Outside CUDA (which they can't compete on because of IP law), AMD is doing just fine with competitive GPUs. Look at the supercomputer top500 AMD GPU footprint: https://top500.org/lists/top500/list/2026/06
Ask almost anyone here and they'll tell you that the C-suite are mostly a bunch of morons who don't know anything about technology, and now you want to ensure that businesses can only ever be run by such technologically illiterate morons, not founders? Insanity!
>The other night I carelessly made an infinite runner game while watching TV and the feeling of sheer abundance quickly faded into a bit of depression. Without scarcity, nothing is really valuable.
This is just a lack of ambition. LLMs allow one to make far more sophisticated games than ever before, even as a single developer, and if doing so development still takes many months even if running an agent 24/7.
Sharia law solves the problem cleanly by requiring the man to agree on a fixed sum deposit (Mahr) in the divorce contract that the wife will get on divorce (with some paid up front and some potentially deferred to divorce time), rather than agreeing to an arbitrary large liability. For people who don't like that idea, consider that if current western divorce laws aren't reformed, and marriage and birth rates continue to dwindle, it'll eventually become the law of your land purely by demographics, as natural selection favors cultures that encourage higher birthrates.
> working class the means to avoid tax and pay for illegal things
Peanuts. It is still the rich that spend the most in illegal things from bribes, tax evasion, etc. even for countries trying to avoid international sanctions.
The bigger the more they profit from crime and lack of accontability.
It causes backlash because there are huge fields of modern academia built around the implicit assumption that everyone has the same IQ and hence the worse outcomes encountered by black and brown people are due to a big societal conspiracy against them, when in reality their outcomes are almost identical to white people who score the same on IQ tests as those groups do.
It is true any discussion of the subject marks you as a racist so how can we have an honest conversation in such environment? Just look at your own down votes?
Having said that, even if the academic outcomes of people with darker skin color were worse (no idea if that is true, or in which country) just knowing that is no proof. It may as well be cultural or even income based (pregnant mothers eating worse quality food for example, or same thing with young children).
Is the question even answerable? What kind of intelligence do we measure with "academic outcomes"? How do we adjust for income and quality of life as a child, things like having both parents, or grandparents? It's an absolute minefield of possible manipulation. Same data can probably be spun to "proove" any hypothesis you have.
Then imagine writing a proposal for such research. What benefits can you predict? If you find there is absolutely no correlation between skin color and academic outcomes after adjusting for all external factors will it convince people that are racist as part of their identity? I doubt it.
Lets say you do prove there is some correlation. What the result of that would be? Open discrimination and vindication of racist views. But even if the principle was true the average doesn't apply to individuals so you can't apply it to any particular person.
In the ideal world, assuming this is true, we could then ask for the question of, well, what can we do about these people with different intelligence levels?
Intelligence is not just a single thing. We can assign a number by an intelligence test, of course, but there are lots of ways to look at it that are more nuanced. Generally, you're not going to say someone is better than everything you're going to find that someone is better at some things. And so can we direct people to the things you're better at for the better of everyone? Division of labor is a good thing.
But contrast, assuming that we find it's not true, then we can ask, well, why are we finding these differences in the data? if it's not genetic and perhaps we can find what it really is and then improve those groups that are currently disadvantaged.
The larger point is you have to know before you can make a useful adjustment.
It would be wonderful if we understood what biological process determines the size of the brain. There are thousands of genes that each affect IQ ever so slightly but if we zoom out and look "macro" biology, then the size of the brain does correlate reasonably well with IQ and it is likely to be influenced by relatively few genes.
This is probably the first route we will find towards increasing the intelligence of children.
What plausible mechanism is there to even approach the idea that skin color influences intelligence? Why not study the effects on intelligence of eye color, or blood type?
This is especially clearly just a racist concept once you realize that none of the studies of IQ vs race actually do any genetic testing, they only rely on phenotype. Which is absurd given the fact that the child of a black-skinned person born in sub-Saharan Africa and a white-skinned person born in a village in Ireland is extremely likely to be black-skinned, but is genetically just as much part of both populations. It's only the history of racism that assigns this child as black more so than white.
