csneeky

Wonder if those two young authors even know the word objective.

I think the poster gets it. As do I. And I do not believe either of us care all that much about the vocal minority.

Claude is better for much than GPT atm. You really think the government is going to hamstring the engineering of weapons and intelligence capabilities by not using it?

Bluster followed by a "we can't do it now but we will... soon". Whoever has the best model can do what they please you'll see. I work with these things daily as an engineer (been doing this shit for 25 years and wow it's like mana from heaven these days). Believe me no one is going to screw with themselves by not using the best one and right now Anthropic has it.

Is it really the case companies like OpenAI and Anthropic will repeatedly visit this archive and slurp it all up each time they train something? Wouldn’t that just be a one time thing (to get their own copy) with maybe the odd visit to get updates? My take is the article is about monetizing unique training info and I see them being paid maybe 10-20 times a year by folks building LLMs which is maybe nothing and maybe $$$$ I don’t know.

Costs more to incentivize people who are already flush with cash to work harder and keep working for you. It’s the prize waiting for anyone here later in life if you kill it and earn the right to join those ranks. Keep your head down and bust your butt at work and it’ll come. No one ever bitched and moaned their way there.

I've been given one by a member of the NYPD twice in the past couple of years. I've politely accepted it, put in my desk drawer, and I do not carry it. Always bothered me. Police culture in this city is fundamentally broken.

And what of the rooster mascot?

Darwin

Most complex, unique, value producing things have a path to monetization for the builder of the thing. If the money isn’t there for the builder they are either not leveraging their relationship to the thing correctly, or the thing does not have the value the builder may think it has.

Pretty sure I’m a machine that’s drawn all my conclusions by statistically analyzing all the input I’ve received since birth… I don’t really know how else I would learn what I have… and I don’t understand how being “just that” is what differentiates modern approaches to AI and my brain.

- "All it can do is assemble patterns according to other patterns it has seen when prompted by a request"

Sounds pretty much like everyone I know.

Fact: functional programming takes more time to learn. It's not full of people that are "smarter' or "snobs" it's just full of people that have taken the time and invested in educating themselves to get to the point where they can do it well. It's not "better", it's just a useful tool for certain types of problems. I'd advise any young engineer to just learn how to do both "imperative" and "functional" programming well and avoid getting dogmatic about it. The vitriol here is in dogma here to be sure

Was going to comment but found myself clamming up and deleting it.

I love that the article focuses on interpersonal skills... too often the knee jerk reaction (as software engineers) is to view "skills" through the narrow lens of engineering (various computer science topics, competency in a language, mathematics, etc).

As I've grown I find soft/interpersonal skills to matter more and more and in many ways, now that I'm a seasoned engineer, trump the hard skills in terms of what impacts my career trajectory. I'd advise any junior/intermediate career software engineer to take the advice from this article seriously.

The link leads to nothing? Has been removed? (Sorry if late to the game but seems no one has mentioned this yet)

After working on more than 20 green field projects over the 25+ years I've been a software engineer I can tell you that yes... all SDLC management tools suck at times, but also can be a great part of something very productive. It's how much they are tailored to the needs of the team and how practical their consumption is. I've been a part of projects where JIRA is a nightmare and part of projects where it is a blessing. Same goes for Trello, Asana, Confluence, "just github", etc.

I've also used JIRA where it is ONLY managed by the engineers and also when it is owned and managed by large teams of non-engineering stakeholders.

My 2-cents: When a project isn't going well it's the team that is deficient, not the software, in 99% of cases. Most of these tools can be customized (and combined with other tools if needed) to create something that works... and this varies on a project by project basis. It's not about the tool... it's about how pragmatic and adaptive a team can be as they apply them. Panaceas do not exist in this problem space.

In that case then maybe the question "Where can I find news that requires the least amount of cognitive load to consume?" is more appropriate... this is also a little defeatist.

I hear you on Reuters maybe that was an unfair inclusion (it is certainly not sensationalist news) but still...

Thanks for the allsides link. If it's what they claim that's a good one.

