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Not really, there is a promise of a better career in the future.

That's the honor

No, that would be deferred compensation. The only problem with that theory is that it isn't real. Grad students aren't working for the promise of a better career in the future.

“That’s a risk we were willing to take.” -Dumb and Dumber

Depends on what they’re studying and where. If you’re a PhD student English Literature at Directional State University most of your compensation is consumption value, not the promise of a career[1] or pecuniary compensation.

[1] For the huge majority of PhD students in the Arts and Humanities there are virtually no jobs in their fields and it’s not that much better in the social or exact sciences, though there is at least some extra academic demand for their skills. There are very, very few fields outside academia where a doctorate is a necessary qualification or close to it and those are ~all a terrible investment if what you want is a remunerative career; things like biomedical research where you do a doctorate, then a postdoc and then get a job paying what an MBA from a top tier business school gets their first year out.


Advice I got from an ex-cancer biologist working at a devices company: get your masters, and get out. PhD programs will always be there, but compound interest won’t.

The art is not lost, just not funded. Feel free to fund the programmers for your own software projects.


It isnt lost but it also isnt a common skill set in programmers any more.

Most programmers are JS web devs writing client side code or server side CRUD.

I would guess < 10% of programmers writing code today get perf / valgrind out on the regular. I know I dont.


You can still write JS or TypeScript code that tries its best to keep memory use under check. JavaScript was around in the late 90s when the memory footprint of software was at least an order of magnitude lower, so it's absolutely doable.


JavaScript in the late 90s was doing a hell of a lot less than it is today.


You don't have to go that deep. 99% of the time our analytics or risk management teams have some really memory inefficient Python and they want me to write them one of our "magic C things" it turns out to be fixable by replacing their in-memory iterations with a generator.


Most people don't have the chance to do that, but hopefully we can see some other languages get first class access on the web. At least there is the whole WASM project.


Too late for what? For you? maybe. There are many others that are okay with it and it doesn't disminish the quality of the work. Props to the author.


> Too late for what? For you? maybe.

Maybe? :)

> There are many others that are okay with it

Correct.

> and it doesn't disminish the quality of the work.

It does affect incoming people hearing about the work.

I applaud your instinct to defend someone who put in effort. It's one of the most important things we can do.

Another important thing we can do for them is be honest about our own reactions. It's not sunshine and rainbows on its face, but, it is generous. Mostly because A) it takes time B) other people might see red and harangue you for it.


You usually cite the original story


You also usually cite what you know. Maybe OP has not read the book.


Well, I've read a translation of the book. If that scene was present, it made no impression.

It's not very comedic in the book. You can see for yourself: it is the entirety of chapter 47, here: https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1257/pg1257-images.html#cha... .

(Interestingly, I would have said that the translation I read came from Project Gutenberg, but it wasn't the one I just linked and no other is currently available there. Does Project Gutenberg take down existing versions of out-of-copyright books sometimes??)


If the book is out of copyright is the translation also out of copyright?

Edit: apparently not. So Gutenberg is hosting whatever they legally can, which is older translations.


There are multiple older translations, but Project Gutenberg only has one at the moment. I'm conjecturing that they used to have a different one (also out of copyright; that's their whole thing), but have taken it down for unclear reasons.

It's also possible that I found a free translation of The Three Musketeers somewhere else, or that I read the same version PG has now and have misidentified it as being different.


Ah, okie dokes.


Banned from doing free work?


N*Log(N) can be approximated to O(N) for most realistic usecases.

As for LLM, there is probably some cost constant added once it can fit on a single GPU, but should probably be almost linear.


There is a difference between being smart and acting smart.


I think that's exactly the point being made. __Acting__ smart gets you paid, not being smart, and that's like, not ideal.


I wonder how you get paid if you fail the interview.


You don't, hence why it pays to act smart.


if you answer ""Well I would probably go home and work on my resume because that's a fool's errand." You probably are missing the wood and the trees.


and if you hire only based on solely on employee compliance then you are also probably missing the wood for the trees. I've worked in such orgs and they're extremely vulnerable to cargo culting.


I’m not hiring on compliance. I’ve accepted that his answer is correct but asked for the purposes of the exercise if he can put that to a side so we can talk about it. I’ve worked with and hired people like this and they tend to turn every molehill into a mountain, which is just killer on a small team.


This part of trust was not about you trusting the government though so it is okay.


Just curious how much does it sell? It gives an idea about how much my personal data is worth


I was just having a quick search and the only email I can find that offered a price range up front was for $0.1-0.4 per user, and that was from 2023. So I assume up to a dollar per user these days?


I imagine it must be very tempting to take that bag while old reddit is still usable.

Thank you for not doing so.


No, fortunately in my case it's not tempting at all.

It's easy to see how many people in less advantaged positions would end up selling out, though.


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