We know that people with red hair tend to metabolize anesthesia differently. It is not completely implausible that there is also a correlation between looks and other traits, although it seems almost impossible to me to untangle cultural, environmental and genetic effects.
Of course, any two traits can be correlated. But unless there is an obvious causal mechanism ("whiter skinned people get sun burns more easily", "darker skinned people tend to have vitamin D deficiencies at higher latitudes"), there's no reason to assume it and start looking for it to prove or disprove. It's a priori just as likely that there is a genetic link between toe shape and intelligence as skin color and intelligence. Yet no one is doing the science of measuring toe length correlation to intelligence, just skin color ("race").
As far as I know phrenology measured all kinds of things and claimed correlations. But they used highly dubious data (even for their time) and the field is now too unpopular to try (something similar) again with better methodology.
And I would say that the racist claim is that there is observable correlation and that genetic explanations are about as probable as other explanations. But I suppose many non-genetic explanations (eg cultural differences) would also be counted as racism, since in these kinds of discussions race and culture are often jumbled together.
And the way IQ is used in modern racist discourse is not this. Instead, the claims are "black people are not less well off on average because of racism in society, either old or current, they are less well off because they are dumber (have lower IQ) on average, so it's only a consequence of that, as dumber white people also tend to fail to get as much success". This is the argument being made, at least publicly, by most modern day scientific racists.
It is my understanding that it's only racist if the group somehow aligns with a race, but I don't know a good term for that belief when it doesn't align with races.
Is it racist, that we put gorillas in a zoo instead of a school because gorillas as a group have lower average IQ? Would we treat Gorillas this way if they had similar or higher average IQ?
Skin colour almost certainly doesn't affect intelligence (much). There are plenty of dark skinned upper caste Indians who are intelligent, for example.
We can predict skin colour reasonably well on the basis of very few genes. We need many more to predict intelligence (and we can't predict it nearly as well).
On the other hand, however...
...there are a lot of people who happen to have whatever genes cause dark skin who also happen to have lot of other genes that do other things...
Some of those others things include a genetic protection against malaria. Others confer a genetic protection against a nasty parasitic worm that prefers to live in the kidneys. The downside is that that protection itself is a bit unhealthy for the kidneys.
And some of them do a might good job of seeming like they cause lower intelligence. If we use our genetic prediction models, then they do in fact predict a lower intelligence.
Well, skin color, hair color, hair texture, certain bone structure features. But black skin color alone is 100% enough to be racially profiled in the USA, especially historically. Or do you think people in the deep South 1900s would have accepted a black-skinned blonde blue eyed neighbor?
Skin color never manifests alone, with the exception of albinos. It's just been a short hand for talking about different races of people, but nobody thinks that any racial property of a person comes from the skin color. These properties you mention are the outwardly visible properties of race. They are determined by race, race is not determined by them.
So if we for example say that a certain man has a deep voice because he is black, we don't mean that his skin gives him the deep voice.
My point is this: the people who run these studies looking for correlations between race and IQ invariably use skin color (and a few other physical traits) as the indicator by which they split people by "race". The concept of "race" is anyway merely a socio-cultural convention and is itself very distant from any genetic notions - and also tied mostly to skin color, at least when talking about "white people" and "black people".
That is, no one would point at a man with dark brown skin and say "that's a white man" even if both of his parents were white and he had just inherited his dark skin color from a grandparent (which can occasionally happen). And more commonly, the child of a "black" person and a "white" person is invariably considered to be a "black" person in the USA *, despite being exactly 50-50 part of both populations from a genetic standpoint. And this can extend for a ridiculous number of generations, since the child of this person with another "white" person would also be considered "black", despite being only 25% part of their dark skinned grandparent's population from a genetic perspective.
This is also the root of one of the biggest fears of white supremacists, the danger of "white genocide" by "race mixing" - as you can't get "white" children when a "non white" person has children with a "white" person.
* I'm saying "in the USA" because other places have their own rules, since race is a socio-cultural construct. In South Africa, at least during apartheid, for example, the children of "whites" and "blacks" were considered a separate "race", "colored".
