wadadadad

100% interviews are about communication and demonstrating thought process; after going through some rounds of interviewing candidates myself, any candidate who can adequately explain what they're thinking and how they arrive at their conclusions will be able to demonstrate their skills much more thoroughly than 'just use Postgres'.

That being said, it's also on the ones giving the interviews to push the candidates and ensure that they really are receiving the applicants best. The interviewers don't want to miss potentially great candidates (interviews are hard and nerve-wracking, and engineers aren't known for their social performance), and thus sometimes need to help nudge the candidates in the right direction.

Interesting that here ChatGPT was able to generally get the correct idea! Two points:

The answer is not specifically 'soccer ball', but just ball. I don't think that I would deem that as acceptable, though certainly it's very close! Maybe others would disagree, haha, and as I stated above, I do think riddles are open to interpretation.

Second, as to why my own prompting didn't get- I didn't specify 'identify the object'. I wonder if prompting that it wasn't necessarily a physical thing was helpful enough to get it significantly closer (still funny that the first answer I received was 'escape room').

As to GP: - in sports with balls, there is 'chaos'. I was aiming more from the audience. In some of the larger arenas of professional sports, there's a complete ruckus on certain actions. - The shape is moot; there's many different kinds of 'balls'. Compare football to soccer to tennis. - Balls all have an objective, a goal, usually to get the ball to a specific location ('goal' in the typical sense, but the vagueness could imply general use as well). This was mostly to imply a sense of purpose and use of the riddle's answer.

Again, not saying this is the best riddle ever, just trying to make a point.

I don't think riddles are necessarily 'solvable' in that there's only one right answer; the very fact that they're open to interpretation, but when you get the 'right' answer it (hopefully) makes sense. So if an AI/LLM can answer such a nebulous thing correctly- that's more of the angle I was going at.

Regarding the wizards example, I'm a bit confused; I was thinking that the best way to judge answers for problem solving/creativity was for correctness. I'll think more on whether the 'thought process' counts in and of itself.

The answer to my riddle is 'ball'.

This is an interesting idea, but as you stated, it's all logic; it's hard to come up with an idea where you don't have to explain concepts yet still is dissimilar enough to be in the training.

In your second example with the wizards- did you notice that it failed to follow the rules? Step 3, the witch was summoned by the wizard. I'm curious as to why you didn't comment either way on this.

On a related note, instead of puzzles, what about presenting riddles? I would argue that riddles are creative, pulling bits and pieces of meaning from words to create an answer. If AI can solve riddles not seen before, would that count as creative and not solving problems in their dataset?

Here's one I created and presented (the first incorrect answer I got was Escape Room; I gave it 10 attempts and it didn't get the answer I was thinking of):

---

Solve the riddle:

Chaos erupts around

The shape moot

The goal is key

I onboarded a junior (not an intern though) as an otherwise solo engineer, and there definitely is something different about both being able to explain to them in such as way that they start to understand, and also watching them grow. I find it fulfilling, something that I don't think can be replicated with AI (and also good for everyone in sharing experience). Maybe it helps that the junior is very interested in the job and growing.

That being said, there's also a lot of time in teaching and explaining that isn't directly pushing work forward, so there's that to consider.

Out of curiosity, what references were you looking at for the setup?

I want to say that the game play was really well done, I really enjoyed the progression (speed of enemies, number of enemies, how quickly they descended) and mechanics (being able to shoot their bullets!)! I don't recall exactly how the original invaders worked, so I'm not sure how much was copied vs changed, but I very much enjoyed this as a brief break. Thank you!

This deviated from the original topic, and I'm not following your metaphor flows. How does your post relate to consultants specifically? Is there an implication that consultants not part of the 'mess'?

You say "No automatic force... whether (the agencies) are achieving any progress)". Don't we have oversight agencies and committees? I'm not following your 'grow and grow'; can you provide evidence that all agencies just 'grow and grow' without achieving progress? If not all agencies, then be specific.

Also, what evidence is there of "stuff" that is "irrational, corrupt, and not serving the mission"? Which mission? What corruption? What evidence of this? Can you speak more specifically here?

Please provide evidence to claims so we can have an discussion around this.

I'm not sure I'm following what you mean by 'social roles'. Which roles are you referring to here?

I'll disagree that it's not at least individual malicious choice, though. Someone decided that they needed to fake/change user agents (as one example), and implemented it. Most likely it was more than one person- some manager(s)/teams probably also either suggested or agreed to this choice.

I would like to think at some point in this decision making process, someone would have considered 'is it ethical to change user agents to get around bans? Is it ethical to ignore robots.txt?' and decided not to proceed, but apparently that's not happening here...

I appreciate your attempt to clarify here, but your citation link above in 2) is for 'trangender', a misspelling (but it does search successfully).

This isn't a 'search problem'; searching for 'gender' and 'transgender' always and immediately redirects back to the main page. I also tested several unrelated searches without any issues (HIV, genome, public, potato).

On this topic, the problem I have with "talk less" as advice is that although simply by 'talking less' you make room for silence and other people to fill it in, it doesn't actively instigate other people to talk. I want other people to pro-actively give their opinions and thoughts.

Thank you for providing the link for this- it's greatly interesting to see how such a failure could occur through human means and the significant impact it had, and how it can directly relate to academia (really, many topics, anywhere there is a '$SYSTEM').

The cover ups in the article were also interesting- a deliberate staging to Mao to prevent uncovering the truth. I'm not sure how this compares directly (is there a centralized authority with power to fix the issue that is being lied to, compared to the decentralized "rotten" system, where the status quo is understood and 'accepted').

I don't understand what you're trying to say here. To share my experience as someone who volunteers, I find it to be one of the most gratifying (humbling, helpful, makes me see the value of life) things, and I think it's worthwhile to share the idea that it could help someone who is searching for meaning. I wholeheartedly recommend volunteering for everyone who can afford it (which I recognize not everyone can). I'm not sure GP here needs to necessarily state "I volunteer and found it worthwhile" every time they recommend it.

What are these "obvious reasons" that volunteering won't help someone seeking direction?

I also don't follow why you haven't stated whether you've personally tried volunteering and whether it's "worked" for you, particularly when you seem dismissive of it and seem to looking for personal reasoning from others.

Thank you very much for your time, I appreciate it! It definitely seems automated schema updating is necessary if you're doing more than a couple of databases, and you raised many other good points that I hadn't fully considered. I can definitely appreciate larger clients wanting their own dedicated databases, so planning for that initially could be a wise choice. Thank you again!