are). A great author can do this so subtly that if you do not follow along closely it is easy to miss or, worse, mistake this to be a problem with the author's storytelling.
Fight Club is one such story. It is non-linear which serves to disorient the reader and at the end we realize the narrator was also unreliable. There are sentences like "Today I almost ate Marla's mother" and we are left wondering what that means until a few paragraphs later it is revealed. The non-linearity masks the narrator's reliability. The book is well-done even though the story-telling is . But you have to read An Artist of the Floating World to see what a master can do with ordinary events, conversations, descriptions of places by (someone who we will later in the story consider as) an unreliable narrator. Stories like these serve as a reminder that every one sees the world differently. We consider others unreliable while forgetting that everyone sees what they want to.
This is not a serious article. There are many topics they could have discussed in depth but the biggest miss for me is that they did not talk about human psychology. Human brains are not evolved to handle a million years of noise and notifications. There would be an incalculable amount of damage to a person's personality from all the ups and downs and vagaries of life.
So many of our physiological systems and the way our consciousness works will have to change unrecognizably that the being that exists after these transformations can no longer be called human. If a thing thinks, it will be finite and want to be.
It is fine to be interested in many things and to not to know everything about those things deeply. It is a matter of time. It is highly likely that if you put in another 10 years in this industry you will know far more about most things in your list.
It is a sign of open-mindedness to be interested in many things. It is a sign of maturity to narrow that list down to pursue them a bit more deeply, then discard what turned out to be not so interesting and pick new ones. The idea is to remember nothing is a waste of time - worst-case, you learn something about yourself while you were pursuing what turned out to be uninteresting for you.
I think of knowledge in terms of concentric circles, rings on a tree if you will. You start from the core and every month or <pick your own timescale>, you keep strengthening that foundation on topics you chose. You might choose an end-to-end project: data in a nosql db, expose that with a rest service, write a react frontend to consume that data. You can do this superficially without knowing what is REST or deeply about React. But if these topics interested you after the first project, you can do the same project in a better way the second time and so on...
Again, many things are a matter of time and if you try to rush them and try to be an amazing engineer in a very short time, it might lead to exhaustion. Reading Hacker News might make you feel people are doing amazing things - but remember at some point in time, those amazing people chose something, one thing, and pursued it. And for every person that's doing an amazing thing, there are ten who are in the process of slowly making progress.
https://www.aldaily.com - I've been going here for more than fifteen years now. It's a great way for me to keep in touch with the literary world both contemporary as well as classics.