jasaloo's comments

Sounds like you were motivated, hard-working, and played the game as best you could.

Though it sounds like you might've overlooked two of the most important ingredients entrepreneurs need when getting something off the ground:

- vast web of influential family connections - inherited wealth

Maybe go back and try it with these two?

Sure. Some people can pull that off. Doesn’t sound like OPs problem.

Also there’s a difference between over-preparing and coming in with a desperate attitude. You’re right that if you have the latter, you’re fucked. Going in with confidence, curiosity, and detachment are important too.

I find my interview anxiety is directly connected to how much sheer preparation I do. There is no substitute for this.

Spend several hours: scouring the internet for common AND uncommon interview questions. Draft strong responses to all of them. Map out your values and reasons why they are what they are. Specific professional qualities you exhibit PLUS multiple anecdotes explaining those qualities.

Then- research the damn company. Hard. Train yourself in their tone and the story they tell about themselves. WHY DO YOU WANT TO WORK FOR THEM?

Mostly importantly: Draft up thoughtful interview questions to ASK. Both general role questions and questions about the industry etc.

This takes time, and practice. But man, when you do it, you feel like a fucking boss going into an interview. And that unlocks the most important part. Mindset.

(For developers and other highly specialized roles, this isn’t exhaustive because you have steps to test your technical skills, but hopefully that helps. I gotten several jobs I’m under-qualified for by using this method)

What a delightfully garbage take!

Also:

“The defining quality of an ideologue, whether on the left or the right, is to acquire one's opinions in bulk. You don't get to pick and choose.”

PG has clearly never encountered two leftists in the same room together. We argue on critical issues more than a thanksgiving dinner table.

"It seems that most people who care already understand the high-level principals of US media propaganda manufacturing..."

Well, how do principals emerge in the first place? Often by intense research, data gathering, and sound argumentation.

I can't think of another work out there that lays this foundation like MC. If you do read it (or watch the documentary which I've heard is pretty good), you might be surprised at some of the filters that exist in the modern propaganda model. I sure was.

Anecdotally, I have plenty of well-educated friends who "care" and also consider themselves very media-literate. A lot of them also readily parrot talking points from the NY Times.

Having this body of work (which is an academic goliath, even by Chomsky and Herman's standards) is essential to critical media studies.

"Meanwhile, Amazon’s Echo and voice-assisted personal assistant, Alexa, was in an estimated 24% of US households as of the fourth quarter of 2018..."

Well that's unnerving.

did the same a while back. Though it likely doesn't change much, never hurts to tell them that this is the specific reason you're leaving.

shout out to the guy who put down two Chomsky books.

Manufacturing Consent is one of the most important works of the 20th century. You'll never read the news the same way again.

I think the ire is necessary.

The article gives a fair range of the different baseline operations and their carbon footprint. Sure the title is provocative, but it’s accurate.

And even the operation that’s still “435x less” is just under the CO2 footprint of a passenger on a transatlantic flight. That’s not insignificant at all.

The fact is that more industries are trying to get their hands on this tech, and they won’t go about self-regulating the types of energy-intensive operations they use if they think there’s profit at the end of it.

“In a new paper, researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, performed a life cycle assessment for training several common large AI models. They found that the process can emit more than 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent—nearly five times the lifetime emissions of the average American car (and that includes manufacture of the car itself).“

Can someone help me out here... this is not a charter school, correct?

"Indeed, half of Pathfinder’s inaugural class was previously homeschooled, Wilder says.

Legally, they still are. Despite its name, Pathfinder isn’t actually a school. It’s not accredited and doesn’t have a state license, which means it doesn’t have to abide by state laws on mandatory attendance and testing. It doesn’t award grades, nor will it give out diplomas should it take on high-school-age students. (It will help them create portfolios as part of their college-application process.) Instead, it’s a “homeschooling resource center,” a place that offers homeschoolers opportunities to socialize and learn in a small-scale, customizable environment. "

yes precisely my thought

I hear you. Liu's outlook is deeply pessimistic. His obvious scientific background knowledge seems to be infused with a dash of western, neoliberal ideology-- that it's just dog-eat-dog out there, and we're all in it for our own self-interest.

It's a bit ironic considering Liu is Chinese- wasn't China's Ming Dynasty the first to land on America in the early 1400s and historically demonstrate that exploration and discovery weren't necessarily accompanied by colonization/enslavement/destruction?

That example gets held up a lot when mainstream historians spin the narrative that Colombus et al enslaved/raped/pillaged because that's just what societies do (while ignoring that it was the debt that the explorers owed to their financiers that drove most of that bad behavior).

yes- I hate to nitpick with these sort of things since I really enjoyed the essay, but as a lover of Liu's series I took issue with the dark forest analogy.

I think the author was rather describing Liu's concept of a "black domain," namely "a region of spacetime in which the speed of light is lowered artificially to completely seal it off (and protect it) from the rest of the Universe." (Wikipedia)

Apart from that, really appreciated the author's ideas and using the phrase "...depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments." Spot on.

Re/ oura rings... anyone else paranoid of a private company having access to intensely personal data?

If I were an insurance company I'd be lobbying the shit out of these guys to see how much they'd charge me to get my hands on it.

(and yeah, I read Oura's privacy agreement already... was less than impressed)

"In general, Facebook candidates are asking much tougher questions about the company’s approach to privacy, according to multiple former recruiters."

That made me smile <3

"To be fair, wouldn't that suggest strong oversight might work then?"

Fair point, that might work if: 1. a public safety/citizens oversight committee does its job consistently, 2. isn't loaded with police-friendly stooges 3. and isn't gradually de-fanged over time in terms of its power.

All three things, with time, can be manipulated by any given city hall, which is often lock-step with the police force.

"...but theories need to be tested one way or another and it would provide some evidence"

Agreed. And I say let's look at how they've deployed facial recognition in China to put those theories to bed.

yeah, maybe... but the question is always 'at what cost?'

There are ways of cutting down on racial profiling that don't require turning our city into a panopticon.

"Perhaps a better argument for an early and complete local ban might be that it allows other regions to be the test subjects."

It's a valid thought, honestly. Though seeing how tightly the police hold onto this tech once they have it makes it extremely difficult to just test the waters (and also requires vigilant public oversight, which the sheriffs' associations will fight tooth and nail).

Also having cops test this tech out, knowing they're going to be deliberately monitored to how often they use it for good reasons (e.g. child abductions) vs abuse it, would probably produce incredibly biased results. Think about it-- the experiment would be entirely self-serving: cops get to trumpet that it helped them for the legit crime here and there (and sitting through public safety committees, believe me, they will TRUMPET it), while showing that zero cases of misuse happened.

Ultimately, we have to think in systems: sure, ubiquitous surveillance would undoubtedly solve the horrific crime here and there, but at what cost to who we are as people? At what cost to how we protect minorities and the undocumented? At what cost to our already eroding public trust?

Fully agree, also having multiple municipalities push through legislation like this can indicate to the state, which can take years to legislate to these issues, that there is a growing appetite.

Also- many activist coalitions will simultaneously advocate for legislation through several local and state levels. It’s actually sometimes ineffective to take the ‘one or the other’ approach.