It’s pretty fast to pop open a new tab and visit sheets.new, I do this a lot but not everybody knows about it (and the rest of the .new TLD) The in-line floating thing is not too attractive to me. But yeah, new window, sheets.new, split screen, you’re spreadsheeting before you know it.
I expect they want people who are willing to be persistent in working on hard problems that might be challenging or require learning new skills. I don’t see the implication others are drawing with grinding, long hours, overwork, etc. I don’t love the term grit as it’s been popularized but still I think the ability to deal with frustration and keep moving in the right direction on hard problems is a valuable one. A person who displays this quality can be expected to do well when faced with a job that requires learning a new programming language or working in a difficult field (including non-programming things like nonprofit work or counseling).
Grit is not synonymous with overwork. Grit is more about, when something is hard, not just looking for an easier task, but continuing to focus on the problem at hand. It doesn’t mean being a hero and figuring things out on nights and weekends. It might mean patiently reaching out to the people who can help you, following up when others drop the communication, taking responsibility for chasing requirements, etc.
Grit can also meaning sticking to your guns when it comes to boundaries and thus preventing burnout.
I guess I just would caution folks to not read too much into this word. It’s not a strong signal of anything, put it together with everything else that you see from the company. Some people just read the book Grit and want to use the term
My bad, I meant clear in a more objective sense, in that it will be actually _true_ that these not-alive things will not be able to “possess” anything, rights included. Agreed that for sure people are going to get all kinds of meaning from interacting with them in the ways you suggest and it will be tricky to navigate that.
I think perhaps the advanced models may be protected legally _as property_, for their own value, and through licenses etc. But I hope we are a long way from considering them to be people, outside of the hypotheticals.
I suppose it reveals that the sentience of others is not knowable to us, it’s a conclusion we reach from their behavior and the condition of the world around us. Until recently, certain kinds of things, like writing about your memories, were only possible for humans to do. So if a non-sentient thing does those things, it is confusing. Especially so to the generations that remember when no bots could do this.
I expect that people who grow up knowing that bots can be like this will be a bit less ready to accept communication from a stranger as genuinely from a human, without some validation of their existence, outside the text itself. And for the rest of humanity there will be an arms race around how humanness can be proven in situations where AI could be imitating us. This is a huge bummer but idk hope that need can be avoided at this point.
That said, it’s still very clear that a machine generating responses from models does not matter and has no rights, whereas a person does. Fake sentience will still be fake, even if it claims it’s not and imitates us perfectly. The difference matters.
> However, without knowing those breakdowns, taking any action to correct those breakdowns is wrong. We can’t accurately say there is a problem.
You’re arguing a different point. I’m talking about the filter on candidates, not eventual hires. Though of course, people who don’t become candidates will never become hires so there’s a relationship there.
It would be easy to see whether doing X to increase candidate diversity (opening up the filter) led to more diverse hires. Especially combined with blind hiring process or whatever at the individual level. But the individual work alone is not worth much if the candidate pool itself is too limited.
If changing the candidate pool leads to more diverse candidates, and then employees as a whole end up more diverse, it would follow that some of those people brought in at the candidate level out-competed their peers & that the overall standard of hires has increased, or at least is no different.
This is not about a target ratio of employed people. Though I think observations about such ratios compared to the general population and to other similar companies can be informative.
To get at the point you thought I was making though… How I feel about quotas is: they might be an ok temporary measure, especially if managed gently, not “must be a woman” for X role, cause yikes. Hiring is capricious a lot of the time anyway, especially at the margin when there is more than one acceptable candidate and all have different backgrounds and experience. All sorts of stuff will come into play. Good people will still be in demand regardless of their race. But if you lose a couple things because you aren’t from an underrepresented group and another acceptable candidate was, who actually cares. If it wasn’t that, it would be some other nonsense like the guy was the same race as you but supports the same football team as the interviewer, or your interview took place before lunch and the other person’s was after.
Since it’s already capricious and full of coin flips, I don’t care at all that sometimes it’s capricious for a relatively good reason like giving somebody else a shot. Fine.
I disagree completely that we have to be 100% certain about a problem before we take action. We just have to know that, more likely than not, there is a problem, and take measured, cautious steps to address it. To me it would be an extraordinary, mind-boggling, coincidence if it turned out that the status quo was working perfectly to get the best candidates hired.
Hmm. Without actively taking steps to widen the net and account for those irrelevant attributes, those attributes instead act as the first filter in your hiring process. IMO the process that ignores this is the one that’s not looking for the best developers. In order to make those attributes truly irrelevant we have to correct for the massive, obvious influence they have in human decision making (on both sides of the hiring equation). Accepting the status quo is actually letting those attributes rob you of good hires.