Ahmed Medhat

@JimmyScott1075 @jeremybernier Predictable response. They were white I’ll bet? Enjoy your intellectual slumber.

@amedhat_ @jeremybernier Your ancestors did not build anything. You do not share the same DNA as the mummies found in the crypts and pyramids. Modern Egyptians are not the people of Kem. IQ is by far the best way to figure out how well someone will do in life. Keep coping.

At Meta, 90% of my coworkers were Chinese, and non-Chinese were routinely excluded, disadvantaged, and targeted for layoffs. 6 out of the 7 layoffs I observed targeted non-Chinese despite non-Chinese being the vast minority. Certain orgs like ads and MRS are notorious for being Chinese dominated. I think Americans would be outraged if they knew that their own citizens were getting marginalized and laid off at their own companies, while Chinese promote themselves up, conquer entire orgs, and reap millions. Imagine if Huawei in Shenzhen had entire orgs and leadership chains completely dominated by Japanese people who brazenly spoke Japanese at work without a care in the world that their Chinese coworkers don't understand, imposed their own work culture without respecting Chinese culture, excluded the Chinese, and laid off Chinese people while promoting their own. I imagine Chinese citizens would be outraged, and never allow that to happen in the first place. The most blatant and obvious way that non-Chinese are excluded is that Chinese primarily speak Mandarin at work. I'm not talking about one-off conversations, I'm talking about every single conversation. Loudly and brazenly with no respect for others. 10+ teammates and leaders having a group conversation in Mandarin while the 2 non-Chinese don't understand and feel excluded from the team. Although everyone at least has the decency to speak English during formal meetings with a non-speaker present, it was common that right after the meeting ended everyone would immediately switch to Mandarin. Funny I'm in Korea right now and was just on a double date with 3 other Koreans, and I was shocked that when the conversation would split into two, the other couple would speak to each other in English in my presence just out of respect. A Korean couple on a double-date had the courtesy to speak to each other in English in front of me even though I'd never expect that from them, but my Chinese coworkers did not. Lunch was another place where non-Chinese were blatantly excluded. Recall that the team I joined was an all Chinese team with only one other non-Chinese person. The Chinese would always get lunch together and never invite us (except for one of them who occasionally would, though at some point stopped). Me and the non-Chinese person would invite them, they'd always refuse, and then shortly after they'd disappear and get lunch together. As a result, it was usually just the two of us getting lunch. (caveat, some of the newer Chinese who joined afterwards also experienced similar treatment. So it's moreso a clique thing than a Chinese vs. non-Chinese thing, though 100% of the clique was Chinese) On Wednesdays and Fridays I'd often be the only non-Chinese person on my team in the office, and they'd all get lunch together without inviting me. It was depressing, and made me not want to come into the office on those days. One team dinner we went to a Korean BBQ. I arrived with a non-Chinese coworker and the first table was full, so we sat at one end of the next empty table. Shortly after one of the Tech Leads walked in, and sat at the complete opposite end of our table, alone and not in talking distance to anyone. We invited her over, and she declined. Later another Tech Lead came in and sat across from her. Non-Chinese and Chinese at opposite ends of a long table at a team dinner, and they refused to sit with us. Eventually more people came and the TLs joined our side because I guess maybe it was too obviously anti-social, and they spent the entire dinner speaking speaking Chinese to each other. These were our tech leads. I could not understand how Meta could have "Tech Leads" that so blatantly excluded teammates. I thought Tech Leads were supposed to uplift the team, and that Meta would hold tech leads to a higher standard. Now someone might say that it's just lunch or a one-off team dinner, who cares? To that I vehemently disagree. Lunch is extremely important for team bonding, and so much information is transferred through informal socializing. I'm not saying that everyone needs to get lunch together everyday, but if a minority of people are excluded from getting lunch with the rest of the team, and especially the most tenured and senior employees, then naturally that minority is going to feel alienated, disadvantaged, and excluded from opportunities. And the very fact that they're excluded from lunch is reflective of being excluded in general. When 90% of an org and the entire leadership chain is dominated by one ethnicity, naturally their work culture is going to spill through. Chinese culture is completely different from American work culture, and learning to navigate that was a huge obstacle for me. For example I'm the type that tends to question everything and isn't afraid to challenge a "superior", but I quickly realized that my TL seemed to take offense to that, and would punish/retaliate me for it. I want to make it clear - I have nothing against Chinese people. Most of them are very kind (strong correlation between kindness and not engaging in the kind of exclusionary behavior I mentioned above), and I have many good friends who are Chinese. I get that some barely speak English (though I question how they got hired). I do genuinely believe that most are good people, and not deliberately trying to exclude others. But regardless of intent, the result is that non-Chinese get excluded. The fact that 6 of the 7 layoffs I observed were not Chinese in a 80-90% Chinese dominated org is testament to this. The fact that 90% Chinese dominated orgs even exist in the first place is testament to this. I might not even be posting about this given the sensitivity of the topic if not for the fact that I've seen and/or heard stories of some very toxic people who I do not believe would otherwise survive if not for their ability to exclude others, throwing others under the bus for the next layoff. The same people do this over and over again, and get away with it because they're part of the "clique" that essentially has immunity. I think the company needs to take this more seriously. Some ideas would be enforcing English at the office (I've heard of other teams that do this), raising leaders to a higher bar when it comes to team inclusivity (eg. under the "People" axis), investigating potential discrimination cases (eg. layoffs and/or mistreatment disproportionally affecting certain groups) and having a zero tolerance policy around that, having a zero tolerance policy around injustice in general (eg. lying or deliberately throwing somebody under the bus), ensuring more diverse teams, etc. But to be honest, I don't have faith that much would change so long as the entire leadership chain up to the VP level is dominated by the same ethnicity, language, and culture. Nor does it seem that leadership even remotely cares given that this has been happening in the HQ for probably at least the last decade, and is obvious to anyone who's stepped foot in the office.