If we define intelligence as IQ then the evidence is overwhelming that the average differs among races. Even in Singapore, which has a very high standard of living, nutrition etc., we still see Chinese Singaporeans perform significantly better than Malay Singaporeans on various measures of intelligence, with Indian Singaporeans somewhere in the middle. The same pattern is seen among Chinese, Indians and native Malaysians in Malaysia, and globally when we compare the mean IQ scores of China, India and Malaysia.
That could also be explained by cultural differences, I don't think the evidence is overwhelming.
Or it could be discrimination.
There are studies that show that black and white mixed races children did not score any higher than children with two black parents, while white people score higher than black people on average, which may point to some discrimination impacting IQ.
We know that discrimination, even between whites, has a negative impact on test scores. It seems like discrimination can hurt people's performance, but the type of discrimination, how impactful it is on the people being discriminated against, and the extent to which it happens over the population probably matters.
There are significant cultural and economic differences between those communities. These will be similar between Singapore and Malaysia. The Chinese and Indians are sufficiently recent immigrants for their culture to still have a lot in common (they speak the same language, follow the same religions, have inherited attitudes) with the places their ancestors came from.
No, you mean to say "if we define intelligence as the output of IQ testing", which clarifies that you're projecting from statistical surveys (with all sorts of potential confounders) rather than some directly queryable and innate attribute of people.
Every study that's been done shows a significant difference in mean IQ across races. Suggesting otherwise is anti-science, putting ideology over reality. That doesn't mean everyone of any particular race is stupid; Indians in America for instance on average have higher IQS than white Americans, in spite of the average IQ of India being significantly lower, because only the smarter Indians manage to immigrate to America.
Most studies of Indians done in famous IQ tests were of those Indians who lived in villages and suffered from diseases. Its been debunked so many times.
Those who immigrate to America are not smarter. They just had the where with all to pay for immigration. Even those who go on scholarship have to prove they have atleast land/housing back in India to even get a chance to immigrate.
I remember looking up the source of the IQ data from Nepal a few years ago. It was a taken from an IQ survey of a school for mentally disabled children..
You're giving away the game here by building an argument around national IQ statistics, because there is no such thing. There are serious surveys of IQ test results in places like the United States, with some statistical validity. There is no equivalent global country-by-country survey that would enable you to compare the United States to India or any other country. The reason people believe there are is because there are multiple fraudulent studies that claim to provide those numbers, and people cite them without reading the underlying papers and seeing what they did to generate those numbers.
>In my opinion this is an acceptable price to pay to reduce pay inequality, which often is much more than 2%. It is also a good argument for joining a union.
A company has a fixed amount of money it can spend on wages. Reducing wage inequality means paying less to the best employees and more to the others, which is great if you just want to slack off but terrible if you're already one of the highest paid employees.
That theory rests on the assumption that your salary is based on how good you are at your job. But if that were the case then corporate life wouldn't be full of people complaining "my boss is an idiot and yet (s)he makes ten times what I do".
I'll argue that money goes to those who are best at internal politics, with perhaps a moderate correlation with work performance.
> perhaps a moderate correlation with work performance
The only time I have seen a correlation greater than 0 is where bonuses where directly linked to earnings or sales ... even then the correlation was not 1
> The only time I have seen a correlation greater than 0 is where bonuses where directly linked to earnings or sales
Maybe I've been lucky to work for moderately reasonable companies, but I've never seen that.
For example in my current company, yearly raises are directly tied to performance rating. And while there is subjectivity in the rating, it is basically impossible to squeeze in a high performer rating for someone who doesn't do anything even if I wanted to (which I don't). It is also impossible to give a very low rating to someone that all peers see doing great work.
The correlation will never be a perfect 1.0, but it is closer to 1 than to 0. Low performers end up getting low to nothing in raises, and the high performers get a multiplier that increases their raises.
> It is also impossible to give a very low rating to someone that all peers see doing great work.
I work at a smaller company now, with a lot of very good people, so I've been happy enough with my rating and bumps.
