Comment by loveparade
14 hours ago
Horrible advice. This may have been good advice 10 years ago, but not today. There are no positions for people who "kind of understand how toy LLMs work" because so many engineers do these days. Most of the real LLM optimization work is at the edge of research and highly proprietary and not something you could ever do without infra that costs millions.
But of course, 10 years ago this wasn't obvious.
you don't reach cutting edge immediately. you start with the basics
I think the answer then is to get a Phd? I mean, one should learn it to satisfy their curiosity and to build things but I don't think it's going to help you career in any significant way.
What would be better advice for a 17 year old?
Throw the computer and the smartphone out of the window.
Or more reasonably, the same old thing : use Linux, hack a little, why not learn programming basics. But learn to own your technology, fight against centralization of technology. The same old RMS story.
IDK where the tech industry is going, if there will be jobs anymore or not, but what I'm sure (and what have been the case for the last 10-15 years anyway) is that for most tech jobs, having good technical knowledge beyond the basics is pretty useless and will probably not be recognized.
If you can, stay a computer geek if that's your thing, but don't make it your career choice, the Eldorado is behind us.
Stay in school, get good grades.
"it doesn't matter what you choose to study because no job is safe from being outsourced overseas, handed over to an indentured servant, or made redundant by a machine. you will spend your whole life surviving while the cannibalistic pedophiles who own everything invent new ways to make you own nothing. be frugal, don't get married, don't have children, do everything you can to stay healthy and independent, and you just might live a reasonably comfortable life."
> don't get married, don't have children
Bad advice. You’re going to need family connections and loyal people you can bet your life on to survive if the rest of what you’re saying is remotely true.
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Most reasonable advice I've seen under this post. Having graduated in 2025 I've experienced the horror of competing with infinitely many third worlders in my small country, who will gladly take 1/3 my pay and be serfs.
I really hope we get another hiring boom like in 2020 when I decided to study CS. Otherwise my career will be very rough. I love it and can't imagine doing anything else.
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Stay away from the internet and learn how to build a local business instead.
Learn math
Yeah he's a moron with a lot of money, that's about it. I'm sure he's said the same thing about various other bags he had bets on throughout the years.