CodeyWhizzBang

It seems to work for doormen

I don't think that's necessary to refute the original point. The point I was disagreeing with was that automatic doors have "won" and doormen are no longer relevant. Whether 25,000 is a higher proportion of New Yorkers now than it was in 1930 isn't really a key point. 25,000 remains a large enough number that it is not true that doormen have been wiped out.

That said, to your actual points, as an intellectual exercise: while the population of New York has increased since 1930 (from around 7m to around 9m), the number of doormen has gone up much much faster (from "a few thousand" according to NPR to 25,000). So on the criteria you listed there, the number of doormen has increased as well.

The doorman example remains true.

If the automatic door hasn't been widely adopted, that literally proves the point I was making that automatic doors haven't "won".

When you say the automatic door "has won" do you mean it's won by rendering doormen obsolete? Because if so, that seems very untrue. According to Vanity Fair and NPR there are over 25,000 doormen working in New York City. 1930 there were an estimated few thousand. So since the invention of the automatic door, the number of doormen has skyrocketed.

Maybe, you'd say there are more automatic doors than doormen. I'm confident that is true, but those automatic doors haven't supplanted doormen; they're automatic doors where there would have been manual doors before.

So everything hasn't adapted around automatic doors. We've just got a lot more automatic doors now. And a lot more doormen.

I think that's maybe the point of the article:

"Whereas before, average was expensive in terms of both time and effort, average became cheap."

A car that starts 50% of the time isn't "average". The average new car starts more or less every time. (And if you said 'modal average', I'd say the modal average new car starts every time).

Not everyone can be average. Half of people will be below average.

I might not agree with the point, but I can see that idea that many things just need to be "good enough" (which we might define as "average") and we save our real expertise for the things that really matter.

My point more was that you said it wasn't a widely shared opinion, but to my mind, it is broadly the status quo. Whether that is good or bad is a separate point.

Is that definitely not a widely shared opinion?

I feel like I can think of lots of situations where society puts in to protect children rather than leaving it to the parents (age ratings on films and games, YouTube Kids, regulations around advertising to children, the whole concept of school, reduced speed limits around playgrounds to give a few examples off the cuff).

The article says:

Why is beauty a productivity-enhancing attribute for males in non-quantitative subjects? Generally, it is difficult to disentangle the reasons behind why beauty improves productivity (Hamermesh and Parker, 2005). However, relative to other students, attractive men are more successful in peer influence, and are more persistent, a personality trait positively linked to academic outcomes (Dion and Stein, 1978, Alan et al., 2019). In addition, attractive individuals are more socially skilled, have more open social networks, and are more popular vis-à-vis physically unattractive peers (Feingold, 1992). Importantly, possession of these traits is significantly linked to creativity (Soda et al., 2021). In our setting, the tasks faced by students in non-quantitative subjects, for instance in marketing and supply chain management, are likely to be seen as more ”creative”, and significantly contrast the more traditional book-reading and problem-solving in mathematics and physics courses, the latter presumably perceived as more monotonous. Together with the large use of group assignments in non-quantitative courses, these theoretical results imply that socially skilled individuals are likely to have a comparative advantage in non-quantitative subjects.

I am very struck by this remark:

"Kovid has stated numerous times that any patches which work towards python3 compatibility without hurting python2 functionality or performance would be happily accepted. Oddly enough, no one has ever taken him up on that, though a number of people have insisted it is very important that he himself do that work."

Unless it's the LTSC edition of Windows 10, which has support until 2029

I'm not convinced "big digital projects" in the private sector fare any better. As far as I can see, the scale of the project is a bigger problem than whether the originator is a private or public company. Public companies just have more of an obligation to be transparent with their failures.

This is only iOS

According to the article:

"Those who got the stipend were less likely to be unsheltered after six months and able to meet more of their basic needs than a control group that got no money, and half as likely as the control group to have an episode of being unsheltered."

So, it seems like it helped get most people back on their feet and into a place where they can live independently without financial support.

The thing is, if I read a study that says “actually, everyone should be drinking 3 glasses of wine a night” I disregard that study as clearly nonsense and would question any future studies I saw by that author.

But with ChatGPT we're not saying disregard what it says, we're saying only disregard some of what it says and don't disregard what it says in future. Which becomes a lot of work to check everything it says every time.

This might be me being picky, but you mentioned at first:

"I've essentially got 15-20 high-priced world-class consultants in every field that I chose to pull from"

And then here said:

"It's an endlessly enthusiastic savant intern - frequently wrong in hilarious ways"

And those feel very different to me.

The second one feels more similar to my experience This is what I spot with ChatGPT (and advocates of it): in the abstract, it is a genius, but whenever we look at a specific example, it's not like that at all.

Might it be made difficult to replace them, even if they're cheaper, because of the political influence of the goal/gas lobby groups in America?

Or the classic result of updating the code but not updating the comment:

//Returns the user's full name return user.email;

They do have MDM. But that doesn't necessarily stop people installing their own apps.

Although the grammar is quite poor in the 50 IQ one

The BBC is semi-public sector. Bonuses are incredibly rare.

The problem is, creating the code isn't really the bottleneck. It's the stakeholder negotiation and conversations and understanding the business problem and updating the site when the business problem changes and updating the wording and changing the site because legal are unhappy with it then changing it back because the CEO overruled them and so on and so on.

There's a line in War of the Worlds that was innocuous at the time, but is impossible to read as intended now to our modern eyes:

"He heard footsteps running to and fro in the rooms, and up and down stairs behind him. His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed ejaculating."

I do agree with you that Apple have done well to support this.

But also 2016 is only 6 years ago. It's not just Apple thing, but it really doesn't feel sustainable for us to keep write off our hardware every half a decade.

I genuinely don't get this mindset at all. Even if they were to pay you, they're hardly going to pay you very much to do some coding assessment that's a few hours work.

This feels mad to me. Companies don't pay people to go through the application process to work for them.

I think the point is they're not working for free - they're doing an assessment. If they're asking you to do real production work for free, that's one thing. But giving you an exercise to assess you is something entirely different.

The assignment is an assessment though, it isn't actual business work. I've seen before this suggestion that companies are trying to get free work out of candidates, but I find that really hard to believe.

I don't know if you're suggesting that interviews should assign actual tickets in an interview, but that seems nearly impossible to do in practice. I've never got back work from an interview or assessment that was anything near production code - nor would I expect to. It's to get a sense of the level of their real world coding skills are since there is such a variance between developers.

The reality is, their core business is law. They probably don't hugely care about IT as long as it works.

The most likely thing, if they found out, is they'd give him some other IT stuff to do as well to fill his time (which he may also be able to automate). I doubt they'd want to fire him - as long as the task is being done appropriately.