non_aligned (u/non_aligned)

non_aligned commented on AI Startup Founders Tout a Winning Formula–No Booze, No Sleep, No Fun wsj.com/business/entrepre... · Posted by u/pondsider

non_aligned · an hour ago

I worked crazy hours in my early 20s because I liked it. I liked computers, I liked my team, and to be frank, I had not much else to do. If I went home early, I would be spending time on the internet anyway.

But the thing is, unless you're building your own business, it just doesn't matter. No one will remember this in five years. In a corporate environment, every doc, every line of code you wrote will be replaced or forgotten far sooner than you suspect. Two or three reorgs later, your team might not even exist as a distinct entity. There will be no statue of you in the hallway after you're gone.

It's also not your family. If you become any sort of a liability, if you make an off-color joke, if the revenue metrics are off by 5% - thanks kid, here's the door. The first layoffs you go through will be devastating precisely because they crush that illusion. Yeah, your manager might be a genuinely nice and caring person, but by the end of the day, if they're asked to sort a spreadsheet with your name in it and then draw a line somewhere, they will, and there will be "nothing they could do".

The only lasting thing you're getting out of the heroics is the money you save, the skills you learn on the job, and for a short while, the reference you get from your old boss when you apply for the next job. If you optimize for that, you'll probably have a satisfying career. If you don't, you wake up one day realizing that you've given up a good chunk of your life to make Sam Altman 0.01% richer, and that's that.

If a company is demanding that you sacrifice social life and well-being, ask yourself what's it worth to you. Are they paying more than anyone else? Or do they just want to get more kLOC out of you for free?

non_aligned commented on Nano Banana image examples github.com/PicoTrex/Aweso... · Posted by u/SweetSoftPillow

mitthrowaway2 · 18 hours ago

Maybe they're better off switching careers? At some point, your customers aren't going to pay you very much to do something that they've become able to do themselves.

There used to be a job people would do, where they'd go around in the morning and wake people up so they could get to work on time. They were called a "knocker-up". When the alarm clock was invented, these people lose their jobs to other knockers-up with alarm clocks, they lost their jobs to alarm clocks.

non_aligned · 17 hours ago

A lot of technological progress is about moving in the other direction: taking things you can do yourself and having others do it instead.

You can paint your own walls or fix your own plumbing, but people pay others instead. You can cook your food, but you order take-out. It's not hard to sew your own clothes, but...

So no, I don't think it's as simple as that. A lot of people will not want the mental burden of learning a new tool and will have no problem paying someone else to do it. The main thing is that the price structure will change. You won't be able to charge $1,000 for a project that takes you a couple of days. Instead, you will need to charge $20 for stuff you can crank out in 20 minutes with gen AI.

non_aligned commented on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah nbcnews.com/news/us-news/... · Posted by u/david927

busyant · 2 days ago

> Also, if your grandpa likes telling war stories, it's only because he survived.

As someone whose parents, grandparents, and entire family lived in Italy through WWII (and one grandfather who lost an eye in WWI), nobody liked talking about it.

If they did talk about it, it was usually brief and imbued with a feeling of "thank God it's over. what a tragedy that we were all used as pawns by the political class for nothing more than selfish ambitions."

non_aligned · 2 days ago

Isn't that just a comforting fantasy, though? Germans also embraced the myth of Hitler as a guy who just somehow hoodwinked everyone and made good people do terrible things.

There was a prominent component of political scheming to his rise to power, and it was a totalitarian state that murdered political opponents even before it got to genocide, but he was enthusiastically supported by a large portion of the German society.

non_aligned commented on Fraudulent Publishing in the Mathematical Sciences arxiv.org/abs/2509.07257... · Posted by u/bikenaga

kaladin-jasnah · 2 days ago

Things like citation brokers (paid to cite papers), abuse of power, paper mills, and blackmail (pg. 10) is appalling to me. I have to question how we ended up here. Academia seems very focused on results and output, and this is used as a metric to measure a researcher's worth or value.

Has this always been an issue in academia, or is this an increasing or new phenomenon? It seems as if there is a widespread need to take shortcuts and boost your h-index. Is there a better way to determine the impact of research and to encourage researchers to not feel so pressed to output and boost their citations? Why is it like this today?

Academic mathematics, from what I've seen, seems incredibly competitive and stressful (to be fair, so does competition math from a young age), perhaps because the only career for many mathematicians (outside a topics with applications such as but not limited to number theory, probability, and combinatorics) is academia. Does this play into what this article talks about?

non_aligned · 2 days ago

I've seen similar stuff in a couple of other places, including IT back in the 1990s (back when it wasn't nearly as glamorous as it is today).

I think some of this has to do with... resentment? You're this incredibly smart person, you worked really hard, and no one values you. No one wants to pay you big bucks, no one outside a tiny group knows your name even if you make important contributions to the field. Meanwhile, all the dumb people are getting ahead. It's easy to get depressed, and equally easy to decide that if life is unfair, it's OK to cheat to win.

