okwhateverdude

Man, all of that sounds awful for those coworkers and customers. But it isn't GPs problem. It isn't their company. He doesn't employ them. He isn't responsible for their experience. Put the blame on their poor experience squarely where it belongs: management. Why is shitty management letting some underperformer ruin things? Super convenient to claim personal integrity and shift the blame to the underperformer when management is clearly not demonstrating personal integrity and protecting their team and customers.

> Basically the wealthy freeze technological growth until they can understand how to make profit from it.

And it is super apparent, especially when you look at the latest from OpenAI. They applied CoT duct tape and bailing wire to a glorified mechanical text processor that magically balloons the token generation costs for marginal improvement. Cha-ching! Not a new model architecture or whatever.

> Advertising works.

By weaponizing psychology to manipulate people into buying shit they don't need. No one should be trying to figure out how to categorize advertisements between waste and effective. They are all waste.

> The server is the authoritative source. It is not supposed to rely on the client for authoritative game state, and if it does, it is fundamentally and terribly flawed.

Indeed. Likely the client is responsible for certain state things and/or implicitly trusted with state updates. How this happens is that most of your game devs are not paid enough or given enough time to do it right. Engines are selected (generally not built) for their ability to get shit to market fast and multiplayer is an after thought, hacked on. And management just shrugs and says we'll force players to run anti-cheat ring0 nonsense.

> You're free to renounce American citizenship to escape future tax obligations.

The hilarious thing about this statement is that it costs a few thousand dollars to renounce (as in a fee, paid to the embassy) and they reserve the right to come get you up to ten years later in tax cases.

He really disappears into whatever character he is playing. Truly one of the exceptional actors of our time. That show in particular highlights this very well.

And then they beg for more every year on Wikipedia itself. It is gross and no one should give them money any more. The endowment amount was met long ago. No one wants their other shit. Just be happy with Wikipedia being the massive success story it is, you parasitic non-profit management class assholes.

It is default, but unless your activities are public, your data isn't included. It will still tell you where your recorded activity would rank (and a CTA to change the privacy). I have a couple of somewhat popular segments I ride. I try to stay in the top 100.

You might thinking of Perl. Affectionately known as the swiss army chainsaw of programming languages, it incorporated elements from bash, awk, sed, etc and smushed them together into a language that carried the early Web.

> Not saying these tools don't have a place. But people are using it without understanding what it is putting out and not understanding the long term effects it will have on a code base.

It is worse than that. We're all maintaining in our heads the mental sand castle that is the system the code base represents. The abuse of the autocoder erodes that sand castle because the intentions of the changes, which are crucial for mentally updating the sand castle, are not communicated (because they are unknowable). This is same thing with poor commit messages, or poor documentation around requirements/business processes. With enough erosion, plus expected turn over in staff, the sand castle is actually gone.

> At this point, quitting seems like the only option.

Man, given this story, I think you have way more options. Like burning the place down, Milton-with-the-red-stapler style.

Jokes aside, GTFO that place, bro. Leave a harsh glassdoor review for the cathartic release (even if it won't get posted). The grass is definitely greener somewhere else even if it might be a gamble to find it.

Just note down everything you don't like about your current shithead employer and ask yourself, "what questions can I ask in an interview that will reveal these shithead employer tendencies?" Then go interview and remember that you are interviewing THEM. Don't worry about actually getting the job, interviews are a coin flip anyhow, just worry about how much shithead signal you're getting from them. If you end up jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, just update your list of shithead employer questions and do it again. Life is way, way too short to deal with shitheads. Love yourself more than that.

TIL. Like, this is the majority of the jobs I've had in the last 20 years. A bit mind blowing that this concept has been written about and studied.

If you don't want to be sat, just mention Jury Nullification. Courts really hate that sanity check on the process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

I get that vibe, too, on the article. A little too: "Summarize this article and use it to write a supporting argument for this premise"

Cute story on why that came to be. At Booking.com, a degenerate case that lead to a DoS that you could cause with specially crafted URLs (I think, memory is a bit foggy) spurned Yves Orton to do that hacking. And it broke a lot of code where the ordering had been consistent enough that people relied on it.

This is true. The further away you go from the bigger cities that aren't touristy, the more friction there is if you only speak English. A1 level of Dutch is plenty to navigate and do personal errands, and even then others still might swap to English to communicate with you if they hear an accent.

> All workplaces should be based on merit.

Because? There are many different kinds of organizations that do work, including families where merit isn't as important. The whole reason why laws were written to enforce diversity is because narrow-minded, little white men weren't willing to accept reality. The reality being that in an equal opportunity society they can't bin the CVs because they don't like the color of their skin or their expressed gender.

