Currently working on game development in Godot. We're making Dice'n Goblins, a dungeon-crawler RPG inspired by classics like Etrian Odissey and Wizardry VII, with a cartoon aesthetic similar to Paper Mario. The twist is that you have to collect and use dice to beat the monsters that crawl inside the dungeon.

A demo should be available very soon, meanwhile you can wishlist it on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2945950/Dice_n_Goblins/

Yes, browsing reddit also makes me feel like there's more bots than humans. The only platform which seems mostly genuine is Discord, at least for small-ish servers.

> Regarding being an investment banker, if you're intelligent, it's imho better to earn your capital and then do your own investment banking for yourself, not for someone else.

Investment banking isn't "owning a bunch of stocks"

For those who are clueless on this: the primary work of "investment bankers" is providing advice to corporate clients on raising capital (through market offerings like bonds and stocks), mergers and acquisitions, and also by underwriting transactions where they act as a middleman between the client and the market - classic case is the IPO.

This is distinct from market making, which is buying and selling securities in the market, albeit that investment banks often have strong market making operations as well.

It's also distinct from asset management, which is the business of taking money from people and investing it for them through e.g. funds.

This article is about the first kind of investment banking, which is legendary for ludicrous overloads for analysts (hires direct from school) during their first few years. Those that survive often go to B school, get their MBAs and come back as associates; but this is also a pipeline that leads into other finance careers like private equity.

> Those that survive often go to B school, get their MBAs and come back as associates

If you're already an analyst and not (completely) burned out by 70-90 hour weeks you are becoming an associate within 2-3 years.

You use the MBA to exit out of IB into VC, PE, PM, CorpDev, etc.

This is also why tech became so popular over the past decade - new grads are earning IB level compensation with significantly better WLB and less barrier to entry, and most analysts are now STEM or STEM Adjacent majors.

This is essentially the route my brother took, sans the MBA. A couple years spent surviving as an IB analyst, after which he was promoted to associate. Stayed on for another year after the promotion, before being headhunted by a PE firm he ended up joining.

Whatever it is, the end result for the worker is the same if not better via stocks and derivatives. There is no relative benefit for an intelligent individual to being an investment banker.

Investment banking associates aren't performing the job of a wealth manager or financial planner. They spend much of their time performing research on businesses, creating presentations on businesses, and working with other businesses. They're not working with retail level individuals looking to have their wealth managed.

Until tech took off, investment banking was the only profession that competed with big law and medicine, compensation and prestige wise. It still is highly difficult and selective to break into, even for those coming from high ranking schools. Arguably much more difficult to break into than most big tech, and unlike with tech, if you miss the internship to investment banking sliding door out of college, it can be near impossible to break into later.

No, a boiler room operation is typically a brokerage, which is a completely different kind of a business from an investment bank.

A century ago, Earth had 4 times less humans. We can handle quite a few decades of low fertility.

The problem isn’t the absolute number of humans. The real issue is the dependency ratio.

Dependency rationalizes itself with acceleration of death rates.

I don’t know what “rationalizes” means, but more deaths don’t necessarily lower the dependency ratio.

For example, a war would kill lots of young healthy soldiers, leaving even fewer people in to care for the old, young, and infirm.

I’m guessing Ukrainian and Russian dependency ratios are getting worse and worse.

China deliberately lowered its fertility to a below replacement level. A few decades later, they decided they wanted to raise it back up higher.

They couldn't. They're not exactly wishy-washy, they happen to be one of the most authoritarian regimes on this planet, even if they understand the benefits of a velvet glove. If they couldn't raise it, why would you think anyone else can?

And we're already at sub-replacement. The same people who make the next generation of people (as small as it is), are the ones who also raise that generation and instill their values in them. What does having one child teach that child about their parents' values? It teaches them that, at most, they should have just one. Or maybe even that they should have none at all. Not only is this a self-reinforcing problem, it accelerates. You don't have a few decades to solve this.

Nor will "evolution" fix it as the other guy said. While some still have large families, it's not just the parents' own values that are instilled, but that of our society collectively. The many who have few or no children have far greater influence on the children of those families, than those families have on everyone else.

Population is counter-intuitive, and none of you understand it.

You're making all these assumptions about how the population grows and shrinks on a tiny subset of human history. People are not going to disappear as a species from social trends like having fewer children. Society will change to accommodate the new status quo and reach an equilibrium, like it has for the entire history of the species. Whatever wipes out humanity, it won't be that.

It’s worth noting that the they only put population control measures in place because their prior policy of encouraging massive population growth backfired horribly due to the strain it wrought on society’s carrying capacity.

That's funny, I remember playing a little bit of a Silkroad themed (MMO)RPG as a teenager (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silkroad_Online). I wonder if this game inspired it somehow.

Fantastic game. Only thing free my friend and I could play so we'd play nonstop for a summer or two. Learning basic business sense running a shop outside the safe towns was one of those cool things MMOs can really offer. Support harp class was OP as all hell.

The "wage dictation fallacy" part is just plain weird. Saying "the wages are not set by the market, not by corporations" makes absolutely 0 sense unless you just forget that "the market" is mostly corporations.

If anyone thinks it's a two-sided fair negociation, they need to look up the word "monopsony". HN users in particular might want to ask google or chatgpt about the "High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation".

As the article mentions, the Red Pine translation is pretty good.

I think you must have read another text. Literally none of what you said is mentioned in the diamond sutra.

Considering the authoritative copy of the Diamond Sutra was written in Chinese, I doubt I would be able to give any direct quotations

It has been the "next IBM" for at least 5 years

Yes, as demonstrated by the reaction to articles like this. Started out as a few dissenters and lots of praise. Now we’re down to mostly negative comments.

Another few years and most of these won’t even make it to the front page.