If anything having a terrible past may make the bar lower for experiencing optimism, as it's easier to expect a better future when the overall bar is lower. Hopefully explaining that well enough and it's certainly not the only issue, but I believe we see the same thing on the stock market when large class action settlements are reached with a corp and the stock then rises as it is forward looking and optimistic now that the 'awful past' is settled. First-gen immigrants tend to have larger families as the impetus to move countries is an optimistic endeavor itself.

And while a reach, I think through this lens you can make an argument as to why lower classes tend to have more children than middle classes (currently in the US). It's easier to expect better for your children when you are at the bottom of the barrel (no where to go but up), whereas the middle class is in an increasingly precarious position.

However, if I was a wall street analyst and believed the AI dreams I would further be concerned that software companies aren't taking advantage of the last remnants of value before software (and maybe labor) values go to zero.

If you've got a gold mine and have recently built the most efficient shovels in the world, why are they not bringing in mass amounts of workers to utilize these shovels before all the neighboring mines. Once all that gold is on the market, the price crashes so it's better to be one of the first mines to get in and dig out all possible value first.

I think you either don't believe in the AI hype, which means a lot of silicon valley companies are tremendously overvalued. Or you do, in which case another huge part of silicon valley is overvalued especially when they are not looking to out-innovate their peers (as evidenced by downsizing), but just riding the wave of AI until what they are selling has no marginal value over some guy coding alone in his bedroom. SV is putting itself into a weird position, but still has some time for financial buffoonery before the party stops.

And anecdotally, when I am eating healthier I am opting for a larger range of ingredients. Probably to keep my mouth interested as I am not getting the food that's been engineered to be perfect to my palate. While potatoes and beans are in my diet, I am also opting for a lot of vegetables that are more expensive, paying more for fresh herbs and interesting spices. I am almost always buying canned beans, sauces, and other foods with some processing to speed up prep time.

I think your analysis suffers from comparing processed food engineered to taste great to the blandest, driest raw ingredients. Factoring in the time and secondary ingredients to make those raw ingredients taste great adds a lot of cost. Add in the cost of more varied ingredients bc very few people want to eat beans, potatoes, rice, and bland chicken every day. And further, you're missing the savings processed foods add by being shelf stable. They can sit on a shelf or in a freezer for months or years vs. fresh produce with a much shorter lifespan.

So yes you can eat very cheap and very healthy, the vast majority of people will loathe that life over time. You can eat kind of cheap, very healthy, with a limited number of ingredients and have things taste great if you have a LOT of time to devote to cooking, this will still not satisfy many.

If you truly believed that, you would be spinning up new projects and offshoots as this is a serious arms race with a ton of potential upside (not just in developing AI, but in leveraging it to build things cheaper). Allegedly every dollar you spent on an engineer is potentially worth 10x(?) what it was a couple years ago. Meaning your profit per engineer could soar, but tech companies decided they don't want more profit? AI is mostly solved and the value of labor has already collapsed? Or AI is a nice band-aid to prop up a smaller group of engineers while we weather the current economic/political environment and most CXO's don't believe there are piles of money to be had by leveraging AI now or the near future.

I could not figure out a way to painlessly gather this info without monitoring users' emails (privacy nightmare) or having users forward emails to the app (too painful/not conducive to user adoption). But if anyone has any ideas how to get around that?

The more exposure between these populations the higher the likelihood that a crossover event occurs.

I have struggled with this myself with ADHD where I think my brain is great and it is society that is wrong as many of the ways I do things/see things/operate are subtly shunned by society and the way it works. Everything from the typical 9-5 (my brain works best 11-7), to most white collar careers revolving around stationary work at a desk (I love difficult mental work, but think better when I'm moving around), etc.

I don't think my brain is wrong or performing poorly, I excelled at school but did not learn much from lecture style formats (figured out how to study on my own). But I have gone back and forth with medication because it is very, very difficult to construct my life in a way that plays to my strengths when they are so different than the norm. Medication helps my brain fit into society better, but I don't think it improves my brain function.

The jobs aren't that hard and many people that fudged their experience are capable, so the liars that are hired perform adequately and hiring team sees no reason to adjust their strategy.

Eventually this gets out-of-hand as people learn to further exploit these practices.

He also gave a very memorable and completely inane speech to our entire school that involved him stomping on a loaf of bread while running for student council (and won). The coolness isn't so much in the tools as the way they are used.

If everyone is using the same criteria, they are all competing for the same group of candidates. Using other processes, no matter how whack-a-doodle, will give you a completely different pool to select from.

I personally think people should not work for a wage less than they need to buy the crappiest home in their town which would negate this need, but the lower-classes haven't developed enough self-esteem or entitlement for that.

Years ago, an acquaintence was an exec at a tech company that imploded in a semi-public way. He decided he wanted to get a documentary made on the whole thing and sent me his pitch. A little too self-aggrandizing, which I pointed out among other things. Couple years go by and a doc did come out on it (not his), uncovers some shady things and lawsuits against the CEO…and a little bit of embezzlement on his part.

So I think you’re right on the money, there’s a reason she worked there. Sucky/shady company and she fit in well.

I also used to work in science, the reason there's so few chances to make it as a top researcher is that there is little opportunity. Look at jobs for a lot of life science majors after a BS, you will find a ton that is washing glassware in a lab, a complete waste of anyone with half a brain.

There's reasons why there is little opportunity that's not worth exploring here, but suffice to say there are a ton of very smart kids in America that choose other paths. Outside tech and specialized physicians, nerd careers are not lucrative on average. With little opportunity, smart people end up doing banal work. Why do banal work and have a mediocre salary predicated on jumping through higher than average academic hoops? Doesn't add up for most people.

Develop something that actually has weight to it.

I haven't used SO in weeks prior and I think ChatGPT has pretty much killed its use case for me. Even two years ago, I would spend 1-6 hours/week searching SO posts depending on what I was working on.