This is a really cool fact. :-)
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I would take the person who only used AI.
Why?
Your fictional problem has the silent assumption that if you are in a high value meeting, you shall act more conservatively (i.e. reduce risk for reliability, even if you loose chances/opportunities). But this is rather a statement that the respective person acts on a risk-averse profile.
I rather have a risk-affine profile. Because it is likely that everybody else in the meeting has a risk-averse profile, it is very likely that if I act on the "non-conservative" choice and I am right, I will have a huge advantage. On the other hand, if I act on the conservative choice, I won't have any advantage over the other participants.
Since I am risk-affine person, I am willing to risk it. :-)
The really hard part of this does in my opinion not so much lie in the aspects that you describe, but rather in doing this without leaving scorched earth with most/all of the stakeholders involved.
In other words:
Doing what you described is in my opinion something that can be learned, and in my opinion a central reason why many programmers consider this to be difficult is that they never learned it, and/or (related to this) were never given the opportunity to be responsible for all of this, so they lack experience.
On the other hand, navigating the whole office politics, and running the political gauntlet that is collateral to it is hell on earth. The only way to survive this is to give a big "fuck you" to everyone, which I more politely described with "leaving scorched earth with most/all the stakeholders involved" above.
Be a little bit careful here: another common textbook definitions of bipartite graphs are:
- a graph is bipartite iff it has no odd circle.
- (for people who are into algebraic/spectral graph theory :-) ) a graph is bipartite iff its spectrum is symmetric.
I personally like the latter two definitions because the "normal" definition of a bipartite graph suggests that
1-colorable, 2-colorable, 3-colorable, 4-colorable, ...
graphs are conceptually very "similar" (k-colorable with different values for k).
But we now that it is very easy (i.e. there exists a polynomial-time algorithm) to decide if a graph is 1- or 2-colorable, but from k=3 on, it is NP-complete to decide whether a given graph is k-colorable.
Using one of these alternative definitions (and then showing "a graph is bipartite iff it is 2-colorable" as a lemma/theorem) makes it very clear that from a complexity point being 1- or 2-colorable is (assuming P != NP) something very different from being k-colorable for k >= 3.
More precise: a graph is bipartite if and only if it is 2-colorable (this can actually be used as a definition).
Since forests are bipartite, and trees are forests, the other two statements follow.
I can imagine some hypothetical scenarios, but I do believe that I have strong evidence that this is mostly not the case.
For example, I think I have already told the story how when I worked together with a person who is a business consultant (and thus salesman) told me that C-level executives are an incredibly easy sales target compared to me. For him, selling something to me was "ultra-hard mode", basically because I could immediately see through every sales tactic that he tried on me.
I assume research-level questions about scientific topics (with a focus on math and computer science) are not easy to monetize (yes, this is by far the most common kind of question to AI models for me). :-D
As I wrote in some parallel post:
"When I look at my history with AI chatbots, 90 % of the conversations revolve around research-level problems in math and computer science. :-D"
For quite a few of them, creating a decent answer involved quite a bit of thinking by the AI, so I assume they are not the easiest queries to answer, and the queries are too obscure to cache.
> Search is a good “purchase intent moment” but people are telling a chat bot exactly what they care about in a purchase, rather than making indirect search terms and reading review sites.
When I look at my history with AI chatbots, 90 % of the conversations revolve around research-level problems in math and computer science. :-D
In my opinion these variants are not very different:
For example keep in mind that physics is basically a descipription of the software that runs reality, which automatically gives you are huge portfolio of potential problems. :-)
For mechanical engineering, observe that the advances in 3D printing and home CNC milling mean that a lot of problems that were previously in the domain of mechanical engineering now become partly software problems.
Or for more "human" problems: If you are very trained in mathematics, you start to see mathematical structures in a lot of "more human" problems (or areas that are not associated with "software") basically all the time. If you find these mathematical structures that you see interesting, it is often possible to turn them into software.
Thus, "figure out what non-software problem you can solve with software" vs "figure out what technical problem to solve" is rather a litle bit like "in mathematics: do you prefer analysis or algebra?" - yes, they (often) represent a different style of thinking and many mathematicians do have their preferences, but in the end both analysis and algebra is mathematics.
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So, I disagree with your point
> Figuring out what problem some companies or people have that could be solved? Very hard, very unexciting, not rewarding.
In my opinion the boring part is not finding or solving problems that companies or people have. As I wrote: after some time, you often start to see highly interesting, often very novel mathematical patterns in these problems (of course not always, but it is not an uncommon situation). Why are these patterns often so novel and interesting? A heuristic answer in my opinion is: if they weren't, someone would typically already have implemented them in software. :-)
The really annoying part is rather convincing the people/company of your solution (which can be considered to be part of step "5) You ship/deploy/publish the program. This means you see people be happy users and/or you get paid for it and so on.").
