He is obviously talking about computer science. Yes, I know in biology or medicine you can often only access the experimental devices during set hours and the lab may not be accessible 24/7 etc. But in computer science the schedule is mostly free, except for meetings and teaching duties but those are specific time slots not a regular clock-in clock-out job like a cashier or bus driver.
This varies widely between fields and institutions. Getting a PhD position nowadays in ML or computer vision is much harder. You need to already have publications when you apply and need to have experience specifically in the subfield, give a good talk, an interview, a good motivation letter / research statement, recommendation letters from good internships and multiple PIs you worked with, good grades, etc.
It can be different in other fields an in lower tier colleges.
"How to be a top YouTuber" by MrBeast. "How to be a top athlete" by C. Ronaldo. "How to become a popstar" by Ed Sheeran. You know that such advice will have limited usefulness to most of the aspiring people.
Karpathy is an exceptional person, maybe not as much as Ronaldo in football but taking advice from him similarly won't be guaranteed to work. You can't have guarantees in such things.
In truth, the more literal but not fully literal thing that happens regarding surviving a PhD is that you try to publish a paper in a top venue but after several rejections you publish in a lower tier one, then you do two more followup in similarly second tier but not terrible venues and you get a "magna cum laude" or perhaps a "cum laude" once you reach 5 years and the prof wants to avoid the embarrassment of not having graduated you.
Of course many people don't come into the PhD with such plans, they expect a summa cum laude and papers in top venues and talk invitations and so on, since they've always been a top student so far.
That's what used to be thought about any school at all, then about high school diplomas then about a university diploma. Each time it was decided that by expanding the number of people they would get uplifted to a better standard of life, a higher class etc. But social status is relative and mostly zero-sum, so the value of a diploma simply goes down when everyone has one. Chasing credentials without actual value contributions cannot cash out in anything real.
This is very true especially nowadays. You typically need several publications to even start a PhD in competitive fields like AI, so people are familiar with the system already.
Too many people stay in academia out of inertia and being comfortable with the "school" mode of existence and are afraid of the broad wide world and the decisions involved. They finish their masters and liked the classes and the thesis topic and so they stay.
But as you said, a PhD is quite different than all schooling before that. And that's good. A PhD is supposed to signify that you contributed new scientific value as judged by the expert international community, not just your teacher. Of course there are many wrinkles on this story like sloppy knee-jerk reviews etc.
But anything in life where you "just show up" and fulfill some explicit assignments tends not to be very valuable. If just showing up and doing what someone else decided for you is enough for a thing, that thing will lose value very soon. Similarly if you make sure almost everyone can do it, it won't have value, but will become a participation trophy.
But nothing in real life work like that. School is fake. You don't get a job just by showing up or having a diploma. Nobody will fall in love and start a relationship/family with you for showing up and fulfilling some list of criteria. Nobody will fund your startup or strike a business deal with your company because you showed up and did some assigned tasks.
In almost all aspects of life being proactive and exercising agency will get you much further than the teacher's pet mindset that school instills. And unfortunately rather than selecting for it, the PhD selects against such agency again because it's the safe option and people who are ready for an adventure usually dislike the academic environment. Not all of couse, I obviously don't mean every single person fits this. But in my experience this explains part of the mismatch in expectations and reality for the "I was a good student so a PhD felt natural" people. Not those come into the PhD with a well thought out plan, and knowing exactly why they want to pursue it, the upsides and downsides etc.
> But anything in life where you "just show up" and fulfill some explicit assignments tends not to be very valuable.
Including paramedic or trauma surgeon, where the explicit assignment is to stabilize the human being in front of you?
Or how about plumber, to stop water where it shouldn't be, making it come out faucets and go down drains where it should? Had furnace issues when we switched it on in October, the HVAC technicians made the magic box generate warm air: his explicit assignment was 'make the house warm' and he showed up and did that.
Depends on your goals. Even as a plumber you have to think about what's worth what, how you specialize, and what the price is. Even as a doctor you may be under appreciated and the explicit goal is not so explicit all the time and sometimes curing the patient requires inventiveness and not only following a script or a textbook. The patients survival is often not purely a cookie cutter application of rules as it works in school.
And in some sense we can make the PhD requirements explicit too: prove that you are able to provide valuable and novel contributions to the scientific community as recognized by them. But it's not box ticking. But so is becoming an especially appreciated and respected doctor in your city. It's not just don't kill too many patients and you're golden.
If you want a mediocre run of the mill PhD it's not super hard. It is hard, but not super hard if you have academic aptitude. You can do something incremental and follow the trends, and eventually some venue will publish it. Not many will read it though and you won't become a leading voice though. There are many incremental paper that help many average PhD students get their degrees.
There are plenty of other non academic fields where you have to work hard and long hours, such as finance or law firms. You can choose less demanding alternatives too but they are less prestigious. Of course finance pays better.
I think the problem is that people want to treat a scientific career as both a regular job and also as something of a pop star personal brand type of thing, and they only want the upside of both.
There are many problems with academia, power balance etc of course. It's not unlike problems for aspiring movie stars or in other somewhat isolated bubbles within society like in sports or the theater scene, or how kitchens work in high end restaurants etc etc. If you want to become an acclaimed top expert in a subfield, it's not easy. And humans are going to do their human things around such opportunities for status advancements.
Better get ready for almost all software to use AI assistance in its creation.
You can build great things using AI agents, and you can build trash.
Your ideological opposition to that is not shared by as wide a percentage of developers as you may think based on some highly self selected online corners.
Way to read something into what I have never even wrote and try to spin it as something ideological. This is not "AI-assisted", it's completely vibe-coded by AI and the software doesn't even make sense since you can't export anything. It's just low-quality trash dumped on Hacker News and I'd argue this is not the place for it.
It's not anything though. It's a website and electron app that promises functionality that completely isn't there. It's useless, but instead of being art, it promises functionality, so it's functionally trash.
I too remember running `rails new MyGreatApp` and having hoop dreams of being the next billionaire entrepreneur, but a boilerplate app is a boilerplate app.
Not gonna like, I am having to actively fight the aversion I feel when reading something was "all written by claude", it is so hard to check if it was properly done or pure garbage, I don't even take the time to check.
I know this position is wrong, but it feels hard to spend my time on something that someone else might not have spent the time to create
Your ideological opposition to that is not shared by as wide a percentage of developers as you may think based on some highly self selected online corners.
Opinions do not win by "high score". Asserting the validity of opinions based on how widely they are held is dumb.
If 30% of devs love openclaw, I'm not re-examining my informed opinion, I am forming a new one about that 30% cohort.
It's also not clear from the other side. Do you give a lot of guidance, so the intern becomes reliant on always having someone telling them what to do exactly on the micro level? Or let them work it out slowly, and during that process get familiar with the systems more closely? I find that having a clear task to solve actually gets me more of an understanding of how everything works, than reading a top-down documentation where I don't have any context of "why".
Also interns can differ a lot. They can need different levels of guidance and can come with widely different levels of prior experience, even in unrelated debugging and troubleshooting like fixing network ports for LAN gaming or whatever kids these days might be doing. Setting up VPN to evade geoblocking or whatever. Others may have no idea what to even do. And those who can do it may take widely different time.
I think an internship is, in fact, a good place to learn these meta-lessons too. You ask for some guidance, then you see it was maybe too much. Another time you don't and spend a lot of time, and have your supervising engineer say "oh I could have told you XYZ very quickly", then you update and recalibrate. There is no single short message that can convey this. That's why experience is valuable.
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