Viliam1234

The article creation [...] growing at a slightly declining pace, which is expected since the amount of knowledge is finite.

Not just because of that, but they also made the process of creating new articles very hostile.

Decades ago, when Wikipedia started, it was possible to create a short article, and as long as no one objected against it, it stayed there, and people could later expand it. That's what "wiki" was supposed to mean.

Today, you need to create an article in a separate "Draft" namespace, then a random Wikipedia editor will judge it, and if it is not perfect (e.g. does not have enough references), it cannot be published. And if you don't fix it by a certain date, it gets automatically deleted. (Rather than leaving it there for someone else to hopefully improve.)

I tried to make an article for an author whose books my kids liked. His books were translated to many languages, he won a few awards, and now some company has bought movie rights for the books. Alas, I have failed to establish notability sufficiently in my short article, so it was rejected. The editor didn't even have to argue that the author is not notable (which would be silly, a google search clearly shows otherwise), only that my article failed to establish it. So the official policy now kinda says that it is better to have no article rather than an imperfect one.

Well, I am not getting paid for producing perfect articles for Wikipedia, which means there is no way for me to contribute anymore. Too bad, I have created a few articles long ago.

Is it just too much effort to complain + favoritism towards frequent editors?

They know how to play the game 100x better than you do, and you don't want to waste your time learning to play the game at their level.

There is a Wikipedia rule for everything, and for the opposite of that, if you know the right buzzwords. If a "good guy" writes on a topic he is involved in, that's great, because he is a subject-matter expert; we need more heroes like him. If a "bad guy" writes on a topic he is involved in, that's a conflict of interest, instant revert and ban. You can accuse people of all kinds of bad behaviors, but if anyone does the same to you, you accuse them of not assuming good faith. You need to be very very patient and diplomatic, because if you lose temper even for a moment, you get banned. Shameless lying is perfectly okay if you stay polite and pretend to be too dumb to understand.

I wonder what happens when you have kids and you can no longer spend your free time to keep learning new things that your company wants you to know.

(Just kidding, I know what happens... they will fire you and hire someone who doesn't have kids.)

Many popular dependencies suffer from feature creep. Instead of doing one thing and doing it well, they do five different things, one of them is the one you need, another one introduces horrible vulnerabilities. Next version fill fix an existing vulnerability, but add a new feature with another horrible vulnerability... so all the versions except for the latest one are flagged as dangerous to use.

it is silently assumed that only the experts who agree with me are the true experts

Hopefully you are renting your intelligence to the company, not selling it.

(Unless the job gets you burned out, in which case it was selling indeed.)

I agree, especially the juxtaposition of "we have still have no idea how all of this is going to work when the dust settles" and "hype". If we don't know, then there is a chance it isn't a hype.

For example, now it may seem that the models are becoming mere infrastructure, and the value moves up to apps and data. But if the models of tomorrow become able to write the apps themselves, then the value moves back. I won't need to pay some to write me a wrapper for the LLM, if the LLM will be able to write the same wrapper, maybe even better because it will be customized for my needs. The app providers are currently profiting from the gap between "what a software company can do using the AI" and "what the AI can do unaided", but that gap is going to shrink, possibly to zero.

The solution was going to be for everybody to write positive stories in which the LLM is good and relinquishes control, which then made it's way into the LLM's training data

Sounds like: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/aligned-ai-role-model-fiction

As a mostly non-programmer it got me a lot done.

I guess this means that you have some good instincts or habits that would be good for a programmer, even if you didn't choose that path.

Programming is more than just knowing the syntax of the programming language and the APIs you want to use. It also requires clear communication and clear thinking, checking things, etc.

There is no reason why a non-programmer couldn't also think clearly or carefully. It's just a fact about humanity that most people don't; and many people have jobs that do not require this, so they never develop the skills. Some people develop them for job-unrelated reasons.

Now we are at the moment when the LLMs can do the syntax and APIs for you, but they still fail at clear thinking and proper caution. That elevates a good potential programmer to a good vibecoder.

Some people took SO too competitively. They tried to be the first to answer your question (even if by a single sentence that would be edited to a longer answer later), but when they could not, they at least tried to get your question closed (presumably so that their competitors couldn't get points for answering it).

At some moment it just stopped making sense for me to ask questions on SO, because if you can google the answer then what's the point, but if you can't google the answer, then some angry competitive user is likely to close your question for some reason.

