My favorite use is actually just to help me name stuff. Give it a short description of what the thing does and get a list of decent names. Refine if they’re all missing something.

Also useful for finding things quickly in generated documentation, by attaching the documentation as context. And I use it when trying to remember some of the more obscure syntax stuff.

As for coding assistants, they can help quickly fill in boilerplate or maybe autocomplete a line or two. I don’t use it for generating whole functions or anything larger.

So I get some nice marginal benefits out of it. I definitely like it. It’s got a ways to go before it replaces the programming part of my job, though.

We butchered humanlike / 10

Sure you can move some parts of the conversation to a review session, though I think the answers will be heavily influenced by hindsight at that point. For example, hearing about dead end paths they considered can be very informative in a way that I think candidates assume is negative. Nobody expects you to get it right the first time and telling the interviewer about your binary tree solution (that actually doesn’t work) can be a good thing.

But the biggest problem I think with not being in the room as an interviewer is that you lose the opportunity to hint and direct the candidate away from unproductive solutions or use of time. There are people who won’t ask questions about things that are ambiguous or they’ll misinterpret the program and that shouldn’t be a deal breaker.

Usually it only takes a very subtle nudge to get things back on track, otherwise you wind up getting a solution that’s not at all what you’re looking for (and more importantly, doesn’t demonstrate the knowledge you’re looking for). Or maybe you wind up with barely a solution because the candidate spent most of their time spinning their wheels. A good portion of the questions I ask during an interview serve this purpose of keeping the focus of the candidate on the right things.

I’m not sure that offline or alone coding tests are any better. A good coding interview should be about a lot more than just seeing if they produce well structured and optimal code. It’s about seeing what kinds of questions they’ll ask, what kind of alternatives and trade offs they’ll consider, probing some of the decisions they make. All the stuff that goes into being a good SWE, which you can demonstrate even if you’re having trouble coming up with the optimal solution to this particular problem.

The language model isn’t teaching anything it is changing the wording of something and spitting it back out. And in some cases, not changing the wording at all, just spitting the information back out, without paying the copyright source.

You could honestly say the same about most “teaching” that a student without a real comprehension of the subject does for another student. But ultimately, that’s beside the point. Because changing the wording, structure, and presentation is all that is necessary to avoid copyright violation. You cannot copyright the information. Only a specific expression of it.

There’s no special exception for AI here. That’s how copyright works for you, me, the student, and the AI. And if you’re hoping that copyright is going to save you from the outcomes you’re worried about, it won’t.

Makes sense to me. Search indices tend to store large amounts of copyrighted material yet they don’t violate copyright. What matters is whether or not you’re redistributing illegal copies of the material.

If I understand correctly they are ruling you can by a book once, and redistribute the information to as many people you want without consequences. Aka 1 student should be able to buy a textbook and redistribute it to all other students for free. (Yet the rules only work for companies apparently, as the students would still be committing a crime)

A student can absolutely buy a text book and then teach the other students the information in it for free. That’s not redistribution. Redistribution would mean making copies of the book to hand out. That’s illegal for people and companies.

It seems like a lot of people misunderstand copyright so let’s be clear: the answer is yes. You can absolutely digitize your books. You can rip your movies and store them on a home server and run them through compression algorithms.

Copyright exists to prevent others from redistributing your work so as long as you’re doing all of that for personal use, the copyright owner has no say over what you do with it.

You even have some degree of latitude to create and distribute transformative works with a violation only occurring when you distribute something pretty damn close to a copy of the original. Some perfectly legal examples: create a word cloud of a book, analyze the tone of news article to help you trade stocks, produce an image containing the most prominent color in every frame of a movie, or create a search index of the words found on all websites on the internet.

You can absolutely do the same kinds of things an AI does with a work as a human.

Oh look what was just posted today: https://youtu.be/Cp5oajtBbtg

TLDW: It’s been proposed. Turn’s out it’s really hard to even do that.

Ooh, great one. Here are my picks for each panel:

1. “The Weave”
2. Sharpiegate
3. Vaccine/Covid Denialism
4. Ukraine Blackmail
5. Election Denialism
6. January 6th

Wikipedia has a whole list of citations on this very sentence lol.

