I am trying out a handyman copilot for small repairs and these folks also have similar vibes. I think job protection is their no 1 priority. The field is rife with regulations as well. Some jobs need licensed professionals while other jobs don't. This varies state by state. It's a regulatory minefield from what I have seen. Perhaps rightfully so because it's your home and if something goes wrong, a lot is at stake.
It is almost always impossible to get someone to repair right away. The supply is nowhere near demand, so it is a problem worth solving IMO.
I have seen hallucinations in comments more than in code. In some of the code hallucinations, I can correct them myself. The hallucinations are obvious. try without finally blocks etc.
So my workflow is to just review every bit of code the assistant generates and sometimes I ask the assistant (I'm using Cody) to revisit a particular portion of the code. It usually corrects and spits out a new variant.
My experience has been nothing short of spectacular in using assistants for hobby projects, sometimes even for checking design patterns. I can usually submit a piece of code and ask if the code follows a good pattern under the <given> constraints. I usually get a good recommendation that clearly points out the pros and cons of the said pattern.
I have a unique related problem. My left leg calf muscle is almost an inch smaller than my right calf muscle. I just noticed it this year. Felt so weird. Why would there be imbalance in calf muscle growth to such an extreme degree. Then I tried to do a single leg calf raise on the left leg and couldn't do it. I still can't do it after 6-7 months. I must admit I am not training the left calf muscle at all, just the usual running and some sporadic squats.
This could have something to do with motor neurons not firing or something I don't know. I went to a physical therapist who suggested some calf and toe stretches and it seemed ridiculous to me. Like why would I exercise a muscle or a bunch of bones that is not functioning as expected, wouldn't that exacerbate the problem ? He didn't give a convincing answer but this paper makes me think he was spot on.
Isolating and exercising the calf muscles could probably help fire those neurons I don't know.I should do some more study on this. It's not debilitating now but I don't know what will be the impact on my balance 20-30 years from now. I am 47.
I have the same thing, the PT is right. Activating your big toe kicks off a chain of biomechanics up to your hip muscles (glutes) and will correct your gait and muscles that are not firing if you work on it consciously. I still deal with it when I forget the problem went away and sit in my computer chair all day leaning on one side not using my other calf.
Awareness is key and conscious work will activate it over time.
Maybe totally unrelated, but I had a PT say people that run or walk on the side of a road experience these kinds of asymmetries.
The side of many roads is graded slightly to drain, and if you have a habit of always walking on, say, the right in N. America to go with traffic, you're consistently training asymmetrically without realizing it.
Do you spend a lot of time driving an automatic transmission? After putting 150,000 miles on my car, I'm kind of surprised I don't have more asymmetry in my legs.
More likely you favor one leg when exercising, which is common and needs to be adjusted for. Asymmetric atrophy creates a feedback loop which exacerbates the atrophy.
I think handwriting is a very personal trait. Some people value good handwriting and they write neat even when they write fast. Others don't. Sadly, a vast majority if the world exists in the other camp. This is why they invented typewriters. If everyone conformed to good handwriting and could agree upon a good writing style standard, the world would have been very different.
I like good handwriting, but good, fast handwriting takes thousands of hours of practice. We used to spend a good chunk of school drilling it into kids, but now it's really hard to justify everyone spend that kind of time when we can technology our way around it and there are other valuable skills to learn.
That’s the same argument for using calculators in the past 30 years and ChatGPT in the last few years. At some point, we lose far more than we gain by “technology our way around” our early development.
Why bother having campfires when we have portable space heaters? Heck, why bother camping at all if we have a nice comfortable space at home? More generally, why do any of the things that connect us to our past?
Personally, I think it’s important to learn by doing and then provide a “here is how we made that easier, and now you know why” type of foundation. Perhaps better is having people develop versions of those solutions for themselves so we don’t just expect someone else to solve all of our problems.
I've known people who valued good handwriting but weren't particularly capable of writing neatly, and others who didn't particularly value it but were capable of staying neat while writing quickly. I think you might be overestimating how much of it is tied to what people value.
That wikipedia article was a great read but I have to agree with GP.
> According to the standards taught in secretarial schools in the mid-20th century, a business letter was supposed to have no mistakes and no visible corrections.
Certainly, there were other reasons like speed, repeatability, official-looking, etc... too. Most typewriters wanted to be cheaper and on-demand printing presses. Some even managed variable width fonts! :)
Oh, the original comment is certainly right in spirit, I just wanted to be pedantic.
But I'm not sure why you quote something about the md-20th century, when we are talking about the (many) invention(s) of the typewriter? They were already old and well-established technology at that point in time.