"free-range" means fully remote, right?

The Anti-Intellectualism of the Hacker News Elites.

AIs are useful tools in programming, whether you like it or not. Yes, there is a lot of hype. There is also a lot of ignorance. AI is not going to write an entire complex application for you, but can easily make its development 10x faster.

There is a prevalent view of economy that insists businesses sell their products at the minimum price they can still make a profit at [...] A Marxist view of economy, if I must.

That's actually how competition is supposed to work in capitalism. If you sell your products at much higher than the minimum price, someone else can make a profit by selling slightly cheaper and taking over your market share.

Also, the idea that chess is a good proxy for genius is a bit out of date.

He wrote that the reason he chose chess was because it was objectively measurable. You play the game, you either win or you lose; there is no way to dispute the outcome.

Imagine that you have dozen children, each of them genius at something different, and that you are surrounded by people who want to prove you wrong. Whatever the artistic genius does, the people who hate you can simply say "yeah, he did something technically impressive, but it's lacking the... nebulous artistic qualities that only we can judge... therefore, not a true genius". Now the chess genius comes and wins every tournament against the adults, there is no way to argue that "yeah, he won all the chess tournaments, but... for some reason we still don't consider him to be a chess grandmaster".

Yeah, it's easier to do the difficult and boring stuff when it's actually easy and interesting for you.

Exactly. Up to some point, you actually do well because you are smart. Then, in the middle of the game, the rules change (from your perspective), and it may catch you by surprise.

It would be much better for the gifted children to attend schools where their effort is visible since the beginning. That is, schools with other gifted children.

For example, in math, my kids didn't learn anything new during their first three years of the elementary school, because they already knew numbers and addition at kindergarten age. Yet they were forced to sit there for three years. It would have been better to give them a book to read, or a collection of interesting problems to solve.

I think it does provide some education for the average child. It's just when you are not average that it fails you.

There is Libre Office https://www.libreoffice.org/

only to realize moments later that it was a thoughtless machine sending him the letter rather than a real human being

Yeah, realizing that thoughtless machines are still more thankful that real human beings would make me depressed.

That's why the social networks don't want to talk about the bots, but they are happy to have them.

The customers these days are willing to pay for programs full of bugs that require enormous amounts of resources, so the craft no longer generates profits.

But it also depends on the organization. If your managers love to micro-manage, you will be paid to do things, because someone else believes they know better than you.

Any mentor type figure is going to be at least partially evaluated by progress of the mentees against some benchmark.

Sounds like the same kind of mistake as evaluating teachers by the grades of their students. Soon people figure out the "one weird trick" how to get the highest score easily.

If you have contacts on the seniors who have left, call them, ask them if they like the companies they are currently working for, and whether the companies are looking for new hires.

In the job interview, give them the list of responsibilities that you have now. Then ask for a higher salary than you have now.

I was a teacher, and I didn't notice anything similar. It's just a job -- if you can do it, you can do it. You can be more experienced, you can be more comfortable with solving certain problems, you can do it better or worse, but there is not... this.

Some software developers seem to be in a lifelong dick-measuring contest. "You are not a true X unless you know this one important thing that I know." Okay dude, now do you expect Miss Teacher to come and praise you for how clever you are? You know some things that others don't, perhaps the others know some things that you don't, why is the former important for being a true X and the latter is not.

Sadly it's not a joke.

Most people suck at math. Those who don't suck usually have many well-paying jobs available for them. There are lots of schools, so many math teachers are needed.

Put these numbers together, and you realize that there is no way to have math teachers who are actually good at math. The numbers just don't add up.

Sounds familiar. The only missing part are the "happy endings" such as:

When you finally complete Feature B, the analysts look at it again, and realize that it actually wasn't necessary, and you should revert it.

We definitely know how to create a Jira ticket for it, and the rest is developer's problem.

I still don't understand why standardized testing gets so much pushback.

Parents of the children who can't pass the standardized tests also get a vote.

Yeah, this is a mistake everyone makes, and it is difficult to explain to people who didn't study statistics.

The short version is that intelligence is an ordinal value, not a cardinal value. You can say that person A is more intelligent than person B, but not that person A is exactly 3.14515x more intelligent than person B.

Intelligence is simply measured in percentiles, that's all. You can't be more intelligent than 100% of the population. The 100% of the population is the population of Earth. You cannot get a higher IQ score than that.