Is any sizable portion of these jobs interchangeable with deep learning?
The best deep learning engineers with infinite hardware built Amazon’s recommendation algorithm, and it’s largely trash. I can’t imagine it’s magically thousands of times more capable for these other tasks.
Since I don’t live in a dangerous area or work as an MMA fighter that stuff wouldn’t help me. Frankly my opinion of what’s scary about people is self-centeredness, social connections, whether they have willingness to throw me under the bus for their benefit, etc. No help from jiu-jitsu unless it makes them bond with you. Or maybe a (my opinion) small but noticeable positive benefit looking athletic can give you.
Something I did as I did when younger that annoyed more ambitious friends: go to Wikipedia and find the incoming freshman class size for the top schools (say Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT). Add them together. Now look up the number of high schools in the US and assume there’s 1 valedictorian per school. There just aren’t enough spots to even fit them.
Now complicate things more: all the elite high schools like Groton or something are gonna be sending way more than their top 1 student to these programs.
My conclusion was that it frankly doesn’t matter how much you compete with your personal classmates unless you have some other angle.
However outcompeting your classmates might get you a full scholarship to the state flagship, which is actually massive if you don’t use it completely imprudently.
I can’t imagine any circumstance other than a Ph.D program where someone spends 5+ years studying in depth some tiny area of science and practicing research. And without doing that I’m having trouble believing almost anyone will do serious research. There are a few people who did it but to me that is extraordinarily unlikely.
As an employee I’ve felt like it’s hard in the past to take initiative and do things that aren’t immediately and clearly justifiable as strictly necessary work. Reading a book might or might not be useful but doing something boring but mandatory is certainly not slacking. With that said any time I tried to take more initiative and take more risks (while making a sincere effort to work on the thing that’s going to move the group/project forward) and then just accept correction if I make the wrong call, usually work was more enjoyable and I was more productive (by estimation of me, other coworkers, and my manager).
A function is (at least formally) a relationship between two sets of things. It doesn’t matter whether there’s any sort of algorithm that lets you input an object from the domain and calculate the corresponding image under the function, or even an approximation. This came up when we were talking about Dedekind cuts or something like that so it’s very much not pedantry at all in that sort of context.
I agree completely. The only risk is that once you get to real analysis, your prof will yell at you for mixing notions of complexity and computability into your ideas of what a function is (happened to me).
This sounds like much more of a hell than sometimes having to chat with a coworker you don’t like (judges monitoring you and punishing you if you don’t work hard enough).