The 4% rule is wildly optimistic. You're assuming that there exists an investment that:
- is 100% liquid
- will return 4% consistently over decades
- every single year
- post-tax
- post-inflation
Good luck finding that one.
So that's why I am saying that the FIRE theory is a theory. A much more realistic number is 2% (and I am still being optimistic here). That means that for someone who needs $5K/month (not insane if you want to have kids), you need $5K x 12 months x 50 = $3M. To get that sum post-tax, you need roughly $5M of income somehow. The set of people who make that amount early enough in their career is very limited.
I wouldn't be surprised if a high number of us is now really doing 3-4 hours of real work a day, filling in the rest with stuff that we'd have been ashamed to do in front of our colleagues (or called for) in the pre-covid world.
This is a good thing. The pre-covid world was mostly a circus in that respect.
As long as the 3-4 hours of daily deep, profitable work are still there, we're good.
Edit: this comment does not apply to small startups where your productivity as an engineer is much higher and it (sadly) makes sense to work for 8+ hours a day.
I've read about the FIRE theory time and again. For some reason, I don't buy it. I fail to believe in the plan that consists in building enough FU money to then "be free".
Free to do what? What was the plan originally?
I think the real meaning of life is to do what you care about today, _with the constraints you have today_.
Sadly, the "good" solution is much harder to accomplish than one might think.
One way to address it is to take it from the People perspective. Are there people you've really enjoyed working with? Go talk to them, see what they work on, etc.
This may get you out of your current (deep) local minimum. Doing this on your own is really, really hard.
I am with you on most of your points, but definitely not on the "normal and mostly acceptable".
The truth of our domain is that you can get great work done in 3-4 hours a day (I am referring to deep work here, not meetings). In fact, most of us become much less productive beyond that. The remaining hours can/should be spent on useful meetings, reading, learning new things, chatting to people about things, etc.
Coasting from a standup to the next with zero work in between is definitely not normal (_if done on a regular basis_) and the sign that something is not right in your current situation.
You may find it OK right now and for years on end. But you're likely going to pay a hefty bill for this many years down the road. I am not saying you should live Elon's life. But finding something meaningful to do with your life should be a goal, I believe.
Indeed. Also, you have plenty of time do to both. Start as an engineer at 22, write code for 15 years. Switch to management at 37. That still leaves you with 15+ years to climb the career ladder.
Using the term "procedural noise processes" instead of "random noise" in the title would have been less click-baity and closer to what the paper is about.
This article is completely disconnected from what is happening in the machine learning community.
Granted, datasets have grown larger and larger over time. This concentration is actually a healthy sign of a community maturing and converging towards common benchmarks.
These datasets are open to all for research and have fueled considerable progress both in academia and industry.
The authors would be well-advised to look at what is happening in the community. Excerpts from the program of NeurIPS happening literally this week:
Panels:
- The Consequences of Massive Scaling in Machine Learning
- The Role of Benchmarks in the Scientific Progress of Machine Learning
- How Copyright Shapes Your Datasets and What To Do About It
- How Should a Machine Learning Researcher Think About AI Ethics?
All run by top-notch people coming from both academia and industry, and from a variety of places in the world.
I am not saying that everything is perfect, but this article paints a much darker picture than needed.
This article seems to spawn many threads on online advertising, but the initial comment from the author seems to be more around a system/architecture issue (i.e. why should a browser require backend servers). I am writing this comment here to see what people think about this question specifically.
The thing is: you paid for your bedroom ceiling, your bathroom and your car. You also paid for your computer & screen, but you did not pay for the content you're watching on it.
I am entirely with you on not wishing any ads at all, anywhere. I just think that it's not realistic to remove ads entirely on the open web today.
This should not be an excuse for the way ads are being run today. It is fundamentally broken. Incentives and attributions should be changed.
Same here. My guess is that they constantly AB test/explore captchas to push the envelope of genuine humans users in order to make it as hard as possible for the bots.