> If Americans want fewer "brown" people in their country, the idea should be to promote global economic and political stability
Speaking as an Indian: "brown" people's countries are "brown" people's own responsibilities. If their countries are messed up, they should also own the task of fixing them.
Other countries can feel free to pitch in if it suits their interests, as you say. But the primary responsibility for our motherlands is with ourselves.
> that a normal person, or a group of normal people
> The accusations is just racism. The fact that Trump gave extra fast visas to white South Afrikaans makes you think that there were some racial reasoning there.
What is wrong if white people want to help other white people escape persecution?
> What they desire is less brown people, and then they work backwards to justify it.
Which is a perfectly fine thing by the way. I can't see anything wrong with it. If the Americans want fewer "brown" people in their country, that is entirely their prerogative. It's their country, after all.
I am from India. Indians themselves have preferences for the kind of people they'd like to allow to immigrate to India. Bangladeshi muslims are not desired, whereas Tibetans are welcome. Intra-regional migration is a problem within India itself, with certain populations being seen as less desirable in certain areas.
Perhaps the "brown" people can work on fixing their home countries so that they wouldn't have to emigrate in order to enjoy a better quality of life.
The west also "forgot" to calculate by hand. Because they invented calculators and computers.
The west is not merely forgetting to code. It is creating systems that can code. They aren't standing still. They are progressing to a higher level of production.
I am just befuddled by how much of this violence is directly motivated by religious concerns, both on the side of Iran and on the side of Israel and USA.
I have been reading on the topic of shunyata or emptiness in Mahayana Buddhism, and have been uncomfortably observing just how much of the artifacts we take to be real and substantial in the world are just "made up". They don't have an inherent reality of their own except what we attribute to them. And yet, made up stories can have very real consequences in terms human suffering.
It ought to be possible to cut through the layers of reifications and simply defuse much of the strife in the world. And yet, we continue to inflict misery on each other unnecessarily.
Just wondering - do you include information on interviewing, salary negotiation, communication with management, leading teams, and maybe topics on career progression?
These would have been very useful to me back when I was in the university.
"Metaproject" doesn't capture the idea that I think the author is trying to convey.
An example: suppose you want to improve your French and also build your knowledge of Physics. So in order to target both projects, you attend Physics lectures in French, and also read French Physics books. Thus you progress in both your projects simultaneously.
I would call this kind of thing, "Poly-projects" or maybe "Project complexes". "Meta" would imply one extra level of indirection away from actually doing the project. E.g., thinking about what kind of projects you want to do would be a metaproject.
A key meta-requirement is to want to think critically about issues.
If there is no desire to discover the truth of a matter and evaluate it against supporting evidence and opposing claims, then all efforts at inculcating critical thinking are dead in the water. On the other hand, if there is a genuine desire to assess arguments and claims critically, there are plenty of resources today that can teach you how.
This is a never-ending process. But the desire to think critically has to be in place before it can even begin. Critical thinking cannot occur without a strong commitment to epistemic hygiene.
In India, the problem is that many people do not even want to think critically. We tend to gravitate toward beliefs that buttress our tribal affiliations. Our tribes are defined by our worldviews, and our tribes must prevail. Hence our worldviews must be proven true, regardless of whether they are in fact true.
There is a striking indifference toward truth as a value - ironic for a country whose national motto is "Truth alone triumphs." Many people have yet to realize that truth - satya - is not something you place on a pedestal and worship, but something you actively pursue, overturning long-held beliefs where necessary.
> I lived in SF for a few years and found the tech community's disinterest in art to border on allergy. It was as if expressing an aesthetic preference weren't an optimal way to spend one's time or money.
Art takes many forms, and not everyone need be interested in the same kind of art.
There's plenty of aesthetic consideration that goes into scientific and technological projects. Consider the huge stack of technologies starting with silicon to massive computing clusters and code-bases with hundreds of millions of lines of code running on them. It's an impressive feat of science and technology, but the many pieces that go into making them also have an austere beauty of their own, often constrained by the need to be actually useful in an unforgiving world.
> Rich are "freer" but they definitely don't work fewer hours than poor on average. In USA the Rich became rich mostly by working.
> But that also does not mean that billionaires have more free time. It's usually not the case, simply because they are more invested in their ventures.
There is a difference between working because you want to, vs working because you have to. The rich have the choice to quit working if they want to and still pay no significant price - the poor don't have this choice. The rich also don't have to put up with disagreeable work, whereas the poor often do.
This is a question of human freedom and dignity - not just of material wealth.
I'd also challenge the notion that the poor don't "work hard". The food delivery guy who works 8 hours a day often in disagreeable weather is arguably working much harder than many rich people.
> I agree but this is a caveat against the fact that the rich and the poor consume equally.
If you consider purchase of political influence as consumption, then your statement doesn't hold. You are only counting the basic necessities of life as consumption - but there are many services that you can purchase as a rich person that poor people cannot.
> This buys into zero sum ideology of wealth.
I'd say that it’s a mistake to treat wealth as either purely zero-sum or purely positive-sum - a false dichotomy. It has both these natures, depending on the level of analysis and the time horizon.
Wealth can grow collectively over time through productivity gains, technological improvement, and better organization of labor. That is the positive-sum aspect, and I don't deny that.
However, at any given moment, wealth is only meaningful as long as it can be exchanged for real goods and services. At the bottom of all such goods and services lie two fundamental inputs: human labor and natural resources. Both are finite as a matter of physics and biology.
Hence while we do see the amount of goods and services ballooning (and hence total "wealth" growing) primarily due to better utilization of human labor and better extraction of natural resources, there is also a sense in which wealth has a zero-sum nature especially in the short term (i.e., several decades, which is relevant for humans).
