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I am from one such community, so I can say what I think are the key factors here:

1) Refugee / Skilled worker policy combine to give communities from the global south a healthy mix of size in numbers and money to support many of them. Skilled workers from these communities are really generous and spend a lot to maintain their communities and community centers / the most unfortunate among them.

2) There is a much more collectivist mindset which is actually very helpful in a freer, more free market system. Many global south countries are less free in terms of business. But Western countries are better about these things. Communities abroad get along when the same people might not have been friends back at home, this cohesiveness lets them open and patronize businesses in the community better. These people can then save on costs (rent, food costs, etc.) while putting that money into collective asset control or other money making systems.

3) It's easier to find the community with Internet. In the past you would need to find or know someone when moving abroad and the options were limited. Nowadays a religious center, cultural center, or other association office or even just scanning the map for restaurant names and clusters can allow you to find your community easily from millions of miles away.

In short, local white collar youth don't have the same collective mindset with each other, and cannot grow by adding more numbers to their ranks, so these are the main differences I feel.


So as I see it, local white collar background citizens are either stretched too thin trying to maintain their peak life style, or maybe not stretched but also not sharing enough.

Perhaps the capitalistic system also does a disservice by encouraging them to keep funds in bad investment vehicles (stock, deposits) instead of social capital or a spare home.


What possible new learning and academic model brings the number one thing everyone in the world pays absurd amounts for in an Ivy League education: status and connections?

Google Translate was probably the first commercial product to utilize Transformer architecture and also training it absolutely racked up a huge bill to NVidia probably even way back in the day up to now

Imagine asking these questions about the "metaverse" and cryptocurrencies just 2-3 years ago.

Some technologies are great, pioneering even, and full of potential, and still flop in the market.


Poor choice of examples.

Bitcoin at $71k is hardly a flop.

That was a term coined by stephenson during the early web, 1992. Virtual worlds are still extremely popular.


If you want to argue and pretend there weren't tons and tons of companies and technical products tied to both cryptocurrency and VR/AR lately that absolutely flopped despite being technically unique and innovative by cherry picking things that would have been sound investments back then and ignoring the myriad ways you'd have lost money or the fact that Bitcoin has less usefulness as a technology now than when it was hyped, fine

Are you really trying to argue that all companies in a space need to succeed, for the space to be successful?

As for bitcoin itself, people and companies have hyped it for their own benefit, but bitcoin itself isn't a company, and therefore isn't hyped. It is one technology that lives on its own and survives primarily because of the will of the people that choose to participate in it.


No I'm not arguing that. It should be obvious

While I believe what you're saying could be true in some cases, I work at a tech giant and there's no "diversity of thought" anyways because anything remotely controversial is not allowed to be discussed at work.

This is a company which went hard on and is now currently backtracking from DEI but this policy of "don't discuss anything controversial at work" has strengthened the entire time making diversity of thought a moot point.


FWIW that stance is (probably) in direct response to the realization that the "bring your whole self to work" movement was a bad idea anyway.

Sure, but diversity of thought doesn't matter if everyone is required to keep their divisive thoughts at home.

Like many left-ish leaning ideas (I'm one myself), it came from ideas about how to improve the world around us, but when the practical implementation of the great ideas came around they turned out to be far more complicated with unintended negative consequences than most imagined and now we're backtracking from the idea.

The same thing was true with the anti-police movement. We can all see problems with policing and envision alternatives, but most practical attempts to implement alternatives (like the now wildly unpopular reformist prosecutors elected in the bay area) had unintended consequences people didn't expect and got walked back.


The thing that's frustrating to me about these outcomes is that they're so easily foreseeable. Whenever things tip over to an "ideology", you start getting these power plays that are light years away from the original goals.

With DEI the "flip" for me in my head was when it switched from ensuring that there was no bias in hiring and reaching out to try to give everyone a fair shot to instead seeing that every single instance where the racial/gender outcome doesn't match the population distribution is inherently an issue of discrimination. My favorite example for the HN crowd is when they cancelled ElectronConf years ago after only getting male speakers despite having a fully blinded application process (and explicitly stating that any "ties" would be given in favor to underrepresented groups). The problem with that stance is that it becomes an unfalsifiable position, allowing everything to forever be blamed on discrimination even if there was no evidence. Even the language changed: it was no longer about "minority" representation, it was about "underrepresented minorities", as if the discrimination and struggles of East Asians and Indians no longer counted.


> Whenever things tip over to an "ideology", you start getting these power plays that are light years away from the original goals.

It's worse. Whenever things tip over to an "ideology", you no longer can question whether the original goals are right, just, moral, fair, reasonable, or achievable.


I probably agree with you politically but I think there's no value in "keeping this in context". This is a specific policy in a specific institution which had specific consequences on hiring specific staff.

Those consequences were largely negative even if you are a great advocate of diversifying our great institutions because they hamper academic freedom, period. The great Universities of America had (till recently) a reputation of being a place where tenure was so strong faculty members could think and state opinions most normal people could never try to articulate. Forcing all faculty to accept a certain ideological position in the manner of the diversity statement really hinders that ability, that academic freedom, which incubates so much intellectual work.


Especially the Columbia Board turning off it's entire Law Review website because it published an article about the international legal frameworks them at grew out of the Nakba.

Whatever side you take, it's shocking how quickly elite colleges have whiplashed back and forth and basically taken no simple, practical, strong stance that both upholds order and the freedom of academic expression they've long been known for.

These diversity statements were a large part of it. By making your offensiveness and marketability to students (esp. URM students) a fundamental part of one's hirability, these statements were a part of chipping away at academic freedom that's now led to where we are today.


I don't find it shocking, because these institutions have never cared about these individual issues, they just want to be anodyne and acceptable to their target audiences. In a time of turmoil, it's hard to be find that universally acceptable stance.

I don't think this is true. These institutions did used to care about academic freedom and the ideals they were built around. They have become enormous and full of money and administrators who don't want to jeopardize the gravy train they're on. And now academic freedom is just a marketing term rather than something real

While reading this I did have a thought, that yeah we carry almost all the information in the world in our pockets, and we are far more alienated from each other than we were before that happened.

AI will have a big hurdle to overcome. If it's not reliable, meaning we have to verify or check its work, as is the case currently and may be for a long time, then how much better is it than Google and the world of information already in our pockets? Can it move past being simply an accelerant of our already highly productive work lives?

I'm not a skeptic. I see measurable productivity gains amongst devs when using CoPilot and other AI completion tools. And likewise the realized reduction in support staff by AI chatbots (yes it comes with a quality drop, but that's frankly fine for a lot of businesses) is there. AI art will probably affect the already heavily squeezed computer graphics industry the most. Most other forms of decorative art and muzak were already cheap enough that AI isn't going to flip flop things on its head there no matter how good it gets.

But industries where mistakes have to be avoided, where verifiability is paramount, where there is already an assumption that your knowledge workers can look up and learn anything they need to get the job done, how much will AI revolutionize those industries vs just slightly bumping up productivity? That's a tough question to answer, frankly


> I see measurable productivity gains amongst devs when using CoPilot and other AI completion tools.

Great. This capability has nothing to do with "intelligence."

You are fact-checking a transformer and you find that the effort is worth it compared to other means of drafting code to narrow purpose.

Sounds interesting in context except that it ignores any teleological implications to God or doom as espoused by the article.


> People completely missed the point of GraphQL, which is you TRADE flexibility for the client for added cost on the server.

I mean, isn't this THE selling point of GraphQL? How was it missed so badly? I think every elementary resource about the technology covers this in the pros and cons section...


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