I wish people were not so inclined to reply with "Ad Hominem Ridicule" one liners. I like a good joke, but such replies lack a certain level of content that addresses the point and feel "low effort".
I do agree that comparing the past with the present if fraught with complicated nuances, and people do tend to see the past with rose tinted glasses. But, I read Talwar's blog post more as a personal reflection on their experiences they are facing and not some kind of scientific treatise on what went wrong.
fair criticism; didn’t mean this as an ad hominem but rather a summarization of (as the comment I replied to points out) this genre of article that keeps coming up (and not just for programming); it’s exhausting mindset to see repeatedly and breaking it down into the core argument (“I liked things better when I was younger”) does have some value IMO
if this were titled “Java/JavaScript peaked” or “my reflections on XYZ” and written like that, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. but claiming programming peaked 15 years ago leads me to not feel bad about my summarization
You'll get old too one day and it will look a whole lot different watching the younguns stumble through completely avoidable mistakes and forget the long lessons of your life that weren't properly taught or were just ignored.
We have records from many periods in history of old men crowing about how society is collapsing because of the weak new generations. Thing is, maybe they were always right, and the new generations just had to grow up and take responsibility? And then again, maybe sometimes they were little too right and society did in fact collapse, but locally.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
Agreed! If anything, I think I'm tired of the "everyone says this when they get old!" hot take. Sometimes things really do get visibly worse and the intergenerational complaining about it is due to it really happening.
I bring this example up every time, but I'm a baseball fan. And seemingly every generation of fan has said there's more people striking out than there used to be. Is it because there part of getting old as a baseball fan? No! It's really happening. Strikeouts have quite literally been going up from one decade to the next for basically a century.
So sometimes it's because the thing is really happening. Environmental ecosystem collapse? Real. People having shorter attention spans every next generation? Real! Politics getting worse? Well, maybe the 1860s were worse, but the downward trajectory over the last 50 years seems pretty real. Inefficiency of increasingly automagic programming paradigms? Real!
Sometimes things are true even if old people are saying them.
> Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
Actually it's the opposite.
Strong men create hard times by trying to show to each other how strong they are. Hard times create weak men because during hard times strong men kill each other, thus mostly weak men remain. Weak men create good times because instead of trying to show their strength they just build stuff so that the world is easier for them. In good times people breed and the population returns to the mean with just enough strong men to start the cycle again.
WWII was the last time strong men created hard times. We are overdue for another round and it shows.
they were not right and I promise when I’m old, I will not have this attitude. it’s one of my least favorite types of people; and that’s precisely my point, old men have been saying society is collapsing since ancient times, yet here we are, with things better than ever
Fwiw I'm with you here. It's perfectly possible to stay excited about new stuff. Just.. take it for a spin! Find the good parts even when they re-make mistakes from the last time someone tried sth like this 2 decades ago.
Like, when React was new I had total Delphi deja vu. And then they went about reinventing MVC (not the Rails MVC, real MVC) and calling it "unidirectional data flow" instead of just MVC, and feeling all smart about themselves and doing proud conference talks, and I was like "this is just MVC but with worse naming".
But React also made it so that every component is designed to be reusable. Like, in Delphi you had a "Form" on which you dropped "Controls" and then you could also create your own controls if you were really advanced. But most people didn't feel like they were advanced enough, so code reuse was a mess. React made it so that every control (cough component) is reusable, because using components is the same as making components. That's a good idea! Purely functional UI, that's also a good idea! Then they threw OO out instead of fixing it, that was a terrible idea, but bottom line it's still great! Plus, Delphi didn't have to deal with the horrible mess that is HTML and CSS so it had it easy.
But yeah lots of people my age saw the same, saw how it was just Delphi all over again but with different mistakes, and focused on the mistakes. It really is purely an attitude thing.
I'm having a lot of fun with signals and SolidJS and observables now and it baffles me that something so elegant and fast took this long to be discovered (or more like, to get ergonomic and mainstream enough).
> I promise when I’m old, I will not have this attitude.
To my ears this is a hilariously naive statement. It sounds to me to be roughly the equivalent or a 7-year old saying "Adults have boring jobs where they sit at a desk all day. I hate it. I promise when I'm old I'm gonna be an Astronaut or play Major League Baseball."
It's not that they don't mean it, it's that one should make promises about a situation they can't yet understand. While some of those kids probably did end up being astronauts or baseball players 99%+ who made that promise didn't. It turns out that being an adult gives them perspective that helps them realize the reasons they want a desk job even if they don't like it, or for many they actually enjoy their desk job (ex they like to program).
So the same if a million young people all thought similarly, and then magically changed their view when they got there dont promises your going to be the one who will break the streak.
You might turn out to be an astronaut, but many people listening, based on good previous evidence will rightly assume you won't.
Read what you just wrote. You are just declaring a belief, not making an actual point.
Do you expect to learn? Get wiser?
If you do, you will eventually develop wisdom that younger people don’t have yet - or may never get. Younger people find new ways to do many things better, but regress in other ways. Lacking your (and your generation’s common) experiences.
