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I see this argument a lot, and it’s not wrong, but it omits the fact that in the USA we tie a lot of meaning and worth to what people do for a living. It’s going to be hard to get people to buy in to having their jobs automated if they see no path to finding some other source of meaningful employment. This will remain true until such a time that we don’t tie somebody’s societal worth to their ability to be productive.

(This also ignores all the fun things about work culture in the USA, like healthcare being tied to your job.)

People were asking about these folks when MTG Arena organized — here they are. Best of luck to them in seeking union recognition and exercising their right to bargain.

What I’m seeing is more developers pushing more code of dubious quality without the ability to respond to feedback on said code.

You can have the best security review in the world, but if the author of the code is not equipped to understand the feedback it ends up being a moot point.

The challenge to me seems less technical and more cultural: how do we keep ourselves intellectually honest and engaged when we now spend the majority of our time orchestrating agents and outsourcing the design and thought processes?

End of an era. She was a very active philanthropist and will be dearly missed for all the good she brought to the world.

Can we contribute to the dialog rather than bash someone’s thoughts on it?

As a start, why do you disagree and how would you further this discussion?

I find this to be an incredibly myopic viewpoint. Software engineering is not defined by a single tool or technology, but rather how we design, implement, and maintain processes of value we want to automate or scale.

LLMs will certainly be an aide, but assuming adoption of them is required across a whole _field_ ignores whole classes of problems, domains, and constraints the production of software covers.

Rather, we should be wary of allowing our skills and hard-earned knowledge to atrophy by over reliance on new technology that is far from perfect, reliable, or even universally available. These tools more than any before suffer from the junk-in-junk-out problem and I’d much rather work with someone who knows their fundamentals than someone who knows their way around a the LLM of the month.

I think the dissonance you’re running into here is that places like Reddit are not monolithic. Saying Reddit, basically a very large collection of user submitted writing, is _entirely_ non-fiction is not correct and ignores years of short stories, web serials, fanfiction, role playing, story telling, and all manner of creative fictional writing. I’d wager to say the bulk of such work on the internet exists under the Reddit umbrella, or is at a minimum cross-posted there.

I knew the publishing and game industry weren’t known for good treatment of their labor, but WOTC had a fair reputation in that regard. This has apparently degraded prior to my joining the company and has continued to do so. A big motivator for organizing for many was the steady erosion of pay, benefits, and the lauded perks despite a workload that has and continues to grow tremendously.

Worked in tech for a long time before I got to WOTC. Went through a lot of layoffs and short term executive decisions that invariably leave anyone without preferred stock out to dry. Wish I had a union then. Glad to have one now.

Edit: Words are my own. I am not a rep of WOTC or Hasbro.

Unless one choses to bargain. Perhaps collectively.

This is actually a pretty interesting observation as GMail, when it first came out, was just as clunky as all the other webmail clients. At the time, everyone was used to Yahoo!, MSN, etc. and Google was the odd one out with their webmail client.

This changed when they were the first folks out there to get a dynamic interface in the browser (some of you may fondly or not so fondly remember the days of DHTML, XMLHTTPRequest, and the like). Fast forward 10 or 15 years and now GMail is the standard by which everything else is measured.

I'm sure there are some things that are objectively better, but a surprising amount of preference comes from familiarity.

It shows up in API responses when you look up your own user.

There’s important history and connotation behind pronatalist narratives—particularly with eugenics, xenophobia, and gender (in)equality.

Vogue did a decent overview of this[1] and history is littered with all kinds of examples if you go looking.

1. https://www.vogue.com/article/dark-history-of-the-far-rights...

Humans have a tendency to ascribe intelligence to how well spoken a person or thing is—hence all the personification of LLMs.

Probably a diversification play and a play to see out bigger contracts. If you've worked in the FEDRamp space, you may be aware that Wiz (last a checked, a year or so ago) is one of the few and possibly ownly player certified to operate in FedRAMP Medium/High deployments operating with the technology it does (eBPF instrumentation).

There is a reason for hoarding data: it’s an asset on the balance sheet. So long as it is legal to liquidate data for cash, there will be incentives to collect and keep it.

Well, in the case of a company trying to market to you, it literally _is_ their business. It makes them money.

The problem is that we have markets where we: - Incentivize organizations to pursue profits at the expense of everything else, which includes social good and civic rights - Rarely hold bad actors accountable (and almost never in a timely manner)

Which means, given enough time, we're always going to trend to whatever makes the most money. Targeted advertising makes money, and will continue to do so unless or until we collectively decide to make it a greater risk to profits than it is today.

I think this is interesting in that I feel, grammatically and structurally, LLMs often generate _higher quality_ text than most humans do. What tends to be lower quality is the meaning of said texts.

Say what you want about marketing-isms of your typical LLM, they have been trained and often succeed at making legible, easy to scan blobs of text. I suspect if more LLM spam was curated/touched up, most people would be unable to distinguish it from human discourse. There are already folks commenting on this article discussing other patterns they use to detect or flag bots using LLMs.

That's the rub though, isn't it? This feels like a form of self-censorship in response to some kind of shibboleth born of pattern recognition.

No fancy keyboard required, just a keystroke on Mac (`alt+shift+-`) and Linux (`right alt+something` depending on your distro).

I'm still salty that I can't use em-dashes anymore for fear of my writing being flagged as AI generated. Been using them for years—it's just `alt+shift+-` on a Mac keyboard and I find them more legible in many fonts compared to the simple dash on the typical numpad.

It's so sad to me that good typographical conventions have been co-opted by the zeitgeist of LLMs.

I suspect this is partly due to the quality of documentation for Elixir, Erlang, and BEAM. The OTP documentation has been around for a long time and has been excellently written. Erlang/Elixer doc gen outputs function signatures, arity, and both Elixir and Erlang handle concepts like function overloading in very explicit, well-defined ways.

I've seen but haven't used CEL. Anybody with experience with competing tech have any strong opinions? I've used OPA, know CEL used by GCP and Kyverno, but otherwise haven't seen anything compelling enough to move away from the OPA ecosystem.

This guide has aged surprisingly well, but I’d add to this: the above response is about as good as you can get—it is firm, non-combative, and moves the conversation forward.

Don’t antagonize your recruiter. You want them to advocate _for you_ when a prospective employer is drafting an offer. Work with them to give them the ammo they need to make that happen.

Effective use of LLMs in this way is not cheap.

I was laid off at my last 3 positions and can really relate to this. If it’s any consolation: how a company handles this is a good indication of the maturity of their management and recruiting function. I also strongly disagree with any assertion that would state “short stints = unreliable employee”. Nobody can make that assertion without confirmation of what caused those stints and the tech market from 2020 - today has been notoriously volatile.

There are plenty of great orgs out there that will soak with you before making assumptions, but as a rule most startups have fairly inexperienced management unless they are founded by a team that’s been through the rodeo a few times.