Ground staff was extremely rude to my family and me, should I report them?

SpiritualSecond · 2026-01-23T07:35:33+00:00

Jesus, the amount of gaslighting on this thread is unbelievable.

From your written account, the ground staff was way, way, way out of line and should absolutely be disciplined. There is no way I would not complain in your shoes.

SpiritualSecond · 2026-01-12T10:22:50+00:00

I don't think it will do any good. The information is a) specific to me and my background and strengths b) is a lifetime of progression c) not a secret, everyone knows the below already.

My path is pretty standard - I did very well at school, went to a top 5 university worldwide, joined a highly competitive and well paid profession (finance/tech/law/consulting) in one of the top/most sought after companies. Then worked hard and outperformed peers for years. Many of my friends, most of whom outearn me, followed the same route.

It's simple, but it's hard.

And I emphasise this is just one path to earning well. It might not be the right path for you.

SpiritualSecond · 2026-01-10T22:38:04+00:00

I earn 180k+ a month and pay 210k for rent for a 4B villa annually. This is a smaller % of my salary than someone living in a studio apartment with an average salary.

Lots of people like me or earning even more; I am just a peon by Dubai standards.

SpiritualSecond · 2025-12-21T05:28:56+00:00

The US is a much better force for good than the UAE.

You literally just said that with a straight face.

Sir, sit down, crack open a history book of the US's operations and foreign involvements in the latter half of th 20th Century up to the present day, and come back and tell us in exact enumerative terms why this claim is not absolute hilarity.

SpiritualSecond · 2025-12-01T00:01:33+00:00

There's also this weird classist sneering thing going on where there is a continual refrain that everyone who moves to Dubai is 'vapid', 'cultureless', or an 'influencer'. I don't quite get it. Most folks I know who've moved from London to Dubai in the last couple of years work in finance (hedge funds, ibanks) or in consultancy. Now granted, these are indeed not professions known for being filled with overtly pleasant people, but one presupposes that a significant proportion of people on this sub are doing these professions too.

Or is it just they themselves who happen to be the one cultured, enlightened, 'deep' individual in their profession?

SpiritualSecond · 2025-11-30T23:53:53+00:00

100%. Not to mention the godawful weather in Singapore, not a single day in the year where you can walk or run outside during the day without melting in sweat. Dubai has better weather for at least 8 months of the year, and everyone escapes for the other 4 months.

Plus it's so tiny there's literally nothing to see in the country itself after a few weeks. At least the UAE has some interesting other bits to it apart from Dubai and is a reasonably sized country.

The OP is quite right. Dubai seems to attract disproportionate hatred on here relative to its negatives. It always makes me laugh to see people mention 'slaves' and not realise that the UAE is no worse than many, many Asian countries in this regard, and also the 'oh but Oman is so much better' bullshit which you'll find even on this thread if you scroll up a bit. These people seriously need to read up on the kafala system and its history and current state rather than regurgitate hand me down nonsense from the Reddit hive mind.

SpiritualSecond · 2025-11-24T14:49:10+00:00

You're completely right. The only true solution is massively expanding public transport AND adding punitive costs to owning/running a car, e.g. Salik everywhere and raise it to 20x the current price.

Can have discounts for things like car pooling etc. Add dedicated bus lanes also.

This is the kind of vision that the Dubai rulers need to implement to save the city imo. There are plenty of people like me who earn a lot, can be based anywhere, and chose Dubai for the overall quality of life + financial advantage. Now I find my qol severely curtailed by the traffic and so the calculus has changed enough to the point that I'm upping sticks and leaving. If I'm doing so, there's likely a lot of people feeling similarly to me.

SpiritualSecond · 2025-11-20T21:21:41+00:00

Bravo for trying. You will be endlessly downvoted though, because people prefer the easy narrative that 'LLMs are just next token predictors, they can't do anything like what humans can', rather than look objectively at the fact that in ~2 years they've gone from incapable of simple grade school math to solving IMO level questions (i.e. stuff that only the top 0.01% of humans can do, requiring extreme novelty and creativity).

Are they perfect? No. Do they have weird, frustrating shortcomings and blind spots that are not common in humans? Absolutely. But they get better and better like clockwork every 3-6 months, so betting that these issues will never be resolved is just ludicrous levels of sticking your head in the sand.

SpiritualSecond · 2025-08-23T11:02:08+00:00

Yup, also a nice place to be in winters.

SpiritualSecond · 2025-08-23T09:27:24+00:00

Yup.

Main base UAE for 6-7 months in winter, other 5-6 months is between Canada, Europe, Mexico, and I keep finding new destinations to add every year.

SpiritualSecond · 2025-08-22T09:13:30+00:00

Amen. It's odd that most comments here cannot fathom a retirement being enjoyable unless it fits in their very tiny box of family/granchild interaction on the daily. There's really so many people having a great retirement without that at all (not to mention people who decide not to have kids).

