While I agree with the sentiment, it is not true that only EU takes a “nationalistic” stance and safeguards its interests. US is famously doing it with tariffs..to bring back manufacturing, and I also remember hearing “America first”.
Doesn’t make what EU is doing right, just that everyone is stifling outside competition in some form.
>Combine it with China's nuclear base and labor pool. And the cherry on top, America will train 600k Chinese students as Trump agreed to.
I dont understand this part. What has nuclear base got to do with chip manufacturing? And surely, not all 600k students are learning chip design or stealing plans
I assume the nuclear reactors are to power the data centers using the new chips. There have been a few mentions on HN about the US being very behind in building enough power plants to run LLM workloads
The frenetic pace of data center construction in the US means that nuclear is not a short-term option. No way are they going to wait a decade or more for generation to come on line. It’s going to be solar, batteries, and gas (turbines, and possibly fuel cells).
That question was asked and answered years ago and the answer is YES (not me personally, but the people in charge)
There are things about China not to be celebrated but one cannot help but admire the way that they invest in their country as a whole. The US is all about "what's in it for me".
Fortunately, we have environmentalists who can protect us from a future of towering nuclear plants and wind turbines with hills covered in solar panels.
Is all that construction really worth it when we could be protecting neighborhoods and historic views?
That's absolutely a fair dig but it's far more complex than that. Our whole manufacturing base being outsourced is on the corporations who chose that "cost-cutting" path.
And it's not an entirely binary choice on protecting neighborhoods and views; for example what's happening in south Memphis with the power plant that's powering the Grok center there is a classic case of environmental racism -- they are cutting costs on pollution regulation because they have a community that they can dump the externalized costs on via their emissions.
Nobody's saying Grok shouldn't have the power, it's just a small detail on how that impact is managed.
The current narrative is that we are out of power so we must shut down power projects that are not politically prioritized, and build nuclear and coal capacity, which is.
I mean they have the power grid to run TPUs at 10x the scale of USA.
About students, have you seen the microelectronic labs in American universities lately? A huge chunk are Chinese already. Same with some of the top AI labs.
Thankfully LLMs are a dead end, so nobody will make it to AGI by just throwing more electricity at the problem. Now if we could only have a new AI winter we could postpone the end of mankind as the dominant species on earth by another couple of decades.
> The truth is that irresponsibles developers will produce irresponsible code, with or without LLMs
True. But the difference is the scale and ease of doing with code generators. With a few clicks you can add hundreds of lines of code which supposedly does the right thing. While in the past, you would get code snippets for a particular aspect of the problem that you are trying to solve. You still had to figure out how to add it to your code base and somehow make it “work”
Surely in any responsible development environment those hundreds of lines of code still have to be reviewed.
Or don't people do code review any more? I suppose one could outsource the code review to an AI, preferably not the one that wrote it though. But if you do that surely you will end up building systems that no one understands at all.
Agree. Any reasonable team should have code reviews in place, but an irresponsible coder would push the responsibility of code quality and correctness to code reviewers. They were doing it earlier too, but the scale and scope was much smaller.
"Delivering this feature goes against everything I know to be right and true. And I will sooner lay you into this barren earth, than entertain your folly for a moment longer."
That’s the only way I would utter it — if I can then sit down and so do it. If I am asking someone else to do I would ask them to tell me how hard it would be and if they need help or if they suggest a different approach.
This is pushing the burden of proof on the society. Basically, asking everyone else to pitch in and improve sources so that ai companies can reference these trust worthy sources.
This. There is a huge opportunity cost, even more so for the “best and brightest” (by whatever definition). The odds of striking it rich are really not in your favor. You may be better off working at big tech for a few years, save up, let the money work for you while you explore your entrepreneurial urge. You have a cushion and maybe that will let you take on bigger and bolder bets than what you could when you come out of college, and you maybe forced to take a “relatively safer” bet because you also have to make money soonish
No you want to take these bets when you are young, its the opposite, you go into stable careers when your appetite for risk and working around the clock has waned
There's an entire generation of FAANG millionaires that just spent a decade out of school working at one of those places and got fabulously wealthy off of it. In fact, it's probably the most likely career to get you rich instead of betting your time on startup equity that might be worth something in 6-10 years.
It’s not just the companies are growing. If you get an offer from BigTech with cash + RSUs and the stock stays stagnant, you will still be better off statistically than spending 5-7 years of your life at a startup.
