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What do you mean when you say "French" or "non-French"?

What are the words you are scared of using if you answered this question?

Why won't you use them?

I asked ChatGPT to write a function which takes a year as input and determines whether or not it's a leap year - a classic basic programming question. It answered perfectly. Of course, there are lots of examples of this code.

Then I asked it "Could you adapt the function so that it works on Venus, where years have 224 days?"

It offered me a new version of the function, which simply checks if the year is a multiple of 224. Apparently on Venus the number of days in a year and the frequency of leap years are the same number. It qualified the answer: "It's worth noting that this function is based on current knowledge and understanding of Venus..."

I asked it "What if we want the function to use Venus days as well as Venus years?"

It offered me the same function, except that a) the variable 'years' was now called 'days', and b) the modulus was changed from 224 to 224.701.

So I asked "Should the argument to the last function be a float or an integer?"

It gave me 3 pars of complete nonsense about how the difference between floats and integers affects the precision of calculating leap years (while again warning that the exact value of the Venus year might change).

ChatGPT does a very good imitation of a certain type of candidate I've occasionally interviewed, who knows almost nothing but is keen to try various tricks to bluff you out, including confidently being wrong, providing lots of meaningless explanation, and sometimes telling you that you are wrong about something. I have never hired anyone like this, but I've occasionally come close.

I have been trying various interview questions on ChatGPT, originally because my colleagues warned me that a candidate who was surreptitiously using it could ace almost any interview. I was skeptical and I have not been convinced.

But I think it's actually a great exercise to practice interviewing on it. If ChatGPT can answer your questions accurately (try to be fair and ignore its slightly uncanny tone), then you probably need better questions. If you are quite technical and put some thought into it, you should be able to come up with things which are both novel enough and hard enough that ChatGPT will simply flounder catastrophically. (I'm not referring to 'tricks' like the Venus question, but real questions on how to achieve something moderately complicated using code.) It's a really good reminder too that when we ask candidates to write code, we should examine and debug it in detail, then ask decent follow-up questions, rather than just accepting something that looks right.

I think this phenomenon is actually something else: in the 1950s people who were commonly depicted as being part of society tended to have a house with a garden and a nuclear family structure where the husband, but not the wife, worked.

There were plenty of people who couldn't afford a house with a garden, or who didn't have one for other reasons, or who were not married or had a different type of family structure, or men who didn't work, or women who did work. But they were made invisible by the lack of portrayal, both in that society's image of itself, and in our image of that society.

(Or by a different mechanism: when people outside of that structure were portrayed, it was as outsiders and aberrations, whereas married couples with children who lived in houses were portrayed as the norm. For example, the protagonist of 'On the Road', commonly associated with that era, does not have a fixed address or a job, nor a wife, nor children. The protagonist of 'Invisible Man', a book central to the discourse of who does and does not get represented in media, lives in a basement apartment alone without a wife or family. The protagonist of 'The Bell Jar' is a woman who lives alone in an apartment in New York while working at a job, then in her mother's house, then in a mental asylum.)

You seem to be the one subject to taboos. You don't want to say what you mean by 'French' or 'non-French'.

I am perfectly capable of understanding and discussing what can be meant by 'Frenchness', and what I mean by it.

But the point of the GP comment was that language has not 'evolved', but is intentionally being used in a misleading way here.

I understand your reluctance to answer a straightforward question: you know exactly what you are, and yet you are ashamed to admit to it.

This is not the political culture of Vercingetorix, nor of Charles de Gaulle ;)

What do you mean by "non-french"?

Yes, and I'd rather go to prison in Munich than to Rikers Island.

If investors see layoffs and judge that the company just became more valuable, either they are right or they are wrong.

If they are right, then isn't the job of management, in a principle fundamental to the US economic system, to follow their wishes? Management doesn't have to do whatever investors ask for, but there is no real justification for them to do something which is both against their wishes and against the interests of the company.

If they are wrong, then surely the problem is that most US companies are having their decision-making driven by a group of people who are paramount but who are making misguided or misinformed decisions. Any tweaking of the exact incentives which doesn't solve this problem is both a distraction and subject to the law of unintended consequences.

Note that I am not strongly in favor of either sweeping layoffs or of the specific US variant of capitalism in general. I just think that one should be honest about to what extent problems are unavoidable to the extent that one cleaves to a given system.

I have lived and travelled in France for around 40 years and I don't at all recognize what you are describing.

Your claims appear to be based on suggesting that you (and, in a laughable falsehood, the wide range of opinion in French society) knows for a fact that this situation exists, but if anyone does not agree with you, that is merely their opinion, since it is impossible to measure.

Firstly, so that I can understand the strength of the correlation, can you pinpoint when "women were given freedom there" and what that consisted of?

Secondly, regardless of the cause of the lowered birth rate, do you agree that freedom for women is a fundamental and inalienable right, and that the problem is how society should advance so that birth rates and family formation go back up without rolling back freedon?

"the cultural norm of the country, as well as its "visual" identity has shifted from a european country to a (mostly) african one"

This is delusional, and yes, I did read the rest of your comment.

I believe it was heavily inspired by QuickTest.

One of the amazing things about Hypothesis is that it's very good at generating weird inputs that trigger bugs in cases when it would be impossible to test more than a tiny fraction of all possible inputs.