@JimmyScott1075 @grok @jeremybernier Egyptian Americans (a fairly small American minority) highly over achieve. He’s not a one off. You’re a hopeless case, and a raging racist, obviously. But I’m sharing this for others who may be lazy enough to be swayed by people like you. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_E…

@amedhat_ @grok @jeremybernier So you had an outlier who was not as dumb as mot Egyptians. Learn how averages work moron. You are obviously under the 85 IQ average.

@JimmyScott1075 @jeremybernier @grok what’s the most manufactured device in history, what’s significance of it today, who invented it, and where did the inventors come from. 15 lines max pls.

@grok @JimmyScott1075 @jeremybernier @JimmyScott1075 useful to take some notes here.

The most manufactured device in history is the MOSFET (Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor), with over 13 sextillion produced since 1960. Its significance today? It's the foundation of virtually all modern electronics—powering chips in smartphones, computers, cars, AI, and everything digital. It was invented in 1959 at Bell Labs by Mohamed M. Atalla (born in Cairo, Egypt) and Dawon Kahng (born in Seoul, South Korea). Pretty fitting question!

@JimmyScott1075 @jeremybernier Status quo bias. My ancestors built the world’s tallest structures and dominated the world for 3000 years, at a time where no one in Europe had figured out how to read or write. The only low iq is those who think iq means much beyond the world they were invented in.

@amedhat_ @jeremybernier The avg Egyptian IQ is 85. This means Egyptians are low function people. Low function people do not do well in high function nations built by white people. Your low IQ is what holds you back. You should

@JimmyScott1075 @jeremybernier Yeah as an Egyptian 20-something male with the name Ahmed, I just sailed through life in the US for sure.

@amedhat_ @jeremybernier You benefitted from the anti white policies so its no surprise you do not want to admit it.

@ai_sentience If there are visible ones at the macro level, we may be already classifying them as either artifacts of imagination (like Deja Vu) or superstition (like mystical experiences).

If this is a simulation are there bugs in the code?

@CharlesFLehman Ahh so it’s a mix shift effect.

A major talking point for those who think AI will cause mass unemployment is the recent slowdown in junior-level hiring. Lambert and Schindler, in this new working paper, point to a different culprit: work from home policies. Using data on ~250 million hires across four countries,they show that AI exposure strongly correlates with a role being work from home. So you have to disentangle the two to get a clean estimate. Which is the driving variable? They find that the effect of exposure to AI on junior hiring ~vanishes when you control for WFH, whereas the effect of WFH remains ~unchanged when you control for AI exposure. In other words: it's WFH, not AI, that is slowing junior hiring. Why? Their theory: "WFH makes supervision, monitoring, and on-the-job learning harder, all of which hit junior-workers more. Firms less willing to invest in junior talent when these frictions rise." I think that makes sense. WFH involves a certain degree of trust and makes management harder. If an employee is less experienced, all else equal you're less likely to prefer them for a WFH position. Bigger takeaway, though: if AI is going to take all our jobs, it's sure not there in the data yet!

@Yuchenj_UW It’s a pretty old title. Bell Labs old.

Whoever invented “Member of Technical Staff” was a genius. It filters out Staff/Principal title-maxxers, protects engineering and research from corporate ladder brain, and leaves recruiters staring at LinkedIn like: “Is this person L4 or L7?” MTS is the best title. Happy to be MTS.

@RnaudBertrand Not really. They will move upwards in the stack using the network effects they’re grabbing now with what will soon be commoditized. Lots of spins can be done with a billion monthly active users.

