
Igor Zhirkov
280 posts

Igor Zhirkov
@rub_duck_type
Programmer, researcher, writer. Author of 'Low-Level Programming: C, assembly and program execution' Ex-compiler team, @the_matter_labs


From now on, nobody should be allowed to say anything about AI unless they've watched @badlogicgames's talk: youtube.com/watch?v=RjfbvD… This slide in particular is gold. There are good ways to use coding agents and there are bad ways. These are the good ways! Other people on Twitter are gradually reaching the same conclusions, so save yourself some time and just watch Mario's talk. (I don't think this list will fundamentally change with future models, either — even if the benchmarks reach 100%. Disagree? Tell me why.)





Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: “50% of all tech jobs, entry-level lawyers, consultants, and finance professionals will be completely wiped out within 1–5 years.”



Dads with young kids Is it normal to just feel tired and burnt out all the time? It’s like you don’t even really get the weekend to recover because it’s all just kid stuff the moment you wake up Arguably the only personal time you have is when they nap (and you’re already dead tired by that time) or the hour after they go to bed but before you pass out Just trying to figure out if I’m doing something wrong





A student today at my elite university admitted to me today that she took a class so she could work on reading for more than 20 minutes at a time. She can't read. She mainly skims and summarizes, she says and still gets A's. This student is, by professional standards, illiterate. Gonna have high GPA when she graduates. This conversation was had after 6 of 22 students dropped my course because the maximum reading per week in one week was over 100 pages. What people aren't grasping is that this is literally *dangerous*. These people are going to be come doctors, engineers, etc. They are - by any metric - vastly less capable than prior generations. These effects are cumulative over a lifetime. This grade inflation is part of the problem, but not even close to the entirety. And the problem obviously starts in K-12. Students don't know history because, you can't actually become historically literate on the advice of 'never assign more than 30 pages a week'. You can't develop any of the skills that came with literacy. This is, quite honestly, a civilizational catastrophe.


79% of grades at Yale are A-range. Graduating summa cum laude requires a record high GPA OF 3.98.





The worst part is that this kind of salary is effectively unreachable for 99% of European software engineers. If they're lucky, they get to negotiate up to €80k at the end of their career. Unlikely. They're extremely competent. Capable. Impactful. But they end up making €40k.


















