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What do you mean when you say "French" or "non-French"?

What are the words you are scared of using if you answered this question?

Why won't you use them?

I asked ChatGPT to write a function which takes a year as input and determines whether or not it's a leap year - a classic basic programming question. It answered perfectly. Of course, there are lots of examples of this code.

Then I asked it "Could you adapt the function so that it works on Venus, where years have 224 days?"

It offered me a new version of the function, which simply checks if the year is a multiple of 224. Apparently on Venus the number of days in a year and the frequency of leap years are the same number. It qualified the answer: "It's worth noting that this function is based on current knowledge and understanding of Venus..."

I asked it "What if we want the function to use Venus days as well as Venus years?"

It offered me the same function, except that a) the variable 'years' was now called 'days', and b) the modulus was changed from 224 to 224.701.

So I asked "Should the argument to the last function be a float or an integer?"

It gave me 3 pars of complete nonsense about how the difference between floats and integers affects the precision of calculating leap years (while again warning that the exact value of the Venus year might change).

ChatGPT does a very good imitation of a certain type of candidate I've occasionally interviewed, who knows almost nothing but is keen to try various tricks to bluff you out, including confidently being wrong, providing lots of meaningless explanation, and sometimes telling you that you are wrong about something. I have never hired anyone like this, but I've occasionally come close.

I have been trying various interview questions on ChatGPT, originally because my colleagues warned me that a candidate who was surreptitiously using it could ace almost any interview. I was skeptical and I have not been convinced.

But I think it's actually a great exercise to practice interviewing on it. If ChatGPT can answer your questions accurately (try to be fair and ignore its slightly uncanny tone), then you probably need better questions. If you are quite technical and put some thought into it, you should be able to come up with things which are both novel enough and hard enough that ChatGPT will simply flounder catastrophically. (I'm not referring to 'tricks' like the Venus question, but real questions on how to achieve something moderately complicated using code.) It's a really good reminder too that when we ask candidates to write code, we should examine and debug it in detail, then ask decent follow-up questions, rather than just accepting something that looks right.

I think this phenomenon is actually something else: in the 1950s people who were commonly depicted as being part of society tended to have a house with a garden and a nuclear family structure where the husband, but not the wife, worked.

There were plenty of people who couldn't afford a house with a garden, or who didn't have one for other reasons, or who were not married or had a different type of family structure, or men who didn't work, or women who did work. But they were made invisible by the lack of portrayal, both in that society's image of itself, and in our image of that society.

(Or by a different mechanism: when people outside of that structure were portrayed, it was as outsiders and aberrations, whereas married couples with children who lived in houses were portrayed as the norm. For example, the protagonist of 'On the Road', commonly associated with that era, does not have a fixed address or a job, nor a wife, nor children. The protagonist of 'Invisible Man', a book central to the discourse of who does and does not get represented in media, lives in a basement apartment alone without a wife or family. The protagonist of 'The Bell Jar' is a woman who lives alone in an apartment in New York while working at a job, then in her mother's house, then in a mental asylum.)

You seem to be the one subject to taboos. You don't want to say what you mean by 'French' or 'non-French'.

I am perfectly capable of understanding and discussing what can be meant by 'Frenchness', and what I mean by it.

But the point of the GP comment was that language has not 'evolved', but is intentionally being used in a misleading way here.

I understand your reluctance to answer a straightforward question: you know exactly what you are, and yet you are ashamed to admit to it.

This is not the political culture of Vercingetorix, nor of Charles de Gaulle ;)

What do you mean by "non-french"?

Yes, and I'd rather go to prison in Munich than to Rikers Island.

If investors see layoffs and judge that the company just became more valuable, either they are right or they are wrong.

If they are right, then isn't the job of management, in a principle fundamental to the US economic system, to follow their wishes? Management doesn't have to do whatever investors ask for, but there is no real justification for them to do something which is both against their wishes and against the interests of the company.

If they are wrong, then surely the problem is that most US companies are having their decision-making driven by a group of people who are paramount but who are making misguided or misinformed decisions. Any tweaking of the exact incentives which doesn't solve this problem is both a distraction and subject to the law of unintended consequences.

Note that I am not strongly in favor of either sweeping layoffs or of the specific US variant of capitalism in general. I just think that one should be honest about to what extent problems are unavoidable to the extent that one cleaves to a given system.

I have lived and travelled in France for around 40 years and I don't at all recognize what you are describing.

Your claims appear to be based on suggesting that you (and, in a laughable falsehood, the wide range of opinion in French society) knows for a fact that this situation exists, but if anyone does not agree with you, that is merely their opinion, since it is impossible to measure.

Firstly, so that I can understand the strength of the correlation, can you pinpoint when "women were given freedom there" and what that consisted of?

Secondly, regardless of the cause of the lowered birth rate, do you agree that freedom for women is a fundamental and inalienable right, and that the problem is how society should advance so that birth rates and family formation go back up without rolling back freedon?

"the cultural norm of the country, as well as its "visual" identity has shifted from a european country to a (mostly) african one"

This is delusional, and yes, I did read the rest of your comment.

I believe it was heavily inspired by QuickTest.

One of the amazing things about Hypothesis is that it's very good at generating weird inputs that trigger bugs in cases when it would be impossible to test more than a tiny fraction of all possible inputs.

There is very very clever code that does things like create weird dicts where the keys are weird strings and the values are other weird dicts or arrays or strings..

If it finds a test failure, it then applies a reduction step, where it replaces the extremal test case with something slightly more benign and checks if the test still fails. This allows it to generate a test case which is just hairy enough to trigger the bug, but no more. This makes it easier to understand why that specific test case fails.

Several answers on that page suggest that daily operation of circuit breakers is not harmless.