Ophthalmology is one of the cushiest and best paid specialties.
My wife is a pediatric ER doctor. She makes about the same as I do as a staff engineer at a big tech company, but she works 11-12 shifts a month (8-9 hour shifts).
The kicker is that her hours are terrible and she has to deal with distressed parents, and sick kids, and the occasional very bad outcome. It also took her 14 years of training and $200k in debt to start making real money.
But the social status of being a doctor really shouldn’t be underestimated. She has so much more autonomy than I do. Her job is as secure as a job can possibly be.
And interviewing. Interviews are basically a hospital flying her out and wining and dining her to try to convince her to take the job.
Yeah the trouble with healthcare is it's secure if you're willing to work the shifts. Even dentists are often working long hours and on weekends etc. (although I don't think night shift is a thing). Even the best doctor will struggle to find a 9-5 that they leave on time every day. Swings and roundabouts.
Lots of happy examples in this thread. Let me add mine.
My 3 year old vastly prefers complex carnatic music to cocomelon (and its ilk). He can listen to a 15 minute, intricate song without losing interest, and will ask for it in a loop. Children can handle a lot more complexity than we generally assume.
Some languages are supposed to be very difficult & mentally taxing to learn, because they have many conjugations. But a native speaker with very low intelligence (however you measure it) has zero trouble conjugating it all correctly.
The keyword in title is "bullish". It's about the future.
Specifically I think it's about the potential of the transformer architecture & the idea that scaling is all that's needed to get to AGI (however you define AGI).
> Companies will keep pumping up LLMs until the day a newcomer puts forward a different type of AI model that will swiftly outperform them.
Not the poster you responded to but I learned quite a bit from kaggle too.
I started from scratch, spent 2-4 hrs per day for 6 months & won a silver in a kaggle NLP competition. Now I use some of it now but not all of it. More than that, I'm quite comfortable with models, understand the costs/benefits/implications etc. I started with Andrew Ng's intro courses, did a bit of fastai, did Karpathy's Zero to Hero fully, all of Kaggle's courses & a few other such things. Kagglers share excellent notebooks and I found them v helpful. Overall I highly recommend this route of learning.
I started with this 3 part course - https://www.coursera.org/specializations/machine-learning-in.... I think the same course is available at deeplearning.ai as well, I'm not sure, but I found coursera's format of ~5 min videos on the phone app very helpful (with speed-up options). I was a new mother and didn't have continuous hours of time back then. I could watch these videos while brushing, etc. It helped me to not quit. After a point I was hooked & baby also grew up a bit and I gradually acquired more time and energy for learning ML. :)
fastai is also amazing, but it's made of 1.5 hour videos, and is more freeflowing. By the time I even figured out where we stopped last time, my time would sometimes be up. It was very discouraging because of this. But later, once I got a little more time & some basic understanding from Andrew Ng, I was able to attempt fastai.
i mean yes but also how much does kaggling/traditional ML path actually prepare you for the age of closed model labs and LLM APIs?
im not even convinced kaggling helps you interview at an openai/anthropic (its not a negative, sure, but idk if itd be what theyd look for for a research scientist role)
I learned ML only to satisfy my curiosity, so I don't know if it's useful for interviewing. :)
Now when I read a paper on something unrelated to AI (idk, say progesterone supplements), and they mention a random forest, I know what they're talking about. I understand regression, PCA, clustering, etc. When I trained a few transformer models (not pretrained) on my native language texts, I was shocked by how rapidly they learn connotations. I find transformer-based LLMs to be very useful, yes, but not unsettlingly AGI-like, as I did before learning about them. I understand the usual way of building recommender systems, embeddings and things. Image models like Unets, GANs etc were very cool too, and when your own code produces that magical result, you see the power of pretraining + specialization. So yeah, idk what they do in interviews nowadays but I found my education very fruitful. It was how I felt when I first picked up programming.
Re the age of LLMs, it is precisely because LLMs will be ubiquitous I wanted to know how they work. I felt uncomfortable treating them as black boxes that you don't understand technically. Think about the people who don't know simple things about a web browser, like opening dev tools and printing the auth token or something. It's not great to be in that place.
What an incredible waste of words. What is this even based on?
For a start, where I'm from, there is no marker around the age of 40 (or 35 or 45). It's the age when people are extremely busy because of career & kids.
Secondly, culture is made by a lot of people. Not so many in their early 20s, but several from late 20s to 60s.
Thirdly, it is also made for people over 40s. Not perhaps Hollywood movies but how about carnatic music? Concerts in Chennai overflow with people over 50s, and barely anyone in their 20s.
Fourthly, it just sounds like someone had their 40th birthday, felt the usual crisis, and tried to make up some idea to create meaning for themselves. Nothing wrong with it I suppose, except that it has no meaning for others.
I don’t really have the energy to debate it in detail, but I wanted to let you know that personally I found the article extremely insightful. In fact, I ended up reading two other in-depth articles written on the same site. I can see what he’s pointing at and why the angle is worth writing and reading about.
