> When you have weeks or months until your deadline, you might spend a lot of time thinking airily about how you could refactor the codebase to make your new feature fit in as elegantly as possible. When you have hours, you will typically be laser-focused on finding an approach that will actually work.
No, when I have hours, I am laser-focused on pissing off the manager who gave me so little necessary time to do the task. :-)
> There's nothing worse than feeling excluded or manipulated by management or coworkers.
What people call "social skills" is nearly always manipulating other people into liking you. People of who its is said that they "lack social skills" are often more honest and much less manipulative.
In my experience, where management is concerned, when employees demonstrated a bit more knowledge, a bit more fluidity, greater ease of communication, I noticed a very distinct change in management's demeaner towards the employees. The above comments are based on my past experience only. This past experience has made everyone involved a bit more sinical with respect to the importance of management. I personally think management should be replaced with an AI that can be turned on and off, as needed :)
Hmm, that has a ring of truth to it. I rarely stayed in jobs where managers tended to silence my points of view or opinions, rather than listening to it. That's not to say that there have been many job opportunities. Perhaps managers/others view honesty and directness as a threat to their position or authority. I've noticed that it is not localized to places of work but looks to be prevalent in most other societal situations. Perhaps emotional intelligence training should be incorporated into school curriculums, so children learn at an early age a bit of tolerance to other diverse points of views. I've tended to limit my posting in places like these as I've noticed a lack of emotional intelligence from some of the people that have replied. This is rather evident from the downward spiral exhibited by the constant downvoting of my comments. I prefer to take the high road with sarcastic levity whenever possible :)
Hardly anyone uses Irish in daily life or for official purposes, notwithstanding its official status. 99% of the Irish you hear outside a classroom is performative.
> The difference is that, fortunately, fine-tuning them is extremely easy.
If this was true, educating people fast for most jobs would be a really easy and solved problem. On the other hand in March 2018, Y Combinator put exactly this into its list of Requests for Startups, which gives strong evidence that this is a rather hard, unsolved problem:
But never a second; the human learned from one instance, effectively forever, without even trying. ChatGPT had to be retrained and to not fall for the “r”’s trick, which cost much more than one prompt, and (unless OpenAI are hiding a breakthrough, or I really don’t understand modern LLMs) required much more than one iteration.
That seems to be the one thing that prevents LLMs from mimicking humans, more noticeable and harder to work around than anything else. An LLM can beat a Turing test where it only must generate a few sentences. No LLM can imitate human conversation over a few years (probably not even a few days), because it would start forgetting much more.
The problem with education is that existing ways of doing things are very strongly entrenched.
At the school level: teachers are trained, buildings are built, parents rely on kids being at school so they can go out to work....
At higher levels and in training it might be easier to change things, but IMO it is school level education that is the most important for most people and the one that can be improved the most (and the request for startups reflects that).
I can think of lots of ways things can be done better. I have done quite a lot of them as a home educating parent. As far as I can see my government (in the UK) is determined to do the exact opposite of the direction I think we should go in.
> The problem with education is that existing ways of doing things are very strongly entrenched.
Which is still a problem of educating humans. Just moved up the chain one step. Educators are often very hard to educate.
Even mathematics isn't immune to this. Calculus is pervasively taught with prematurely truncated algebra of differentials. Which means for second order derivatives and beyond, the "fraction" notation does not actually describe ratios, when this does not need to be the case.
But when will textbooks remove this unnecessary and complicating disconnect between algebra and calculus? There is no significant movement to do so.
Educators and textbook writers are as difficult to educate as anyone else.
> You could probably detect essay cheating (AI written) in the exact same way by questioning the student about it - why did they organize the essay in this way, what was their motivation for focusing on X, or expressing something as Y... Of course anyone can concoct an explanation on the fly, but it should be obvious if they are speaking from the experience of having authored it or just coming up with a post-hoc rationalization.
I wouldn't claim that I am bad at writing (at least in my native language, which is not English) - at least many colleagues say so. But I do insist that when writing I don't think that way. If I were to answer these question, my honest answers would be:
"why did they organize the essay in this way": I just wrote down the thoughts that came to my mind, and then gave them some structure that seemed right.
"what was their motivation for focusing on X": Either "because it felt right" or "I had to write at most x pages, and indeed it would have made sense to focus on more topics, so I focused on this arbitrary thing"
So indeed I would claim that a lot of sensible reasons why things are this way actually are post-hoc rationalizations. :-)
> So indeed I would claim that a lot of sensible reasons why things are this way actually are post-hoc rationalizations.
Perhaps, but still I think that responses to questioning about an essay that the student did actually write will come a lot more quickly and naturally, even if they indicate that not much thought was put into it, than if they realize they are being called out for cheating and and have to make something up on the spot, since they didn't at least read it carefully!
> Our CEO started sharing screenshots of his xitter/linkedin feeds and most of them contain wisdoms like "Opus 4.5 is better than 90% of talent". There is also longer form business fan fiction. It usually follows this template: there is a hero - a humble manager/sales person, and a villain - a cocky, nerdy software developer. The villain claims that some task is impossible or takes months to complete. Then the humble hero (equipped with Opus 4.5) completes the task in 2 hours. The villain is then humiliated/fired and everyone lives happily ever after.
I do have the impression that many programmers are much more resistant to bullshitting, and love to call out the mistakes when confronted with bullshit. Getting into management, on the other hand, means believing in instead of fighting lots bullshit.
So, of course the mentioned CEO gets lots of such stories in his xitter/linkedin feeds; CEOs are not insanely eager to comment on such stories why the premises are wrong, and by which dirty tricks this manipulates people. Rather, by climbing up the company ranks, they actively had to believe in more and more fairy tables (or bullshit); if they are too resistant to the brainwashing that they have to believe in, they will stop climbing ranks.
> Quite the opposite, capitalism even enforces useless work because it’s the main source of income.
If the work was really so useless, companies would love to become leaner (i.e. fire the employees who do useless work). It's rather the government who by its control freakery introduces lots of red tape for companies.
Rather: the customer will find someone who can confidently pretend that thet can make firm delivery commitments.
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