It still is! I think getting your foot in the door is much more difficult now compared to 5-6 years ago, similar to difficulty finding entry level work in 2008-2009 financial crisis.
Market conditions aside, the points the OP blog post makes about asymmetrical value are evergreen.
"Give yourself permission" here means acknowledging you're doing a "good enough" job (for now) instead of a "perfect" job, and not beating yourself up about it in the short term. The Wiki article on self-compassion [1] has more context on the therapeutic value of practicing self-compassion and the impact on measurements of life satisfaction/happiness, curiosity, resilience, etc.
Depending on the task/behavior, you may carry the same attitude into the medium/long term, OR figure out how to course-correct medium/long term to align with your values. E.g., if one of your core values is militant conservation of water, either because it's expensive or one of the disappearing resources on Earth, you might strategize ways to conserve your energy to do the best possible dishwasher-loading job every day. That's what I was getting at when I said these type of tasks are "microcosms" because sometimes they reveal misalignment of values.
Why do you say "therapist" here (with the air quotes)?
On the other side of this argument, I've seen "just run the dishwasher twice" used as shorthand for giving yourself permission to do whatever is needed to get the job done and not letting perfectionism paralyze you from making progress.
This blog excerpt explains the idea [1]:
> Knowing this week was going to be a lot, I’ve been living by “run the dishwasher twice”. What the hell does that even mean?! Essentially it means to do whatever is the path of least resistance to get shit done. The advice came from a therapist to a woman who was feeling very low & was struggling with everyday tasks such as doing the dishes. She didn’t have the mental capacity to scrub dishes before putting them in her crappy dishwasher so she wasn’t doing them & they were building up & causing her more anxiety. Her therapist said not to rinse the dishes & just run the dishwasher twice, even three times if that’s what it took to get them clean. It was a game-changer for her, one that enabled her to do a small task in an imperfect way just to get it done.
I wish the OP article had dug a little bit deeper into the psychology behind daily task conflict in relationships. The dishwasher is one of many microcosms (laundry, car, pets, etc) that I wish I'd paid more attention to in my relationships, because these conversations really do reveal relationship dynamics around HUGE issues like compromise, empathy, perfectionism, and judgmental behavior.
Eh, if you hadn't found Stumbleupon then you would have experienced the same effect from one of the zillion other competitors in the attention economy.
You're right that this kind of novelty-seeking content has a profound impact on the brain. It's really interesting to see finally see longitudinal research, plus research on screens/novelty on child development (search for $thing + "psychosocial development").
One of the most encouraging thing I've taken away is that neutral pathways are still quite plastic well into adulthood.
For example, here's an experiment to try if you wake up and scroll in bed. After you do your morning routine, jot down a mood score (-1 feeling crummy, 0 meh neutral, +1 feeling good). You can do this for a week or two if you want to collect control data. Then, force yourself to get out of bed without looking at your phone (buy an alarm if you have too). You should see changes in your mood log within a week. Sleep regulates/replenishes dopamine levels, and scrolling through a dopamine wonderland first thing in the AM can result in dopamine dysregulation for the rest of the day. Try it!
I do this a lot; it's just nice to have some quiet companionship while working on something.
The difference between body doubling and "working in an office setting" is mutual agreement to avoid distracting each other. I usually combine body doubling with a pomodoro timer, so 25-30 minutes and then a break. This isn't conducive to deep flow work, but it's great for getting your taxes done, booking a trip, researching a dreaded thing, reviewing a PR, etc.
As an outsider looking at Microsoft, I've always been impressed by the attention to maintaining legacy APIs and backward compatibility in the Windows ecosystem. In my mind, Microsoft is at the opposite end of the killedbygoogle.com spectrum. However, none of this is grounded in real evidence (just perception). Red Hat is another company I'd put forth as an example of a long-term support culture, although I don't know if that's still true under IBM.
I'd love to know if my superficial impression of Microsoft's culture is wrong. I'm sure there's wild variance between organizational units, of course. I'm excluding the Xbox/games orgs from my mental picture.
