It'll be interesting to see if we get better / worse at figuring out what effective LLM interaction should look like, since that seems prerequisite to this kind of evaluation. Right now there's so little data on whether e.g. casual conversational interaction works better than structured prompting, and so, so, so much superstition - I don't know if I'd really trust judges to have good instincts about what's effective rather than what resembles their own use patterns.
I would like to preemptively acknowledge that this is not the center of the article, but:
> Did you know IQ tests are effectively illegal for hiring in the US because they disproportionately screen out minorities? I learn things when I research these posts.
The provided link discusses how this is itself a common misunderstanding and they're not illegal if they have to do with the job, but you have to justify that they do have to do with the job.
> Using fully automated scoring would also be against the law in some places: New York City requires annual bias audits of automated hiring tools, and you don’t want that heat.
The elision of the gap between "[it's illegal to do this]" and "[it's illegal to do this without checking for bias]" is interesting.
Thanks for posting this clarification. It's actually even simpler than that: for white collar employment there's going to be a presumption that IQ is relevant to the job, and there's no procedural hurdle you have to clear to IQ test applicants. The sole concern is, presumably, whether a candidate who is rejected can mount a successful disparate impact claim.
Several household name corporations routinely apply general cognitive tests to candidates. The companies who deliver these tests have logo crawls just like any other SAAS company. If this was a lucrative field for plaintiff's lawyers, you'd expect that not to be the case.
IQ tests aren't more widely used because they're not very useful for qualifying most candidates for most jobs. You generally want to know if a candidate can do the job, not how well they do on IQ tests.
> Anyone who has a digital "OPTIfont" and a font editor can readily view the problems, including usually several times too many Bezier points within any character. I counted 78 control points on a minimal character, for instance, that should have had less than a dozen.
For a lot of folks, they're never going to notice the difference, but this gets into target audience sophistication, etc. etc.
(edit for clarity: I'm pretty confident the ChatGPT typeface clones would be low quality. Notable too, however, that the Century Library ones might also be!)
Not just outside but to places with sufficient interesting birds. If that costs a gallon of gas, or you have limited mobility, or limited time to spend getting to the right spot, or limited free time while the sun is up in certain months... yeah I could believe that's actually more restrictive for a lot of people than getting 5 years of use out of a VR headset at $70 per year.
Convincing yourself that your local birds aren't sufficiently interesting is a great way to rationalize avoiding getting into birding. (Source: I am trying to learn to distinguish all the pigeons that constitute most of the bird population near me. They're great.)
And it is a classic for folks with limited mobility:
There's a reason why it has a reputation as a great retiree hobby - it's "go sit on a bench and pay attention" not "first, purchase a mountain bike of adequate spec...".
I think going to benches is fine but takes non-negligible effort. As for looking out my window from home... Maybe? It really doesn't seem like there are enough birds visible to make that worth it.
The person in that article saw ten species in two months? This doesn't sound like a situation where your activity is listed as "birdwatching", it sounds like you spend a minute on it every once in a while.
And if I consider binoculars and a feeder, that's on the same price tier as VR.
This looks like it's capturing how wealth is shifting around from people moving. But how does this net out with changes in wealth / income / whatever from people who stayed put? It'd be very interesting to learn that California was actually contracting, but while this data presentation suggests it, that's not what's actually here....
> Can this be gamed? Teaching the AI to write less like stock Claude and stock ChatGPT? Yes, absolutely. And honestly that would be great. Because half of the irritation is that all these AI-written article sound the same! If they're all being written with each individial's, each company's, own rules and preferences and character that'd probably be nice?
This is also why I as a US citizen strongly support green cards for everybody in the industry who's fractionally eligible for them - my working conditions are shaped by what they can get the labor force as a whole to put up with, and that's shaped by visa indenture.
Right, even if one starts from an aggrieved position of "They took our jerbs!" after it's happened you do not want to let those workers be underpaid or abused, because it will (A) only increase the incentives of employers to import pliant immigrant labor and (B) it'll ripple out to harm the bargaining position of all "locals" still in the same line of work.
P.S.: Conversely (inversely?) there's often a vague idea of "if we somehow make the positions suck ass, then immigrants will stop coming, and somehow locals will be hired to a no-longer-sucky position", which is, er.... Wishful thinking. It'll get one a sense of vengeance, but it wont help pay the bills.
To my knowledge economists do not believe this one is black-and-white, but that's much more of a question about the issuance of H1B visas they begin with anyway.
As if your (very American) bosses wouldn't find another to put you down and wrong everything they could from you. Today ICE is going after immigrants, tomorrow Pinkerton is going after you.
That doesn't feel accurate to me. If you're laying off employees en masse while getting new h1b visas, maybe - but everybody I know who's gotten a green card from tech employment was employed and working for a long time before that process even started.
If one is just waiting on a status change that’s ok. The labor certification is complete. If labor certification is being applied for as layoffs happen or if large tranches of new H1B are applied for at about the same time - that’s clearly an issue.
> I don't really see what damage this would do or why you'd have to apologise.
FTFA:
> I didn't learn these libraries. Hell I barely know which libraries I've built on top of! Open source development used to run on attribution, how can I attribute what I barely know I've consumed?! Why would those developers continue to work on these projects when they now go even more unappreciated than they used to be?! I assume many have stopped.
> And those are just the libraries. The code it is generating is synthesized from being trained on code they have sucked out of the public (and perhaps not so public) internet. Code like my own from my own Github page and many many others, all without attribution or compensation. I could have paid someone to build it, freelance software development used to be a thing, but I didn't. I bet that market is pretty dry these days.
Even pre-LLM: I've found a lot of colleagues (mystifyingly to me, both seniors and juniors) who really want to be able to turn their brain off when doing investigations into complicated cross-system behavior (feedback loops abound), and they don't like hearing that it can't be collapsed into a runbook. If a drinking bird (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_bird) on an Enter key could do it, I could rig something up so I wouldn't need you!
To be fair, that is often a reasonable tradeoff when there’s higher priority things the business needs to focus on.
I sometimes suggest timeboxing investigations for this reason. Spend 4h on this - if root cause is not found, just throw more hardware at it. Although I expect a writeup of what was investigated and ruled out, so that it can be used when someone returns to it.
Yes, one of the primary dysfunctions I see in business environments is a culture that doesn’t create space for timeboxed and clear discussion of tradeoffs. Everyone must have both the _appetite for_ and _implicit or explicit permission to have_ a reasonable discussion of option A vs option B and the long vs short term costs and benefits of each. There must be enough discipline to not rabbit hole or scope creep and decisions must be captured somewhere in a concise way so that everyone who is impacted is informed, and everyone who will inherit the downstream consequences can understand and articulate the decision chain that led to current state.
This is rarely if ever done in a sensible way. Instead you find Managers, Engineers or PMs avoiding troublesome stakeholders, hallway convos or Slack DMs that are never properly written into public record in a searchable/readable way, last minute overrides from higher ups based on limited context of the problem space or their own unaligned career goals, poor recordkeeping, panic mode bandaid fixes when systems break, etc...
IMO a lot of the “meat proxy” and “loop obsession” behavior we’re seeing is simply people using the sense of short term productivity gains as self-soothing against anxiety from corporate dysfunction that they have no control over.
I've seen it too, and it seems to be getting worse as companies move more and more communication onto Slack, ticketing systems, Confluence, etc. Modern channels are a huge high velocity dumping ground. The only way anyone can even pretend to keep up with all the - frankly - spam is arbitrary sampling.
Oldschool periodic reports and memoranda weren't perfect, but they did encourage taking time to curate one's message. And gave others somewhere to go for a properly curated message.
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