Even if you deeply into tinkering, 1 can be an insanely exciting and rewarding step: for example "how could an abstraction look like in which 2-4 become trivial special cases for many classes of programming problems?".
In my opinion the difference between "entrepreneur type" and "programmer type" (and yes: it can happen that both of these types work in the reciprocal job) is rather:
- People of the programmer type see solving problems as their primary goal. Satisfying customers just serves the purpose that these people pay money so that they can continue working on solving problems.
- People of the entrepreneur see satisfying customers as their primary goal. Programming is just a means to an end.
> That can work in the B2C space but it's horrible in B2B.
My experience differs: (conservative) companies like stability, so calling some very new model "Preview" is a good idea to make it clear to the customer that this frontier model should be treated as more experimental than the default offering.
With "believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does" do you mean that they are superbelievers or rather sceptical of AGI/superintelligence? I have seen both positions on HN.
The position that I have rather often read on the internet is: Jonathan Ive did very good work at Apple as long as there was a counterpart who could steer his creative vision. This counterpart was of course Steve Jobs. When Steve Jobs died, there wasn't such a counterpart anymore, so Ive's work for Apple got much worse.
No, I wouldn't.
I think a lot comes down to differences in mentality:
- Many Germans think that they had a hard time getting to a decent level in English. So they expect the same willingness from foreigners to get to a decent level in German. (#)
- Many German native speaker really care about their language: It is a very common situation that German native speakers correct both native speakers and people who learn German as foreign language. With some people who learn German as second language, I get the reaction "Even if this is grammatically wrong, you nevertheless understood the sentence.". I do believe this person did not get my point: Among English native speakers I often observe this mentality for their native language, but I would really claim that "German language is a kind of thinking", so such mistakes really feel like a wrong-typed computer program.
So
> As an adult, I can never hope to compete on native German fluency with someone who's born and raised in Germany to educated German parents.
Being able to compete on this level is not something that is expected from you. But (also cf. (#)) willing to cram brutally hard to get near to this level over some time is.
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Thus, to come back to your point:
> Just take an immigrant in front of you next time and see him make two mistakes in a row in one sentence while casually talking to him (maybe he's tired, maybe he's lazy but who's to judge). You'd inherently think less of him, deep down, wouldn't you?
As I wrote: I really wouldn't think less of this person because he makes mistakes. But - very in accordance of what I wrote - I would think less of such a person if he doesn't work really hard to get better in German fast.
In other words: It's really not about not making mistakes (everyone does), but about not working hard to get better.
For those who are not so deep into GPU architecture:
ROP: Raster Operation Pipeline
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Render_output_uni...
Also many Germans think this way. They have just given up that the politicians will ever change that.
Rather: because a lot of less formal thoughts (including jokes) are difficult to express in English since they often rely on structures that the English language does not have.
> if you speak German, you risk sounding like a child
I can ensure you that you don't sound like a child (nursery language is typically not taught in language courses for foreign speakers). Rather, you sound like a person who did not take learning German seriously.
In my observation, in Germany the tolerance for the symptoms associated with mild autism is a little better than in the USA. On the other hand: if you aren't able to learn the German language fast: forget it.
Also be aware that starting a career in Germany is much harder than in the USA. On the other hand: once you are in, it is rather easy to stay in your job (in particular at a big company where there is a strong Betriebsrat (work council)) as long as you work somewhat dutifully and don't do anything really stupid. Just don't expect to move up the ladder (moving up the ladder or switching companies every few years is rather uncommon in Germany, so don't come with such an expectation).
> My family pre-immigration 150 years ago still exists in Germany and now appears to own a large road-construction concrete company. I wonder if that string is worth pulling.
This "I had ancestors in country X" seems to be a common sentiment among US-Americans. As a German I can really not understand how US-Americans get the idea that anybody in this country cares about that. If you really cared about the country, you would learn the language to a near-native level and get deeply into the country's culture.
Considering how often the Deutsche Bahn isn't on time (I say this as a German), the SBB should have use for this rolling stock nearly all the time - so it's rather efficient. :-)
Having lived at that time in Germany, I can tell you how excited many Germans rather were to openly name the responsible politicians "war criminals" (and would have been insanely happy if these politicians were brought before a war crimes tribunal) and the compatriot soldiers to participated in this campaign "murderers". I know this very well because I was among these people.
Even on the schoolyard there was a deep divide between the boys who were not completely rejecting the idea to do their (at that time near-compulsory) military service instead of considering at most doing alternative service as the only acceptable alternative, and those who did alternative service did then use every available opportunity to spread their opinion about wars and the military (they often had to work their alternative service in some welfare facility or retirement homes - places where you meet lots of people to whom you could tell your "soldiers are murderers" opinions).