"Types and Programming Languages" (aka "tapl")

I know one employer this will impact: Goldman Sachs. Not only do they demand you tell them what your current salary is during the interview process, they force you during a rigorous background check before your first day to prove it.

If curious I would have gotten the question with Try and Either wrong (because I forget), and I don't really use Scala Streams so I don't know without looking at the API doc. The others would have been fine for me but all of that is besides the point...

It was also not my point at all that an engineer that knows how to build a construct like an IO monad in Scala, but doesn't understand traits/abstract classes (which would be funny and hard to find I imagine) would be preferable to anyone else...

And furthermore, I agree that we live in a world where teams and projects get hosed by architect astronauts. But that isn't the point either...

The point, my angry friend, is nothing more than the observation that I, with my skill set, would do exactly what I said: Be unable to answer all those correctly in an interview, and in the process I would not have been asked anything that would flesh out many of the other skills I have. Skills relevant to the language in question and, arguably, more empowering to an organization than those listed.

I think it is very telling about the state of interviews in the tech world when:

1. I can NOT off the cuff answer those all correctly (at least not without a little Googling).

2. I can, largely off the cuff, implement an IO monad in Scala using higher-kinded types and compose instances of them in a hand rolled non-blocking server.

Love this, from one of the answers the author gave:

"You can indeed become enormously wealthy and still be a good person just playing the game. That point needed to be raised because, as Orson Welles once pointed out, everybody has their reasons. Very few people are thinking as a sociopath might think, that nothing matters to me."

Glad to see this sentiment is a driver in this book's dystopia. A little slice of healing for our political climate.

Yes, as far as life is concerned I do.

Everything we or other life forms do comes from an attempt to make an improvement. Be it selfish or altruistic, it is always to alter some state of the world for a perceived benefit.

But our competence varies. So we all fall on some spectrum of competence in any given endeavor no matter how small. From this variation and rank we can derive hierarchy.

This transcends all species and their traits.

Not all lions kill as well as other lions though. Take a snapshot of all the lions in the world alive right now and rank them by their ability to kill and the number of offspring they have. Some are better at these two things (they killed more and attracted more mates). This is quantifiable and trivial to fit into a hierarchical scheme of some kind.

It isn't hard to extract similar hierarchies from other species...including humans.

Scientists are employees in many contexts (almost all contexts). We may just have to agree to disagree on that one. Be they in service for an NGO, school, or oligarch.

But to say nature has no hierarchy? I suppose "hierarchy" can mean many things. But in my case I mean fitness and selection for it. The most fit are at the top. Nature tends to select for those better suited to their environment. And those best suited thrive and push the success of us all forward. It is how you got here and have what you have. Intellectual, emotional, and physical traits are all subject to this selection. The thriving academics with the most freedom are closer to the top. The best employees (however you want to define employee) tend to be given the most freedom and trust.

All employers want their employees to "do the job to the best of their ability". But the freedom given to you to decide how your success is measured is proportional to your experience and past performance. There are those in both academia and private industry that get a lot of freedom to do their work/research.

But there is a hierarchy to this just like everything in nature. The exceptionally strong and bright animals have more freedom in why they choose to do and how they do it. And that system has worked to get us all this far.

The system this article is pushing against isn't fun for many but inevitable. The further you are from the top the more subject your performance is to poor evaluation schemes conceived by those far from the top too.

Tech workers are as disparate and varied as non-tech workers...

There is a hierarchy and I think it is unlikely we will see common ground emerge. Survival of the fittest and the best will still win the day. Just like the labor unions of the industrial era, efforts like this are doomed to be spikes of ideology rife with the same contradictions of those it proposes to keep in check.

Some tech workers run multimillion dollar businesses and some push bits around for them in the wee hours of the morning for much less.

Some have PhDs in category theory and write Haskell on a multiple 6 figure salary in finance and some maintain dated ruby on rails systems they didn't write for much less.

Some roll around on scooters in data centers putting out real fires in environments that need high availability. Others spend their days upgrading old versions of windows in small town school districts.

The same divides that existed before the internet will follow us. Nothing new here. Work hard, strive to get to the top, and hang on. Unions are not the answer. Darwin always wins the day.