> The hearsay is essentially repeating what was announced publicly. Their job listing might as well have said, “now seeking applicants for total shit show”. It’s bad form for us to say this out loud.
It's a good thing to point out these unspoken truths explicitly. As people internalize the norms that make it bad form, it becomes easy to skip the mental step of acknowledging the problem. Even internally. But that quiet acknowledgement is necessary to keep oneself sane. Without it, the best case is someone steers away without good reason, at worst it leads to experienced and expressed frustration that doesn't add up and can snowball into the wrong places.
The bit about stream viewers is interesting. What is the typical viewer experience?
I assumed watching streams is similar to watching vs participating in sports. I played a few as a teen, got quite good at one. As much as I like watching highly talented people apply their skill it does nothing to scratch the participatory itch.
Software projects are too large to be left to licensed practitioners if you want to ensure quality. It would require the producing company to follow a formal quality management system. Discussing individual licensing is a distraction until that is in place.
I think articles like this are roundabout arguing something different from their text.
It’s not about how much to half ass our hobby projects that were often halfassed without AI.
Over years professional development has reached many context-dependent equilibriums for the amount of quality to build into various types of software. Professionals are facing downward pressure on that equilibrium point - not just the faster iteration promised by AI.
>I can assure HN that they want to be on the grid as quickly as possible.
In a conversation about negative externalities, I don't see the purpose of such a statement. If everything else were equal, nobody would choose negative externalizes just for the fun of it.
Furthermore, a company 'wanting' something is only loosely correlated with the internal political will and resource allocation to achieving it. And says nothing about whether that internal effort is appropriately scaled to the external complexity of the task.
It doesn't prevent people from outsourcing their thinking to AI. People don't bother preparing to discuss topics beyond what AI told them. If they have access to their computer during the conversation they'll ask AI rather than google for reference material. If they don't have access, they'll suggest "investigating" (asking AI) and reconvening.
We had a problem that involved some open source library. The call consisted of various people saying what claude said about the code, then me explaining how it was incomplete or misleading (read: wrong) based on what I learned from actually reading the code.
Tenuous connection between unrelated topics to fit them into larger ingroup/outgroup dynamics is the junkfood of persuasion tactics. Bad for you but addictive anyway. If you look for it you'll see it all the time.
I appreciate that it allows people to engage with and discuss the work without immediately feeling boxed out by pretentious poppycock.
I also think obviousness is overindexed as the indicator of bad art because it's often the easiest property to articulate about something thoroughly bad. A lot of the tv and movies that make me quote the robot devil ("You can't just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!") would not be improved by making the characters subtler. They could be the same level, or even more forthcoming, if the writing sounded like natural conversations real people have.
>Renegade urban graffiti artist Banksy is clearly a guffhead of massive proportions, yet he's often feted as a genius straddling the bleeding edge of now. Why? Because his work looks dazzlingly clever to idiots. And apparently that'll do.
- Creator of Black Mirror, 5 years before series premiere
You know the meme that goes: "Be yourself. No, not like that."
It is possible for someone to have a goal of changing themselves into a person who can fit in socially, and be effortlessly comfortable while doing so. After building the underlying skills, they know how to navigate social situations well enough to intuit how much honesty and revealing is appropriate for a given situation, and can roll back "fake it until you make it". They can accept surmountable social penalties for the comfort of less self-filtering and chance to have more meaningful connections.
"Be yourself" means to change yourself, and then stick the landing.
Graybeards love to yap. Just talk to them or consume the wide amount of material already out there.
It takes curiosity on your part though. Handwaving about practical concerns taking priority is a path to never getting around to it. "Pragmatism" towards skills is how managers wind up with an overspecialized team and then tell themselves it was inevitable. The same can happen to you.
>if no matter what the result, we can always just say "the candidate who won could always have won given the forecast" - what are we really adding to the conversation here?
When the "upset" candidate wins, it will have been statistically likely. Yes. What they're adding are error bars in the collective consciousness.
Ironically enough, the hype pop of 538 was actually driven by people misinterpreting the stats and using them to feel vindicated in their support of Obama. The comedown was finding out that 25% is still 1-in-4 odds.
538 should be killing the horse race coverage by doing the most sober version of it. But horse race is big business. Therefore: boo 538, booooooo, they're harshing the vibe of my favorite reality show.
The big "DOWNLOAD NOW" ads placed on webpages for software downloads are pretty bad too. Whenever I'm setting up a fresh windows machine I haven't grabbed an adblocker yet and am not used to seeing ads so they get me every now and then.
>Thinking "its not accurate enough" should not EVER be a reason to decide not to try something that could potentually help in this unprecedented situation. It may well not work well enough but we won't know unless we try!
You do know you're using this line reasoning against the guy who literally invented the phrase "security theater," right?
It's a good thing to point out these unspoken truths explicitly. As people internalize the norms that make it bad form, it becomes easy to skip the mental step of acknowledging the problem. Even internally. But that quiet acknowledgement is necessary to keep oneself sane. Without it, the best case is someone steers away without good reason, at worst it leads to experienced and expressed frustration that doesn't add up and can snowball into the wrong places.