If you want to make friends, water your friend seeds.
Everybody knows a bunch of people by name, and nothing else, from various contexts. You go to matriculation, there's a bunch of people introducing themselves, too many to get to know. You work a job, there's 50 people whose name you know. You go to a party, your friends introduce you to 10 new people, and you don't have time to talk to them all.
The ones you don't talk to much, they are your friend seeds.
You move to a new town, and you know nobody, other than that one guy you never spoke to after the first week of university. Contact that guy.
Could it be that what we called flow state was actually a sort of high level thinking time afforded by doing low level routine work?
For instance I'm the old world, if you wanted to change an interface, you might have to edit 5 or 6 files to add your new function in the implementations. This is pretty routine and you won't need to concentrate that much if you're used to it, so you can spend that low-effort time thinking about the bigger picture.
I was wondering if there's anything behind the idea that people who learned how to code before AI will become the human capital version of low-background steel.
Everyone who starts to code after AI has a problem: it's hard to believe you went through the pain and frustration that people often think is required to become a senior engineer. Even if you did, you are in a lemon market with quite a few people who took the shortcut in college. Much better to hire a guy who learned before they could cheat, and then give him the tools to replace the juniors.
I partially agree with this idea, but there will always be the Jeff Dean and Fabrice Bellard of the world... but 99% of companies won't ever get the chance to hire the top 1% of programmers. Therein is the problem. Maybe a better way to look at it is the statistical likelihood of producing good engineers and scientists goes down with AI because of poor fundamentals.
In SW this is perhaps the easiest domain to counterpunch. Get young folks learning computer history and understanding how the hardware works down to a register level. We write most software with some mental abstraction of what the hardware is actually doing. That's the crux, I believe, and if we lose widespread hardware understanding then we truly do become lost at sea, practicing the mystic art of non deterministic incantations
> How do you value people who learnt to code in the 80's, 90's or 2000's today?
Personally I rate them really really highly. They are always fascinating to talk to. But they also compete with newer cohorts who mature.
> Will new developers know/understand what they don't know, or will the new state of things simply become normalized?
Yes because a 32 year old guy with 10 years of experience who got given AI recently is going to be around for an awful long time reminding everyone that he has something the younger ones don't have.
Superficially, the article is right, intelligence services didn't get this wrong, and the administration made a bad decision despite having a good appraisal to hand.
But really, it's a values failure.
Wanting to make decisions that are good for America, and good for its friends, is a value. Putting people you are supposed to represent ahead of yourself used to be the kind of thing people would say mattered. It used to be a thing that leaders tried to demonstrate that they had carefully considered their decisions.
Once you have an administration that puts itself ahead of everything else, this whole thing makes sense.
This administration is full of insecure people who want to show how strong they are. You can see it in how they talk, and the constant stream of memes coming from the WH. It's incredibly juvenile, stuff like having Trump portrayed with a sixpack, beating up his enemies.
Strongman regimes have a tendency to try to steal the blind, to use a poker concept: bully the opposition into giving you a concession, by making super aggressive moves. Like picking pennies off a train track, most of the time you will win and the opponent will back down, EVEN if on paper the opponent tends to have the better cards, because a rational opponent will appreciate putting a lid on risk. This last bit is really important, because it means the bully learns that he can win despite rejecting advice.
So you can go around sucker punching people until it stops working, and there's a decent chance Iran is where it stops working. If it's not Iran, it will be the next thing, because they can't stop.
And to get back to values, too many Americans are unwilling to take responsibility for their country's actions. If you look at what causes discontent with the current Iran situation, it is things like gas prices. In other words, self-interest, still.
Cuba is already lined up. If they feel confident they would try on India because India often does not do what it is told. They have almost got that region under their thumb, except for India. Impressed by Srilanka though.
North Korea is another but I don't think they will dare to make that move.
I think this is being overstated by Indians who would like to think that India is more important to the US than it is; other than H1B discourse, I think the US has largely forgotten India exists.
Invading nuclear-armed India (from where?? Pakistan?) would be a completely insane thing even by Trump standards. It's a plan that disintegrates on contact with a map.
Not necessarily with invasion to start with. First would be destabilisation. It's neighbors are not doing too well lately. Many of them imploded within a short time span.
India can do what to the US with its nuke ? It's a deterrent for China.
India is weirdly more often forgotten in D.C., and almost never thought of as a threat, that framing is, as another commenter mentioned, a myth that largely propagates in India. It has recently only featured in Washington due to being a potential counterpoint to China, wherever that project is right now.
The same thing that France or Russia could do with their ballistic missile submarines. Just because the ICBMs won't reach the US doesn't mean that the ALCM and SLBMs are harmless.
They bought a few that are more silent, but their acoustic signature got acquired through intelligence/bribery operations. Quite an irreparable loss that the Indian population is not as acutely aware of.
One asset that India can threaten is Diego Garcia.
> One asset that India can threaten is Diego Garcia.
