Hiring funnels at big companies are funny because they're all about stacking filters together in a way that optimises some random grab bag of metrics in the candidates who make it through.
One of those metrics is "number of people hired who literally can't write code". You'd be able to give these candidates a full description of what the median is and they still wouldn't be able to finish this question, and you're not going to get too many false positives, so you add it to your rotation as the first question and have an enthusiastic mid-level engineer do it as the first half-hour round of an interview.
Then you design a few more rounds to test for the positive things you want, like pair refactoring, architecture, lunch with the team, or whatever floats your boat. That way your senior engineers don't need to interview people who can't write code and you stand a lower chance of accidentally hiring some of them.
`arc land` is burnt into my brain by Phabricator, so I'm aware that the term predates LLMs, but it still drives me nuts.
It's impossible to undo some of these linguistic wobbles. Even if you could filter out 100% of LLM input, the humans themselves are learning to say "land" at a higher frequency now.
This is misreading the original reply. An enormously complex problem is different from an enormously complex project. Complex projects can usually be decomposed into tasks of varying complexity, some of which I bet an LLM helps with.
Good for you, but that is entirely you describing your life and doesn't address the point.
Which was that, if "what matters is that you move, consistently, every week", then it's motivational to tell sedentary people that pretty much any amount of exercise will do. Once you get over the initial activation energy then exercise is easier.
Have you ever heard of the motivational technique where, instead of telling themselves "I'm going for a run", people will say "I'm going to put my shoes on and see how I feel, no commitment and no pressure", and they end up nearly always going for a run anyway plus they do it more often and have more fun?
Also, have you read Dynomight's blog post[0] about how the biggest barrier to starting exercise isn't improving too slowly, it's overtraining and giving up?
This article could be seen as a way to do the minimum exercise possible. I think a better reading is that all exercise is good, you can spend five minutes on the exercise bike or do a few leg raises and push-ups, no pressure, it's still good for you, and maybe tomorrow you'll go for a run or make it to the gym.
I've had two dogs. One didn't like fireworks but would just turn his head towards the noise then walk over to the nearest human, and the other completely ignored them.
However! The first was a Labrador cross and the second was full lab. Breeds intended for use as gun dogs might not react to gunpowder and explosions as much.
I feel the opposite. AI writing is like a version of Google Maps where you can see little black and white houses up close, but when you zoom out, all those details fade to white noise.
There are a bunch of upsides here. Industrialisation increases standard of living compared to an agrarian economy. A service economy, where services mean things like industrial engineering and product marketing, increases standard of living even further.
I get that tool and die is going to be in demand again one day, but that's not an overall downside. For that to happen, every country which could be outsourced to will be too wealthy and have a service economy, and they'll have to use their wealth to hire the last remaining tool and die makers as instructors. Compared to the upsides of nobody being a subsistence farmer or sweatshop worker anymore, and of most people living in advanced economies, that downside is small.
I'm starting to think that when non-experts believe a job will be easy to automate with AI, it usually has hidden elements which they don't understand and which make automating it almost impossible.
Meanwhile, there are all these intellectual jobs which are hard for humans to do, so we assume they're just hard in general. Look closer, though, and many don't involve human social interaction, only require a small amount of good taste, and don't have any physical component.
A socialist might object that deregulating private enterprise (and let's add lowering taxes, moving to a flat tax rate, cutting programs, etc.) is obviously not socialist regardless of anything you nationalise. And they would be right!
But this person, who is neither socialist nor libertarian, is obviously not a normal centrist either.
The political compass always seems to me like it should be a heatmap, or a polygon of 90th percentile political views, or something that more clearly shows the standard deviation and the presence of outlier positions.
Some simplification is necessary, but not so much that it obscures the difference between a normal centrist versus someone who wants to nationalise half the economy and deregulate the other half.
It's more like you have a business making engines, each generation of engine has eventually turned out to be profitable over its lifespan, but each generation has an exponentially increasing R&D cost and your customers will switch from the old engines to a competitor if they don't like the newest generation.
You're stuck racing against your competitors with the distinct possibility that your R&D costs will outgrow the market demand, and you can't stop because otherwise your customers will stop investing in your dead end tech and switch.
I don't think Australia has many true four way stops in cities and towns. Usually there's a give way sign on two of the directions, or lights, or a roundabout.
Unmarked intersections do exist, mostly on bush tracks and backroads, but I don't think I've ever seen the four stop sign arrangement here in Vic. Apparently it's slightly more common in NSW.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, the argument isn't that whoever controls AI will use it to kill everyone, it's that they'll control nearly everything because power snowballs.
They could kill everyone, so aren't you glad they decided to open a soup kitchen instead? Here, have some UBI. Of course, it's not quite "universal" yet, so you'll have to sell your house to make it under the means test. A local firm, owned by a national private equity company, forming part of an international portfolio fund, making up an ETF owned mostly by Anthropic investors, will be happy to buy that bit of real estate. Oh, you wrote that on social media? I'm afraid you're not the kind of tenant we're looking for.
This is basically how life already works for people who aren't capable of holding down a job today. I don't think it's ridiculously cynical or nihilistic to extrapolate from the available data and assume it's going to suck once working people have no bargaining power other than asking politely.
The first comment said "They need a lot of money to do that. Where do they get it all from? Not the jobless masses I presume?"
I was explaining that money is irrelevant and so are the jobless masses. Someone owns the factories, and that person is the one who is relevant here. They of course need to be convinced, by money or other means, but the jobless masses are only relevant to the extent that they own and control wealth; since they are jobless, they probably have very little ownership or control.
You are correct that there are additional steps here, but wealth is growing increasingly concentrated, and the burden of proof is on the person claiming that trend won't continue.
Money is a mirage. You can't use dollars to hold land; you need force projection.
Once upon a time that meant guns and soldiers, but today it increasingly means drones. Drones mean mines, factories, supply chains, chemical plants, and farms. Money can buy these things, but it's not the only way to get them.
You can chase the money around all day, but money is only one small part of wealth, and wealth can increase with no injection of money at all.
> This might be why despite AI automating so much work, the 996 grind culture is more alive than ever.
There's an interesting paradox which occurs when a particular field finds its work becoming easier. Suddenly, the world needs more of everyone else's job and less of your job. You have to work harder now that there's less work to do, because there's more competition.
One of those metrics is "number of people hired who literally can't write code". You'd be able to give these candidates a full description of what the median is and they still wouldn't be able to finish this question, and you're not going to get too many false positives, so you add it to your rotation as the first question and have an enthusiastic mid-level engineer do it as the first half-hour round of an interview.
Then you design a few more rounds to test for the positive things you want, like pair refactoring, architecture, lunch with the team, or whatever floats your boat. That way your senior engineers don't need to interview people who can't write code and you stand a lower chance of accidentally hiring some of them.