irvingprime

I've had a theory for years that the free market is mostly a myth, that really most business execs are herd animals who form their strategies by copying others. Usually they copy the ones in the same industry, making them all look pretty much the same.

That's one of the reasons we have economic cycles. It's because trends come and go in waves. When one wave bankrupts a bunch of companies, they start to dig out and then the next wave hits, endlessly.

Well, I'm writing a science fiction novel. There are references in it to AI but just as a tool people use. It's not about that.

All kinds of things! I work with AI every day to do various kinds of work. Coding. Research. Brainstorming. I write up notes nearly every day and then I post a summary of each week on Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/cw/aiconfessions

One of the projects that features in these notes is the attempt to build a programming language using AI. https://github.com/xvandervort/graphoid

Since I left my last job, I do a lot of writing. I also have a couple substacks. One is a humorous weekly look at science and tech (https://technoscreed.substack.com/ ) and the other is a monthly exploration of history (https://historyroad.substack.com/)

Developing a graph-based programming language called Graphoid. The original concept was to target AI-related programming. Probably not ready for that yet!

Repo: https://github.com/xvandervort/graphoid

Claude Code is doing the majority of the coding, with close supervision from me. I write notes while I'm working on it. Notes are here: https://www.patreon.com/cw/aiconfessions

I'm using Claude AI to build an experimental programming language I call Graphoid. (Built for dealing with graphs). It's early days and I don't know how worthwhile it is but I'm having fun.

repo: https://github.com/xvandervort/graphoid lab notes: https://www.patreon.com/cw/aiconfessions

Bingo! You found the prize! Putting tech that is prone to hallucination in charge of anything that has serious consequences when it's wrong is a terrible idea. You do not want hallucinated payments or receipts, or legal citations. You want these things to be both true and correct, EVERY TIME.

For many years I've developed on a Linux VM running on a Windows host. At a couple of jobs I ran a Linux VM on a MacOS host.

This way, my development environment remains stable and portable and the thing I use to read email and surf the web is whatever. It works for me.

Reject. Period. No compromise. No friendly comments about how it can be improved. Just reject it as unreviewable.

Then ban the idiot who submitted it.

Customer service? In the age of AI? What have you been smoking?

You are in a completely normal dev shop. What's happened is that the start up mentality of "ship something - anything, and ship it NOW" has infected everything. Maybe over time you can make it better. But educating management can be a slow and frustrating process. Good luck!

Vibecoding is bad coding. Always. Even if I take the headline as correct, so what? It's still crap code that will collapse into an unmaintainable mess sooner rather than later.

I'm no longer at the company but yesterday was my last day so my information is still current.

The division I worked in was demanding that developers use AI at least once a week and they were tracking people's usage. The boss nagged about it every day.

I had no problem meeting the requirement but did find it's contributions to be very hit or miss as to usefulness.

I once cut off an interview as soon as the interviewer told me the job was building and maintaining a porn site. Never made it to an actual job offer.

It's an interesting model but in practice I don't think anyone is really all one way or all the other. A better way to approach it might be to find out which narratives are most important to someone and how far they'll go to protect them.

In the end, being a fact-based person might just be a narrative you hold about yourself.

The longest period of unemployment I've ever experienced ended about 6 months ago. I was unemployed for 11 months. The company that finally hired me was intentionally targeting people with lots of experience. I have that. They also pay less than I used to make but I took it because I needed a job.

Previous to that period of unemployment, my resume tended to get noticed. I got interviews from 3 applications out of 5. But this time, it was 3 out of 150.

Read that last paragraph again. My resume has not gotten worse. I still have decades of experience, a master's degree and a bunch of patents. That used to count for something.

My conclusion is that the market has gotten much worse for people with experience who don't hide being white and male.

Decent guesses. I won't be surprised if someday (maybe in court testimony) we find out that you are very close to correct.

That is truly awful customer service.

You can't back up lies on the fly. You're contradicting yourself now.

Your complaint that jobs are for the specific tech stack is spot on. Employers are currently treating every job as a specialization. It's a combination of a filtering technique (because there are too many candidates for every job right now) and complete stupidity (Because there are too many options for tech stacks so that, sometimes, your pool is very shallow indeed).

I'm older than you are and have been out of work for longer than ever before in my life. BUT I finally got a decent offer and will be starting a new job soon. There is hope.

Location: New York State (up by Lake Ontario)

Remote: Only

Willing to Relocate: No

Technologies: Ruby, Python, Redis, Mysql, Postgres, Mongo, and many more.

Resume: See linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidvandervort

Email: drvandervort@gmail.com

I've been a team lead, a manager, a project leader, a researcher and an architect. Also a poet but there isn't much call for that.

Horrid? It looks fine to me. More importantly, it does what I want (more or less). What do you think is so bad and how would you fix it?

I apologize for this blatant self promotion but if you want to hear about science and tech news with a strong dose of humor, check out. https://technoscreed.substack.com

You might learn something. If you don't laugh, you might be too serious. See a professional.

Well, I got laid off. I have a decent resume. In past job hunts, I got call backs on 50% of applications. Now responses are closer to 1%.

Sure seems recessionish to me.

How do you feel about tech information with an emphasis on humor? https://technoscreed.substack.com

I've mentored a couple developers who have made heavy use of ChatGPT or CoPilot in their work. I tell them the limits of it as well as the strengths. The upshot is that, if you use the code one of these tools produces without understanding what it does, you're going to be in deep trouble. As often as not, the code they produce is not well suited for the intended task, or is incomplete (commonly with security flaws) or is just broken.

To get the most out of AI, you have to be on the top of your game. You have to be able to phrase your needs extremely well and evaluate the output for possibly subtle problems.

As the tools get better, the need for deep understanding will increase.

Therefore, you should apply yourself to getting very good at using AI. That's where a lot of your career will be going forward. And if you're good, it will INCREASE your value to employers.

My message to you then is to take heart! You are well on your way to being one of the few who can do great things with these new capabilities. To be honest, your career may go through some ups and downs as the world learns to adapt to AI. But if you stick with it, you'll always be on the cutting edge!

You're confused. The public doesn't demand "thought policing" from AI at all. This is purely an elite, mostly academia, thing.

Yes to not answering stupid questions. One of my pet peeves about job applications is the "Voluntary self-identification" form that has all required answers. So I select "I do not want to answer" and assume they're too stupid to hire me.

It's going very badly. I'm not even getting nibbles lately.

You're right but too late. The die is cast. The world is not going to change to suit you.

It's rare for anyone to read cover letters. I put one in once in a while. Mostly I have ChatGPT write a draft and then I cut half of it and make some adjustments.

Even with the AI helping, it's more work than I usually want to do for something that is probably going to be ignored.