This is a good list. Another, often overlooked is:
Sometimes we just get incredibly unlucky and interview at the same time as someone wildly unusually more qualified.
This is a good list. Another, often overlooked is:
Sometimes we just get incredibly unlucky and interview at the same time as someone wildly unusually more qualified.
And, does it know how to discern genuine user input from astroturfed marketing copy in disguise?
That’s the beauty of it, it lends legitimacy to the astroturfing campaign. That’s a feature, not a bug, in the eyes of folks trying to maximally enshitify and push their shit products anyway.
Oof. Even investors (who aren’t billionaires) are getting shafted by the current deal.
Stock performance has been utter shit, because the SEC (and equivalents) aren’t blocking illegal company mergers and acquisitions.
Not a bad plan, but it’s way easier to be born into an emerald mining fortune.
I setup a mail forward, and check the ‘to’ address to all incoming messages for about a year.
Some other good answers already but here’s a sound byte version:
It’s currently expensive to borrow money, and then the borrowed money isn’t as useful as it used to be.
People will assume you work on Cybersecurity.
Edit: Also, people will use this method to verify an email is from you.
Interesting! I learned something here. Thank you.
Interesting bit from Wikipedia:
Had Metternich not stood in the way of “progress”, Austria might have reformed, dealt better with its problems of nationality, and the First World War might never have happened.[94] Instead, Metternich chose to fight an overwhelmingly fruitless war against the forces of liberalism and nationalism.[95] Heavy censorship was just one of a range of repressive instruments of state available to him that also included a large spy network.[72] Metternich opposed electoral reform, criticising Britain’s 1832 Reform Bill.[96] In short, he locked himself into an embittered battle against “the prevailing mood of his age”.[97]
Sounds familiar. He’s certainly not the last person to do so…
Lol. Thank you. Sometimes when rational thought and optimism are at ods, I choose optimism.
- The largest e-commerce platform in latin america and the most used in my country requires FR to use it.
I minimize my use of the largest eCommerce platform in my country. It’s a pain, but it can be done, and I feel good about my money going to organizations that better match my values.
- The bank is now pressing me to use their app with FR as a 2fa when using homebanking from its website, something that wasn’t necessary up to some weeks ago.
Sounds like a great opportunity to check into joining a credit union. All banks are predatory. There’s lots of other great reasons to minimize your exposure to banks.
- The telecoms demands FR from now on if you want a new SIM card in case you lost your phone or it’s been stolen.
- The government is in the same direction as it’s moving to digitalizing many burocratic procedures and also requires FR.
I imagine you may be stuck with these. Sometimes we can’t win them all.
I wouldn’t take that as a reason to give up. Having your face on file in fewer places is very lively to save you future headaches.
Ideally this will be less of a concern in the future, when the vast majority of organizations no longer have utter shit for Cybersecurity.
But that day is not today.
Isn’t this still engineering a solution?
If we drop the word “engineering”, we can focus on the point - geometry is another case where rote learning of repetition can do a pretty good job. Clever engineers can teach computers to do all kinds of things that look like novel engineering, but aren’t.
LLMs can make computers look like they’re good at something they’re bad at.
And they offer hope that computers might someday not suck at what they suck at.
But history teaches us probably not. And current evidence in favor of a breakthrough in general artificial intelligence isn’t actually compelling, at all.
Sometimes even researchers reach new results by having a machine verify many cases
Yes. Computers are good at that.
So far, they’re no good at understanding the four color theorum, or at proposing novel approaches to solving it.
They might never be any good at that.
Stated more formally, P may equal NP, but probably not.
Edit: To be clear, I actually share a good bit of the same optimism. But I believe it’ll be hard won work done by human engineers that gets us anywhere near there.
Ostensibly God created the universe in Lisp. But actually he knocked most of it together with hard-coded Perl hacks.
There’s lots of exciting breakthroughs coming in computer science. But no one knows how long and what their impact will be. History teaches us it’ll be less exciting than Popular Science promised us.
Edit 2: Sorry for the rambling response. Hopefully you find some of it useful.
I don’t at all disagree that there’s exciting stuff afoot. I also think it is being massively oversold.
Great question.
is there any legit reason anyone should learn advanced coding techniques?
Don’t buy the hype. LLMs can produce all kinds of useful things but they don’t know anything at all.
No LLM has ever engineered anything. And there’s no sparse (concession to a good point made in response) current evidence that any AI ever will.
Current learning models are like trained animals in a circus. They can learn to do any impressive thing you an imagine, by sheer rote repetition.
That means they can engineer a solution to any problem that has already been solved millions of times already. As long as the work has very little new/novel value and requires no innovation whatsoever, learning models do great work.
Horses and LLMs that solve advanced algebra don’t understand algebra at all. It’s a clever trick.
Understanding the problem and understanding how to politely ask the computer to do the right thing has always been the core job of a computer programmer.
The bit about “politely asking the computer to do the right thing” makes massive strides in convenience every decade or so. Learning models are another such massive stride. This is great. Hooray!
The bit about “understanding the problem” isn’t within the capabilities of any current learning model or AI, and there’s no current evidence that it ever will be.
Someday they will call the job “prompt engineering” and on that day it will still be the same exact job it is today, just with different bullshit to wade through to get it done.
It’s been a long time…
I mean, it has, a bunch of times. And they haven’t so far.
But I agree, in principle. When they’re impacted, in a way they actually understand, things may get better.
I regularly recommend configurations to peers that are arguably impossible for normal humans. (Not on purpose! Sorry Dave!)
I love to run stuff on Raspberry Pi, and I fear no gcc
compile flag. (Ok. That’s a bold faced lie, even I fear a couple of them.) So I frequently forget the bullshit I had to do to get something weird running on a random Pi.
Yeah. Good point.
What we have for open hardware and firmware, on phones, in particular, is very slim pickings.
Open hardware has open source firmware.
We don’t have all that much of it yet, but it exists.
It’s nice. I use it to communicate with peers who weren’t afraid to set it up.
Support the people, not the country.
I agree wholeheartedly.
Right. It’s different in that it lacks Google Framework Service, and adds a bunch of privacy controls, like additional quick toggles to control the cameras, and microphone, the way other Android can quick toggle the flashlight and location servcies and bluetooth.
The biggest thing is substantially more granular per app permissions, controlled from a calentral interface in settings.