I'm continually shocked at how well companies can continue on despite serious internal problems. I do think it usually catches up with them though, and there are a lot of "terminally ill" products out there that are going to die eventually. I've seen those projects first hand, and I've seen the slow decay of the product that happens when a company loses control of its tech stack. It can take years.
I think that cuts both ways though, because I think even the business people would be shocked at how well things can seem to work despite serious dysfunction. If an entire team dies off but 3 months later things seem "fine," the business types will just assume everything is as good as it ever was. I know it's popular these days to say that good tech and good business are not always the same thing, but I do think that many of those same businesses would be a little worried if you actually convinced them that their tech was coming off the rails and was only going to get worse. Some businesses just want to be acquired and don't care what happens after that, but not every business thinks they're on a clock.
If you're big enough, like say you're a trillion dollar megacorp, then important teams folding up and being reborn is just part of your ecosystem. I've seen big tech power through churn for years with nothing but human wave tactics until the business climate changed enough that the team in question became less critical, and that's when they let it die.
I agree with your point, but I think the honest answer to your question is that people view creative jobs as aspirational whereas the other "rote" jobs that were being automated away were ones that people would have preferred to avoid anyway.
When we're getting rid of assembly line jobs, or checkout counter staff, or data entry clerks, or any other job that we know is demeaning and boring, we can convince ourselves that the thousands/millions put out of work are an unfortunate side effect of progress. Oh sure, the loss of jobs sucks, but no one should have to do those jobs anyway, right? The next generation will be better off, surely. We're just closing the door behind us. And maybe if our economic system didn't suck so much, we would take care of these people.
But when creatives start getting replaced, well, that's different. Many people dream of moving into the creative industry, not out of it. Now it feels like the door is closing ahead of us, not behind us.
Well, everyone is different biologically and every drug affects everyone differently, I didn't mean that there's no biodiversity between people. What I meant was that these stimulants don't function differently based on whether you're "cognitively healthy." Methylphenidate doesn't do something different in a person with ADHD versus one without, because it doesn't interact with any mechanisms of the illness, and whether or not you have ADHD you're experiencing similar effects on the drug.
Contrast with, say, SSRIs, which might have some effect in a healthy person but you're looking at a different range of effects compared to someone taking it for depression/anxiety/OCD/whatever.
I don't agree with them, but I don't agree with you either. Spreading fake science and medicine is fundamentally harmful to society, and doing it just because you want to trip legally is not a good enough excuse. This is like a textbook example of the ends not justifying the means, and it's from the same playbook that big pharma uses.
I don't agree with the parent that it's okay to lie about the health effects of a drug just because you want it legalized, but I feel like you missed the forest for the trees here.
When a drug is stigmatized in the United States, it is essentially impossible to get it legalized without showing there is a medical use for it. That's just how it is. If your goal is to get a drug legalized, it does not matter whether that's how it should be, or whether this is all rooted in systemic discrimination, or whether pharmaceutical companies push stuff that's just as bad under their veil of legitimacy. Citizens who are anti-drug are under the impression right now that ~100% of illicit drugs are extremely dangerous and a major threat to their community, and they are not going to sit around and listen to a history lesson philosophizing about how all their fears are a propagandized illusion.
Even if you got them to listen, they would just say "Why risk it?" The only way to start changing minds is to point out there are upsides to drug legalization beyond just "freedom is good." That's why all of the arguments for legalization focus on health/therapeautic benefits, either directly from the drugs themselves or in the ability to treat those who need help with addiction.
Some people take psychedelics for the feeling of connectivity, and there is some talk out there about psychedelics being healthy for the brain and "helping the brain form new connections" (all of that is based on very limited evidence and a lot of woo), but even that isn't what the article was about.
The article just scanned people's brains while they were on drugs and saw that the electrical activity was more erratic and scattered than normal, not more active and connected, and concluded that people were using psychedelics based on a myth.
Agree. Amusingly, the authors found evidence that the drugs work: students spent more time focusing on even the easy version of the task. The impulse to "be done" with something and stop focusing on it is one of the things stimulants counteract.
I'm also not a big fan on emphasizing the "cognitively healthy" part of the equation. My understanding is that stimulants do exactly the same thing in a person whether they're "cognitively healthy" or not; they're not the sort of drugs that target a deficiency or clear up some specific problem. The only difference is that some people have more of a need in this area than others.
This reminds me of an old article I read about how psychedelics don't actually "increase connectivity in the brain" like users thought, as though that had anything to do with why people use psychedelics.