When I was at "bigcorp", I was still as good at my job, but I didn't play the game very well. I presume I was not visible enough to be rated highly by my peers (peers aren't those in your team, but outside your team) and so I didn't see the rate of progression I think I merited, and eventually left.
I'm pro salary transparency, but both things are true and OP should not be downvoted:
- Some employee salary discrepancies are inefficiencies due to humans sucking at rationally evaluating other people
- Some employee salary discrepancies are legitimate outcomes of value produced relative to other employees
The problem is the more we create policy assuming the first one is true, we eliminate everyone in the second category (however small or large that category), making the economy less efficient. I would argue pay transparency isn't one of those policies however, and in fact would lead to more efficiencies.
That said, all interventions have consequences, and less growth and higher inefficiency from cutting tall poppies is indeed a risk. As someone in Europe, our total lack of productivity growth is leading to collapsing governments, underwater social entitlement systems and mass riots. These are serious issues that should be discussed and not dismissed outright with downvotes.
Now you've permanently handed power to employers to claim every year is "a tough year" and pay people less, while tricking people into uprooting their lives and taking jobs under the pretense of "the salary is low but you usually get a crazy big bonus!"
Let me guess, your next rebuttal:
> "But then we'll create more policy to try to stop the downsides of the first policy we created!"
Now you have a patchwork of 48,000 regulations all collectively harming the efficiency of the economy and creating all sorts of weird un-intended consequences and loopholes for low-trust people to game instead of rewarding honest people for doing the right thing like you intended.
The thing about employee ownership is that, almost by definition, employees don't have much capital (that's why they live by selling their labour) and businesses need capital to survive. That capital has a cost, either interest on loans or profits going to outside shareholders.
My actual response "But then we will have to deal with biases, discretion and management collecting their 10mil bonus by giving the juniors a pittance"
The flip side of course is people who actually work in bonus heavy revenue generating roles - where the impact is easy to measure - tend to leave if they are not valued and take their clients with them.
Things work a lot better in a healthy economy with competition and low friction for people to move around - exploitation blossoms when people are trapped by economic circumstances
This is the lump of labour fallacy, right? Companies don't actually have to have fixed labour budgets; indeed ideally firms should be always willing to hire/retain a worker at a salary less than that workers marginal revenue product, as this is profit maximising.
Apart from the general difficulty of organising like this and actually evaluating the marginal revenue from an additional employee (it's hard enough to attribute to your existing employees!), this marginal revenue is likely to have diminishing returns as the company grows and from a risk management point of view you will want to have some margin so that you don't flip into losing money as soon as business slows a little.
Companies can decide to do it however they want. They don't have to conform to a platonic ideal of a bureaucracy. A company expecting to grow its market share will give it's managers more leeway than one that's under financial difficulties.
What can happen, which is why you may have seen budget constraints prevent profit-maximising hiring, is that the finance dept is operating off older information than the managers in business units (or just is crosswise with them for any reason at all). You can definitely get a situation in which managers can't get approval to do profit maximising hires, but this isn't inevitable.
I can imagine that this is the dynamic which for actual x10 developers makes flexible YC-style startups more appealing than rigid FAANG-level companies.
How well correlated are the highest paid employees to the best employees, though? My guess would be that salary correlates strongly with self-belief, charisma, and negotiation skills
These very much tend to strongly correlate. You're definitely more confident in negotiating and counter-offering if you have 10x skill as your leverage.
That’s not at all the case. Five of us recently moved internally via a remapping and they gave us pay rises. I negotiated 15% more than the initial offer, everyone else took the initial offer. Roughly same ability.
Indeed the only reason I could do this was because the new salary ranges were shown thanks to pay transparency.
I would speculate that 10x devs' underestimation primarily concerns their percentile ranking relative to peers, not necessarily their absolute skill. Comparing yourself to the likes of Carmack and Wozniak is what pushes you to become cracked in the first place.
Imagining this problem is just a sign that your company can't do pay grades or job titles properly. Or work out the concept called a "bonus".
The thing is, if you're rewarding performance through _process_ it ends up being more public and you have to have a written justification for it. Not just favouritism.
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