Add to this the academic culture where, frankly, there are fewer incentives to address misbehavior and where many jobs are for life... and the nature of the field, which makes cheating is easy (as outlined in the article)... and you have an explosive mix.

non_aligned commented on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah nbcnews.com/news/us-news/... · Posted by u/david927

non_aligned · 2 days ago

I'm not here to defend the US, but here's one way to look at it: the death toll of alcohol abuse is much higher, so how can one conceivably defend a society that allows its consumption? Almost everywhere in the West, the answer is basically "we like it, we like the freedom of being able to drink, and it's an acceptable price if tens of thousands of people die".

It's essentially the same thing, except unique to the US. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but your exasperation is essentially the same as my exasperation, as a non-drinker, that I or my children can be randomly killed by someone driving under the influence - and everyone is somehow kinda OK with that.

non_aligned commented on Guy running a Google rival from his laundry room fastcompany.com/91396271/... · Posted by u/coloneltcb

the_real_cher · 2 days ago

I always wondered why someone couldn't do this.

Google was invented many years ago by two guys in a dorm room and since then there's been so many white papers and advancements in the public sphere and the actual underlying problem has not changed that much, that it seems like it could be done by a small group or independent person.

non_aligned · 2 days ago

I think there are two factors that helped Google. First, the search engine landscape back then was absolutely abysmal. I'm sure someone will chime in saying that it's abysmal today as well, but the reality is that 99%+ of consumer searches get good results today. And that's simply because the nature of search has changed: we have billions of people using the internet, and they overwhelmingly just search for products to buy, local restaurants that offer takeout, or for familiar pop content to watch or listen to. And there's some SEO spam there, but also pretty fierce quality assurance by search engines.

Second, the internet was different: when all nerds declared that Google is good, that was CNN-grade newsworthy (and CNN used to matter a lot more back then), simply because the internet seemed kinda important, but there was no other authority on the topic. Today, that's not the case. If you need someone to opine on the internet on air, you invite some political pundit or a business analyst.

So no, I don't think you can repeat the success of Google the same way. It was a product of its time.

non_aligned commented on US High school students' scores fall in reading and math apnews.com/article/naep-r... · Posted by u/bikenaga

Aurornis · 2 days ago

> However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education.

I always find it interesting that the anti-schooling mentality is so prevalent here on HN, too. It’s most obvious in threads about cheating, where a popular topic of discussion is to defend cheating as a rational reaction because school doesn’t matter, a degree is “just a piece of paper”, and you’ll learn everything on the job anyway.

It also shows up in the tired argument that college is only really about networking, not learning.

I’ve had some on and off experience mentoring college students in the past. Those who adopt these mentalities often hit a wall partway through college or even at their first job when their baseline intelligence runs out and they realize they don’t have the necessary foundation because they’ve been blowing off coursework or even cheating their way through college for years.

I’m afraid that LLMs are only going to enable more of this behavior. It’s now easier to cheat and students are emboldened by the idea that they don’t need to learn things because they can always just ask ChatGPT.

non_aligned · 2 days ago

The difference is that you can, quite successfully, keep "cheating" with an LLM while at a job. And people do, not just in lower-importance roles, but at law offices, etc.

I work in tech and I see this more and more every day. By "cheating", I mean deciding that you don't want to do the thinking or even spot-check the result; you just ask an LLM to vibe-write a design doc, send it out, and have others point out issues if they care.

non_aligned commented on YouTube is a mysterious monopoly anderegg.ca/2025/09/08/yo... · Posted by u/geerlingguy

starfallg · 2 days ago

TikTok is a fluke, created by the condition of how it was originally born as Douyin in China. It is also the only app that translated well from the domestic China market to international markets.

Being backed by lots of VC cash and Bytedance's revenues in China is a key factor in getting TikTok established overseas.

non_aligned · 2 days ago

TikTok is the most prominent one, for a number of reasons, but other platforms that pioneered or copied the format also reached considerable prominence. Instagram Reels, Snapchat Stories, etc. And tellingly, when YouTube wanted to compete, they needed to build an experience quite separate from the rest of the site. There is a qualitative difference in how people perceive and consume this type of content. It's not just "vertical YouTube".

Of course each one of these platforms was backed by VC or stock market money, but that's the nature of the industry. Over the years, VCs ended up throwing a lot of money at Google and YouTube killers and that didn't get them anywhere, so that in itself isn't the winning formula.

non_aligned commented on Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office businessinsider.com/micro... · Posted by u/alloyed

t-writescode · 3 days ago

You missed the people more productive at home because they have less overall life stress, no pain of commute, disabilities which make commute painful or hard, etc.

And I suspect that’s a *LOT* more people than you’re giving credit.

To be very clear, I’m in that group, and probably so. Several engineers I’ve worked with are in that group, as well. I suspect it’s actually quite common in software.

non_aligned · 2 days ago

I honestly don't think this shows in the data. As a software engineer, I really want to believe it, but I think we're prone to confusing well-being with productivity. We feel better about the work, but if you try to quantify it in any imaginable way, it's not there. Not in launch velocity, not in the number of pull requests, not the number of design docs created, bugs fixed, etc...

Of course, all of these metrics are individually goofy, but in aggregate, they give you some approximation of productivity.