I think his idea of taxing AI tokens would do more harm than good. It would only make AI more expensive, which would create the exact inequality effect that he is trying to prevent.
I had the same thought as PG (although I'm considerably older than 17). The playing field in software development has been leveled by AI, which led me to wonder how you can get ahead of the curve. My current answer is to understand both AI and data intensive systems at a deeper level than 90%+ of people.
For the AI part, I recently started working through this CMU course on Modern AI which teaches you how to build an LLM from scratch. It was posted on HN a few months ago and has been great:
https://modernaicourse.org/
If anyone has other recommendations for beginners, please share them!
Obviously a lot of depression is genetic or due to some unfortunate life circumstance. It's got nothing to do with intelligence.
But what I've also noticed is that a lot of people with unbalanced lifestyles end up becoming depressed.
For example, they might have a habit of going to bed at weird inconsistent times, wake up late, eat junk food, not regularly exercise or go to the gym, etc.
Someone with that lifestyle is much more likely to become depressed compared to someone who sleeps 8 hours a night, wakes up at a reasonable time every morning (i.e. 5am - 8am), has a stable job, and exercises regularly.
Humans are built for routine. Drifting away from that is unnatural.
Have you thought about whether this is kind of backward? It is possible that having a certain genetic predisposition makes it easy or difficult to stick to a good routine.
I see this in myself: No matter what I do I find it very difficult to stick to one routine day after day after day. I just kind of get extremely bored with it quickly. I know my life would probably me noticeably better with more routine, but I'm just not wired that way.
I do have a lot of creativity and a strong analytical mind, so maybe that's the price I have to pay for that.
Long story short: people are wired very differently from each other.
> But what I've also noticed is that a lot of people with unbalanced lifestyles end up becoming depressed.
This may be backwards in many cases from what you are thinking.
> For example, they might have a habit of going to bed at weird inconsistent times, wake up late, eat junk food, not regularly exercise or go to the gym, etc.
People with executive disfunction disorders (ADHD, Bipolar, etc) are going to have massive problems with procrastination which causes stress. The stress causes them to worry. The worry and procrastination prevent them from going to sleep. The lack of sleep causes their body to search out junk food (also because it's quick and easy). The regular exercise part is another routing thing.
And depression can cause reduced energy levels and procrastination that leads them to missing the gym and then the shame cycle.
One thing I've been thinking about recently is whether being open source is good or bad for security.
Open source obviously makes software more auditable, but in an age of LLMs whose intelligence is increasing at an exponential rate, it also makes it much easier to find and exploit vulnerabilities.
For example, had ColdCard (the other hardware wallet that got hacked) been closed source, it would have been much more difficult to exploit the randomized number vulnerability that the attacker used to get the private keys.
Maybe the answer (at least in this case) is somewhere in between where most of the thing is open source, but the parts that deal with creating the sensitive data are kept closed source.
Agreed. It's not just a reduction in size, but a reduction in general quality. For example, my preferred NIVEA roll-on deodorant used to come in a glass bottle and now it comes in a plastic one.
I suspect shrinkflation has a lot to do with inflation. Companies degrade the quality of their products to preserve their margins which are being eaten up by inflation.
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