In what dimension do you mean? Legally? Yes, unless based out of a place with an anti-BDS law. Politically? Sure, it's a bet against those currently in power and for the sentiment in the population. Practically? Yes, they can refuse business and contracts. I suppose they could also put killswitches in their hardware/software, but I wouldn't be a fan of that for digital-rights reasons. Economically? Who knows, the market makes no sense at all currently. They could probably get away with whatever.
> My brain does not work the same way, as when I was before 36.
I'm not sure it's that bad if you do it full-time like any other student. Getting a degree should be doable even at 40+. I used to be a university lecturer in CS, and occasionally I got older students who did very well.
That being said, I think the issue is employability. You may get a degree, but is anyone getting to hire an older person with not experience?
Sometimes I wonder if people praising AI work on the same type of code as I do.
Just now, I was working on a bug report. I had Claude write the code. Perfect, CI is green, new tests, everything seems fine. Took me 5 minutes. Then looking closer, I can see that there may be a performance regression and that the code seems pretty verbose. I iterate on the prompt "of course, you're right, let me fix this". New code is even more verbose, lots of comments that shouldn't be there, the code is more intricate, it takes me some time to understand what's going on. Plus new test cases to review.
After a day of asynchronous iterations on this, I finally sit down to look at this problem. There was a one line fix that Claude couldn't find on its own.
I lost time, reviewer lost time, and if this had been shipped as is, the system would have been worse. I could go on and on because this happens daily. And the worst part is teammates submitting slop.
I think it's decent advice, but from my experience, it can take years to make friends that way. I practiced various sports my whole life in the context of sport clubs (martial arts, climbing, snowboarding, swimming...). The way it worked for me is that after months, sometimes years of chitchatting with same people over and over, I barely made any good friends from that context. I did make a bunch of "acquaintances". Definitely better than staying home, but not a silver bullet.
Often i sit around a coffee shop where i work frequently as a remote employee, and I think to myself, "there could be another person here that i have the capacity to be really good friends with but i will probably never know it." And I think about how that's probably true of other people in that coffee shop.
The engineer in me wants to believe some technological solution to finding and connecting with potentially great friends is out there, waiting to be uncovered. But of course, an engineer would say that.
> there could be another person here that i have the capacity to be really good friends with but i will probably never know it.
I often have the same thoughts. There are many lonely people eager to make friends.
I used to live in NYC where I didn't know anyone. And I remember one evening at the coffee shop in Barnes and Noble, there were only two other people there, and we started to chat. Even though we had very different backgrounds, we started to hang out and became good friends (but lost contact since then unfortunately).
Sometimes it doesn't take much, just exchanging a few words. Forcing oneself to be a bit more social, without expecting anything, is probably a good habit.
Yes it's very easy to just let things sit at the "acquaintance" level. You know people at the gym, or at work, or at whatever recurring thing that brings you together. But to extend that to friendship, you need to invite them to do something outside of that. Get lunch, come over for dinner, game night, movie, whatever you're into. And then they need to reciprocate at least somewhat evenly. If this doesn't happen it's not really a friendship. And (in my experience) it's very rare for adults to progress beyond the "acquaintance" stage.
The unstated bit is that you have an incidental excuse to talk to them (compared to cold approaching in other contexts) but you still need to talk to them. Everything depends on you making the effort.
Compared to a gym, the class setting almost forces you to talk to people. I wouldn't see myself talking to people in a gym, but in a snowboarding club or martial arts class, or a group hike, it's difficult not to. Once you exchanged a few words, even for the sake of an exercise, the ice is already broken. At the very least, you'll say hi the next time you see that person.
> People coming from highly respected universities are doing everything with AI
Nowadays, everybody is doing everything with AI, young and old alike. It's very hard to justify not doing it. That being said, you can produce good code with AI, if you know what it should look like and spend the time to prompt and iterate.
It's unreal what the Quest headsets can do. Go look up "questnav." Robots on holonomic drivetrains moving at 20 ft/s while strafing and spinning, maintaining perfect pose tracking using nothing but a Quest 3S strapped into a 3D printed bracket. And with basically zero latency. Oh, programmed by high schoolers btw. It's astonishing.
I believe they optimize for fairness and consistency. They interview a huge number of people from very different backgrounds so they need a standardized process. It's not perfect but I can understand the logic. And there's team matching phase if the candidate pass the interview, it's not a random allocation.
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