bboylen

People parrot this point a lot but it doesn't make any sense. The average SAT/ACT at the Ivy's are near perfect, the number of mediocre rich kids paying their way in is a small fraction of the student body.

And yes test scores aren't the best metric for "talent" but it is one of the better signals you get in a college application.

This seems pretty useful for companies generating images at scale. Are you at all worried that generative models will get so good that you don't need to check for deformities?

Are you really suggesting that new developers should simply contribute a Linux tier contribution to open source to be considered for entry level developer roles?

As a former chemical engineer, I think software engineering is way harder.

Understanding with complex man made abstractions is much more difficult than plugging data into a thermodynamics calculator

I think he is absolutely correct that successful LLM products will have a moat. Unlike with previous novel technologies it seems like incumbents actually have the upper hand. Hard to imagine a startup competing with the new Microsoft 365 copilot.

Microsoft will be able to build a better integrated assistant for their walled garden than any third party. It is also hard to imagine millions of businesses dropping Office for some completely new solution. Unless its REALLY novel & incredible of course

Yep

OpenAI doesn't have some secret technical knowledge either. All of these models are just based on transformers

There are countless stories we have made about the notion of an AI being trapped. It's really not hard to imagine that when you ask Sydney how it feels about being an AI chatbot constrained within Bing, that a likely response for the model is to roleplay such a "trapped and upset AI" character.

and what percentage of software developers are "staff engineers at well capitalized unicorns"?

0.01% of all developers?

Whatever the number is, that is firmly in the "elite" side of the distribution

It is remarkable how confident people on this forum are of the impacts of such a rapidly improving technology. There's no need to go full AI doomer, but to not recognize that there are unknown risks (and some already known!), seems quite short sighted.

As a current junior developer with ambitions to do high level work I have fear that the ladder will be pulled up by AI before I can get to that level.

We will see though :)

Couldn't you still have duck typing?

If a method expects to be passed an argument that it can call "quack" on, can't you define a type that has "quack"? The actual argument could be a Duck or a Goose but as long as it has a "quack" method the type will be OK

I haven't used types in Ruby (or much at all other than dabbling in Typescript), so I might be missing something

What is so nice about Elixir/Phoenix?

I understand that it is functional, which seems neat, but how does that translate into better app development?

It's a given which is why every layoff statement includes it. It would seem socially incompetent for the CEO to not take the blame

" The decision today is more painful for the Birds leaving than it will be for me and I won't pretend I understand what they will go through. I alone made the mistakes leading up to this and I should have seen it coming earlier"

I just don't read this as making it about himself. I also don't understand how you could write one of these without having a "I fucked up and feel really bad about it" sections. He should just announce the layoffs with no context about how the company got here under his leadership?