The difference is: Some people are willing incredibly hard to fight for this, even though it is obvious to them that they will have no meaningful impact. Shouldn't you rather be willing to fight magnitudes harder if you know that you will have no meaningful impact because:
- Realizing that you will have no meaningful impact rather makes you realize how important the fight is.
- When you know that you won't have any chance of a meaningful impact, you will much less held back by having any kind of mercy with any person that is part of the corrupt system.
Windows NT (including Windows 2000) was considered to be a workstation OS by Microsoft. From Windows XP on, the NT-based Windows operating systems (except for the server ones) were targeted to consumers.
Among mathematicians, I wouldn't claim that "Fields medalist disease" is an unusual term, though this term is typically meant to mean "some mathematician got a Fields medal, but did not prove any other deep mathematical result afterwards". There also exists the much more derogatory term "dead wood" for mathematicians who once proved highly celebrated results, but after they got tenured, no they didn't manage to prove anything deep anymore."
Concerning the "crackpot undertone" of "Nobel Disease": lots of mathematicians know the names of achieved mathematicians who got into some eccentric ideas ("eccentric" in the sense of "outside the Overton window") once they got older.
Famous examples for the latter point are Serge Lang
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Serge_Lang&oldid=...
or Anatoly Fomenko
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anatoly_Fomenko&o...
When the Itanium was developed and introduced (2001), nobody was thinking about general-purpose computations. DirectX 8.0, which introduced Shader Model 1.1 (which was far away from being suitable for GPGPU; Shader Model 1.1 was rather about strongly (also size-)limited programs for the vertex and pixel processing stage), was only introduced in 2000, the first release of CUDA was in 2007, and the first release of OpenCL was in 2009.
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Yes (but this is off-topic).
> Deponia also good, Truberbrook.
For both of these games, the original native version is in German, so of course their German (not-)translation is good. :-)
> What I cannot stand are things that are medieval and then everyone refers to you as Ihr instead of du or Sie. Was that even a thing? Even the star wars games do it… which i guess it’s because jedi “knights”.
Yes, this is called called "Pluralis Majestatis":
> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralis_Majestatis
The Pluralis Majestatis is a formal addressing that is more formal than (singular) "Sie" for a single person (typical for addressing aristocrats of higher a noble rank).
The "Pluralis Majestatis" is not to be confused with the Pluralis Auctoris
> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralis_Auctoris
and the Pluralis Modestiae
> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralis_Modestiae
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Concerning your point "What I cannot stand are things that are medieval and then everyone refers to you as Ihr instead of du or Sie. Was that even a thing?" Even the star wars games do it… which i guess it’s because jedi “knights”.
As I already hinted: this is the correct for medivial setting if you have to address people of a higher a noble rank (if you don't use it, it would feel deeply wrong to native German speakers).
Concerning "Star Wars": I know little about this topic, but your point shows that for a proper German localization, you really have to think deeply about which kind of group needs which kind of addressing to which group (informal pronouns, formal pronouns, Pluralis Majestatis, ...).
For such settings which have no historical reference such as Star Wars I consider it to be very plausible that if the original setting was written in English, the authors never actually thought about such questions, so it is very likely that such questions were hushed over when a localization was done under time pressure (or English native speakers who commissioned the translation/localization underestimated the importance of such considerations).
There is a reason why hardly any German person speaks of "unsere (Bundes-)Regierung" [our (federal) government], but nearly always about "die (Bundes-)Regierung" [the (federal) government] [1]. Indeed, the federal government is something that many Germans rather think of something like a catastrophic natural force than something where you have any sense of belonging. To further prove my point: what US-American jokes are about lawyers are jokes about politicians in Germany.
[1] That the German article "die" is a quite different verb in English makes this even nicer: if you know a little bit of English, you immediately think of "die, (federal) government", when you talk in German of "die Bundesregierung".
This in my experience only holds for AAA titles.
For many smaller games, the German translation/localization is so bad that if one's English level is not insanely bad, it's even more comfortable to play the English version, and use a dictionary for lots of words (i.e. invest more time using the dictionary than playing the game) than tolerating the pain of how bad the German translation/localization is.
I rather disagree:
Many German movies that are produced don't fit my taste (the reasons are a little bit off-topic), and there exist quite a few Germans who think similarly. I could come up with a list of German movies that I like, but this is something that would take a little bit of thinking/effort.
On the other hand, in my experience/observation/bubble many Germans are quite interested in German literature. I could very easily come up with dozens of books of German authors that I like (of course, such a list would be strongly biased by my own taste).
Thus I would claim that (native German) literature is much more deeply ingrained in German culture than (native German) movies, and I am really surprised that you seem to live in a strange bubble where nobody in it seems to be interested in reading belletristic books.