Great, so the economic {dis|in}centives are keeping a bunch of people fed but doing useless study of a dead end and even kept you from pointing out the emperor has no clothes (assuming your epiphany is valid). Is social conformity holding back science?

Not to put too fine of a point on it, but why not merge one of the simpler PRs for this feature, gate the feature behind an opt-in env var (ie. OLLAMA_EXPERIMENTAL_GRAMMAR=1), and sprinkle these caveats you've mentioned into the documentation? That should be enough to ward off the casuals that would flood the issue queue. Add more hoops if you'd like.

There seems to be enough interest in this specific feature that you don't need to make it perfect or provide a complicated abstraction. I am very willing to accept/mitigate the side effects for the ability to arbitrarily constrain generation. Not sure about others, but given there are half a dozen different PRs specifically for this feature, I am pretty sure they, too, are willing to accept the side effects.

I think this is a neat project, and use it a lot. My only complaint is the lack of grammar support. llama.cpp that they wrap will take a grammar. The dumbest patch to enable this is like two lines. And they seem to be willfully ignoring the (pretty trivial) feature for some reason. I'd rather not maintain a -but-with-grammars fork, so here we are.

https://github.com/ollama/ollama/pull/4525#issuecomment-2157...

>The AI can nonetheless deliver bullshit better than a child, despite the child having potential to eventually do better.

Honestly, I always felt slinging bullshit was a super useful skill. I'm pretty good at it and synthesizing on the spot from practice. When the big models first hit and I saw how much better at bullshit they were than I was, it really made me feel uncanny valley uncomfortable. Their output had the same truthy+confident timbre that I could write, but it drew from an unfathomably wider shallow pool than I could no matter how much I've read and could tenuously link together.

I wish this wasn't the case. I also wish bullshit wasn't a useful skill and more people were inoculated against it. I'm just waiting for the new machine gun phishing wave to spring up where enough PII is available from hacks, and for-sale datasets to craft very persuasive, targeted phishing attacks at scale.

As it stands right now, Bullshit, mostly.

I gave some of the llama3 ablated models (eg. https://huggingface.co/cognitivecomputations/Llama-3-8B-Inst...) a try and was pretty disappointed in the result. Could have been problems in the dataset, but overall, the model felt like it had been given a lobotomy. It would fail to produce stop tokens frequently and then start talking to itself.

Only because I, as a SWE, know how that sausage is made. Either it is some misguided desire to show a customer that you're working on the product ("See, we're still alive, please keep paying us money!"), some PM or UI designer stuffing their promo packet ("Look at how much increased engagement we have!" by making users now click twice as much), or to satisfy the whim of some c-level sponsor. Rarely is the UI actually improved or made more efficient or actual user research conducted. Prime example is the last Slack UI update from last year that introduced a ton of dead space and other annoyances. Like, the tool is for reading and writing text. I want to see the text. Why did you shrink the text area for that stupid dead space on the left? Guarantee they are measuring useless metrics like clicking on those stupid buttons on the left now and patting themselves on the back on how awesome and useful their change was.

This will produce garbage. I've experimented with getting content out of LLMs and it requires very careful context and system prompt grooming from multiple angles to get the things to produce and refine just single, coherent scenes for fiction. Just telling it to produce an outline and then iterate the sections to generate them will result in a collection of confabulated essays that won't be a coherent whole.

>Because there's enough complexity that takes years to understand. I think as an engineer your ability to provide value climbs in multiples the more you understand the product and what the company itself exactly values, besides the tech. You can solve meaningless problems using tech, but if you understand what is exactly worth solving, this is when your value can skyrocket, especially the larger the company is. Because you will have the understanding of marketing, leadership and product people while having technical capability to know what can be done.

Yes, exactly. I am lucky that I am auto-didactic and grok things quickly. This is what I meant by complex/interesting problems: those are the kinds of problems that management is interested in because those make money. The more skilled management is, the more able they are to recognize those opportunities and allocate skilled labor to make it happen. The friction and need for finding a new company is when you work for under-skilled management that don't.

>And also I feel like if it's better to switch companies every 2 years because of better pay, it implies that the current company is not actually healthy, because if they were, they would understand the value you provide, you should be able to provide more value at their company rather than starting from scratch in another company.

Those companies only deal with the market reality when hiring new. Yes, it would make sense to retain your valuable people and reward them accordingly in an equitable situation, but when your shareholders are pressuring you to reduce labor costs, it is too tempting to give only CoL adjustments in spite of record profit quarters. They bank on retention through other means besides monetary (inertia, "career progression" cult, etc). To them, labor is a resource that is fungible rather than the core pillar of their business. They simply won't value your labor appropriately without negotiation.

