It seems that pass rate decreases with effort increase, on GPT5.5? This is highly counter-intuitive and I don't see any explanation, any idea why they'd get this result?
Perhaps you're a better-than-average driver? I unfortunately am not, and have had the opposite experience (people flashing me because I forgot to turn off the high beams, or couldn't do it fast enough due to e.g. a corner, or drinking water with that hand, or whatever). In long straight lines it's relatively easy to do it, on windy roads not so much. On the other hand, with current car I don't remember anybody flashing me.
Personally, I just developed a strategy for dealing with too-bright-incoming-lights: just focus on the right edge of the road - that takes my eyes off the lights, and it's where the danger lies anyway. With that, late-commuting vehicles are a lot less of a nuisance than people who just have poorly tuned low beams or simply keep high beams on always. And those problems/ people are unrelated to the "automatic commute" technology - arguably the tech improves things on that front, even in the not-so-great implementations.
Admittedly mine is somewhat high end, and I have seen broken implementations (which is what I think you describe; e.g. for auto high beam assist mine will redirect the beams around isolated cars, won't completely switch to low beams except in heavy /heavier traffic; and when it does, it takes at least several seconds to switch back - which makes it impossible to do the kind of "flash" you describe).
But I'm kinda' surprised by the cruise control, I don't think I ever drove a car, even a rental, where cruise control wasn't at least "genuinely useful". Even the non-automatic one. How does it "not take into account vehicles in other lanes"/ what makes it dangerous?
> If you don't call an exterminator with the proper poison almost any effort you make will be moot.
Nah, not true. I lived in a student housing that was positively _infested_ with cockroaches (and had stuff like wood paneling on the walls, just to get an idea - i.e. lots of places for roaches to hide). We managed to largely get rid of cockroaches in our room (you still get the occasional one, because well, you had to open the door, and hallways were infested as I mentioned).
It's not _that_ hard, there are a lot of solutions. You need to do 3 things:
a. seal all holes/cracks/niches (e.g. with silicone). cover ventilation holes with nets. Install sponge/rubber bands to make sure doors/windows close well.
b. kill them once when you move in (after doing the work at point a) using copious amounts of insecticides; then install roach traps (sticky ones are good) to catch the occasional one that makes it through your defenses. Keep occasional spraying in the corners/ behind the fridge/ near the pipes/ in places where they are likely to gather.
c. Keep it clean/ don't offer a lot of incentives for roaches to come over to you (no breadcrumbs all over the place, food in closed containers etc)
Do these well and you should be largely roach-free, regardless of the building. But yeah, it's an annoying fight if the building itself is infested.
How are all these "broken and dangerous"? In my car (Volvo) they work rather well. Perhaps sign detection sometimes misses signs, but so do I so I can't fault it. The others though, I rank them all somewhere between "genuinely useful" and "absolutely awesome"
You can still believe that the scientific method works; and might leads you to 2 conclusions:
(a) "I can prove earth is not flat" (using this methodology)
(b) I cannot prove there is no God, though I may believe the prevalence of evidence does not support the hypothesis, there's no scientific test that I can design.
To be fair, their control variables treat the first objection (wealth), not the second (brand preference; and yeah there's some correlation but one doesn't imply the other)
That's for the good studies. Let's not pretend that all published studies are honest. Unfortunately it is quite reasonable to be skeptical about extraordinary claims such as this one.
If we ignore cost (which is kinda hard to ignore), I feel Codex kinda' does it for me. Sure it's not really an editor but I find I don't need that _that much_ and it's easy to launch an external editor (they actually have the feature).
The ironic thing is that half a year ago, after trying factory.ai I thought chat-first interface was a stupid idea that will never work.
I wonder how knowledgeable in compilation was the engineer that attempted this. I'm pretty confident that I could produce a decent C compiler in a few weeks (or less), if given Opus 4.7 + unlimited tokens + a good test suite. (and this is not blind unsubstantiated belief in AI, I've recently rewritten a somewhat sophisticated interpreter in a week with AI; and have worked on several C++ compilers in the past, including a GCC port to a custom DSP, so I have a bit of an idea about what this would take).
But yeah, this is not a "one shot" project, none of it is. One shot doesn't work even with humans - after all, this is exactly what killed waterfall as a methodology.
you can absolutely know. they do suspiciously well. you just give harder problems until they can't solve it. how they react/approach a problem that they can't immediately solve _is_ the interview - not the "how many things they solved correctly" part.
That said - I seldom need people to be hardcore algorithm solvers
What I typically did was a variation of fizzbuzz (can the candidate code very basic logic?) and then finding a bug or minor requirements extension in their online screening test/"homework" and asking them to solve that on the spot (did they write the code themselves/can they modify it). It's typically enough, there's diminishing returns to test more in-depth the programming skills - the rest you can discuss domain knowledge, general experience, working style etc.
To be fair it doesn't say "you can't score a goal" or "you can't kick the ball", it says you can only decide to _try_ to do that. But agree it's not that deep as they seem to think, you can take this line of thinking further as much as you want (you can try to move your leg but perhaps due to injury or external blockage it won't move; so all you can really do is "desire" not "decide"? Is there some very deep meaning to this? And what even is this "you" that we are talking about?)
One thing that is worth pondering is what parts of the "old wisdom" (if any) are no longer true. Because the set of "common sense knowledge" has a tendency to mutate in time. Take the first statement:
> Impactful software tends to be written by many humans that need to collaborate.
This was definitely true. Is it still true to the same extent/ in the same way? Not obvious...
In Romania I think they just gave back the money (or maybe it was on a voucher with "if you don't use the voucher by date X, we'll refund the money"). which is in stark contrast with how other low-cost airlines like WizzAir behaved. Perhaps it was regional policy; or perhaps it was due to their previous interactions with UK regulators? But for me, they gained a lot of respect for them back then (whereas WizzAir is on the "only if absolutely no other choice" list - and I think I only used it once, for a business trip where it had a good direct flight AND I didn't care if I actually made it to the destination, or if I got stranded there for a few days - since the company would've been paying)
I kinda' like Ryanair as lowcost airline? They're fairly efficient (boarding, serving etc), they _actually fly_ the advertised flights (with relatively few exceptions), and the food is reasonably priced. During COVID they would just give your money back, no shenanigans like "they're in our company wallet". Sure they have their quirks but they don't seem to go out of their way to deceive you, they're pretty open about what you pay and what you get.
Now Wizzair is "mostly not an airline" for me, because they have all the negative traits I hinted above. E.g. they'll happily advertise flights they have no intention of flying, make refunds hard, are as misleading as they can be about pricing, make it impossible to checkin online a few hours before the flight so that you have to pay their high fees, etc.
I wouldn't want the Ryanair experience for long-haul flights; but for short 2-3h ones within Europe, they're fine, I'm always considering them. Not for the perceived cheapness, but for the "I expect them to actually fly AND be on time" part.
If your feedback loop is hours or days, I don't think it's bad you spend some time thinking ahead of doing. Oh, you missed the unknown unknowns? You'll hit them soon enough anyway, this is not a model that encourages abstract planning with no action taken, for extended periods of time....
The problem with "AI zealots" is seldom that they spend too much time planning ahead. If anything, it's the opposite.
Waterfall was bad due to the excessively long feedback loops (months-to-years from "planning" to "customer gets to see it/ we receive feedback on it"). It was NOT bad because it forced people to think before writing code! That part we should recover, it's not problematic at all.