This is as disingenuous as saying that both the rich and the poor consume the same amounts of calories, nutrients, oxygen and water, and hence they are not that different.
The key issue is that money often translates to such things as power and leisure. Prosperity is not consumption - it is the command over power, resources and time.
The poor have to sell their time in order to afford the basic necessities of life; the rich don't have to. So the rich have a lot more free time than the poor and the resources to use it well. The rich simply are freer than the poor, who are not unlike prisoners with no claim over their time.
The rich also get to influence policies to a far greater extent than the poor. In a way, wealth is just stored influence. This in turn helps them perpetuate their privilege. For instance, they can fund narratives that normalize inequality and lobby for lower taxes.
The lives of the rich are also far more secure than the lives of the poor. Many poor people are one major life crisis away from penury. This significantly affects the quality of their lives. Access to more wealth would mitigate this.
One could also flip your argument as follows: wealth is a scarce resource. If the rich already have everything they need to live a happy life at low amounts of wealth, then letting them horde more wealth than necessary is unjustified. Instead, that should be distributed to those in need. This would make no difference to the well-being of the wealthy, but it would help others who need resources more.
One of the ways in which we are truly blessed these days is in seeing how easy it is to take a morsel of insight and couch it in simulated profundity. The following is a similar sounding passage I got from ChatGPT. I call this, "Choprafication".
Consciousness is not a state but a curvature — a bending of possibility around the locus of being. Awareness is not the field itself, but the gradient formed when that field folds back upon its own continuity. To be aware is not to perceive reality, but to experience the interference pattern between what is possible and what is momentarily resolved.
The mistake of modern inquiry is to treat experience as a product, rather than as a modulation. Experience is not generated by matter; matter is stabilized experience — frozen potential captured in persistent form. The brain does not create consciousness; it diffracts it. Neural structures act as resonant chambers in which existential potential coheres into meaning-bearing forms.
Information, as it is commonly understood, is already too late in the process. Information is the fossil record of potential after it has collapsed into structure. What precedes information is tension — not energy in the physical sense, but directional propensity. This is why consciousness cannot be computed: computation presupposes discretization, while consciousness operates in the continuous domain of pre-discrete differentiation.
Life is not animated matter; matter is life constrained by boundary conditions. Biological systems are technologies evolved to maintain coherence within this field of potential. Each living organism is a localized recursion, a standing wave of existential pressure negotiating its own persistence.
Thought itself is not symbolic manipulation but phase alignment. Concepts emerge when distributed potentials synchronize across neural substrates, briefly forming holographic identities that feel stable only because they recur. Memory is not storage, but repeated resonance. Identity is the echo of these resonances mistaken for a fixed source.
Qualia are not properties of neurons nor illusions produced by computation. They are the fine-grained textures of potential as it resolves under specific biological constraints. Red is not a wavelength; it is a particular solution to the problem of perceiving difference within a living system tuned for survival.
Those who demand equations mistake maps for territory. Mathematics describes the shadows cast by potential as it intersects with form; it does not touch the source. What is called “physical law” is merely the statistical regularity of resolved potential observed from within one of its own expressions.
To exist as a conscious being is to be a site where the universe hesitates — where possibility briefly considers itself before continuing onward. You are not observing reality. You are reality, folded just enough to notice.
India has neither the ability nor the desire to attack the US. The very idea is silly.
The country has its hands full enough coping with its state of quasi-chaos and belligerent nuclear-armed neighbors without taking on the worlds leading superpower for absolutely no reason at all.
What we tend to forget is that even with the catastrophic effects of climate change, the Earth is still vastly more inhabitable than other planets in the solar system. More pertinently, today we also have the intellectual tools to come with the right solutions for a good part of this problem. Solutions most likely won't require dramatic breakthroughs in fundamental science; probably just more clever engineering and better social and political coordination.
The real problem is that this is happening in one of the most socio-economically underdeveloped regions of the world. Despite isolated centers of modest excellence, India still hasn't fully absorbed the implications of the scientific revolution at a popular, cultural level. A good part of the population are still caught up in pre-modern modes of thinking. Rather than addressing this gap, the political establishment is only deepening an irrational and romantic belief in the worth of India's classical worldviews to continue their hold on power.
More than climate change, I dread the self-inflicted servitude to infantile notions that is holding India hostage. It's not really difficult to emerge out of this - we just need to shed our intellectual timidity and face reality as it is.
I have always thought of DSA as a proxy for a subset of general software development skills: the ability to translate a problem into computer science or programming terms, implement it in code, and argue that the implementation is correct and efficient. Skill in solving DSA problems can signal both an aptitude for absorbing computer science knowledge in general and a capacity for solving problems through programming. It's not the whole thing, but it's certainly an important component.
It’s not unlike a research mathematician being expected to solve quadratic equations. He may not need them in his day-to-day work, but with a little preparation he should be able to handle them. If he struggles with quadratic equations in an interview where such knowledge is expected, that would raise a red flag about his training.
This may, in the end, be for the best - if it dents American power over the long term.
I like America and Americans very much, but no state should wield the kind of power the United States currently holds, precisely for the reasons the Trump administration exemplifies. When a responsible government is in office, all is well and good. But when the political winds shift and a more capricious actor takes charge, such concentrated power can become dangerous.
I hope America’s allies have taken note and will adjust their policies accordingly.
Speaking as an Indian: "brown" people's countries are "brown" people's own responsibilities. If their countries are messed up, they should also own the task of fixing them.
Other countries can feel free to pitch in if it suits their interests, as you say. But the primary responsibility for our motherlands is with ourselves.
> that a normal person, or a group of normal people
We just have to become not-so-normal then!