291–300 of 421 posts
I don't share the sentiment here. I find the essay too long and boring. I usually enjoy reading his valuable essays but this one is too much about his life which is not that interesting to be honest, given I don't know him personally. But that's OK, not every essay needs to appeal to everyone.
Unfortunately I would have to agree. It reads like a note to self vs an essay for public consumption
> during the first year of grad school I realized that AI, as practiced at the time, was a hoax. I had a similar realization during grad school about a lot of the popular topics at the time (early 2000s). I even used to call them "the hoaxes of computer science". Things like grid computing or formal methods of software engineering had a lot of resources behind them, but nobody was able to use the results. Instead, ve…
Funny because I do have the same feeling these days: that ML is a hoax. Even funnier: I do have a master's degree in ML.
I like this as a descriptive phrase. ML won't be "intelligence" per se, but it can do repetitive tasks that otherwise required thought.
> during the first year of grad school I realized that AI, as practiced at the time, was a hoax. I had a similar realization during grad school about a lot of the popular topics at the time (early 2000s). I even used to call them "the hoaxes of computer science". Things like grid computing or formal methods of software engineering had a lot of resources behind them, but nobody was able to use the results. Instead, ve…
> the low end eats the high end: that it's good to be the "entry level" option, even though that will be less prestigious, because if you're not, someone else will be, and will squash you against the ceiling. This happens with jobs too.. especially software jobs. Nobody wants to do software QA, want to know how to get a software engineering job when the market is tight or otherwise inaccessible... software QA.
I think it's important that PG published this essay this week. And that he included projects that were wildly successful (YC) as well as projects that didn't get the traction he wanted (Bel). To me it shows two things: 1) that some of the most successful people make miscalculations about what the world needs. 2) that a few of them, like PG, are courageous enough to admit that. Personally, reading PG's essays and then…
> as well as projects that didn't get the traction he wanted (Bel) Was traction his goal? I'm not sure about that. I think the ROI on Bel is extremely high. It only looks small if you compare it to something like YCombinator.
So a weird thing is happening today. When I was a kid, like Paul, I had to beg my parents to get me a computer ie. spend money on it. Once I got it, I couldn't stop using it and hacking and figuring things out. Kids these days... :) have everything, I made sure my kids have all good equipment, they have good instruction but they are kind of not interested it all. If they do something, this is more to please me, as th…
Not a teacher, but some thoughts.
Direct "telling" of motivation, i.e. a rational explanation, doesn't necessarily achieve intuitive motivation, which is excitement, that knack for learning or doing something great; but I'm certain it's a good step. Talk to them: why should they learn things in the computer? You can make games, you can change the world (it's complicated, but it's true enough to be valid to tell children!), you can understand how nature works (when building models and simulations); you might use (increasing chance) it in most jobs you can get in the future, from a writer to financial analyst to lawyer. And motivation ought to be about taste as well -- show, and tell, how it is awesome what you can build, how it is awesome how everything works, develop their internal (intuitive) motivation and sense of beauty.
Try to get them to do it, however simple: make a tiny simple game using perhaps pygame or scratch, or draw some lines using p5.js. Let them have fun. Teach them about science and philosophy. Things will develop from there I'm sure.
Good luck!
This comment really resonated with me, I found myself in this exact situation at 25, in a "very prestigious and selective place" for AI nonetheless. It took me a couple years to realize the smart people are just playing the game, the unsuspecting losers are "playing it straight" and getting endlessly frustrated. I found my balance by, frankly, taking advantage of a system that is FUBAR. Incidentally, I also took some…
I fear I'm one of these unsuspecting losers...except I guess that comment makes me suspecting. IDK, I don't want to play the game but it only gets worse in the corporate world. I wish there was a good solution, where someone could play it straight and get rewarded justly. Your art work is beautiful by the way.
The most pure people I find are in quant finance, engaging the market at the abstract "number" level purifies everything, even if money corrupts at the individual level.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I found this essay very interesting but not very useful. I don't have trouble identifying interests, I have trouble pursuing them with the intensity of a PG. I don't mean this as a criticism at all. I don't think it would be possible to write an essay that would solve this problem.
What do you think is stopping you?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we see what we're predisposed to see in these things. When I read the essay, what stood out to me was how long he got by with almost no money. Living on $7 a day etc. If there's privilege here (and if we're using that word in something other than a Twitter putdown sense), it seems to me more more intellectual than financial. pg has clearly always been single-minded about doing what he wanted to do / was inter…
I think it’s so much more difficult these days to get significant success (jobs going away to AI, more competition, many of the low hanging discoveries and technologies being completed - I would love to make billions writing a chat app or simple CRUD database like Facebook!) that most of us are predisposed to focus on the luck part of things and not the hard work element. I agree with you - people are missing the fac…
In 1998 I wrote an IRC client for Linux/Gtk+. Really the first graphical app that wasn't Tcl/Tk or Motif based. Even back then people were saying "yet another IRC client", due to the fact that there were dozens of them around. I was often embarrassed to talk about my work because it just felt a bit lame and overdone. But in reality, I wasn't thinking big enough.
Since then: Twitter, WhatsApp, and Slack all came along and made billions. And also Line, WeChat, Snapchat, and more.
This all came after AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and others died off.
Slack was not even 10 years ago. I'm still baffled at how Slack happened. Any one of us could have created it, but did not. What you should realize is that the marketplace is fluid and changes based on technology, incumbents losing their mojo (see AMD vs Intel right now), and various other factors.
People often talk about first-mover advantage, but I've never seen the relevance. Facebook came after MySpace, Friendster, and others. MySpace was vastly more open, and yet Facebook, with their restricted profiles and limited availability eclipsed MySpace. Slack came into an environment with Skype and Hipchat. Microsoft and Atlassian both had deep pockets and first-mover advantage and couldn't win. Google was up against Lycos, Excite, Yahoo, and even offered itself up for sale to AltaVista for $1 million. But in the end they had the better tech and the better user experience.
> Working on Bel was hard but satisfying. I worked on it so intensively that at any given time I had a decent chunk of the code in my head and could write more there. I'll have to say reading this makes me feel a bit sad for pg. It seems that he worked on Bel extensively for four years, and the end result was something which appeared on the front page of Hacker News for one day and then disappeared. I haven't seen it…
If anything, Viaweb is the odd thing out, since it was pursued with the explicit intent of making money (though I expect the whole affair was fascinating from the inside anyway).
Not everything has to be evaluated in terms of its popularity, "success" or "impact".