I know someone who was in a similar situation at your child’s age, in the Stanford CS program. He was able to pause his studies and secure some kind of agreement he could come back when he felt ready. He worked on his issues for about 15 years, barely making enough to pay rent. But then he went back and finished, subsequently got better jobs, and now he’s retired at age 49.
There’s a full-color dimming filter in Accessibility -> Zoom -> Zoom Filter -> Low Light. You can assign it to the accessibility shortcut for quick access.
I understand that nowadays when we think of AI we imagine deep learning and neural networks, but nowhere on the website does it claim that that is the case.
When I was younger I tried the generalist consultant thing. Did a bunch of interesting jobs and patted myself on the back for being able to tackle so many different types of problems, stacks, stages of the business, etc. It actually was really fun.
To my surprise though, as I got more and more general the rates I could demand got lower and lower, even though I had all these successful projects and good references etc. I finally picked up on the fact that the only companies who would consider a generalist either didn’t know what they were doing, or couldn’t afford an expert in the specific skills they needed.
Decided to specialize in something in-demand, and life got a lot easier.
"only companies who wanted a generalist either didn’t know what they were doing, or couldn’t afford an expert in the specific skills they needed." Spot on.
I went down the same path, and came to the same conclusion. Most of the time you don't even have to learn that many new skills to "specialize", you can just change the messaging and positioning on your website/resume/conversations with future clients.
I've had mixed experience here. It REALLY depends on what you're specializing in; specialization alone doesn't cut it. Also, you can get away with being a skills generalist if you instead specialize in a field/topic/etc (IMO).
So its more about positioning, I think. How you're able to sell yourself and the skills you have.
I once met a programmer who, while broadly skilled, had looked around and seen that .NET programmers were in high demand: "So, I became a .NET programmer!", and things worked out well for him.
What you say is 100% true. It's a bit sad nonetheless, companies often hire specialists when what they really need is a great generalist. Few orgs understand their own needs very well.
It's also a difficult exercise to the generalist-minded, to market oneself as a specialist. One must adopt a very reductive view of one's own skills of experiences. "From now on, I'll just be a Python programmer who specializes in backend systems for the medical industry" is hard to internalize.
Be an expert with the ability to generalize in your back pocket when you need to. A generalist skill set does not mean you have to do generalist jobs either.
I've been lucky in that respect. A lot of start-up financial firms in my sector are founded by traders looking to go our on their own. The last thing they want to do is deal with "back office" matters so it is one space where generalism pays a premium.
I've done well and been paid well but I'm moving away from generalism for other reasons.
What fields/tech stacks would you recommend to specialize on? I have nearly a decade of experience in programming but I'll probably specialize just to stay in-demand.
Sadly that logic doesn’t work here, though it’s tempting. There’s a portion of the population that refused vaccines, due to a combination of factors including misinformation. Omicron going wild would put millions of elderly people into the hospitals, jamming up the healthcare system and leading to millions more excess deaths.
So what is the endgame here? Covid is not going away. Does that mean that China will become an isolated island with waves of lockdowns for the next decades?
If that’s what suits the party best, probably. Communist dictatorships aren’t known for very rational policies when they need to save face on something.
That’s the question a lot of people seem to have, but think about it: they’ve already bought themselves 2 extra years of vaccine + therapeutics development, and beefing up of medical infrastructure. There’s no way they can do lockdowns forever, and they’re open about that in all the media. But there’s a point in those other trends at which opening up becomes millions of times less dangerous, and we’re just not there yet.
Force elders to vax. Build up antiviral stockpile. Maybe wait for milder strain. Roll out phased living with covid experiments by region. Take a few extra years to spare millions of deaths.
It's wild to me that they're able to enforce heavy lockdowns like these but aren't able to persuade everyone (or a large enough % of "everyone") to take a vaccination.
I forgot which numbers I saw, but yeah their overall rate is high. The problem is that so many of the remaining unvaccinated are elderly, so if they start getting sick they’ll get it bad and overload the system.
Another problem is that the efficacy rate of Sinovac is far lower than that of the mRNA vaccines in preventing illness, although it still drastically reduces severe disease.
Sounds like they’re only advocating incremental improvements to the current policy?
Compare China death rates over the pandemic to basically anywhere else. If saving 5-10 million lives (estimated based on % of US population lost to Covid) doesn’t count as working, what would?
We should be able to weight the cost of saving those lives vs the harm caused to those who would otherwise be fine. If we don’t have those numbers I don’t think we can define what worked and what didn’t.
Just looking at raw lives saved (especially when most of those lives are older than average age of death) is too simplistic.
Of course nobody wants to die before their time and perhaps after one month in ICU but a country the size of China has about 10 million deaths every year (1% of 1 billion.) I wasn't happy to be locked down for 2 months in a much milder way than the people in Shanghai. I'd really change country if my country had a Chinese approach to virus containment because it's going to be a really bad decade. Until China needs their people to work all the time no matter what, then covid will be banned and forgotten.
So your point is that things cannot improve when they are bad because no one can voice a contrarian view, but your evidence that things are bad is Shanghai's vice-mayor advocating contrarian views?
My point is that the only way for China to contain Omicron is to increase lockdown measures to the point that many people are dying due to lack of food and healthcare. The alternative is to abandon CovidZero policies completely and go the path of heard immunity. And in China you are not allowed to express those facts, because it means the leaders were wrong to promote CovidZero.
China is on Earth, not in some other solar system. If their excess deaths per capita were a fraction of the numbers in the West, there would be no way to hide it.
The easiest way to hide it is to report death was caused for another reason. If someone like yourself is going to take their numbers at face value they have already hidden it.
Whether out of malice or just the difficulty of testing corpses with inadequate supplies s, I thought it was widely assumed all countries were underreporting in at least 2020 and probably further. Therefore, everyone serious looked at excess deaths.
People are still arguing how many people died in the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961. Some say as low as 15 million others as high as 50 million. It's easy to hide millions of deaths in authoritarian regimes.
I’m in Shanghai too. It’s a city of 25+ million people: there will be some bad stories. But overall it is running remarkably and the vast majority of people aren’t thinking about how oppressed they are by having to eat fish. They’re helping each other and encouraging each other, because they know the cost of not doing this is millions of lives.
The number of confirmed COVID deaths in the US is almost a million, so "millions" doesn't seem that much of a stretch for a much larger country like China. Of course this is not directly comparable because the number of deaths depends on vaccination status and age demographics.
And other countries with fewer deaths have higher vaccination rates. China has the problem of both, low vaccination rates in the risk populations and worse vaccines than the mRNA ones.
But lockdowns can't work forever, I don't see how this is sustainable without dramatically increasing vaccination rates and getting better vaccines. Lockdowns only gain you time, you still have to do something useful with that time.
Anecdotes are anecdotes. Everyone I know thinks it's dumb.
Also, millions of people would not die from covid if China did nothing. If you go by UK data and extrapolate, it's somewhere in the range of 400k.
Assuming an average of 10 years of life lost, that's about 4 million QALY. Shanghai's lockdown alone already has cost half a million QALY (interpreting being locked down as not quality life) and as it's not about to end anytime soon, is going to push well over a million. Given that it's pretty unreasonable to believe China can get away with a zero-covid policy without these continuing harsh lockdowns every month or so somewhere, there's little case for "lockdown" over "let it rip".
Just to share that option.