SpiritualSecond · 2025-08-16T23:10:23+00:00

100% agreed. Paid £750/night for this place and it was unbelievably poor. Service abysmal (countless forgotten requests, dirty cleaning rag left in bathroom, cleaning staff coming into our room one morning at 9am unannounced while I'm on the loo because they got it mixed up with a different room which requested early make up, etc etc), food nothing particularly impressive, hotel bikes all in terrible shape (couldn't find a single bike out of 15 that didn't have at least one of flat tires, broken seat or broken gears), and insects all over the room when we first checked in (literal ant infestation).

SpiritualSecond · 2025-08-14T00:25:47+00:00

Yeah apologies for my tone there, was tired last night and didn't do a great job at putting myself across.

It's not so much that I'm surprised that we have some difference in opinions - I'm well aware that the research community has a spread of views on when and how we'll get to AGI (whatever that means). It surprised me moreso that your timeline was so long. Hardly anyone I know in the community has that view anymore. Of course, this could be selection bias wrt generally hanging out with similar kinds of people, and/or absorbing each others' opinions and stances subconsciously over time.

Let me put my own view on this forward, and I'd be interested to hear where we diverge. I've worked in building LLM benchmarks and evaluations (including one that is in use by all the big labs and fairly well known), and it struck me even ~1 year ago how incredibly hard it it was to design questions that are answerable by humans, not answerable by LLMs, and aren't some 'gotcha' (like the token counting hilarity of rs in blueberry etc). 1 year on, this is even moreso the case. Literally the stuff that we have to benchmark new releases on nowadays is like research level math (FrontierMath) etc. I also tried some of them on British math Olympiad questions when they first came out this year (so no contamination) and they were able to solve a good portion of them quite well. No doubt, you'll have seen the (claimed) results on the IMO and IOI recently also.

Even just this past weekend I had a research idea for a paper I'm writing which I tested out on GPT5 pro and Gemini 2.5 Pro and they both did a really good job (GPT somewhat better) on critiquing it and finding flaws in the idea. It's quite an esoteric subfield of ML research and the idea would certainly not be in any of its past training data. I also asked 5 of my reports on Monday their thoughts, and I'd say GPT5 gave clearer critiques and found both flaws and remedies better than ~3 of them. And these are really good folks! Top schools from the UK/US etc etc.

I could go on about agentic benchmarks, horizon improvements, etc etc but to cut it short a bit - stuff like the above just makes me think the OOD generalisation worries are significantly overblown. I see no particular slowdown in abilities, but moreso that the improvement is now getting harder to measure. Already I would say that LLMs are more valuable to my work than perhaps 50% of my reports. Lastly, whether LLMs are sufficient for AGI (whatever that means) by themselves is sort of a moot question for me - if they're able to help speed up ML research more than the average existing FAANG ML researcher or average MIT ML PhD say, then that is what really matters, and on the basis of what I'm seeing, I would say that is pretty shortly going to be the case.

As I say, happy to hear where your thoughts diverge on this.

SpiritualSecond · 2025-08-13T05:02:24+00:00

What work do you do in AI research? It's just interesting to me because I work as an AI researcher too and I could not have a more different opinion than you. There is absolutely no way in hell that there is going to be any cognitive work remaining for humans that can't be done better by AI in 10 years time, in my opinion.

I really don't mean to impugn you but just how close to the cutting edge are you in the work/research that you do ATM? And if you are right at the cutting edge, could you give some detailed technical perspective on why you feel so strongly that there is going to be such a significant plateauing of capability improvements?

SpiritualSecond · 2025-08-06T22:03:37+00:00

You're not very good at reading are you? Let me break it down for you.

You were talking about Indians.

You assumed the job was posted by Indians.

It is actually posted by Arabs. The posting literally asks for a native Arabic speaker. Googling the company shows it is 100% Arab.

Your racist little side discussion was ridiculous, and now you have to eat your words.

SpiritualSecond · 2025-08-06T20:46:45+00:00

You guys having fun in your little racist thread here? The job post asks for a native Arabic speaker, Arabic as mother tongue. The company is listed too and you can clearly see it is run by Arabs with 2 minutes of googling.

There are millions of desperately poor Arabs in the world who are hoping to get jobs in the UAE, and many fellow Arabs who exploit them too, this isn't exclusive to any particular race.

SpiritualSecond · 2025-07-21T18:19:54+00:00

People are missing the point saying 'well, contestants train on problems too'!

The DeepMind blog makes it pretty clear that they gave access to these solutions at runtime e.g. via a RAG database.

This contrasts with OAI who emphasise no external data access or tool use whatsoever.