YC is not really advocating you to become a worker at a startup. They want you to become a founder. As a founder you don't need to be a huge success for you to be well off. I'm one of 3 founders currently in a bootstrapped company that has done okay. We are approaching end of year 5. This year we will make 700k revenue, 240k profit and 50% yearly growth. Typically this kind of business is not something a VC would consider investing in, but it can still be profitable for the founders.
I'm not very liquid at the moment. My salary is a measly 60k a year. Most of 80k that is my share of the profit will stay in the company instead of go into my pocket, but the 33% ownership in the company is valuable. Very typical valuations for companies in general is 10x profit, which would mean my share of the company is worth 800k. Companies getting strategically acquired can be 20x revenue, which makes my share of the company worth 4.7million.
At FAANG I would have likely made a liquid 300k * 5 = 1.5million, which would allow me to spend more money and enjoy life right now. However, the next 5 years with my company will likely be a lot more valuable. If we manage to grow 30% a year then after 5 years profit will be 900k. That means 300k a year profit share, 3m valuation at 10x profit and 17m valuation at 20x revenue.
You realize that you’re kind of making my point? Even with your rosy projections, you’re still going to be making much less than a few returning interns I know made in their first three years working at BigTech.
Heck you’re making less than a run of the mill enterprise dev is making in a second tier major city in Atlanta
And as a founder, you still need to do well to do better off than a BigTech employee and statistically you won’t come near.
And on top of that, you’re sounding like every startup that doesn’t realize that they can’t linearly project growth based on past performance. The first cohorts are almost always easier than later cohorts unless it is a platform with network effects.
Don't forget the actual rate of return vs time spent working too. As a founder you're probably working at least 50% more time than the average faang dev, plus the added stress of being in a high impact, high consequence role.
Thought experiment: What group do you think will have the higher median total earnings over 10 years - the group that worked at BigTech or the group that worked at a YC startup?
You make your money first, let it make money for you and then do a startup.
Not sure about the timespan that you are referring to. Post covid hiring high, in the last 2 years or so, the hiring bar has been extremely high, in general. Not denying your experiences, may be it is even higher for you.
Personally, my experience has been that pre-covid, majority of interviewers were assessing your problem solving ability and if you can code the algorithm that you came up with. Getting the most optimal solution and fixing all edge cases for all problems in all interviews was not strictly necessary. But these days, even if you have the best solution coded up for 3 problems and missed one edge case in the 4th problem, you are not “good enough”. At one place, I was dinged for not thinking of the edge case before I wrote the program, even though I caught it while coding it up, in spite of having the write solution for the other 3 problems asked in the 2 coding rounds. It is a tough market, and probably tougher for you. Good luck mate.
The linked article is about a fraud conducted by a few bad apples. I can see people colluding with others that are similar to them for criminal activities - gangs, drug smuggling, and probably other frauds too. I am not sure how you inferred caste based nepotism among *all* indians in tech from that article.
For one, I didn't say "all Indians" are bad apples, just that the nepotism and cast issues are rampant enough that it's a know issue at this point in the tech industry where Indians are sometimes overrepresented.
Secondly, do you expect people to post links to all cases of Indian nepotism/cast issues in the tech industry, when Google is at your fingertips with enough cases that it's not an isolated incident? That link was one an Indian friend shared right now when I sent him the Subaru link, when I asked him if the nepotism is real.
Fair enough that you did not say all Indians. But, your statement was broad enough to say nepotism is widespread among Indians in tech. And the article you linked was about fraud which doesn’t imply widespread nepotism in tech. I am not asking for articles for all instances but something that is more relevant to the point that you are making.
Sure, but if an group of Indian employees within Apple US are going out of their way to scam their employer for money, it's another black mark on the graph for that demographic being into unethical activities, since then you can't say anymore "well it's just one rouge bad apple, not representative for the whole group" when it's a coordinated effort of a whole group.
If they're wiling to go that far to scam their employer it's not a far fetch the fact they're also into nepotism when hiring.
You’re making the same mistake others here are. People hire from their networks just like they hire referrals. If you worked in India or China or wherever, you probably know some talented people of those ethnicities just as a result of your experience. Using your network to hire those talented people is normal and not discriminatory. Everyone does it. Somehow Indians are singularly attacked for it on hacker news and all kinds of assumptions (like nepotism) are made with zero evidence.
I am not discounting what you said about wealth concentration and upward mobility, but the top post that started this thread is surely a counter example for what you are saying? Yes, the makers of openai/gemini/whatever could power such ai tutors, and make more money, but there are legit cases where this will be an enormous boost that was unthinkable just a few years ago.
Doesn’t make what EU is doing right, just that everyone is stifling outside competition in some form.