nottathrowaway3

It evokes a larger brand of similar wordplay which is basically the professional equivalent of "it's not you, it's me". The reason people don't like it is that it essentially tries to trick applicants into misunderstanding their economic interest, rather than just admit they're rejecting you because you're bad.

> If such an applicant gets a job...

Getting the job offer would not cause any of those problems. By getting it you would build valuable interviewing experience. Taking it is the thing that's not in your interest. That's all I'm trying to say.

> I have the conclusion opt-in async/await is a mistake. I think high level language/runtime like c# should handle it automatically...

This is not a good idea unless you like having to make all your code thread-safe (well, async-safe). Explicit declaration of "hey this method might not run all at once or be interleaved with other methods" is a good idea; explicit opt-in is the same in every other implementation of async/await (ex: js).

tl;dr

> language and compiler capable of rewriting normal control flow into a state machine implementation of coroutines

The median chess player is usually described as mediocre (if you ask chess players). They suck as badly as the median clarinet player in your high school band/orchestra.

> me: You are a chess grandmaster playing as black...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5f/Ingmar_Bergma...

The KNIGHT holds out his two fists to CHATGPT, who smiles at him suddenly. CHATGPT points to one of the KNIGHT'S hands; it contains a black pawn.

KNIGHT: You drew black.

CHATGPT: Very appropriate. Don't you think so?

> "and no one will ever help you in life" ... strange thing to say in a hospital bed?

It's strange until you get the hospital bill in the mail.

> I try to click less on negative stories and more on positive stories.

An alternative approach is to consume news from multiple countries (including your own). It's so interesting to see how all the fnords are different and just how conditioned you were to consume the one kind of media designed for your country.

The answer will either be some socialist rationing policy, or genocide.

Current "work for a living" systems only sustained the population because a human could be the most cost-effective way to get something done. Unless there are still tasks where human labor is the best option (research jobs maybe), this entire economic system will collapse.

> then it's in the best interest of ... the applicant that they not be hired

This kind of wordplay makes sense from HR's perspective. Ex: it "wouldn't be a fit for you anyway", there are "other jobs where you'll be able to grow more", etc.

The best interest of the applicant is always to get an offer (or stop the interview process of their own volition). Not get rejected by a screen and get zero feedback. Obviously this costs more for the business, which is why they have incentive to use that kind of reasoning.

Even if you shouldn't take it, competing offers can be used in various negotiations. And getting practice at interviewing is how you get better at interviewing (and at your actual job).

Depends if it was a standard project format like npm or setup.py.

The risk is, by asking, you indicate you don't know how to use standard industry tooling.

"hey, your starter code is not running in my environment, have any documentation about how to set it up" is a better question to ask when it's some custom script they hacked together.

> We call it a valid instance of an Othello game board. We. Not GPT. We. People who know the symbolic meaning of "Othello game board"...

The board structure can be defined precisely using predicate logic as (X, d), i.e., it is strictly below natural language and does not require a human interpretation.

And by "reduction" I meant the word in the technical sense: there exists subset of ChatGPT that encodes the information (X, d). This also does not require a human.

Unless the decision-maker is short or otherwise unattractive. For some managers' egos, fully remote work was the best thing to happen to them.

If RTO happens, such people will go back to constantly getting mogged by their subordinates again.

> Human: ...but the intention is to have a "model" rather than the full thing

Rat: easy for you to say.

Also, this was the plot of Shinsekai Yori.

> There is no way to represent the state of the game without some kind of board model.

I agree with the conclusion but not the premise.

The question under debate is about not just a stateful ternary board X but a board endowed with a metric (X, d) that enables geometry.

There are alternative ways you can represent the state without the geometry: such as, an ordered list of strings S = ["A1", "B2", ...] and a function Is-Valid(S) that returns whether S is in the language of valid games.

Related advice: don't get a math degree unless you enjoyed the above pedantry.

> And there is no ceiling yet in sight

We are approaching the time when we find out if the human brain uses language encoding as its core mechanism of thought, or if it has any tricks left up its damp, fleshy sleeve.

Then there becomes a "material" difference between Othello and those LL(1) grammars as grandparent comment suggested there wasn't.

I would argue the optimal compression for such a table is a representation of the geometric algorithm of determining move validity that all humans use intuitively, and speculate that any other compression algorithm below size say 1MB necessarily could be reduced to the geometric one.

In other words, Othello is a stateful, complex game, so if GPT is doing validation efficiently, it necessarily encoded something that unequivocally can be described as the "geometric structure".

> It doesn't seem materially different than knowing that U always follows Q, and that J is always followed by a vowel in "legal" English language words.

The material difference is one of scale, not complexity.