Thanks for asking this -- your question made me realize I don't have much experience with pain at all! The answer is pretty run of the mill stuff -- I got my finger stuck in a door-crack-like spot. Ugh.
Childbirth pain is not horrible and sharp like that. It feels a lot more productive, so to speak. It's not right to use the word "pain" to describe both things actually. Without that pain, you'd have to depend upon a nurse to tell you when to push -- there would be a delay between her seeing the monitor and asking you to push. It all seemed very unlikely to work to me (but of course it works). But if you feel the pain yourself, you will know when to push.
Also it comes in waves. After each wave of "pain", you get completely pain-free rest periods. But of course towards the end when the baby actually comes out, the rest periods shorten and the pain periods lengthen so it all kind of rolls into one. Many women are not so lucky as me and have prolonged labour, lasting into days. Mine only lasted a few hours so it was fine.
I completely agree with the other person who replied to you. Personally I said no to anaesthesia because they put that in your spine -- shudder.
I'm not the person you're asking, but I may be able to satisfy your curiosity a little. I have given birth without anesthesia -- in fact, I did so twice. I found it arduous and difficult, and there certainly were moments of pain, but I would not describe the experience overall as exactly painful.
You know how when you've been running for a long time and you really want to stop? That was the primary unpleasant sensation for me. Something between a muscle cramp and a side ache, though quite intense. Really uncomfortable, really hard work. Very distressing if you freak out about it and get frightened, but actually a pretty cool experience if you lean into it. Toward the end of labor there was some significant pain, enough to make me yell, but there was also so much going on that I was very distracted from it. You can experience some pretty significant pain and not be very badly distressed by it if you're super focused on some goal and working hard for it, and boy does childbirth have that effect. ;)
Now, you shouldn't overly generalize from my personal experiences. Every pregnancy is different, and every delivery is different. But I have always thought the characterization of childbirth as the greatest possible pain was overblown. In my experience, it was more like a major athletic event which involved some significant injury - a marathon or a boxing match or something in that neighborhood. You do really injure yourself enough that it takes some weeks to heal, but I honestly think that part of the equation is comparable to a bad sprain. Maybe a bit worse, but much more like an athletic injury than some of the horrible diseases people get.
At any rate, it is not the most significant pain I've personally experienced. That prize goes to an infected gall bladder / passed gall stone. I've also had leg cramps which I thought were more painful than childbirth, though they didn't last as long. To relate it to the original claim, I definitely think it's plausible that dysentary is worse. Internal organs dying is high on the pain scale.
(If you're curious about why I chose to avoid anaesthesia, I hadn't liked it during my first delivery. I had a long and painful labor during which anesthesia was delayed, and when I finally got it, I found it didn't much lift my distress -- I later understood that was because my pain wasn't pain exactly, it was me doing a poor job of working with my body. Aaand I was at a dumb hospital that had put me on my back, which is painful, and I didn't know any better. Anyway. I didn't see it as really relieving my discomfort, but it did confine me to bed for a couple days and robbed me of being my most alert and best self during a very important moment in my life. My second two deliveries were better experiences than my first.)
Yeah, I’m going to say you were pretty lucky. With my first I had pain significant enough to be traumatic, before the stage where I could get an epidural. I used to tell people if I’d gone out and had my husband run over my leg with the car, it would have hurt less and I could have gotten pain relief in the ER. It wasn’t as bad the second time though. It is truly a large range of experiences.
> Imagine someone being a brain surgeon also interested in the heart, kidneys and urinary tract, nose-throat-ears, ... that's a Renaissance Doc.
Do you mean that such a Renaissance doc this is not a good thing? I think this is exactly the sort of doctors we need.
Right now, my father has diabetes t2, high bp, a slightly enlarged prostrate gland, a series of UTIs, hernia, skin rashes and probably a few other things. He's fairly rigorous in researching & learning about his conditions. But no doc he consults takes an overall picture of his health. You have nephrologist, urologist, cardiologist and so on. They tend to miss things among themselves until he reminds them.
Yes medicine has advanced greatly but a renaissance doc would be transformative for people like him.
You know what a lifestyle coach is? Or a physiotherapist?
A few surgeries, treatments and lifestyle interventions can do it. Though it's not an easy task. And further, not a cheap one. Treatments tend to synergize.
There's so many specialized doctors.
The generalist is called a general practitioner, but commonly reduced to a specialist in ENT infections.
He meant that micromanaging and getting into details is good (not disparaging him here, fwiw I agree with him), but he didn't want to come right out and say it. Also, I think he's not yet sure what else it involves -- like the 100 ppl party thing. He just knows it's not delegation.
> He meant that micromanaging and getting into details is good
This isn't what I took away, but it may be that we're saying the same thing differently.
My takeaway was that founders should 'trust, but verify'. And where they disagree/don't understand, they should question and pursue the truth of the matter rather than defer to experience.
