is this naivety or privilege?
People in the SV/fintech sphere tend to have a really skewed idea of what typical salaries are for people "working in tech". What they really mean is "FAANG(-alike) and fintech", not "tech". They're in the third hump of the trimodal distribution of developer salaries, and may have some inaccurate ideas about the rest of the market, as a result.
(BLS gives me a median of ~$97k in 2021, if you're wondering if there's a big difference between the average and the median)
and I do agree with him, I'd rather do not have car, they're annoying and costly.
PS: I'm in Europe.
Some certainly choose to take on more expenses like living by themselves, choosing luxury housing, having a nice car, spending on nice clothes and vacations. But it’s pretty common for people to live with roommates and otherwise not “ball out” while eschewing most of that - it’s very common for tech college graduates to follow the money mustache/boglehead financial strategy of avoiding lifestyle inflation and living like college students for a while. And if you do that, you could easily have living expenses at 40k/y or less even in an expensive city like SF, Seattle, LA, NYC.
And you don’t need an outlier income to save 40k+ per year (including 401k) on 40k of expenses either. The 401k contribution limit is 22.5k. Per smartasset’s calculator, you’d only need an income of about $100k to save $40k on $40k of expenses while living in California, (that’s without employer matching while maxing 401k). And $100k is a totally reasonable figure for new grad tech TC in California.
> AI will be the single most significant driving factor of change in the world. If we solve AGI (or achieve intelligence close to AGI), we'll likely solve most of the world's problems.
I literally don't get the confidence in this statement. I'm not an AI-doomer by any means, but AGI (if possible) will likely be the most powerful technology humankind has ever invented. Just in terms of possible impact, why would we assume it will solve more problems than it will create (or the opposite)?
Think of recent super-powerful technologies we've invented. Sure, there's the potential for fantastic fixes to many problems that come out of nuclear tech. But there's also... the threat of nuclear annihilation? Is that all net positive? Do we even really have a way to evaluate on the timescale of 100 years? How can we know the net impact of nuclear tech in the next century, or millennium?
How can we call this sort of rhetoric anything other than blind optimism? Why would we have any priors about how AI will go? Why do we say things that make us blindly rush forward?
I'm not being sarcastic, or trying to argue one way or another. I'm genuinely asking. How does anyone have confidence in "AI is good" or "AI is bad" claims? Is confidence even good in this case?
For me, these questions lead into such deep and treacherous waters it's probably best to stop the comment there. There are limits to what even interested HN addicts can ask of each other.
Overall the list reads exactly how I would expect an ambitious 25 year old would write. A little bit of generic health advice, a little bit of latest hyped tech (5 years ago he would have wrote decentralized finance, or DAOs I guess), a little bit of bragging (here I'm founding companies at 25 and teach people to do so properly). This is a like every intro to a self help books or modern biographies.
Personally I think AI is going, over decades, to lead to huge changes on par with the invention of the computer and Internet, but like the computer and internet, it will be more gradual than we think. It’s already happening and we aren’t at the beginning, we’re just near some kind of dotcom-style inflection point IMO. Don’t get too caught up in the hype!
Anyway, the problem I have with posts like these is they simplify and confidently state things that take asymmetrically large amounts of text to refute or refine, because there are several other points (like blanket suggesting 2meals/day) I take issue with, and others I really like (renting/going carless) but are presented without the context or reasoning to justify them. Most of these points would require their own post to do them justice IMO
Whether that involves the current humanity's status-quo or not, I'm not sure. I would even say that given where the world is heading right now, I would love to try and take a shot at some form of AGI governing us (making decisions etc) and establishing the world order. I'm not sure we can escape this future unless we go back into the medieval era.
In general, I guess I'm an optimist at heart and I'm more focused on the amazing things we would be able to do with the infinite compute and infinite resources rather than the doomsday scenario, but I'm supportive of thinking of both.
We all experience life differently, come from varied backgrounds, start our careers with varying levels of life skills, carry defaults passed on from our parents (for good or bad), etc.
What seems cliche to you may be revolutionary to someone else. I would have benefited from a list like this earlier in my career.
Stick around for a while and you'll see that the sorts of story, the topics, and even some specific articles go in cycles of popularity. It's kind of interesting in and of itself.
Don't you mean "your?"
It’s also just interesting to read what kind of advice younger people would give to those younger than themselves!
PS This wasn't meant to be an advice per se. That's why the list features "ing" most of the time :)
Cool. I'll wear my giant veiny penis hat to the office from now on.
Unless you know the target audience well enough that it would be well received. Carry on then.
> as long as you don't cross societal norms
Really? If you have a severely deviated septum you'll likely have a benefit. Talking as someone who has undergone a septoplasty, the ENT wanted to make me perfect and the surgery was horribly painful. What actually helped was treating my allergies.
My surgery wasn't horrible. It was nothing at all because I was out. The first few days were really bad because I was unable to use my nose to breathe and my brain was glitching because of that. I still think it was worth it.