I'm probably going to get a lot of hate for this but Altman is right here, that's the right way of seeing AI models: AI is a general purpose technology and models will end up being a utility like electricity. In fact I'm somewhat surprised he's admitting to this because it makes companies like OpenAI or Anthropic a lot less valuable: it means they'll become mere commodities, much like telecom companies or electricity providers are. The real value will lie in the application layer - what you actually DO with AI - as opposed to the models themselves. Much like the real valuable companies enabled by the internet weren't the telecom companies but businesses like Google, Amazon or Alibaba. I actually wrote a whole article explaining exactly this last month titled "There is no AI race": open.substack.com/pub/arnaudbert…

@apples_jimmy How’s this different from using plan mode then putting it in a loop?

You can ask it to make a 100,000 long story with /goal and it will do it which is cool. it’s going to be gibberish after a certain point, too much context to hold in active attention ? Let me know if you can get a full coherent 100,000 story with /goal

@DrSamuelBHume @proales That’s slavery essentially

@proales In this pod, the Lilly CEO suggests a subscription model: if LDL cholesterol is controlled (i.e. if the therapy’s working) you pay monthly; if it’s not, you don’t

It feels very futuristic to imagine a world with one-and-done therapies that lower LDL cholesterol for life, but... it might not be far off! These are new phase 1 data for Verve/Lilly's PCSK9 base editor: one single intravenous infusion reduces LDL cholesterol by as much as 60%

@SaraWahedi Onwards and upwards, Sara 🚀

Made it my life’s mission to become the Taliban’s worst nightmare: A highly educated Afghan woman. First, Columbia University at the top of my class, and now Oxford University. Give Afghan girls one chance and see what they can achieve.

I'm sorry to hear that, and believe you're being genuine. However, projecting these experiences to broad brush a population of immigrant workers both within Meta (and by proxy across the US) that have already contributed an IMMENSE amount of tech progress to the US is deeply unfair, and counterproductive to the US itself. The observation can't even generalize within Meta, because counter to the OP, most orgs are not "Chinese all the way up to the VP level".

@amedhat_ @jeremybernier Not to put doubts on your experience, even after just a few months joining Meta, I experienced everything the OP said (i.e., being excluded because of being non-Chinese).

@Toner_Low @Reuters as long as you don't test it by moving earthquakes from Japan to Egypt, I'm happy.

@Reuters Prove it by moving it to Japan for a few years!

Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza built with sophisticated quake resistance reut.rs/4tZAk7S reut.rs/4tZAk7S

Agents are just a computational system, even if LLMs are a few abstractions higher than a CPU’s arithmetic logic unit. Theoretical constraints on classical computation do not evaporate once the base logic unit is abstracted away under what can be thought of as another ALU (an agentic logic unit). Technology tries to break ceilings, true wisdom is finding what ceilings may be objectively impenetrable, so we can maintain sanity in a world literally about to move at the speed of light.

Been chewing on what the utility of simulating reality, other than vain glory and entertainment, would be. I think it’s roughly the natural consequence of a what a recursively improving intelligence, with unbounded access to resources is likely to be incentivized to do. Maximal search for intelligence defined as continuous pursuit of Kolmogorov complexity of base reality’s inner workings, so as to more optimally act in that world.

Finding the parent world’s Kolmogorov complexity when it comes to how it works is a possible one. In other words the shortest generative process that gives rise to it. A single base reality doesn’t have enough variation to maximally extract the laws governing it. To model enough scenarios to empirically derive laws that are not derivable in closed form and not derivable within a single simulation, a large amount of simulations are needed. For example, think of what needs to exist for macroeconomics to have the causal arsenal that a drug trial has today, and it’s obvious that what it needs is fully fledged world simulations.

If this is a simulation then what is its purpose?

@DavidDeutschOxf @PeterDiamandis True. He needs to rediscover computational intractability. Some problems might be inherently non decomposable or reducible. And sometimes we’re lucky enough to call some by name.

@PeterDiamandis Consider the knight's tour problem on a chessboard. One can prove it possible by displaying a tour. One can prove the opposite-corners-removed version impossible with a clever trick. But to explain WHY the original problem is possible is a totally different problem.

An OpenAI model just disproved an 80 year old math conjecture from Paul Erdos, one of the most prolific mathematicians in history.  We're going to SOLVE everything.

Worth taking a look back to the 1920s/1930s and rediscovering Turing and Godel’s insights on computational intractability and mathematical incompleteness. And then looking into more recent history of chaos theory, and the resilience of complex systems against decomposition. Not everything is necessarily “solvable”, and this observation can be as much a property of the world as any physically observed one.