The fast.ai courses are exceptionally good for getting started and learning the concepts, but, once you've mastered an intuitive understanding of the techniques, I highly encourage people to dig deeper into the concepts - specifically, reverse SDEs, stochastic calculus, optimization, score matching.
Jeremy does an excellent job making the content approachable, but, if you want to go beyond being an excellent practicioner, you cannot skip the theory bits.
I completely agree re: Potemkin village tour of recruiting, but, those townhalls are not a window into company culture at all exactly because they get leaked.
The only way to get a candid view into company culture is to have insider friends that can tell you what it's really like to work there.
It's a vicious cycle, but, every time one of these internal town halls gets leaked to the internet, the execs lose the ability to speak candidly, and the workers feel like execs are completely aloof and detached from the reality on the ground.
Unfortunately, it's incredibly difficult to maintain a certain level of trust once an org gets over a certain size.
Some VCs were definitely better than others: the very worse was probably the All In Crew who were trying to spread a bank run to tie the government's hand. Truly despicable.
I absolutely think that depositors should be made whole - and - they will.
At the same time, I think a lot of the VCs who systematically talked shit about government regulations while trying to shill crypto as a solution should very publicly eat crow. I won't lie: it will give me a great deal of personal satisfaction, but, it will also make any "bailout" (or, whatever you want to call it ) a much easier lift politically.
Absolutely: the challenge is that any signal that you use to identify "good websites" from "bad websites" will be adversarially optimized by incredibly motivated people.
You are dealing with a moving target that has a huge financial incentive. It's a very difficult problem.
I distinctly remember a prescient thread from Yishan Wong (former Reddit CEO) about how trying to run Twitter would break Musk - and - it looks like it was spot on.
He paid 44 billion dollars to be a mod - I hope he is getting his money's worth.
Beyond the criticism of the format, I found the explicit clout chasing to be completely offputting, and I think I used Clubhouse a grand total of 3x before never turning it on.
I would genuinely love to read an anthropologist dive into what causes social networks to take that turn. At its best, Twitter is full of smart nerdy people talking about science, mathematics, history, etc..
Clubhouse feels like LinkedIn, completely detached from resumes, so everyone wanted to post thinkpieces without being in any way tethered to their concrete achievements.
I wish this was on the GoodNotes/SublimeText model: pay once for a premium version of the app, and then never worry about subscriptions. The moment something requires subscription my threshold for buying it goes up 1000 fold.
I know that Apple is incredibly secretive about their launches, and I'm not surprised that carries over to their internal culture, but, I'm incredibly skeptical of stories told from the point of view of an HR person that has every single incentive to hype up their revolutionary new process that unleashed productivity and improved morale.
Every single time I read a similar story and I had first or second hand knowledge of how things actually played out, the role of the person telling the story was massively stretched out.
I agree with your first point: 24 out of 394 is too many for my taste, but, given how hyped the sector is, it’s not a huge amount.
Per the second point, I actually completely disagree. I think there’s huge social dynamics in play that make it harder to move away from proof of work because miners have massive amounts invested into mining equipment. We might see Ethereum move to PoS eventually (maybe) - but - that will be in spite of social dynamics and because some of the leaders are stubbornly trying to do the right thing.
What a disappointment, so many NFT/crypto companies. Given current blockchain technology, this is something that straight up makes the world a worse place by making existing processes significantly more carbon intensive.
I would consider working in crypto to be the equivalent of working for Juul or a tobacco company. Not quite as evil as working for a company that provides spyware that's used against human rights activists, but, the rung above that.
I'm a bit torn: I see the potential for civil liberties abuse, but, one of the things I loathe the most about American culture is how entitled 'consumers' feel towards treating workers that are serving them. I feel that the mistreatment of airport staff is that kind of behaviour taken to extremes- and it's something I'd like to see utterly crushed.
I think the complaints about SEO spam are valid - but - I think msweibel and pg misdiagnose the challenge. The challenge is that you are dealing with an adversarial system, and, the better your search engine is, the more widely used it becomes, the more valuable it is for your adversaries to find ways to game your rankings.
Any new niche search engine will go through a small window of time where they have the luxury that none of the sites they are indexing are spending all their effort trying to reverse engineer your signals, and optimize against them. I'm incredibly skeptical that they can remain useful once people all the SEO efforts of various marketers start to be turned against them.
Reading that story, I wonder where hustle culture went wrong. Paul Graham famously celebrated "breaking the rules" (http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html) - but - this is a crazy ratchet.
I really hope that this behaviour doesn't become any more normalized than it already has. Success is not worth anything, and, while some rules may be pointless, not every rule (and norm) is an obstacle you have to hack around on your way to success.
Really exciting work: could you make it easier to find peer reviewed studies (or even better, ongoing clinical tries) that critically evaluate your product on the webpage?