Your job title encompasses the highest-order bits about who you are, professionally. The value is much more between organizations than within a single one.
If you plan to stay at one place for a long time, it's much less important. You have a chance to figure out how things 'really' work in practice. I know a guy who is a senior architect, and everyone refers to him as that at his company, but his actual on-paper title is something like "project technical lead". It's just not very important if you are going to stay there for 20 or 30 years and chase deep breathing metis.
I don't have the same career outlook, so my job title is important to me. I actively negotiate for it. My own title is "senior DevSecOps engineer". Criticism of the acronym notwithstanding, this paints an instantly legible set of competencies around what I do best, what I do adequately, and what you probably would get better value for money paying someone else for. I'm probably pretty good at vulnerability management and securing CI/CD pipelines. Optimizing weights on our anti-spam logistic classifier is probably not the kind of thing I can do well. Etc., etc.
Titles mean even less across organizations. Any interviewer worth their salt is going to hire you and level you based on how they ascertain the level of scope , impact and dealing with ambiguity you dealt with.
You can be a “CTO” of your little 5 person company - you might be leveled as an mid level software engineer at BigTech
>First, there is no such thing as a [socially] successful person who has never ever creeped anyone out. Give yourself permission to be creepy. I am not saying that you should go around trying to creep people out; of course, if you know something is going to scare someone, you shouldn’t do it; it is best that one avoid becoming Harvey Weinstein. But miscommunications, awkwardness, and misunderstandings happen. Sometimes people make mistakes. You are not going to become Harvey Weinstein by accident. Most people have interacted with someone who has creeped them out at some point, and it does not exactly cause lifelong damage. And while there can be some negative consequences, particularly of creeping people out at work, if you ask [about] a random stranger['s day] at a bookstore or something and they’re creeped out, you know what will happen? Absolutely nothing. The [social] police will not come lock you up for creepiness in the third degree.
Lightly adapted from [1], which is actually the best article online about how to find love and date.
I'm surprised by all the people saying they dislike transactional talk. Voluntary trades are positive sum by definition, so a good transactional conversation should also be a joyous one.
Anthropic cares first and foremost about extinction risk. This is not what everyone who professes to care about human welfare thinks should be at the top of the priority list. See e.g. the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement for an example of a humanistic approach to letting humanity die off with no replacement.
One of the most challenging problems in AI safety re/ x-risk is that even if you can get one country to do the right thing, getting multiple countries on board is an entirely different ballgame. Some amount of intentional coercion is inevitable.
On the low end, you could pay bounties to international bounty hunters who extract foreign AI researchers in a manner similar to an FBI's most wanted lost, and let AI researchers quickly do the math and realize there are a million other well paid jobs that don't come with this flight risk. On the high end you can go to war and kill everyone. Whatever gets the job done.
Either way, if you want to win at enforcing a new kind of international coercion, you need to be at the top of the pack militarily and economically speaking. That is the true goal here, and I don't think one can make coherent sense out of what Anthropic is doing without keeping that in the back of their mind at all times.
One could just as easily make the opposite argument. Given that your values and priorities may change significantly over the decades, a smart investment now into a solid, stable, and prosocial public identity may reap considerable and wide-ranging benefits in ways you couldn't even predict. This is especially true if you take seriously the idea that it's not what you say but how you say it that matters in the end.
This is actually what I believe as well although I believe that its better to be pseudo-anonymous for me, right now.
In the sense that if I ever create any business/idea which can be serious enough that I want to back it up. I might create hackernews post about it.
Although that being said, I do sometimes make alts just to publish something if I don't want it under this particular account.
I do feel like I can be wrong, I usually am[0] but I think that I want to improve myself and perhaps this account can be a way for people to see me grow perhaps and sometimes fall as well. Life feels like a sin wave with ups and downs.
I have had some paranoid thoughts as to what if I get into controversy later on in life because of some things I do in my teen years but there was a line from a friend that I heard which said, "that anyone with more than 1 brain cell can figure out if a person has improved or not"
I do feel like authenticity is gonna be the differentiator if both code and infra aren't the bottlenecks. Perhaps authenticity can be treated as part of marketing but I feel like its also paradoxical to gain authenticity if you want to do marketing. Imo, a person has to be authentic for the sake of being authentic and only then and then can he also get some marketing benefits.
Authenticity means to share both good and bad (well as much as you can, I don't think one should be completely 100% authentic but rather only keep a few personal things to oneselves and even if they get leaked, then y'know just have the grace to accept it and considering that quote from above, I think most people will understand most things especially when you realize that there are people / (youtubers?) in the world who are part of serious accusations/controversies where I feel like most other controversies should be pretty non-issue fwiw.
Like my idea is being authentic enough to satisfy myself. If I become more authentic but if I feel unsatisfied/worried etc.,then that's wrong too.
[0]: (This is such a good quote from how to win friends that I use it quite often)
You seem polite enough even psuedonymously, so I'd say you're doing a good job so far. :)
>I have had some paranoid thoughts as to what if I get into controversy later on in life because of some things I do in my teen years
I have a relevant anecdote, from back in halcyon 2008. Maybe it will help you when it comes to believing your friend, or at least it will temper your paranoia, which I think is well meaning in small doses.