There is very very clever code that does things like create weird dicts where the keys are weird strings and the values are other weird dicts or arrays or strings..

If it finds a test failure, it then applies a reduction step, where it replaces the extremal test case with something slightly more benign and checks if the test still fails. This allows it to generate a test case which is just hairy enough to trigger the bug, but no more. This makes it easier to understand why that specific test case fails.

Several answers on that page suggest that daily operation of circuit breakers is not harmless.

It's difficult to explain credibility beyond the definition of the word, but if you have any purported reason "to think that poverty of young adults, narcissism, or lack of patience, is materially different and has a material effect on the number of parties in the present day compared to 10 or 20 years ago", I can tell you whether or not I think it's credible.

Yes, but now you're redesigning a normal electricity setup for a large building like a school. This is the system that was, presumably, replaced by the broken IoT system, plus the absolute minimum of traditional kit outside of that.

On the last par: suppose that it is true that a) 10 years ago people were less self-centered, impatient or poor than they are now and b) 10 years ago there were more parties.

Does this form the basis of a well-evidenced claim that there are fewer parties because of increased poverty, narcissism or impatience? Of course not, because there are lots of other time periods we can easily look at.

For example, in the 1950s young people were probably on average poorer than they are now. Perhaps they were also more narcissistic, or equally narcissistic as they are now. Were there also fewer parties? If not, this suggests there is something wrong with the theory.

My question to the GP is: do they believe that there are no time periods like the 1950s in my example, which might raise doubt about their theories? If they think there aren't any, is it because we have never been so poor and narcissistic as we are now? Or is it because there have never been so many parties at any prior time period, as there were in the golden age they identified where we were at our least poor and narcissistic (whenever that might be)? If there are such periods, why isn't that part of their theory? If 'the 1950s' were different, what is it that makes them different, and is that reflected in the theory?

It should be clear here, that any variable which has moved monotonically in one direction for ever and so is currently at a global extreme, is correlated with every other, especially if it is a phenomenon which can't be measured in formal units (like narcissism or fear of strangers). Saying that (satirizing the GP here) 'we have never had so many smartphones, and we have also never had so many allergies, therefore allergies are caused by smartphones', is laughably easy to dismiss, for a number of reasons.

This is a catalogue of irrational scare-mongering.

Do you honestly believe that "housewarmings, birthdays, holidays, sports games, barbecuing, karaoke, ... parties ... for people joining the team, for people leaving, for projects kicking off or finishing" have decreased because of the prevalence of false sexual accusations, allergies, smartphones, or intense goal-driven schooling?

Do you have a credible reason to think that poverty of young adults, narcissism, or lack of patience, is materially different and has a material effect on the number of parties in the present day compared to 10 or 20 years ago?

Would you also claim that there haven't been other prior time periods where people were just as poor, self-centered or impatient as they are now, and there were more parties? Or is the claim only based on interpolation of specific, correlated changes in the recent past?

You can't flip a circuit breaker every night and every morning.

Firstly the school's safety code would not allow it. Secondly they are not designed for that. Thirdly, there are probably lots of things in a high school which need to be kept on overnight: computers, fridges, lab equipment.

The question was not 'what do you do if you need the toilet?' but 'what do you do about people who haven't got anywhere to go to the toilet?'

By definition, if there is a public toilet accessible to you, or you are welcome in a restaurant toilet without paying, you have somewhere to go to the toilet.

It is certainly in the book.

What are you supposed to do about people who haven't got anywhere else to go to the toilet?

If you place them in custody, you might as well provide them with some basic housing that costs less than jail. They have literally nothing to lose from fines, court dates, tickets, probation. They don't have a toilet, what else are you going to take away from them.

The police are correctly judging that the need to defecate is not a criminal problem.

Manhattan is not NYC. Most poor people live in the other 4 boroughs. Most wealthy people live in Manhattan (and Brooklyn).

This is far from true.

This would be annoying for people whose credit card just happened to expire and who then have to deal with not having the service for a period, re-signing up, losing loyalty bonuses, etc.

A Chinese company operates in the US, obeys local laws while doing the same sketchy things that home-grown companies do all the time and it's a 'national security issue'.

US companies operating in the EU are expected to follow local laws and ... this is unfair because the US is pursuing its own narrow internal interests in Ukraine, like it always does, and Europeans are supposed to be grateful?

It seems insane to me that the happy path involves you getting $70k. Working in finance, I would expect that amount as a bonus in any year where I perform well and the business isn't unprofitable.

When I've spoken to people about the finance/big tech/startup trade-offs, we've often talked about the upside from startup success (outside of the Google or Instagram case) being around an order of magnitude bigger than that - in the 'pay off your mortgage' ballpark. Is this unrealistic?

What about the First Amendment?

Do you really think that Elon Musk's contribution to electric vehicles is comparable to Jobs' contribution to smartphones?

Steve Jobs worked on personal computers before they existed. He was recognized as a visionary with his first iconic device, the Apple II, and he make a huge impact on computing with the Mackintosh which came out in 1984. The list of ground-breaking devices which he worked on is longer than anyone else's. Almost everything he did between the days of solder-yourself computers and the point when everyone had a camera/internet/voice/video/touchscreen-enabled device in their pocket was pushing towards making personal computing and networked communication easier, more user-friendly, better designed, more reliable, etc.