Which is why the only old people who can’t see any real regression are … well I have yet to meet that kind of old person, other than those unfortunate to have dementia.
Also, every new better (or perceived better) way to do things has to reinvent many obvious things all over again. Things many won’t realize were already solved by previous practices. Which takes time.
So meanwhile, regressions.
And there is no assurance that new ways will really be better, after all regressions are addressed. Because it is impossible to see all the implications of complex changes.
Anyone who isn’t aware that the amount of today’s glue code, rewriting of common algorithms for slightly different contexts, the mush mash of different tools, platforms, and dependencies, and all their individual quirks, was a non-optimal outcome…
But the current pain points will drive a new way. And so it goes.
Progress is not smooth or monotonic.
It is a compliment to discount that you won’t also notice. Not a critique.
??? my point is someone who doesn’t know the first thing about me called me naive and made bold claims about my future that I’m certain are wrong; time will tell but there’s nothing of substance to discuss from their comment, hence my reply
you’ve also just said a ton of stuff I don’t disagree with, but I’m not sure what discussion you’re trying to have here
I do regret the time spent reading this article and participating in this comment section; that was naive of me!
> Anyone who learns anything looks back on a naive version of themselves. I remember thinking a lot like you, too.
I'm so glad that for the most part in my early internet days (early 2000s), I was pseudonymous. I tended to have very strong opinions about stuff I had barely just learned and didn't have experience to get nuances. My political opinions have completely flipped and I look back on my young firebrand days and unfortunately see lots of young people repeat the same vapid shit that I believed because I was ignorant but convinced it all followed from simplistic crap ideas I was raised with.
"...it’s one of my least favorite types of people; and that’s precisely my point, old men have been saying society is collapsing since ancient times, yet here we are, with things better than ever"
Which is a pretty strong opinion. Also, pretty much all societies that ever existed have collapsed. When that happens, life generally sucks and lots of people die. I'm not just talking about ancient Rome or Greece, or Easter Island, or the fall of dozens of different empires, or more recently South Sudan or Haiti.
Other people in thread called you naive. I won't insult you like that but just given the statements here, there's a whole lot of familiar-sounding overconfidence that reminds of things I'd have said in my 20s.
If you don't think they were at least sometimes right, to what do you instead attribute the various cases of socio-economic collapse documented throughout history?
I'm not sure that's directly analogous, though. We're talking about people looking at specific cultural trends and making reasoned arguments about specific causes and effects, not just saying "X will happen". Specific models and assumptions about how human societies work are often validated by historical example, and don't just predict end states, but sequences of events that extend over longer terms.
When people say they see history repeating itself, it's worth hearing them out.
> I’m saying if every generation has old men screaming “society is collapsing”, they aren’t right, even when they’re locally “right”
But every generation doesn't have old men screaming "society is collapsing" at the same rate. There's always a baseline of people with a "get off my grass" mentality, but if you factor that out, occurrence of people actually pointing out that the world is on a dangerous path isn't uniform from one era to the next. Very few people, if any, were seriously making such an argument 30 years ago.
People who are genuinely making reasoned arguments, and not just complaining about things being outside their comfort zone, should absolutely be taken seriously.
> claiming programming peaked 15 years ago is absurd
Well, what are you measuring? It certainly peaked in some dimensions 15 years ago. Whether you personally see those dimensions as important is of course a subjective question.
That's because the thesis it's expounding on isn't "old people don't like change", but rather "experienced people often see their juniors unknowingly making avoidable mistakes".
An interesting Reddit r/AskHistorians thread on the question """Does the aphorism "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times", accurately reflect the evolution of civilizations through history and across different cultures?"""
copying only the conclusion for a tl;dr: "The only way that the aphorism explains history is by reinforcing confirmation bias - by seeming to confirm what we already believe about the state of the world and the causes behind it. Only those worried about a perceived crisis in masculinity are likely to care about the notion of "weak men" and what trouble they might cause. Only those who wish to see themselves or specific others as "strong men" are likely to believe that the mere existence of such men will bring about a better world. This has nothing to do with history and everything with stereotypes, prejudice and bias. It started as a baseless morality tale, and that is what it still is."
That reply completely misunderstands the quote. It is about how people with integrity, who are willing and able to put out effort and endure difficulties to build a better future, do usually manage to make things better than those who do not.
It’s essentially a truism warning people that problems you ignore don’t fix themselves, and has nothing to do with gender or gender stereotypes, that’s a linguistic misunderstanding. In this context, “men” is gender neutral and means “people.” In old english, the word “men” is explicitly gender neutral and there was a different word, “wēr” for male people, which is still used in some contexts, e.g. “werewolf” means wolf man.
I’m not sure what you mean. I don’t see a bias here, the point is plainly stated: the notion of weak men is dubious. You might not agree, but then engage with something substantial.
If you don’t see a bias in political communication (and that is what all of this is), then chances are very high you share the bias.
Abundance allows comfort, comfort enables complacency, and complacency can weaken the social fabric by encouraging short-term gratification over long-term maintenance.