Starting from scratch is really only a limitation if you don't ramp up quickly. And that means building social capital and demonstrating clear wins early.

> While I don't feel my current company is healthy, at least I feel like I've been able to climb through promos and compensation faster than if I were to switch every 2 years. I have been there for 6 years.

And how broad or deep has your experience been in those 6 years? Any serious migrations/rewrites/stack changes/scalability challenges/greenfield? Do you really feel you've been challenged professionally in that time? Being on the new hire cusp, especially for new initiatives is where all the action is and what has management's attention and capital expenditure. Being a backfill hire on a feature factory or vendor implementation team is definitely not where growth is going to happen.

And have you accumulated enough wins to make your next interview process easier? Thing is one of the gigs with the most impact in my career was one where I was able to find new opportunities within the org to deliver value, but it was the confluence of smart, motivated people working on interesting/complex things. If you aren't getting that, your 6 years in one place doing the same thing is working against you because all tech ages and decays.

Not OP, but I have a similar track record. Frequent switches because boredom, better pay (especially the first half of my career), and always searching for that amazing moment of confluence where I'm the dumbest guy in the room and working on an incredibly interesting/complex problem. Two years is about right to tackle something important and deliver, and also feel out if there are other opportunities at the current company. It has mostly worked out for me. You get really good at on-boarding yourself and getting up to speed quickly. I sell my labor as being an expert generalist and have professionally worked with half a dozen different languages, numerous different stacks, in a few different industries, and at big, small and in-between sized companies.

>Unfortunately, it is very hard to judge somebody's coding ability in discussion alone. You can sort of get the idea whether they have or don't have experience and whether they have luck being asked about topics they know (although you can help your luck just knowing a lot of stuff).

I disagree with your stated difficulty in judging coding ability by discussion alone. A skilled interviewer is easily able to ascertain breadth and depth of the candidate's experience provided the interviewer is also an expert and curious. And part of being a skilled interviewer is using all of the information at hand in their CV.

>The task is usually ambiguous a bit and this is explicitly stated so that the candidate is actually expected to get stuck, don't know things and have to talk to me to get the problem solved. You would be surprised how many candidates do not listen or can't follow simple advice even when I am almost giving them the solution on a platter.

Would instantly pass on working with you based on this alone. The intentional ambiguity is deceitful. The expected dependence and expected deference is so patronizing and manipulative. I don't need to have an ego measuring contest in an interview. You win, you're the smart, awesome guy. Go enjoy all that success, bro.

I've had too many interviews like this where the dudes on the other side of the table have internalized their superiority at proctoring their simple tasks. These dudes think they are the great gatekeepers of... something. Like, the candidate just wants to cut code so they can pay rent and eat. They don't really care, nor should they, about your product, or your customers. It's an exchange of labor for a pittance of the value produced. And the dudes on the other side of the table are gate keeping it.

Honestly, this feels very Forth-y just with a finer grained control over tokenization. It would be cool if you could compare and contrast the two. Because in Forth I can redefine dictionary words and have control over parsing much like Cognition. Your bootstrapping looks very similar to the scaffold building you do in Forths in using primitives to define higher level words. Cognition even has implicit stacks. Are you sure you didn't just invent a new flavor of Forth?

> I think the most common reason might be toxic or ineffective management, fighting their own problems, real or imagined. Newcomers should read the room whether that's the case as fast as possible since in that case offering "solutions" could indeed be counterproductive or outright dangerous to one's career.

This. I am currently facing such a problem having very recently joined a new company. They recently had a very expensive incident and would like to not repeat it. I was handed an analysis task for the system that caused the incident with the expectation for me to make recommendations to improve the reliability. And, so far, my recommendation would be to refactor/rewrite large chunks of it (reduce cyclomatic complexity, greater test coverage and from the perspective of use cases, strict exception handling, fully documented state chart with all transitions validated, etc). When I gave a status update on my analysis that isn't finished yet, my manager was concerned that I would recommend exactly what I am going to recommend.

So now I am kinda stuck. Do I openly say exactly what they don't want to hear even if I was tasked to do exactly that? Luckily, I don't really give a shit about "career" nonsense, I am too old for that. But at the same time, I do want to build credibility and social capital in this org. My experience in building highly scalable, resilient systems says that the current implementation is sub par, and it shows with amount of break-fix work the team is constantly doing. I don't really want to be Cassandra and say "If you don't do this, the risk of another catastrophic error is really high". And I don't have enough data or time in the org to know what kind of persuasive arguments tend to find sympathetic ears.

So I have to gamble a bit, follow my principles, and honestly explain why their system is shit, in palatable terms, and hope they don't give me the boot.

It is stressful and I hate it.