There is near unanimous consensus among economists that tariffs are self-defeating and have a negative effect on economic growth and economic welfare

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff

Tariffs are a net negative. Always. The things produced will not be competitive on the global market, if they were, we’d already be making them. The higher prices always destroy more jobs than they create. Retaliatory tariffs destroy even more jobs. The higher prices drive down demand and make the working class consumer poorer. Always.

There’s no economic upside to tariffs, over any time horizon. They create a small number of jobs in a specific sector at a very expensive cost. Some politicians might decide that the enormous economic cost is worth it for other reasons, but a net positive they are not.

I work at a pretty progressive company (comparatively but definitely not perfect) and DEI there has nothing to do with preferential treatment, nor does it need to be.

The fact is that if you want to hire the top X people in the labor market, but your hiring and business practices exclude, say, half of that market, you absolutely will not get the actual top X. You will have to reach deeper into your half and be forced to pick people that are less qualified and/or capable.

So DEI, at least where I’m at, is about widening that pool so that you can actually get top talent. That means reevaluating your business practices to figure out why you’re excluding top talent. Maybe your recruiters always go to specific colleges for recruitment and certain websites. Maybe just the way they’re talking to candidates is more attractive to a certain type of person. Maybe you’ve got hiring requirements and an interview process that is not actually predictive of success. Maybe candidates are looking for some benefit that you’re not offering. Everything needs to be looked at.

For example, “Women just want more flexible working arrangements so that’s why we can’t get them” is something I hear often. Well, have you actually evaluated why your company is so inflexible? Is it actually necessary? Or are your executives a bunch of people who learned how to manage in the 20th century and haven’t changed since then? Maybe there are things you can do to enter the 21st century and make room for more women, not just because they’re women, but because you gain access to people who are actually better at their job than the ones you’ve had. Not every company can be supremely flexible, of course, but the number of times that inflexibility is actually necessary of much smaller than its prevalence.

The demographic breakdown of your workforce is a quick and easy weathervane to help figure out how these efforts but of course they’re not everything. Diversity comes in maybe forms, not just skin color and genitals. But in my company they’re used in a backwards looking manner, to see how new policies are working, not for quota filling and preferential treatment.

I mean, Agile doesn’t really demand that you do or don’t use tickets. You can definitely use tickets without scrum.

Yeah it’s crazy. To me, respect for the presidency keeping it crime-free. People committing crimes in pursuit of the presidency or while in its office should be harshly prosecuted, not let off.

Your inability to come up with a way to produce evidence doesn’t make the strong atheist’s stance unfalsifiable. Unfalsifiable isn’t “We can’t produce any evidence that would falsify the claim right now.” That would take us to an absurd definition of the word where any scientific theory that requires more advanced technology than we currently have is “unfalsifiable.” That’s not what the word means.

The difficulty in proving that God exists isn’t what makes theism unfalsifiable. You shouldn’t make any assumptions about what can or cannot be proven true at some point in the future. What makes it unfalsifiable is that there’s no rational way to prove that God doesn’t exist, not because of an inability to collect evidence, but because the logical framework constructed by religious claims forbids it. Strong atheism has forbade no such thing. There’s no equivalence here.

Strong atheism is, in fact, a religious belief: claims of the non-existence of gods are no more falsifiable than claims of the existence of them, so in order to “know” there is no god one must have faith.

Um… Show evidence that a god exists. Poof, you have falsified the claim that no god exists. Pretty easy, actually.

ITT: A bunch of people who have never heard of information theory suddenly have very strong feelings about it.

Models are not improving? Since when? Last week? Newer models have been scoring higher and higher in both objective and subjective blind tests consistently. This sounds like the kind of delusional anti-AI shit that the OP was talking about. I mean, holy shit, to try to pass off “models aren’t improving” with a straight face.

I think the real chaos is how it would affect dates. “The store is closed on the 25th” now would necessitate specifying the exact hours and dates because it would likely bleed from the 24th or into the 26th. Anyone filling out a form would have to be careful to check the time to make sure they get the date right. Even just the simple statement “Let’s get together Tuesday” becomes ambiguous.

It would be pretty dumb to add all that confusion to the vastly more common use case, for what?