> Its baffling that you think the collapse of the USD would have no negative ramifications on the rest of the world.
Empires rise and fall, pax Americana was not the world's first hegemony. The end of the British Empire is within living memory - while they sowed seeds of instability in a handful of former colonies that still flare up today, the rest of the world is fine. Britain, on the other hand, has had to enter a "managed decline", and is a much smaller player in world politics than it was a century ago.
What do you think the US is going to do for that bang? How could a bang ever bring the wealth and peace that its prior friendship with allies brought?
The US doesn't have the cards to play, because the current US Government doesn't even understand where the wealth has come from. That US Government has risen to power by tricking the public into thinking that the very things that make the US wealthy and powerful are actually a scam making them poorer.
The current US Government has already broken the trust that makes the US strong. The repercussions will take years to become fully visible, and without immediate course correction those future repercussions will get far far worse.
> What do you think the US is going to do for that bang?
Literally a bang.
Or many bangs. The largest military in human history going YOLO won’t be a pretty sight. (The only way it sucks more in America than it does abroad is if we go civil war. But even then, it’s almost certain to go global.)
The negative ramifications seem to be better than being invaded by the US or having regional entities invaded by the US, and the ensuing instability as a result.
If its going to be like this the rest of the world might as well cut its losses
You seem to have a very limited view of the world if you think the US doesn't have fans of totalitarian rule and that the "rest of the world" is exclusively against US global strategy. I am going to guess that you actually have no idea what the negative ramifications of the collapse of a currency that underpins the foundations of our world are, because it is something that is near impossible to predict.
I agree that at some point, governments and people will need to step up and fight back, but the idea that the US will somehow fall in a vacuum and everyone else will live happily ever after is laughable.
Yes but you have a) no idea how bad the suck will be b) no idea how long the suck will last and c) what the "better" will look like.
I am not advocating that the status quo should go on, I am just saying that the repercussions will be vast and long lasting, likely resulting in a world war, and whatever follows after that(if anything).
The US isn't going to get hyperinflation. It's going to get a Japan style heat death. More and more wealth concentrated into low yielding debt, rather than invested into growth, while purchasing power is chewed up by persistent currency debasement. Japan never did suffer real deflation (that was a lie), it suffered massive inflation: they debased the Yen to garbage levels, drastically chopping down the standard of living of the typical Japanese person, wiping out their wealth, eroding the value of their output per capita. Only in a twisted, failed Keynesian experiment could one confuse such epic scale inflation with deflation. What they thought was deflation was an economic heat death due to their productive capital being tied up in low yield debt.
Have you been to Japan? Salaries are low, but stuff is crazy cheap (even after the past year of inflation). People are still feeling whiplash from the fact that prices can change at all. Many menus and items have prices that have barely changed since the early 1990s, and most of those changes were to add sales taxes to the menu.
The exchange rate of the yen has dropped recently by a lot, but the inflation experience there has been the exact opposite of America's.
“There's no chance US will default on its debts, all it has to do is to print more money.”
Trying to inflate away 40+ Trillion in debt would directly result in hyperinflation.
> they debased the Yen to garbage levels
Look at Yen to USD exchange rates and it’s clear they didn’t. “From 1991 to 2003, the Japanese economy, as measured by GDP, grew only 1.14% annually, while the average real growth rate between 2000 and 2010 was about 1%,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades Meanwhile the USD exchange rate in Jan 1988 was 127 vs 140 in 1998 vs 107 in 2008. It went up and down all through the 20 years of poor economic growth, but something else was clearly the issue.
It did not go into a hyperinflation after the WW2, when the US debt load as a share of GDP was even higher than today; and deflated in the same way US is likely to do it now (bond rates forced way below inflation with yield control).
I am not saying that the process will be pleasant for the US or its citizens. But it is not without precedent and is extremely unlikely to cause hyperinflation. My 2c.
The big time suck I see with robotic anything is that simulation for training will only take it so far...eventually it needs to be in the real world, making mistakes, and this comes with far more red tape and much higher risk, slowing down the process. I don't see hardware as the bottleneck, its software and hardware working together in an environment where the stakes are much higher than just in the lab.
Its kind of crazy that the knee jerk reaction to failing to one shot your prompt is to abandon the whole thing because you think the tool sucks. It very well might, but it could also be user error or a number of other things. There wouldn't be a good nights sleep in sight if I knew an LLM was running rampant all over production code in an effort to "scale it".
There’s always a trade off in terms of alternative approaches. So I don’t think it’s “crazy” that if one fails you switch to a different one. Sure, sometimes persistence can pay off, but not always.
Like if I go to a restaurant for the first time and the item I order is bad, could I go back and try something else? Perhaps, but I could also go somewhere else.
I'm okay with writing developer docs in the form of agent instructions, those are useful for humans too. If they start to get oddly specific or sound mental, then it's obviously the tool at fault.
The OMSCS degree you get is equivalent to the in person one, so there is no way to make the distinction in an interview. I actually don’t see how people see that an experience like this brings no value, given the rigor of the assignments. One certainly would come out with a better knowledge of how things work, develop a better work ethic, and hopefully make some network connections on the way…
The whole point is, if an LLM can easily complete rigoruous assignments and all the student has to do is add a little bit of personalization to the output, then has that student really learned anything? Can they evem come up with a plan to do such tasks without the LLM, even if it takes a lot longer without it?
Educational certifications in the era of LLMs are going to be increasingly meaningless without proof-of-work, and that's going to mean in-class work without access to computational aids, if you really want to evaluate a person's skill level. This of course is the coding interview rationalization - CS students have been gaming auto-graded courses created by CS professors for some decades, and now that's easier than ever.
