complexmango

How soon will we be able to run a GPT4 level LLM on a MacBook, with acceptable latency? 2025?

Astounding to see racism and ignorance represented as virtue signaling so blatantly!

Are you aware that the majority of STEM seats in Indian colleges are set aside for either affirmative action for ‘lower’ castes (itself an arbitrary criteria) and women?

The average man in India is competing for approx 10% of college seats!

And saying an Indian STEM degree is worth millions in lifetime earnings reveals even more ignorance - outside of a handful of colleges, the India higher education system is considered woefully inadequate, underfunded, pumping out graduates who only succeed out of personal initiative.

Every major corporation in India essentially has a retraining program to actually teach what’s necessary for work. The worker training issue is one of the top challenges faced by businesses there.

Perhaps it’s time you described your own ethnicity and background etc. Let’s learn a little more about where your biases flow from.

If you actually grew up in India in the time period of the OP, or knew anything about it other than nonsense in woke publications, you would feel ashamed for your tone and envy and render a sincere apology to the OP.

This reminds me of all the educationally highly credentialed people I knew confidently predicting in 2016 that Trump would jail all democrats, declare martial law, and ‘women would be raped in the streets’.

I would recommend looking up American history, in the 70s, 50s, 20s, 1800s etc. Today is a milder form of the political polarization that is endemic to America, and ironically America’s strength.

If there was a betting market on a theocracy, I would bet the house in the opposite direction, but frankly so would everyone.

Relax and enjoy the weekend, America is going to remain America for a long, long time.

How would you explain affirmative action on the basis of race today, in this context?

And guess what has ZERO effect on pollinators? CO2. The only ‘pollutant’ ESG scores and activists harp about. Why? To distract from real polluting chemicals that cost a lot more to remove from our environment. Don’t even get me started on microplastics and its impact on the endocrine system of every animal, not just humans.

Its fascinating to observe people believing that mega-corporation and paid-politician promoted value systems are looking out for the interests of you and me.

Are you also going to prohibit your kids from riding in a car because the chances of a traffic accident are non zero?

Asking because kids 1-4 are being hospitalized for COVID at the rate of 1.6/100,000, deaths are at 2/1,000,000 and traffic accident mortality is 11/100,000.

https://emilyoster.substack.com/p/covid-risks-for-small-chil...

https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...

I’m from India, and have plenty of family and friends there in close contact, and I have literally never heard of anything as ridiculous as this yet. No idea why this is a top voted comment.

People don’t acknowledge ‘a weird sort of spirituality to atheism’ because it’s an absurd concept.

Because spirituality is born from spiritual experiences, not religious theory. Atheism, on the other hand, is a belief system.

It’s like sex - talking about it is quite different from experiencing it.

If Christianity doesn’t help you, that’s alright. There’s a ton of Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists, Zen practitioners who have a radically different approach than ‘The Book’. And there’s also psychedelics for a taste of what’s out there.

I have a computer science degree but I still find it strange that anyone doesn’t find life an unfathomable mystery.

For example - do you know who you are? Ie who is the ‘you’ that experiences the world? Have you ever looked inside?

We began algebra in 5th grade in India. In much humbler circumstances.

Luckily, our teachers made it clear that math was about effort, not skills, talents, or parents.

We were all expected to practice a lot of math, including algebra, until we figured it out.

And it worked - the ‘gifted’ students needed less practice, everyone else needed more practice. But by 6th grade, everybody passed algebra and figured out the basics. By 9th grade, when we were doing pre-Calc, it was unthinkable that someone in our class couldn’t do algebra.

Applying ‘Social Justice’ to math is simply the continued dumbing down of California. To what end, I can’t figure out.

If only epidemiologists had such humility

Love the wink-wink nudge-nudge hint towards violence typical of the radical left, the planet over. The US is full of refugees from places that fought for 'workers rights' with 'rifles and multicultural unity' and never recovered. Check out all of South America, and even India, former USSR, China, etc.

Employment in the US is totally voluntary, with unemployment one of the lowest in the developed world, immense competition for tech talent, and you think this requires 'reckoning of the owner class' - which is often the SAME workers' 401k accounts?

What exactly is your ideal - that 'workers', who are also 'owners', fight themselves?

You need to get out more. I grew up in India and watched this trade off play out in real-time. Yields went up, taste and quality declined. But still not as bad as the US.

Unreal how competitive the virtue signaling is on HN, when the reality is that every major tech company is falling over itself to hire anyone who isn’t A) Male and B) either white or Asian/Indian.

What planet do you live on?

What are your thoughts on certain bakers refusing to bake certain cakes, and refusing payment for them as well?

What you actually see in America is that most millionaires come from humble beginnings. That doesn’t mean most people from humble beginnings become millionaires. A->B does not equal B->A. Basic logic.

Go talk to the owners of the five nearest local small businesses, ask them how they started, and see how it goes.