I think the difference in our perspectives is the type of studios we work for. In a AAA studio what you're saying makes perfect sense. But I've worked entirely for small- and mid-size studios where developers are often asked to help out with things outside their specialization. In my world, even having a specialization probably means you're more experienced and thus you're involved in a variety of projects.
Whether that's "most" software engineers in games or not I can't say. AAA studios employ way more engineers per project but there are comparatively way more small- and mid-sized developers out there. It's interesting how strong the bubbles are, even within a niche industry like games.
Yeah, regardless of hallucinations and repeating the same mistake even after you tell it to fix it, iterating with ChatGPT is so much less stressful than iterating with another engineer.
I almost ruined my relationship with a coworker because they submitted some code that took a dependency on something it shouldn't have, and I told them to remove the dependency. What I meant was "do the same thing you did, but instead of using this method, just do what this method does inside your own code." But they misinterpreted it to mean "Don't do what this method does, build a completely different solution." Repeated attempts to clarify what I meant only dug the hole deeper because to them I was just complaining that their solution was different from how I would've done it.
Eventually I just showed them in code what I was asking for (it was a very small change!) and they got mad at me for making such a big deal over 3 lines of code. Of course the whole point was that it was a small change that would avoid a big problem down the road...
So I'll take ChatGPT using library methods that don't exist, no matter how much you tell them to fix it, over that kind of stress any day.
I had a friend jokingly poke fun at me for the way I was writing ChatGPT prompts. It seemed, to him, like I was going out of my way to be nice and helpful to an AI. It was a bit of an aha moment for him when I told him that helping the AI along gave much more useful answers, and he saw I was right.
Interesting. I also work in game development, and I tend to work on project-specific optimization problems, and I've had the opposite experience.
If I have to solve a hairy problem specific to our game's architecture, obviously I'm not going to ask ChatGPT to solve that for me. It's everything else that it works so well for. The stuff that I could do, but it's not really worth my time to actually do it when I can be focusing on the hard stuff.
One example: there was a custom protocol our game servers used to communicate with some other service. For reasons, we relied on an open-source tool to handle communication over this protocol, but then we decided we wanted to switch to an in-code solution. Rather than study the open source tool's code, rewrite it in the language we used, write tests for it, generate some test data... I just gave ChatGPT the original source and the protocol spec and spent 10 minutes walking it through the problem. I had a solution (with tests) in under half an hour when doing it all myself would've taken the afternoon. Then I went back to working on the actual hard stuff that my human brain was needed to solve.
I can't imagine being so specialized that I only ever work on difficult problems within my niche and nothing else. There's always some extra query to write, some API to interface with, some tests to write... it's not a matter of being able to do it myself, it's a matter of being able to focus primarily on the stuff I need to do myself.
Being able to offload the menial work to an AI also just changes the sorts of stuff I'm willing to do with my time. As a standalone software engineer, I will often choose not to write some simple'ish tool or script that might be useful because it might not be worth my time to write it, especially factoring in the cost of context switching. Nothing ground breaking, just something that might not be worth half an hour of my time. But I can just tell AI to write the script for me and I get it in a couple minutes. So instead of doing all my work without access to some convenient small custom tools, now I can do my work with them, with very little change to my workflow.
You said that ads are misinformation because they try to convince you to buy something that may or may not be in your best interest to buy. My response to this is that's a ridiculous definition of "misinformation," and I disagree with it strongly.
You said nothing about levels of influence, or about modern ad campaigns versus word-of-mouth advertising, or anything of the like. I couldn't have responded to these things even if I wanted to, because you didn't say them. All you said was that selfish motivation == misinformation, and that's wrong, and I disagree with it.
Of course I suspected that you wrote your comment because of angst against the manipulations of "modern ad campaigns," and not because you believe that's actually a useful definition of misinformation, and you just proved it for me. You're trying to redefine words so you can use those words to give your point more oomph.
I also said nothing about you believing advertising shouldn't be allowed. Why do you think I said this? I didn't even imply it. I only said I thought you were being cynical.
It's true that there's a massive gap between a vendor hawking their wares on the street and "modern ad campaigns and techniques." There is also an entire gradient between these two things, and you see examples all along this gradient if you actually pay attention to advertising. The existence of this gradient is why I take issue with your original comment.
I think I agree with basically your whole comment but I'm wondering if you could explain what you mean by "software-only AGI". Obviously all software runs on hardware, and creating specialized hardware to run certain types of software is something the computing industry is already very familiar with.
In the far far future, if we did crack AGI, it's not impossible to believe that specialized hardware modules would be built to enable AGI to interface with a "normal" home computer, much like we already add modules to our computers for specialized applications. Would this still count as software-only AI to you?