There is absolutely no way you’re passing OMSCS tests if you’re winging it on the other assignments, and the tests usually account for over 50% of the grade. Certifications you’re right about but there are ways to test knowledge without asking for code snippets.
> there is no way to make the distinction in an interview
Just ask?
Some online degrees state that they're equivalent, but interviewers may still have their own opinions. I would discourage anyone from failing to mention the online nature of a degree in their CV. You're really not doing yourself a favor. A rigorous online degree is something to be proud of. I see people with PhD's proudly announcing their online course certificates on LinkedIn. However, 'discovering' that an education was of a different nature than one had assumed based on the presented materials may raise questions.
This just reeks of you being insecure and thinking online education is of lower quality than in person education. Are you also pining for everyone to go back to the office? The degree GT gives you is literally the same thing as the in person degree. If GT does not make the distinction, why would I???
That says nothing other than that the interviewers have a narrow mind and/or are ignorant. OMSCS is a very well known program, and it's their problem if they don't know it.
This is very debatable. The courses look like they were recorded in the 90s.
The DB course particularly sticks out. My undergrad's DB course was fathoms harder than this. This is what you'd expect a highschooler should be able to learn through a tutorial not a university course.
If it doesn't talk about systems calls like mmap, locking and the design of the buffer pool manager, it's not a university Database course it's a SQL and ER modelling tutorial.
Respectfully, I think you should do more research.
The OMSCS program is well known and well respected in the tech industry. It's a masters degree from the currently 8th ranked computer science school in the U.S.
The university make no distinction between students who take the courses online, vs in person. I.e., the diploma's are identical.
I’ve taken graduate-level courses in databases, including one on DBMS implementations and another on large-scale distributed systems, and I also spent two summers at Google working on Cloud SQL and Spanner. Database research goes further than DBMS implementation research. There is a lot of research on schemas, data representation, logic, type systems, and more. It’s just like how programming language research goes beyond compilers research.
I don't think watching the lectures is the hurdle that anyone at OMSCS is trying to jump. The program has a pretty low graduation rate, and the tests are known to be fairly difficult, which essentially requires the student to do work outside of class or go to the resources available through GT to understand the material. I can look up the highest quality lectures on any subject on YouTube, it doesn't mean I will understand any of it without the proper legwork.
FWIW I meant the diploma is identical, the actual experience will obviously vary. Some people will get better outcomes online, some will get better outcomes in person.
Is this a common thing to have at university? I'm from one of top universities in Poland; our database courses never included anything more than basic SQL where cursors were the absolute end. Even at Masters.
Do not worry, I do not work with databases in professional life as my main aspect. But I was not given a comprehensive education, and not even once there was a focus on anything more in depth. I came out without even knowing how databases work inside.
Naturally, I know what I could do - read a good book or go through open source projects, like Sqlite. But that knowledge was not was my uni gave me...
I am jealous of American/Canadian unis in this aspect.
OMSCS student here. You are absolutely right that the DB course is one of the weaker offerings. There is a newer Database System Implementation course, which is based on Andy Pavlo's excellent undergrad course (which is also available online), but only the first half or so of that course is covered, which is disappointing for a graduate course. In terms of the larger program, however, the two database courses are outliers and most courses are of much higher quality and definitely not undergrad level.
Hey — head TA of DSI here and want to correct some misconceptions.
DSI (6422) is taught by Andy Pavlo’s first PhD student who help to create the CMU course and a rather famous DB person. It is the same contents as the on-campus course (and were actually working to deepen/increase the depth of coverage). It’s designed to bridge between DB Theory and reading Postgres or MySql source code when it comes to DB designs and trade-offs — and covers topics like r-tries which I don’t think is covered elsewhere + a series of 12 seminal DB papers. As in any other grad-level class, you get out as much as you put in — and it’s super rare to have access to a DB researcher like Joy or hear his takes on DB development as a student at scale.
If anything, the feedback we’ve gotten from both on campus undergrad and MS students is that the OMSCS lectures + improvements are making their session more rigorous.
We actually launched a new class (CS 6422) that addresses exactly this and taught by Andy Pavlo’s first PhD student :) OMSCS db classes reviews are outdated IMO
I get the sentiment though. Happiness is a mix of the right hormones firing, so the question is: how does intelligence affect different types of hormones, if at all. Given how sensitive our hormones are, it would be difficult to control only for “intelligence”.
By that logic, "How does loved one dying affect different type of hormones, if at all. Given how sensitive our hormones are, it would be difficult to control only for 'loss of a loved one'".
If you have depression or another condition affecting your affect and your emotions, sure. Otherwise it's pretty obvious to anyone that concepts on orders of magnitude higher levels than hormones being correlated with happiness, or if you prefer, those concepts having a significant effect on the overall action of those hormones.
Loss of a loved one is a very specific event, intelligence is a very broad idea that isn't even well defined. I have no idea what this means: "concepts on orders of magnitude higher levels than hormones". I guess your intelligence is just much higher than mine.
Knowing almost nothing about memory and the brain, I don't know if I agree with "Every memory your brain has ever produced is still there".
Memories seem to be constructed by a group of neurons together, and it seems clear that neurodegeneration is a thing, whether by trauma or due to aging. When pathways degenerate, maybe you have a partial memory that you brain can help fill the gaps with(and often incorrectly), but that does not make it the original memory.
"If there’s someone out there who just sits on the beach all day and survives by eating coconuts"
This seems like a dire situation for most humans and probably isn't the status quo for human operation. Its perfectly fine to sit on the beach, but eventually a light should go on that would say "lets go build some tools", "lets go see if I can catch a fish", "lets build a hut". Which would all be fine and admirable things to spend your time doing.
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