Apparently they all believe in paying $40 for boiling water because I don't.
I do believe in paying for bananas though.
April 7, 2025
The pop-up WeChat notification from a rarely active group chat conveniently named “Tech ⛰️” stopped my trek down Canal St.
During the three days, my head spiraled around questions and answers regarding what I should do.
Yes, I need to represent.
Yes, it’s recorded, more than half the class never goes, and there is a 99% chance he extends the homework again.
Yes, compared to some other people at this dinner....
In the end, I responded to the group chat.
Because after a whole three days of unnecessary suspense, my ultimate conclusion in the end was in fact to attend, with an implied stipulation that we must be eating good food.
I spent the first half of the hotpot eating—as any person would if they were at a restaurant—listening to our guest of honor interrogate the other guys about their lives. I’m quite grateful he never got to me, given that I did in fact stay up until 3am the night before and wake up at 6am to start debugging again. The only reason I maintained a semblance of awakeness was because of the invisible powers of adrenaline. And maybe coffee.
Through careful listening, I learned many different things about myself mainly, all in relation to tech. This is why we don’t put five CS majors at a dinner table together.
After all their bickering, these are my sentiments to the table’s conversations that I never bothered verbalizing:
Re: “There’s no such thing as a backend engineer.”
Agree.
AI can do it all nowadays.
AI can also do frontend engineering too. Toss together a Canva with a UI-looking interface, paste a screenshot and ask ChatGPT to generate some HTML code, and there you have it. Put that prompt into ChatGPT right now. You can thank me later.
So software engineering is essentially fake.
How do you think I made this website in a week?
Re: “Cybersecurity makes money off of selling fear.”
Agree, but grudgingly.
During one of my weekly wonderfully timed 6-8:30pm Application Security classes, my professor finally decided for the first time in three weeks that we should engage in the concept of a “break.” Since everyone no longer understood this concept, our professor opted to pull up some of his research on cybersecurity.
“There will be an all-out AI-powered cyber war in 2036. That’s why cybersecurity is such a hot industry now,” he proclaimed.
But according to every Asian person I’ve ever debated in high school policy debate, fear mongering is orientalist—a way to justify American hegemony and denounce Asian societal structures as backwards.
However, is it orientalist if a Chinese person, currently exercising their freedom of speech in America, believes that cybersecurity profits off of selling fear that China is going to hack America (because they are)? Maybe, maybe not.
Regardless of how I feel about orientalism, I believe that cybersecurity itself is more than just selling fear. According to Information Technology in the Business Society (yes the Stern class with me at the top of the Stern curve), cybersecurity at its core is Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (aka. the CIA triad). In other words, cybersecurity is more about praying the average Instagram user doesn’t type their password on a spoofed Instagram clone and falling prey to a crypto scam. Not global politics.
Re: “Reinforcement learning is the next big thing in AI.”
Strongly disagree.
I know just as much about reinforcement learning as the next person. But the words “reinforcement learning” don’t sound like the words “multi‐context protocol.”
The next step in AI is the scary step that nobody’s looking forward to—computing on private data. With MCP, all those Stern entrepreneurs who are trying to break into the field of “AI financial advisors” can finally profit off of all our private data.
Which doesn’t sound like news to me. Me and my 20 GB of Facebook data are sitting in a corner snickering. They’re very excited to stand up once again in Congress to announce: “Senator, we run ads.”
Re: “Would you rather you raise your kids to be the next child programming genius or give them a relaxed childhood?”
I reject the premise of this question.
Now, I wasn’t one to call these experts in their field stubborn and uninformed. My humble self denies any claims to be an expert in any of these subject matters whatsoever. They’re also, without a doubt, a very intelligent congregation of men, just maybe a little pigeonholed in their little subcategory of CS, unknowing of the world beyond.
But alas, I’m only here for good dinner food.