Not to mention software like peoplesoft, SAP and servicenow. Absolute shit interfaces that employees have to deal with day in and day out.
Now, an in-house tool built on top of this Anthropic API can save hours of drudgery. I can already see sales teams smiling at the new 'submit your expense report' button.
Why is it so hard to just accept this and be transparent about motives ? It's fair to say 'we were not aligned with Sam, we tried an ouster, didn't pan out so the best thing for us to do is to leave and let Sam pursue his path", which the entirely company has vouched for.
Instead, you get to see grey area after grey area.
Because, for some weird reason, our culture has collectively decided that, even if most of us are capable of reading between the lines to understand what's really being said or is happening, it's often wrong and bad to be honest and transparent, and we should put the most positive spin possible on it. It's everywhere, especially in professional and political environments.
For a counter example of what open and transparent communincation from a C-level tech person could look like, have a read of what the SpaCy founder blogged about a few months ago:
Stakes are orders of magnitude lower in spaCy case compared to OpenAI (for announcer and for people around them). It's easier to just be yourself when you're back on square one.
This is not a culture thing imo, being honest and transparent makes you vulnerable to exploits, which is often a bad thing for the ones being honest and transparent in a high competition area.
Being dishonest and cagey only serves to build public distrust in your organization, as has happened with OpenAI over the past couple of months. Just look at all of the comments throughout this thread for proof of that.
Edit: Shoot, look at the general level of distrust that the populous puts in politicians.
It is human nature to use plausible deniability to play politics and fool one’s self or others. You will get better results in negotiations if you allow the opposing party to maintain face (i.e. ego).
hypocrisy has to be the core of every corporate or political environment I have observed recently. I can count the occasions or situations where telling the simple truth is helpful. even the people who tell you to tell the truth are often the ones incapable of handling it.
From experience unless the person mention their next "adventure"(within like a couple of months) or gig it usually means a manager or c-suite person got axed and was given the option to gracefully exit.
By the barrage of exits following Mira's resignation, it does look like Sam fired her, the team got the wind of this and are now quitting in droves. This is the thing about lying and being polite. You can't hide the truth for long.
Mira's latest one liner tweet 'OpenAI is nothing without it's people" speaks volumes.
That's giving too much credit to McKinsey. I'd argue it's systemic brainrot. Never admit mistakes, never express yourself, never be honest. Just make up as much bullshit as possible on the fly, say whatever you have to pacify people. Even just say bullshit 24/7.
Not to dunk on Mira Murati, because this note is pretty cookie cutter, but it exemplifies this perfectly. It says nothing about her motivations for resigning. It bends over backwards to kiss the asses of the people she's leaving behind. It could ultimately be condensed into two words: "I've resigned."
It's a management culture which is almost colonial in nature, and seeks to differentiate itself from a "labor class" which is already highly educated.
Never spook the horses. Never show the team, or the public, what's going on behind the curtain.. or even that there is anything going on. At all time present the appearance of a swan gliding serenely across a lake.
Because if you show humanity, those other humans might cotton on to the fact that you're not much different to them, and have done little to earn or justify your position of authority.
“the entire company has vouched for” is inconsistent with what we see now. Low/mid ranking employees were obviously tweeting in alignment with their management and by request.
People, including East Asians, frequently claim "face" is an East Asian cultural concept despite the fact that it is omnipresent in all cultures. It doesn't matter if outsiders have figured out what's actually going on. The only thing that matters is saving face.
Everyone involved works at and has investments in a for-profit firm.
The fact that it has a structure that subordinates it to the board of a non-profit would be only tangential to the interests involved even if that was meaningful and not just rhe lingering vestige of the (arguably, deceptive) founding that the combined organization was working on getting rid of.
Because if you are a high level executive and you are transparent on those things, and if it backfires, it will backfire hard for your future opportunities, since all the companies will view you as a potential liability. So it is always safer and wiser option to not say anything in case of any risk of it backfiring. So you do the polite PR messaging every single time. There's nothing to be gained on the individual level of being transparent, only to be risked.
Their (Ilya and Mira) perspective on anything is so far remote from your (and my) perspectives that trying to understand their personal feelings behind their resignation is an enterprise doomed to failure.
Predictability is great for everyone, from managers to directors to even company investors. What everyone wants to see is consistent yoy/qoq growth. We should all strive for this kind of consistency.
However, balancing this consistency with new adventures is where things get a bit tricky. I kind of like Jeremy Howard's approach to learning here. I don't know if it can be applied to a company or a team scale.
