The most probably answer from the facts we have is quite simple and human... Jealousy. They both were classmates in the same overseas undergrad program, Nuno was a well established and accomplished professor in one of the preeminent tech schools in the world. While he flunked out of his program, and hasn't done much of note.
It even has a name, tragedy of the commons. I have been saying it constantly for the last few years with all this AI hype over LLM's going on. But with business focus really narrowing down to short time frames, what do you expect
Dude, seriously. I'm a citizen and work in a lab, and I have a world expert in my lab... One of maybe 5 in the world, Canadian... And the difficulty for him to stay is insane.
If you asked any American how hard he should have it, they'd probably expect he just needed to fill out a form, pay $150, and wait 1-2 years.
There are sensor sections on both sides. If you short the tracks together with a large enough wire, it triggers the signal box. Actually learned this at the MIT swap fest when manning the back gate a decade ago. Got some cheap alligator clips and strung to them together, no luck.... Larger gauge copper did trigger it, and confused a ton of people when no train came by lol
Don't forget being observant of things that many people in our distracted (attention economy) society tend to miss/ignore.
I had a friend's wife gas-light him into thinking he is on the spectrum and that many of his friends from college are as well... A well established and respected engineering school in the US. I'm not saying there aren't people there who would most likely fall onto it, but being detail oriented or interested in science and engineering enough to get credentialed in it being a signifier of autism was just sheer lunacy.
It really is frustrating how fast our society devalues and dilutes the meaning of any word these days.
Autism spectrum highly favors jobs where it's basically person with data. I have seen estimates that a *majority* of programmers (my own field) lie somewhere on the spectrum. I suspect I lie at the mild end of the spectrum--and I see programming as playing to my strengths and against my weaknesses.
Before software paid as well as it does now, the percent on the spectrum was definitely a high double digit %.
Normies have since invaded and finding someone to geek out with has become hard. (No one wants to discuss the finer points of CPU architectures anymore!)
> I have seen estimates that a majority* of programmers (my own field) lie somewhere on the spectrum*
That seems incredibly unlikely today, and doesn't at all match with my experience. Obviously I am not qualified to diagnose someone with autism, but the idea that more than 50% of my colleagues, past and present, are on the spectrum... that just doesn't pass the smell test.
If his friends are engineers that's, uh, believable. It depends on the kind of engineer of course, but they are certainly like that. The question is if they're high-functioning or not.
"High-functioning" is contextual for most autistic people. (The trick is to remain in those contexts, while developing skills to push the boundary a bit further out: get good enough at it, and even your closest friends will say "wow, that meltdown came out of nowhere!".)
Further more, who thinks our little voices matter anymore in the US when it comes to the investor classes?
And if they did, having a counterweight against corrupt self-centered US oligarchs/CEOs is actually one of the biggest proponents for an actual powerful communist or other model world power. The US had some of the most progressive tax policies in its existence when it was under existential threat during the height of the USSR, and when their powered started to diminish, so too did those tax policies.
Seriously though, our leaders are actively throwing everything and the kitchen sink into AI companies - in some vain attempt to become immortal or own even more of the nations wealth beyond what they already do, chasing some kind of neo-tech feudalism. Both are unachievable because they rely on a complex system that they clearly don't understand.
The most probably answer from the facts we have is quite simple and human... Jealousy. They both were classmates in the same overseas undergrad program, Nuno was a well established and accomplished professor in one of the preeminent tech schools in the world. While he flunked out of his program, and hasn't done much of note.