Case in point. I wouldn't expect a submarine to occupy the littorals of San Francisco, but an attack on Florida, Hawaii, or a distant base would be difficult to defend against.
Of course, such an attack is basically suicide, but still a possibility. Defensive systems like AEGIS are stretched too thin to deter a coastal attack.
You think so ? That is interesting. I am no expert though.
I expect Indian subs to be kept good track of. Threatening Florida seems a stretch. Assets in around Indian Ocean are a distinct possibility. In fact India does not need subs for that.
Everyone has forgotten ISRO. I don't see why they wouldn't be able to get a nuke into the US on a rocket, if for some reason they were mad enough to do so. But the US nuclear deterrent mostly makes that moot.
One thing that's an open pair of questions for me is: exactly how dangerous is a high-altitude EMP anyway? And do countries with nuclear weapons actually model this in war games?
I've seen it suggested that even a relatively modest HAEMP would be able to physically damage most transformers in the continental USA, necessitating replacement of all of them at the same time when they're all custom and have month-to-year lead times. No electricity, no fuel pumps, no refrigeration, in the US 90% of the population starves within a year.
The US power grid could have been defended in the decades since the March 1989 geomagnetic storm revealed such weakness, but given various evidence such as the fires in California caused by failure of century-old power lines that were well past due for repair, I doubt they have been.
What I took from the video game thing is that he thought he could fool people.
It's very obvious to gamers when someone hasn't played, it actually doesn't matter whether you have high level gear.
There's things you can't buy with money, and respect is one of them. He fundamentally doesn't understand how status works. He could, for free, just put out a video where he says "look at me, I'm a busy CEO, but I play this game even though I'm bad at it".
This is made even more interesting by the fact that musk was caught misrepresenting himself playing the computer game Diablo in the not-so-distant past. IIRC he was either buying accounts or paying someone else to stream on his behalf. [0]
As a complete aside, I beat that game along with the DLC, lvl 170 (scadu 19), all by myself, and it was by far the biggest gaming accomplishment of my life.
People who lie about things like that make me sad. It's actually a hard thing to do. Waste of time? Absolutely.
This is why I was wondering what the point was. Surely most countries will claim taxes from you if you work there, so having an Estonian entity will do little?
Can someone explain the actual benefit of sitting in a developed country and charging via Estonia?
I suppose there is one possible rather significant benefit, depending on where you live. If you're going to be an independant contractor, a freelancing "gun for hire", you may want a corporate entity to be your front: As a sole proprietor[1], you'd be personally liable for all your business liabilities -- debts, as well as, say, prosecution. A joint-stock company[2], OTOH, is a legally independent entity, that carries its own assets and liabilities independent of the stockholders. So "as a business", you'd perhaps want not to "be yourself", but rather "be" a joint-stock company.
Those can, AIUI, in many countries be hard, bureaucratic, or expensive to set up. The great advantage of Estonian "electronic residency" (again, only AIUI) is that it enables you to easily and cheaply set up an Estonian "electronic stock company", which might not be so easy and cheap where you live.
It's not just about "charging"; it's about shielding.
For customer, unless you are a true digital nomad e.g. have no residency anywhere the benefit is: none.
For Estonia who uses services like Xolo to promote this for unaware people the benefit is: money (in a form of dividend tax, e-residency registration fees and so on).
Isn't that more or less how it works? You pay tax where you live, with the justification being, as you say, that you are benefitting from the social structure there?
The big country that is an exception is the US. Their citizens have to pay tax regardless of them being elsewhere, and the difference is dealt with via various taxation treaties. I imagine the justification is something like "we help our citizens everywhere, so they owe us tax".
> I'd be interested to hear how others see it. Like I said, I haven't really thought about this too much before, and may be missing something more fundamental and obvious.
The big thing that's missing is corporations. They are imaginary entities, with a bunch of rules about what they are allowed to do, how they pay tax, etc. Once you create a corporation (or several), you can move profits around according to various accounting rules, which are often disconnected from how ordinary people interact with an entity. Are you buying coffee from Starbucks on Oxford Street, or Starbucks UK, or Starbucks Luxembourg? Most people don't think about that when they buy a coffee, but the accountants do.
You can also change what kind of tax you are paying. If you have a company, you can pay yourself a salary or a dividend. It's still money either way, but depending on jurisdiction taxed differently.
I guess the next step in this evolution is to set up controlled news sources. You get people who have an official press card to report on things as you need as part of the reporting manipulation business.
"Hey there's this newspaper that says this obscure thing happened, please resolve the bet in my favour"
Everybody knows a bunch of people by name, and nothing else, from various contexts. You go to matriculation, there's a bunch of people introducing themselves, too many to get to know. You work a job, there's 50 people whose name you know. You go to a party, your friends introduce you to 10 new people, and you don't have time to talk to them all.
The ones you don't talk to much, they are your friend seeds.
You move to a new town, and you know nobody, other than that one guy you never spoke to after the first week of university. Contact that guy.
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