Your rules have lookback = 1, while the Othello rules have lookback <= 63 and if you, say, are trying to play A1, you need to determine the current color of all squares on A1-A8, A1-H1, and A1-H8 (which is lookback <= 62) and then determine if one of 21 specific patterns exists.

Both can be technically be modeled with a lookup table, but for Othello that table would be size 3^63.

> As someone who is occasionally challenged by finding the right balance between assertiveness and diplomacy, I can see how this AI would be a game-changer for professionals like myself. Your keen understanding of the nuances of workplace communication is truly commendable.

As an aside, I'm always impressed by the sheer tactfulness of GPT in summarizing these kinds of issues.

> Unfortunately it will also mean a lot of junior folks may never get back into software jobs.

Why do you suppose this age-based partitioning is going to happen?

There are a lot of senior people who are less effective than bright juniors. Being a good software engineer can always be learned. I think what's more likely is that the quality bar in general will be raised across all age bands.

Me too.

(1) U.S. total wages were $9.7 trillion in 2021 [1].

(2) Most Americans are not inherent masochists and have too much self-esteem to be effective at sucking up.

(3) The average white-collar office worker would be willing to give up a portion of their salary to not have to stoop.

We have discovered a market.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BA06RC1A027NBEA

That would actually be an interesting product: spell-check but it edits your email or slack message to be more sycophantic. I'd use it.

> is phenomenal at Code

Can it

- attend bullshit meetings

- lick my manager's boot

- tell them that their ideas are good but in the masochistic, self-deprecating way they like to hear it from me in

Not yet? Darn it, guess my job is safe for now.

Utility (= (pleasure minus pain) x time) is the essential good when we're talking about animal and human welfare. Good actions increase expected utility; bad actions decrease expected utility.

Machines experience no pleasure or pain and thus there is zero utility gained/lost by destroying them. Dogs and humans do; it's bad to kill or torture them.

Throwing a dog in front of a train (or killing/torturing it for research) to save a child depends on how likely it is that it will work, and how many QALYs the dog and child have left.

(1) The "Linkedin style" is certainly not unique to males.

(2) It was a good story and a relevant comment.

No reason to bring gender into this discussion, why not criticize/discuss the comment itself.

Also (for those like me who didn't know the rules) generating legal Othello moves requires understanding board geometry; there is no hack to avoid an internal geometric representation:

> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversi

> Dark must place a piece (dark-side-up) on the board and so that there exists at least one straight (horizontal, vertical, or diagonal) occupied line between the new piece and another dark piece, with one or more contiguous light pieces between them

Good people remember though and hold a grudge if you insult them on the way out the door. People you want to hire in the future are watching as well. There's incentive to be classy (ex: Microsoft's https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/18/subject-focusing...) unless the whole ship is going down.

Edit:

That being said, after actually reading it, the Meta letter is relatively classy. The HN comments made it seem worse than it was.

If they don't create value, why do people pay for it? And by your logic, isn't Google doing the same thing for website owners.

There's more nuance to these issues that you suggest. The U.S. government is investing in tech for various legitimate strategic reasons you can read about. Government bureaucracies historically fail to produce (or contract) good products for reasons you can observe by working at one (or by reading Dilbert). Many tertiary sector businesses are indeed just middlemen but still create value in a more complex way.

I get it that tech can be criticized in the way you're doing it. This discussion had been had thousands of times on this site. I have nothing to contribute besides what I already said, and even all of that had probably been said thousands of times as well.

That is literally every business in history. The innovation is how they choose to get that dollar.

> I'd be curious how you justify this when the U.S. (largely agreed-upon to be the most corporate-friendly first-world country over the past 50 years or so) has the largest police-state, prison population, military, etc etc etc

The U.S. has been the leader in all those lovely statistics long before tech became the biggest thing in the economy.

I think you missed my point. I simply don't believe in fetishizing "true" (and therefore "untrue") innovation. We live in a messy world. Innovation is just a culturally-loaded way to describe people optimizing things. I miss the 90s and 00s too, man.

Also I agree with you.

> Nearly all of our savings has gone to funding companies that do a thing that existed, but on the internet, rather than funding real innovation.

Man, if my money was forcibly tied up in some bullshit pension fund that mainly invests in VCs, I would be pissed, too.

Investment should be controlled by the people whose money it is. Corporate 401k plans are much more flexible which is probably why we have such a difference of opinion here.

I am a public market investor only. If I had the capital and the time to diversify maybe only then would I consider private markets.

> If it was true innovation, the world wouldn't be becoming a worse place every day that SV was essentially handed the keys. Our kids wouldn't be more depressed, climate change would be addressed, public health crises would be solved

I disagree here. The world sucked in these same ways before the internet and it will continue to suck after. True innovation from the government's perspective is increasing its control of citizens and the efficiency of their labor by any means necessary.