If money weren't an object, which labs or lines of research would be the most interesting to you? Do you have strong personal preferences between university/academic research, national labs, and private/startup research roles?
Back to the reality where money is a real factor, what was the difference in compensation like? Was it like a 10x difference or closer to 2x?
I'm asking because I'm a software engineer/founder, but I stepped back from my career due to burnout. I went back to college to study physics and geek out on quantum computing, but I know it'll take grad school (likely a PhD plus postdoc) to grok the full stack. Trying to get a sense of what might be ahead of me.
I'd recommend starting with Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Isaac Chuang and Michael Nielsen ("Mike and Ike"). It's the text used in most intro courses.
There's an "Intro to Quantum Mechanics" section that covers what's strictly necessary to understand quantum algorithms.
> Internal company documents from 2019 and 2020 show thousands of reports of “serious physical assault”
> By this point, Matthews had already been reported for rape at least once to Hinge. Court documents show that he had already allegedly sexually assaulted nine women and drugged 10. Not only did the apps allow him back on, they featured Matthews’s profile.
> Match Group didn’t make it easy for the Denver prosecutors to convict Matthews. A search warrant was issued for Hinge in July 2023. Two months later, prosecutors were still empty-handed – with the judge in the case asking at a hearing whether he needed to start “dragging people in to get stuff done”. It wasn’t until February 2024 that the Denver district attorney’s office said they had finally received documents returned by Match Group.
Disgusting. I didn't see any reference to "Duty of Care" in the article, but I hope this case is used to establish precedent of holding tech companies accountable for the same "Duty of Care" standards you'd expect from a brick/mortar business.
TTS runs Cloud.gov (government cloud provider similar to AWS) and FedRAMP certification. These aren't small programs.
TTS also runs data.gov, which hosts tens of thousands of local/regional datasets. I don't think there's anything close (please correct me if I'm wrong) to providing this level of access to this kind of data. Off the top of my head, data.gov has historical tap water data, lead/toxic substance tests in public spaces (schools), EV vehicle/charging infrastructure, crime data, air quality, etc. A lot of this data is collected at the regional/state level, but data.gov warehouses it all.
LLMs that use Chain of Thought sequences have been demonstrated to misrepresent their own reasoning [1]. The CoT sequence is another dimension for hallucination.
So, I would say that an LLM capable of explaining its reasoning doesn't guarantee that the reasoning is grounded in logic or some absolute ground truth.
I do think it's interesting that LLMs demonstrate the same fallibility of low quality human experts (i.e. confident bullshitting), which is the whole point of the OP course.
I love the goal of the course: get the audience thinking more critically, both about the output of LLMs and the content of the course. It's a humanities course, not a technical one.
(Good) Humanities courses invite the students to question/argue the value and validity of course content itself. The point isn't to impart some absolute truth on the student - it's to set the student up to practice defining truth and communicating/arguing their definition to other people.
As a learning exercise, I enjoyed Neural Networks From Scratch: https://nnfs.io/
There's also a world of statistics and machine learning outside of deep learning. I think the best way to get started on that end is an undergrad survey course like CS189: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jrs/189/
Maybe I'm the outlier here, but 15 minutes to chat with a human about my use case and pricing is way more efficient than donking around in docs/trial product.
The only product I really want to punch in credit card info and GO is commodity software (e.g. AWS EC2 or a domain registration service.
I think wires sometimes get crossed in pricing/sales models, where an enterprise product gets priced like commodity software ... but that's usually a sign the company is immature. There shouldn't be a sales team for software that costs 2-3 figures. Software costing 5-6+ figures absolutely requires people in the sales/onboarding process, because a big part of what I'm paying for is support.
Are there any mechanisms to balance out the "race to the bottom" observed in other types of academic compensation? e.g. increase of adjunct/gig work replacing full-time professorship.
Do universities require staff to perform a certain number of reviews in academic journals?