Textbook quote right here:

More people should learn to program but less people should become software developers

apparently this hit #1 on HN in the morning and spawned some really solid discussions and personal reports (+ the usual heckling). Thanks to @kev_in_hu for posting it to HN .. totally forgot that's a thing news.ycombinator.com/item?id=294810…

was wondering about the angry nerd mob with torches gathering outside my apartment Scott Alexander

my gut is that productivity software for the life sciences, particularly R&D, will turn out to be a failure. there's 10+ companies in this space, and none have cracked a GTM. The simple truth is R&D is cash strapped, doesn't buy software, and has impossibly long feedback loops

I've bio-pilled a few SWE friends and know a dozen more that would take a pay cut to go into bio/research software if it was seen as a valid "cool" career with a clear path and enough salary to build a family eventually

"why would any machine learning researcher want to work at something that isn’t at the forefront of generalization capability? ". Great read

A Life

Excited to share what I’ve been up to with the mech interp team at Anthropic! transformer-circuits.pub/2023/may-updat…