chess has had engines 100x better than magnus carlsen for years and it's not dead. people who have fun giving these competitions will continue having fun, while people who don't will keep crying that they're useless or dead or whatever.
yeah, it's being very slow for me too! I don't have monitoring on it as such, but there was an outage just today (https://status.openai.com/) so it's probably still unstable or something.
i'm not employed by google, nor have i ever been. GSoC is google paying people to work on open-source stuff, with little direct relation to their profits.
I was a student in a no-name college with no real chance of landing an internship at the big tech companies, given my cv had neither the prestige of a good college name nor many impressive projects.
GSoC basically allowed me to jump into an open-source project (no credentials needed), prove that I'm skilled enough to contribute and gain meaningful experience solving real world problems. This then snowballed into larger career opportunities later down the line.
GSoC basically changed my entire career. I'm glad that Google keeps this running, especially given that they got rid of other cool competitions like Codejam. Hopefully, they can continue finding the budget for these extremely valuable contributions to open-source.
The way that I think about this is that anyone who's good at skill X has put in the hours. Putting in the hours is not a sufficient condition for "getting good" or "being successful", but it is a necessary one. Each and every successful person has been obsessively devoted to their craft
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So, yeah, just write. If you want to write good stuff, there's a non-zero probability that you'll get there. But if you don't write, the probability drops to zero.
As a person who loves playing chess but will never be as good as an IM (let alone GMs or Magnus or engines), I've had to internalize this. It's a good feeling.
If you think people good at things (like writing) get good at those things without producing an insane amount of low quality content, you need to update your model of the world.
Losing my google account has to be a worst nightmare scenario. I've started disentangling slowly, starting with mail, but Google Photos is just so convenient.
Also, what this does is really separates the wheat from the chaff. If the company can't tell me the salary or the job, it's not a good fit anyways.
Interestingly, what this means is that Google is not a good fit at all. They wanted me to talk to a sourcer, who would connect me to a recruiter. That's too much corporate foreplay for me, especially without even knowing what team I'd be joining.
I never really understood what incentive a government had to recognize bitcoin as legal tender. There are no real benefits over something like UPI in terms of user UX. It takes things out of the government's hands, as it's harder to print money.