Meta's leetcode gambit includes leetcode Hards and Mediums which aren't just "remember your hash maps and trees!" They're incredibly hard to brute force under time pressure if you haven't practiced similar problems before. Now do that for every interview -- exhausting.

Alternative? Lol? System design. "Walk me through systems you've built." Have a conversation. If you can't then maybe you don't have the skill for interviewing or dare I say the skill to be an engineer.

In many traditional industries, companies are built and run by the most senior members of whichever discipline. Tech is different because most of its skilled members intentionally cede soft power because of personal (imo short-sighted) predilections and the exorbitant amount of money flowing in has caused a mad dash from other disciplines.

The "elites" are people trained either institutionally or personally (from their relationships with others) to understand power dynamics and utilize them for personal gain.

Navel gazing is a great away to achieve nothing. Being lorded over by someone who couldn't even figure out how to build and host a simple webapp is ludicrous. Should the CEO of my hospital not understand that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell? Should the partners at big M&A law firms have no idea how to read a contract? No, because that's fucking ludicrous -- yet it persists in tech because its technicians have zero training, education, or even sense for elite ways of thinking.

Simple RAG is fine for very simple workflows, but semantic similarity vector search has a lot of edge cases and isn't the best tool out there. RIG or even recursive LLMs work better in the general case.

Whatever you're saying, it does not really mesh with my experience.

Despite the enormously heinous stuff I've seen on that site, it has made me a better writer, developed my critical thinking skills, and given me a perspective on the world and its people that wouldn't have existed without.

It also introduced me to many different things and developed my taste beyond measure.

The massive downside, that I suspect the grandparent still wrestles with, is integrating all of depravity of humankind into a coherent world view without falling into cognitive dissonance between the idealized and constructed world with an onslaught of information on the actual reality of it.

It's sort of like looking into the Epstein files and having to decide one's reaction to them:

- crushed by despair at the state of things leading to nihilism and depression

- deciding to ignore it all, and continuing to go on about one's life without integrating it

- acceptance, normalization, and corruption

- a secret fourth option that reaffirms you, using that news as fuel for whatever ends in the hope you can improve the world even if just a little bit, despite how ugly it is

And so on.

On your second point: LBOs aren't the only tool in the toolkit, and it's not as popular as it was decades ago, so I would lean towards the parent simply conflating "buying an ownership stake in a business in some capacity using other people's money" with the strict definition. Regardless, yes PE firms need to figure out how to get 20%+ IRR throughout a short timeframe (usually a 5 year holding/funding cycle) -- however this is through any means necessary. Philosophically, it's about increasing efficiency of operations and growing the business. In practice, it's financial engineering because PE firms do not have the operational skills to make any value-added changes to firms besides driving costs down.

Saddling a business with debt is reductionist. I've seen absolutely nonsensical financial structures that make no sense for a layman, but in practice end up "using the business' finances to 'own' (beneficially) the business" (see: at the most vanilla, the strategy of seller financing in SMBs). No this is not technically "putting debt on the books" but it is in all practical respects a novation/loan transfer that can leave the purchased co financially responsible for servicing any debt that was used in its purchase.

On your third point: what I wrote above can be used as context. It's not risk free revenue, frankly it's very risky unless you're in an inflationary environment where your assets will grow regardless of your business operations solely because the overarching economy is growing and you're riding a tailwind. However, it again boils down to financial engineering. It's not as simple as assets - liabilities = equity. The calculations used to determine valuations are so ridiculously convoluted. The amount of work that goes into financially analyzing businesses and finding "loop holes" that can justify higher prices is the core business model. The debt factors into it, but there's ways to maneuver around it through various avenues.

For example:

* debt-to-equity conversions (reclassification of debt as equity)

* refinancing

* sale-leaseback (selling company's assets to a 3rd party and using that money to pay down the debt, then leasing the equipment back)

* creative interpretations of what is actually debt (e.g. reclassifying real debt as a working capital adjustment or a "debt-like")

* dividend recapitalization (a nasty trick of loading the company with debt, paying that out as a dividend to the holdco, then selling the company at lower enterprise value. They still extracted value for their LPs/investors, despite the exit being lower)

* separating the debt from the operating company into a different holding company that services the debt

Bounce rate: a bounce is someone visiting your site and not signing up. A bounce rate is the amount of people that do this compared to sign ups

Touchpoints: things a user interacts with, like a landing page, a nav bar with a sign up button, the sign up page itself, forms on that page, etc.

Bloat: too much "stuff" that is unnecessary towards some end goal like too much copywriting on the landing page, or too complex of a sign up flow, etc.

This isn't snark, but this is all industry standard terminology.

User-facing touch points: everything a user can interact with

Sign-up friction: self explanatory

Stickiness: less bounce rate

Lean: don't overload with touch points/bloat

No amount of words will change that.

It is my experience -- after seeing the quality of thinking from those philosophically trained (I am not) -- that learning philosophy is learning how to think, and by extension figuring out for oneself what is capital g Good.

Morals and ethics are different and you conflate them. That is the crux of your confusion. Someone can understand morality inherently without ever thinking about it; but ethics requires actual intentional thought over years and years of reflecting on lived experience. What is good for you and your small circle can be grasped intuitively, but to grasp what is good "at scale" must be reasoned about. Without having seriously grappled with this, one is liable to have simplistic views, and in many cases hold views that have already been trodden through and whose "holes" have been exposed and new routes taken in unveiling ethics.

Without seriously having interfaced with it, it's like talking to someone about the exercise science when all they know is do steroids, lift weight, and eat. Sure, that works, but it lacks nuance and almost no thought has gone into it.

Anyway, this is tiring. Philosophical discussions are not something to do with strangers. It requires intimacy and is a deeply personal conversation one should have with those close to them and explore together.

The obesity likely is the main culprit-- if I had to guess. Fat stores act as sites for testosterone to be aromatized to estrogen -- so if your E2 is elevated that would be a marker.

2. Yes

There is no "off ramp" for GLP-1s in my experience, because the off ramp is so insignificant to not worth a mention. You just don't take another dose after a week has passed from the previous one, and you're back to baseline. Same way there is no off ramp on taking aspirin -- just don't take it.

Can you share your longitudinal anecdata? I am considering going back on AAS for the QoL benefits, but would like to create a better mental model of long-term ramifications for testicular health.

It's my understanding that 40, it simply is expected that your hormones levels will be much lower (and that is not necessarily a bad thing). However my mind is failing to grasp what long-term damage TRT can do to the HPTA when not using an obscene amount of gear and on HCG.

Trying to figure out the mechanism. Perhaps receptor desensitization and epigenetic compensatory changes?