egocodedinsol

I’ve worked trades. I loved a lot about it! But I’m so glad this article pointed out the range of status: not all trades, or roles within one are equal. If you are an incredible welder who can run a perfect seam every time you can command a huge salary. For the rest of the welders it is quite different. If you can handle customers and a crew you can run a quite lucrative electrician shop, for the rest of construction it is quite different. Repeat.

I’m not saying it should be that way, but people need to be clearheaded that a top blue collar job is not as easy as showing up. There are real performance differentiators - reliability, judgement, skill, etc - and the numbers touted often belong to the top performers.

And anyone who thinks office politics go away in a family owned shop is extremely naive. Nepotism is default (and frankly reasonable. Why wouldn’t someone leave their business to their daughter if they were interested?). Large places are like that, too. Someone on a union job asked me point blank who I knew, the implication being that I’d have to know someone to get hired on.

I loved the camaraderie, being on the move, and building something physical. But it wasn’t a nice relaxing stable existence, either.

“a more user security-conscious LLM is a good idea. I don’t know why it needs to be wrapped in novel-lengths of LOTR quotes and Sci-fi speculation” <-> “This post is like the ultimate expression of the idea that the only valuable thing writing has to offer is information, and not personal experience, poetry, advice, humor, etc“

Hired hands, serfs, migrant workers had all of that and more for most of human history.

Yeah I’m checking - I saw several other oncologists suggesting song a separate discussion.

I'll grant that we could send humans to mars sooner if we really wanted to. My point is that not achieving a bigger dream doesn't make current progress a hype wave followed by a winter.

And "LLM's just make plausible looking but incorrect text" is silly when that text is more correct than the average adult a large percentage of the time.

this attitude is so ridiculously disingenuous. Surely if a computer can score incredibly well on math olympiad questions, among other things, "a computer can make plausible-looking but incorrect sentences" is dismissive at best.

I have no idea about AGI but honestly how can you use claude or chatgpt and come away unimpressed? It's like looking at spaceX and saying golly the space winter is going to be harsh because they haven't gotten to Mars yet.

What nonspecific advice do you have for immigrants who want to (co)found companies but are on h1b’s or student visas?

they didn’t submit it here - I’m not sure they bear a responsibility to make sure their work is accessible to HN or any other target audience. If you don’t find an otherwise respectful and substantive blog post useful, perhaps best to leave it be.

An unsophisticated person looks at this and says golly I better get tan!

A somewhat sophisticated person says something like the above.

People who change the world will wonder there’s something there. especially given the sober and candid examination of possible confounding factors and mechanisms of action.

“There are approximately seven scanners per million inhabitants and over 90% are concentrated in high-income countries. We describe an ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner that operates using a standard AC power outlet and is low cost to build.”

This is fantastic. What a sentence to get to write.

> There are few good passive investments right now. There's so much capital available in search of returns that all the good ones and most of the mediocre ones have been taken.

This is one of the more insightful comments in this thread. The risk is not merely that Sam’s investments are not diversified, it’s that Sam has competition from more sophisticated capital. Truly passive investments often scale (and get more passive with scale). That scale attracts a lot of capital that can afford lower revenue, higher risk, and better expert knowledge.

This comment may be unpopular because it's not tremendously useful.