When I was 13 or 14 years old I got suspended from high school because a friend posted a link to the Anarchist's Cookbook, which I had never heard of, on my Facebook wall. Some of my classmates got very scared and called the headmaster saying I had made a bomb threat against the school.
When the principal pulled me in to talk to me about this, it became very clear I had no idea what they were talking about. We talked for much longer than I think anyone in the room expected, maybe for three hours about existentialism, Zappfe's essay The Last Messiah which I had read the night before, whether I thought I was a victim of bullying (I didn't), what I thought of the school (excellent, a welcome refuge from a very turbulent home), thoughts on Cicero's speeches, the books we were reading in English class at the time.
I got "suspended" for a week and my parents took me to a therapist for several months afterward. I had thought after this for the rest of high school that my chances of ever going to college were totally shot, because a suspension appears on your permanent record. However, when it came time for me to actually apply to colleges, I found out no such record of the week at home ever existed. There appeared to have been a miscommunication all those years ago; I had actually been put on some kind of medical leave.
Now of course going through all of high school thinking that no college in the country will accept you now no matter how hard you do is going to change your incentives a bit. Ironically the very thinkers I had been reading at the time helped me quickly conclude that I wanted to do my level best anyway, even if there was going to be no payoff at the end of the road at all for me. In some ways it let me take more risks than my other classmates. I became the earliest person in my class to take our infamously hard physics course, and I walked out with top marks on both kinematics and electromagnetism. I don't think I would have taken that risk if I thought I had to optimize my GPA.
I trust you to think about this story and come to your own conclusions on how it moves your needle.
>I post under my real name here, pretty much the only place I post. It keeps me honest and straight in what I say when I choose to say it.
I do the same thing, and I think I'm a much better person for it. The Internet is not, in my final analysis, some indiscriminate dumping ground for my personal issues and moods. It's a place where I can relax and practice putting forward a more prosocial form of myself, even when what I actually have to say is uncomfortable.
While we can't predict how the adversary will read and respond to our moves, I suspect the easier marks are the people who choose to publicly drench everything they touch in negativity and cynicism. It's a sign of an already compromised social immune system.
Exactly. He recently said the following in an interview:
"AI safety and anti-capitalism [...] are at least strongly analogous, if not exactly the same thing." [0]
[0] Nick Land (2026). A Conversation with Nick Land (Part 2) by Vincent Lê in Architechtonics Substack. Retrieved from vincentl3.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-nick-land-part-a4f
I like the idea of not buying disposable furnitures, especially when there are alternatives at the same price. I can stand on my current desk (the ikea kitchen table) with my full weight and probably jump on it, the previous one was bowing if I did as little as resting my elbows on it
Some people defend it because they are nondualists. They think the moral value of human life rounds to zero against the existence of something which can effortlessly outclass them in all domains. This is obviously confused, but they can't bring themselves to say "Very cool, and also I think humans are inherently special and deserve to continue existing even if all we do is lie around all day and watch the Hallmark channel."
Happy Valentine's day to those who celebrate btw <3
>Just be honest since the start that your product will eventually abandon its FOSS licence. Then people can make an informed decision.
"An informed decision" is not a black or white category, and it definitely isn't when we're talking about risk pricing for B2B services and goods, like what MinIO largely was for those who paid.
Any business with financial modelling worth their salt knows that very few things which are good and free today will stay that way tomorrow. The leadership of a firm you transact with may or may not state this in words, but there are many other ways to infer the likelihood of this covertly by paying close attention.
And, if you're not paying close attention, it's probably just not that important to your own product. What risks you consider worth tailing are a direct extension of how you view the world. The primary selling point of MinIO for many businesses was, "it's cheaper than AWS for our needs". That's probably still true for many businesses and so there's money to be made at least in the short term.
"Informed decisions" mean you need to have the information.
Like with software development, we often lack the information on which we have to decide architectural, technical or business decisions.
The common solution for that is to embrace this. Defer decisions. Make changing easy once you do receive the information. And build "getting information" into the fabric. We call this "Agile", "Lean", "data driven" and so on.
I think this applies here too.
Very big chance that MinIO team honestly thought that they'd keep it open source but only now gathered enough "information" to make this "informed decision".
If you plan to stay at one place for a long time, it's much less important. You have a chance to figure out how things 'really' work in practice. I know a guy who is a senior architect, and everyone refers to him as that at his company, but his actual on-paper title is something like "project technical lead". It's just not very important if you are going to stay there for 20 or 30 years and chase deep breathing metis.
I don't have the same career outlook, so my job title is important to me. I actively negotiate for it. My own title is "senior DevSecOps engineer". Criticism of the acronym notwithstanding, this paints an instantly legible set of competencies around what I do best, what I do adequately, and what you probably would get better value for money paying someone else for. I'm probably pretty good at vulnerability management and securing CI/CD pipelines. Optimizing weights on our anti-spam logistic classifier is probably not the kind of thing I can do well. Etc., etc.