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+# Fall 2024 Course Review: EECS 496
+
+2024-12-21
+
+Course Title: Major Design Experience — Professionalism
+
+Rating: 2/5
+
+EECS 496 takes the form of guest lectures. Almost every week a different
+speaker would take the floor. Some are boring. Some are great. The lecture
+topics are (taken from course schedule):
+
+- Introduction
+- Interview Essentials
+- Startups
+- Achieving Financial Fitness
+- Investments
+- Project management
+- Respect in the Workplace
+- Venture Capital
+- Intellectual Property: Trademarks, patents, and copyrights
+- Introduction to Ethics (I missed this lecture because Whitfield Diffie
+  gave a talk earlier)
+- AI and Ethics: Trust, Cooperation, and Society
+- Technology and Public Policy
+
+## Honorable Mentions
+
+### Venture Capital
+
+You didn't expect me to compliment a venture capitalist, did you? Well,
+"recovering venture capitalist", as Brendan Richardson describes himself.
+He's a funny guy. He wasn't defending VC. He was roasting it, mercilessly.
+Quote unquote:
+
+> True of False?
+
+> The reputation of Venture Capitalists as selfish, arrogant, greedy jerks
+> is DESERVED?
+
+> TRUE!!
+
+His talk almost caused me to have sympathy toward VCs. Takeaways:
+
+- A VC's job is nearly impossible
+    - Like spotting a future Olympics champion in kindergarten
+    - Most startup companies fail
+    - Most VCs fail
+- Most of the money VCs throw into startups isn't theirs, but that of much
+  bigger companies ("Limited Partners") like foundations or insurance
+  companies
+- Because most startups fail, those who succeed must generate explosive
+  returns (10x, 100x, you name it)
+
+And that's why, according to Richardson, VCs sleep like babies, in that
+they wake up every two hours and cry.
+
+Still though, VCs cannot be acquitted of their crimes against humanity and
+the environment.
+
+Lesson learned: I could never be a VC.
+
+### AI and Ethics
+
+Ben Kuipers doesn't believe in the singularity. Machines aren't gonna team
+up and kill us either. As of 2024 (hi archaeologists), when a machine
+kills someone, it is not because it wants to; it's because it wasn't aware
+that it's about to kill someone. Like the Waymo that dragged a pedestrian
+down under. Nobody thought it could happen, but it did. And there wasn't
+a section of code, or a part of the model, that dealt with this scenario.
+
+Kuipers argues that, by the time an AI faces the trolley problem, it's
+already too late. If a car on autopilot is driving on a narrow street, and
+it can either kill a pedestrian or the passenger — the debate should not
+be about whom to kill, but about why the fuck didn't the car slow down in
+the first place.
+
+### Technology and Public Policy
+
+Molly Kleinman believes public policy is necessary, no matter what the
+techbros say. When a technology is said to be for the "public good",
+a good question to ask is always "but _whose_ public good?"
+
+A lot of modern innovations be like:
+
+\> create cool technology  
+\> look inside  
+\> biases
+
+One example she used was the speeding cameras in Chicago citing more
+tickets in Black neighborhoods. The root cause was that roads there were
+often wider so drivers had less incentive to slow down. Infrastructure
+issue.
+
+### Respect in the Workplace
+
+Taj Williams, DEI person at CSE, talks about allyship. Allyship is when
+you're in the majority but support minorities.
+
+Me, being in several minorities, believe this should be one of the first
+lectures, not the seventh. If it were, I wouldn't have called EECS 496 the
+"torture lecture".
+
+## Dishonorable mentions
+
+These are the lectures that made me coin "torture lecture".
+
+### Investments
+
+He starts from the importance of paying off credit card debt. Forty
+minutes later he's talking about real estate investment. My brother in
+christ that's quite a leap
+
+I asked him if he considers real estate investment ethical under current
+social circumstances, when homeless people exist. He was kinda upset and
+I did not ask any further.
+
+### Achieving Financial Fitness
+
+I wasn't planning to retire in the US, but now I know how 401(k) works so
+thank you I guess??
+
+## Assignments
+
+- Elevator pitch: Try to sell myself to an employer at a career fair
+- Budget: Figure out how much I'm gonna earn and spend when I get a job
+- Executive summary: Try to convince that my MDE (473) project has
+  a market and is profitable (it's not)
+- Microaggressions: Try to deal with bigots in the workplace with
+  Direct/Delay/Delegate/Distract
+- Op-Ed: Write an op-ed about a technology that raises an ethical concern,
+  and another to argue that the concern isn't so threatening
+
+I was deducted two points from the Microaggressions assignment because
+I forgot to include a "Generative AI statement", which, if it did exist,
+would say "nope". I don't have a problem with the deduction, I'm just mad
+that I can't even write an assignment without doing a captcha.
+
+## Verdict
+
+Overall experience is Not Good™. I took this course only because I had to.
+I sure am glad there exist a few good lectures to justify it.
+
+Although most of the knowledge didn't immediately come to use, it might
+prove helpful some time in the future.