We never needed "AI" or LLMs to think we're nothing more than machines.

You're not using AI or non-technical recruiters to screen the resumes, but many companies are: it is quite hard even for qualified people to get through the filters and get their resume in front of someone qualified to evaluate it. So in the end applicants at every level of skill spam their resume everywhere, while doing whatever they can to get them through the filters (which includes stuffing them with keywords). The only ones who avoid that slog are those with connections to directly get an offer, but not everyone who is a good developer is also good at networking.

That does not tell us that the quality of developers has decreased, just that the bad ones are sending out a higher proportion of applications, which they could be spamming to every job opportunity on the horizon.

Last I heard, Apple sales haven't plummeted and thrown them into bankruptcy, so it sounds like they learned the lesson just fine: it's fine to show people ads. People might complain a little bit, but they won't stop buying. Cost is $0 and ad revenue is presumably more than $0.

If someone is stuck with your proprietary software and you aren't showing them ads, then you're leaving money on the table. What're they gonna do, fork it out?

Yeah, I'm hung up on that too. You can come up with some outrageously huge numbers for mass and angular velocity, but once I multiply them by zero distance... I'm missing something.

the outer edge of the mass exceeding the speed of light

That intuitively makes sense, but I thought part of the black hole cheat is that it doesn't have an edge. I thought they were literally singularities, with a circumference of zero. Apparently not the case?

How a thing with a circumference of zero could meaningfully "rotate" is beyond me, but I thought this (and many other suspected properties of rotating black holes) was supposed to be beyond my ignorant layman understanding!

Asking someone to relocate across the country, and not offering severance if they refuse, is basically firing people without severance.

This may be fine legally as severance is only something that companies offer voluntarily, subject to a severance policy that they write themselves, so I'm sure they have a loophole in it for that. But I've never heard of any other US big tech employer doing that: this just reinforces the impression that Amazon is the worst employer among its big tech peers for tech workers.

An adversary can coerce a proprietary software producer to compromise the code. That's what we're going to see here.

An adversary cannot time-travel to when a protocol was invented, and compromise the protocol. (Though I guess the NSA can come kind of close to that, by "helping" as it's being developed, w/out the time-travel part.) That's what we're not going to see here.

Ergo, proprietary apps will remain unable to provide secure messaging, but secure messaging will remain available to people who want it.

AFAIK Peacemaker S02 comes out in August. Of this year!!

Whatsapp chats are end-to-end encrypted, which your texts are not. Also texts do not work internationally reliably or for free.

The alternative to Whatsapp is Signal (or other end-to-end encrypted, crossplatform chat app), not SMS/RCS.

Outside the US it has also become the standard communication tool. Send a kid to school? there is a whatsapp group for the class parents, and another one for your carpool. In the US enough people use iphones for Apple's messaging app to have critical mass, but that's not the case almost anywhere else in the world.

Einstein's "spooky action at a distance" ("spukhafte Fernwirkung") is *not* entanglement. It is the collapse of the wave function. This is a widely held mis-conception, but Einstein's first use of the term was in a thought experiment that did not involve two entangled particles but only a single particle hitting a detector. He objected to the idea that when the particle hits the detector in a specific spot, the wave function everywhere else instantly collapses to zero, unbounded by the speed of light limit.

Personally I've almost never asked algorithm questions to candidates in interviews. I feel like the typical algorithms in these questions are hard enough that if you don't know it/remember it you'll struggle to come up with it in a few minutes during an interview, while also being easy enough that if you do remember it, it won't be too hard to come up with an implementation. E.g. dijkstra's algortihm is really simple once you know it, but dijkstra was a pretty clever fellow to come up with it in the first place... So it ends up being largely a knowledge-focused question, which isn't the best.

When I'm interviewing a junior, I'm actively looking for pockets of knowledge and understanding in a sea of ignorance (the field is too vast for anyone, but especially for someone newer to it), so knowing they don't know a specific thing doesn't tell me much: they don't know most things, and that's ok. I might ask an algorithm question to a recent CS grad who tells me that algorithms and data structures was one of their favorite classes. When I'm interviewing a senior candidate, asking an algorithm question would likely measure how much interview practice they did to remind themselves of all that stuff, more than how good an engineer they are.

I guess there are some super-simple algorithm questions that can be used to filter out the people who can't code at all (e.g., fizzbuzz, or insert into linked list or such), but any kind of programming task will probably do for that purpose.

If we don't preprogram them in advance, then how will kids learn "Math class is tough!"?

I appreciate the idea behind letting people use whatever tools they use in the real world in the interview: it's a bit like open book exams. If you can quickly look up something, it's as good as knowing it yourself in practice.

However, as somebody who has interviewed a moderate number of people (including one last week), I don't know how I would incorporate AI use in a live interview. There's so much randomness when you use AI to assist you in solving a complex problem: sometimes it works right away, sometimes it requires a lot of trial and error prompting, sometimes it does not work at all and I give up and do it entirely by hand. I do believe with some practice it can increase my overall productivity a little bit, but on any given task it may or may not help.

When I interview someone and I ask them a question, I can compare that to how well I would have done on that question (which is a bad metric if I'm the one who came up with the question) and with how well past candidates or colleagues have done on it. But if they're using AI, which changes from day to day, what am I comparing against? what counts as good enough? Maybe one candidate's chosen model/tool happens to be less good at this particular problem then another candidate's, so they waste time chasing hallucinations. Does that mean I shouldn't hire them? It's really hard to evaluate.

Selecting office software is not a political statement

That's right, it's not a statement. It's just a position. You either hold the position that it's ok to be dependent on a third party and it's ok to fail if that third party turns against you, or you hold the position that it's not ok and you would prefer to stay up no matter what adversaries want.

It only becomes a statement once you tell someone that security and reliability are among your values. ;-)

Scale isn't the main problem, interoperability is. If you've solved interoperability (i.e. you've got SPF, DKIM, etc working so gmail.com and outlook.com will receive emails sent from your system) then you're in good shape.

Not that running large systems is necessarily easy, but it doesn't have enemies the way interoperability has enemies. Scale is a merely conventional problem that Google and Microsoft aren't making worse for Linux users. Nobody's pushing back, trying to make you fail; your only foe is savage reality.

And man-vs-savage-reality is a pretty nice conflict to be involved in, compared to man-vs-man.