Speaking from experience, btw.

This is amazing - just ignore Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Andrew Carnegie and several other of the richest people of all time who came from humble beginnings, just because they don’t fit your narrative.

For the past 15 years I have worked with wealthy people for a living, hundreds of them. Two things stand out: 1. Most of them came from humble beginnings, typically as immigrants 2. Most of them stress their kids won’t be as successful because of having it too easy

It’s alarming to me how much ignorance there is about real life outside of tech on hackernews, and how insidious academic leftist propaganda is.

Somehow that doesn’t count in the lefty HN echo chamber.

Agreed, now do antifa and BLM

Google ‘regulatory capture’

I’m probably older than you and heard this exact same argument used by the Indian government to censor television (we had exactly 1 channel of government run TV growing up).

Are you listening to yourself? You sound like a religious zealot hundreds of years ago arguing to ban the technology of books because they might say things you disagree with. ‘Ban Martin Luther, he is trying to destroy the Catholic Church’.

It remains a mystery why so many Americans are so incredibly ignorant of history. Is it because school systems became overrun by propaganda because of teachers unions?

Your anecdotal experience is not borne out by either facts or my anecdotal experience.

Houston is literally the most diverse city in America, statistically speaking.

And you have to look hard to find religiously conservative people in any Texas metro that are also exclusionary. I say that as someone neither white nor Christian.

If anything, the only place you may find a lack of diversity is Austin, which is overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly intolerant of non-leftist opinions.

No. The concept is that there is an infinite, indescribable void from which emerges consciousness manifested in matter.

And conscious matter creates universes constantly, that appear out of the void, hence creating time and space. This would also imply that its possible not only to change the future, but also the past.

The masters advise, however, that these are distractions and that the journey inevitably leads to experiencing the void itself, hence stepping out of time and space, and consciously experiencing any aspect of time and space and consciousness one wishes to, while always remembering that one is beyond it.

There is an in depth explanation in Zen, Buddhism and Hinduism of this phenomenon.

I would suggest reading anything by Nisargadatta Maharaj, who expanded on this in detail to questioners from all over the world who came to his humble dwellings in a Mumbai tenement to observe him. I’d suggest starting with ‘I am That’, available on Amazon, iBooks etc.

He claimed to be outside of time and space himself.

The United States was once a 3rd world country that lost 10% of its population in the American Civil War. Within 5 decades of that, it produced 50% of the worlds manufacturing output.

Needless to say, Europe was it its peak at the time, and has only declined since.

Excuses are easy to come by - root causes are more useful to examine.

There is a much simpler explanation.

1. It’s an order of magnitude easier to fire people in the US Vs the EU. That means American employers are more willing to take chances on people, ideas and growth. EU small business are family run for a reason.

2. It’s an order of magnitude easier to shut down a business in the US Vs the EU. So, again, an entrepreneur can take more chances in the US.

The EU favors big businesses that are hand-in-glove with the government. The US does so to a much smaller extent - smaller players and individuals have a fighting chance. Most US mega businesses today were tiny not too long ago (e.g. almost all of tech).

Perhaps this is the first US President in decades, who either out of raw courage, sheer necessity or personal (so far undetected) corruption, called out what has been known for the entire time:

1. That China manipulates its currency to improve its economic competitiveness

2. Restricts access to its domestic markets

3. Uses North Korea in negotiation leverage

4. Uses trade deals to capture foreign territory (e.g. the Sri Lankan port project)

Using an ad hominem (“not well”) to discount the democratically elected, leading political actor of a country, seems to be a uniquely American trait (I grew up in India, where we know our politicians are corrupt, but highly intelligent rational actors).

Ad hominems are not a useful tool to try and understand motivations of political actors. It’s ok to say ‘I don’t know why’ when the reasons for an action seem opaque.

Agreed. And the elephant in the room: All major space programs worldwide are an integral part of their respective country’s defense program. And were from inception.

India lives in a dangerous neighborhood, and protecting its citizens is by far the #1 priority of its government. The space program will always be well funded as a result.

You get less of what you tax, and more of what you subsidize.

I guess the French want fewer people visiting their country?

I immigrated to the US from India to flee exactly this slow progressing nightmare. Beyond stunned to see it happening here!

I once believed this as well, via one of my degrees (economics). It turned out to be contradicted by reality.

Ricardo and Adam Smith argued that the consumer surplus gains of free trade for the higher labor market would be greater than the losses sustained in producer surplus in the same market. I.e. that American consumers reap more $$ from imported foreign cars than American workers/business lose.

However, since then its become obvious that the population that loses jobs cares a LOT more than consumers do about their cars being a few $$ cheaper (e.g. Donald Trump won Michigan and Ohio).

In other words - political differences DO matter. Perhaps economics should return to its previous name - Political Economy - in order to actually describe the real world again.