I've held for a long time that sensory input and real-world agency might be necessary to grow intelligence, so maybe you mean something like that, but even then that's something not incredibly outside the realm of what regular computers could do with some expansion.
I like this comment because I think it highlights the exact difference between AI optimists and AI cynics.
I think you'll find that AGI cynics do not agree at all that "engineering a 10x/100x version" of what we have and making it attempt "AGI algorithms 24/7 in an evolutionary setting" is a "safe ticket" to AGI.
Yes, 1/3 and 1/6 are quite important. Do enough making and you will run into those fractions plenty. It just turns out that in practice, as you say, easy unit conversions outweigh the benefit of clean division. Metric's important benefit is that it's a consistent base, not that it's specifically base-10.
And now that we use computers for a lot of measurement, those infinite decimals aren't as big of a deal. (Well, most of the time, anyway. Representation of infinite fractions famously creates some programming problems. But I mean for the user making the measurement.)
Base-10 is easy to learn since it's the same we use for counting, but I think there's an interesting argument to be made that purely from a science/engineering/making perspective it would be better to use a consistent base-12 measurement system.
First, I (and many people that I know) do get upset when an ad misrepresents a product and we get burned. It happens all the time, and people complain about it constantly. You might argue this is wasted breath, but it still happens.
I would also say that while everyone accepts that ads are at a high risk for dishonesty, the vast majority of people live their lives assuming that ads convey some useful information, even if it's just the vague intent and target audience of the product. It's easy to pick out specific genres of ads that don't seem to do this, and ad rhetoric can often be complicated and interesting, but generally speaking they do try to convey some sort of genuine information about the product.
Saying that ads are fundamentally misinformation people because they are "obviously trying to convince someone to purchase something which might actually not be good for them to buy" seems like a reasonable criticism at first glance, but actually I think that's kind of a ridiculous standard. No one except my closest friends and family have any idea what might be "good for me to buy", and I am not so against the idea of basic commerce that I think it's useful to say that someone hawking their wares is "misinforming" the public simply because they're trying to sell to strangers.
This is not to say that the ad industry isn't infested with slimy people with perverse incentives. Of course it is. But advertising itself is a basic extension of human communication, and I think it's awfully cynical to say that any attempt to show someone why they might want to buy your product is spreading misinformation. I do believe that it's okay to advocate for something, and then let people decide for themselves if they agree. If it's not, then nearly all human discourse is an exercise in misinformation.
(Inb4 "actually, nearly all human discourse is misinformation")
Presumably something like "a string is a sequence of characters" would be a good first answer, though it might prompt some follow-up questions.
I love how questions like this suddenly become more complicated when you have a deeper understanding of the internals. Your first instinct of an answer might not be 100% correct. If I were asked this question unexpectedly, I'd probably trip over myself a few times as I thought through it out loud.
What counts as "injured" or "killed"? If shots are fired and the resulting human stampede kills 4 people, does that count as 4 mass shooting deaths? Obviously the shooter is at fault, but these details affect the interpretation of events.
My undergrad was in statistics. In our capstone course, my professor had us read journal articles and discuss the statistical analyses within. I remember one study we read (peer reviewed, a couple dozen citations), and my professor's take away was, "I can't say it's wrong, but based on the data they gave, I can't for the life of me figure out how they reached their statistical conclusions." So yeah, it's a "fact" that the researchers reached a certain conclusion, but the conclusion itself is not fact.
I don't believe in post-truth, but "Facts are facts; truth is truth" is a philosophical statement, not a practical one. And even then, we have an entire field of philosophy to iron out those details, which we call epistemology.
Agreed. And to add, rebuilding is usually a faster and smoother process than building the first time, which I've found to be true for both physical and mental/emotional feats. It's very rare that all that "wasted" time and effort is truly wasted.
I think that cuts both ways though, because I think even the business people would be shocked at how well things can seem to work despite serious dysfunction. If an entire team dies off but 3 months later things seem "fine," the business types will just assume everything is as good as it ever was. I know it's popular these days to say that good tech and good business are not always the same thing, but I do think that many of those same businesses would be a little worried if you actually convinced them that their tech was coming off the rails and was only going to get worse. Some businesses just want to be acquired and don't care what happens after that, but not every business thinks they're on a clock.
If you're big enough, like say you're a trillion dollar megacorp, then important teams folding up and being reborn is just part of your ecosystem. I've seen big tech power through churn for years with nothing but human wave tactics until the business climate changed enough that the team in question became less critical, and that's when they let it die.