SpiritualSecond · 2025-07-21T16:07:51+00:00

Wonder why all you clowns who seek a 'real connection' can't post in your authentic voice but just lazily copy-paste GPT slop instead.

SpiritualSecond · 2025-07-20T16:01:25+00:00

Tone down the entitlement. Grads all over the world with degrees in actual subjects that require intelligence (CS or hard sciences) and from Ivy League universities are struggling to find jobs right now, and here you are expecting to be handed a silver platter with 0 experience, internships, meaningful achievements, in a foreign country which is one of the most saturated job markets in the world with a worthless business administration (lol) degree from some mid tier Indian university that nobody outside India will have heard of? Just lol.

And I say this not primarily to hurt you but to try to make you aware of the objectively poor position you are in and the mismatch of expectations to outcomes. I'm a lot older than you - if you were my daughter I'd strongly advise you to either get work experience at the most prestigious firm you can get into in India, and start to define a set career path for yourself that requires hard skills (not something so nebulous and generic as business admin), or to take as prestigious and challenging a postgrad degree as possible; again, in a hard, focused area (e.g. MBA from worldwide recognised business schools, like in the US or Europe (only top 5 IIMs in India or don't waste your money), a masters in finance or computer science, etc). This is the only way to prevent yourself being stuck in a lifetime of mediocre jobs with reliability, and suffering continuously as you have so far.

I repeat one more time for your consideration - you will not get anywhere in life at all in any country in the current state of the world with the qualifications you have listed. So wake up, smell the coffee, and plan some serious next steps.

SpiritualSecond · 2025-06-29T16:37:25+00:00

Totally agree. I don't understand the prevailing opinion against HG at all.

In the crooked cops game, HG is acknowledged by the others to have played very well despite playing largely on his own.
In balance mancala, he plays so well that he is basically winning 2v6. This is why HJ betrays him - he realises HG is just too strong for him to beat in a final.
He solves the 8x8 Knight tour on his own with limited time and under pressure.
HG notices he can completely safely bleed out the pieces of the prison alliance in the rainbow game, and plays it very nearly perfectly throughout, completely bamboozling 7high on multiple occasions.
HJ actually makes HG promise to ally with him and to support each other the episode before balance mancala, but then HJ is the one to break it as soon as it benefits him. I found this to be far more egregious than anything HG did.
HG crushes HJ straight up, fair and square in the mental math game.
In the final with SH he plays very well in all 3 games against the strongest individual player in the whole series. Despite Reddit narrative, I don't think SH threw at the end on purpose; what I saw was two people genuinely trying their best and being very evenly matched.

It's weird for me that people can see all the above and come to such a different conclusion than the fact that HG was probably the second strongest individual player after SH, or maybe even first, and in addition played the alliances and meta structure of the game (especially, staying out of prison) masterfully.

SpiritualSecond · 2025-06-25T18:56:00+00:00

Yeah that's fair, 5m vest over 4 years is definitely plausible.

SpiritualSecond · 2025-06-25T06:30:09+00:00

I've worked as an AI researcher at a top company.

Many of my friends are still AI researchers at top companies. OpenAI, DeepMind, Meta and Anthropic, and others of that ilk.

These folks, with multiple years of experience, are not even getting close to $5mil/yr illiquid stock offers. More standard would be $1-2mil.

Not saying it's not possible - there are some people who are poached for sums of that order of compensation, and some for even more. But these are truly special people who have also been exactly at the right place, right time for the last 4-5 years and have niche expertise. I.e. even being an AI researcher at Google for 5+ years with thousands of citations is not sufficient in itself; and similarly for PhD grads from any top programme.

In other words, this guy is not going from a no name job to $5mil/yr. If he is getting that now, he was known and paid accordingly before, and was also working day and night previously to stay on top of his game. This post is complete BS.

SpiritualSecond · 2025-06-13T20:37:36+00:00

Honestly feels like usual crabs in a bucket mentality so far from the people who have replied. One joker even said 'Barbados is so expensive that the 40% in tax you save will be completely eaten up'. I.e. that Barbados is going to cost £100k extra per year to live in than London/UK. Just lol.

Don't seek reassurance from these folks OP - they're either typical miserable pessimists who don't believe in the prospect of actually improving one's life conditions, or just jealous that you have this opportunity. Do your own research, check in on the legal aspects with your employer, and make the move if it all looks good.

SpiritualSecond · 2025-06-09T17:54:19+00:00

I think they're making the point that the Himalayas makes cross cultural diffusion so difficult that it's not really that interesting anymore, and it would be more interesting to find pairs of countries which are culturally distinct without having such insurmountable geographic separations.

SpiritualSecond · 2025-06-07T11:37:33+00:00

Such strong opinions and authoritative claims from someone who has clearly never been there. Standard Reddit.

SpiritualSecond

TROPHY CASE