Spend 50% of your time on predictable tasks, those that you have mastery over and can do comfortably.
Spend 50% of your time on frontier stuff things that break your comfort zone.
Over time the some of the latter tasks will get into the former category, thereby leading to automation organically.
The ratio of comfort:frontier tasks is personal and let's engineers choose their ratio. Some may want the ratio tilted in the comfort zone (greater predictability ) while some may choose to adventure into the frontier zone (lesser predictability ). An organization should have space for both. Even the same individual can alter these ratios based on their life stages, external circumstances.
Put rather simply, a good software engineer can also choose to be a good technician and vice versa. Why should these roles be mutually exclusive ?
> Predictability is great for everyone, from managers to directors to even company investors.
I think it's terrible for the knowledge worker, causing both great emotional turmoil (at the dissonance of expectation versus how they actually perform) and reducing quality of output greatly (by forcing output when more dweel/pondering time is required).
Hammock Driven Development by Rich Hickey was such a an enormous relief of a talk to run into, back in the day, hit upon so many tensions & frustrations I had because business Taylorism expected consistent output, expected me to know the process from a->b and to be able to say at every point I am x% of the way through the journey. The businesses doesn't know what's happening but cares enormously about making sure it's extracting as much consistent "progress" as it can out of me/us.
HDD talked to how analysis & understanding, how development & problem solving iteration really work. And it works nothing like what a business wants. And what a business wants hurts the quality & doesn't permit ideal outcomes to emerge & surface. https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
And the human factors are that dwell and pondering are essential for creative and knowledge work. Time in the hammock opens possibilities, fuels the muses.
> Spend 50% of your time on frontier stuff things that break your comfort zone.
That would be so excellent. I still get that mandate a lot, but so often I see peers whose whole life is cranking out pre-digestrd ready-to-go tickets. I want to see a world where we raise up engineers & engineering, not just ticket technicians.
Their goal might not even be to build a high growth high revenue business. Sustainable yes. So perhaps low growth, low - med revenue and who knows potentially high revenue.
If anyone else had done this, I'd be very skeptical but give Andrej's penchant for teaching and how good he is really at it, I am super excited about this endeavour.
Let's not forget the inbound and organic interest this would drive. For the intro LLM Course, people are already submitting PRs and Andrej is requesting them not to. Imagine that!
Update June 25. To clarify, the course will take some time to build. There is no specific timeline. Thank you for your interest but please do not submit Issues/PRs.
It's high time someone disrupted the damn desk phone network of these hospitals. It's definitely not a technical hurdle in 2024. All calls go on the data network. You route your calls out of the main router and any call that gets routed in such manner will have the ID of the router. Tag the router id to the hospital or hotel and be done with.
Is it not this simple ? With dual SIMs any phone can serve 2 lines so employees officially switch to the hospital e-sim within the hospital premises.
Or maybe telecommunications in general need disruption. Instead of having a number that anyone in the world can call, I should provide an abstract identity to a contact. When I approve that entity to contact me, and they get a unique identifier that only their identity can use to contact me, I decide how important their calls are to me:
1. Phone rings no matter what (doctors and other high profile contacts that I do not want to miss a call from)
2. Phone rings unless sleep mode active (family/friends). A second call within 3 minutes rings through in case of emergency.
3. Call goes straight to pre-recorded message (generic or unique to that identity) that tells them to text me their message/request (or when AI gets good enough, and it doesn't seem like it there yet for all accents, it transcribes their voicemail message).
4. Caller can leave a message but it is completely ignored by me and I don't know they left a message unless I go and check my spam folder.
I can change the call handling of any identity at any time, and there should also be an email and text message layer on top of this system so the same rules apply and I choose who can contact me with those methods as well.
I never get spam calls, but I do get a lot of spam SMS messages - also in Germany. (They're almost always fake 2FA activation messages from some bank I'm not a customer of)
You should try fast.ai practical deep learning for coders part 1 and 2. It's quite dated 2022 but the principles you learn are very valid and highly useful in today's context. Especially self attention, transformers and the newer architectures based on these concepts.
Many who have done the fast.ai course have pivoted their careers into not only ML engineers but also research scientists.
It's not an easy course so to speak so you have to work through it in your spare time.
Since you are interested in deploying/scaling feel free to jump straight ahead to lesson 2 of part 1. Jeremy is an awesome teacher. I don't like or come from academia so I find his style of teaching very wholesome.
It is almost always impossible to get someone to repair right away. The supply is nowhere near demand, so it is a problem worth solving IMO.
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