People worry about masculinity because masculinity requires structured, pro-social outlets to not be toxic. A aimless or misdirected male population is an incredibly corrosive and/or dangerous thing. It can rot out a society from within, or make a society susceptible to subversion from without.
Societies use rhetoric about strength because if a society does not maintain systems that cultivate competence, responsibility, purpose, and pro-social ambition (especially in its most impulsive members), it becomes brittle.
You're doing the same assuming "good times = comfort = weakness" as a thing you already think, which is what the long reply I linked is debunking. What you said implies an opposite, something like: scarcity and famine strengthens the social fabric by encouraging long-term thinking over short-term maintenance. Actually it doesn't, scarcity leads to dog-eat-dog short-term survival tactics anything from stealing from neighbours, eating next year's seeds, up to eating the farm dog or selling the farm machinery or cannibalism, and leads to squalor, disease, and fire risks because nobody has time or energy or resources to spare on anything but the most urgent survival.
Abundance, by contrast, allows seed saving, food storage for winter, spare resources to use on washing and hygiene and medicine and recovering from illness, rule of law and enforcement, time away from subsistence farming and scavenging for food to enable things like developing metalworking skills, inventing, practicing archery, spending time on other society-building rituals like building churches and going to church.
> "A aimless or misdirected male population is an incredibly corrosive and/or dangerous thing"
If they are "incredibly dangerous" does that not make them "strong"? These are supposed to be the "weak men" created by "good times", aren't they? Are they strong men created by weak times who are themselves creating weak times by rotting society? Or are they strong because they are men, independent of the times? Does this fit into the saying at all?
> scarcity and famine strengthens the social fabric by encouraging long-term thinking over short-term maintenance
Famine is not isomorphic to “hard times”, and particularly not what the aphorism is referring to: self-created hard times, wherein a society’s ability to self-sustain and compete externally is needlessly curtailed.
> If they are "incredibly dangerous" does that not make them "strong"?
I said corrosive and/or dangerous, and weakness can be both corrosive and dangerous.
What you linked to was not a debunking. It was a political viewpoint. Reasonable arguments exist for a different one.
> "particularly not what the aphorism is referring to"
The aphorism does not say what it is referring to, you are making this up so it says what you want it to say (which is bias). This wouldn't be a problem if you used that to make a point and argue your point, but it is a problem when you just go "I imagine that it means something else, so you're wrong". Self-created hard times such as ... what? If laziness in farming doesn't create famine in winter... what hard times are more relevant than that for a society in 0 AD? "Needlessly curtailed" by who or what effect?
> "I said corrosive and/or dangerous, and weakness can be both corrosive and dangerous."
Can it. Is there any way to measure this weakness? Is it actually a thing?
> The aphorism does not say what it is referring to
In which case it makes no falsifiable claims. If “hard times,” “weak men,” and “strong men” have no stable meaning, the cycle can’t explain anything and can be retrofitted to any narrative. There would be nothing to argue for or against.
That isn’t the case. “Hard times” in this context means the cumulative internal consequences of institutional decay, complacency, and short-termism. Not natural disasters. That’s why your famine example is irrelevant.
> Is there any way to measure this weakness? Is it actually a thing?
Sociological concepts are evaluated by their broad effects, not by a single scalar value. Declining institutional competence, eroded norms, reduced accountability, and loss of collective purpose are both observable and historically recurrent.
That’s your opinion, but like I said it’s not valid to imply that it is the normal view and those not agreeing are biased. Instead of trying to hear understand and challenge what historians have to say you flee intellectually, which is ironic given your take on strong men.
I’m not historian but for example I could challenge the idea that a rhetoric about strength and keeping a masculine ideal for the young male population was non existent in European feodality where only nobility had the privilege of fighting, and 90% of the population were farmers. Or that 2000 years ago Jesus already challenged the idea that men needed to be strong in the traditional sense, and that real courage was loving and forgiving among others. I could go on with fashion and clothes but maybe just look at a West European king painting to reevaluate what masculinity is supposed to look like traditionally.
My understanding is that your rhetoric appears only recently (and is therefore not traditional) coinciding with nationalism rise and the need for bodies to throw in the total war (another modern invention) meat grinder.
You can disagree, and I’m open to hearing your counter arguments, because I’m not dismissing you as biased.
> Instead of trying to hear understand and challenge what historians have to say
One self-described historian. On a Reddit post. Let’s not pretend this is the unified or authoritative voice of the discipline.
> I could go on with fashion and clothes but maybe just look at a West European king painting to reevaluate what masculinity is supposed to look like traditionally.
You’re conflating aesthetic masculinity with functional masculinity, and that’s a category error. The aphorism isn’t about how men dressed in the 17th century or how they signaled status — it’s about what kind of men can sustain a civilization.
In this context, “strong men” refers to individuals who demonstrate the discipline, competence, long-term responsibility, and willingness to bear risk that are required to build, maintain, and defend the institutions that keep a society stable — especially when conditions are difficult. It’s a sociological concept, not an aesthetic one, and it has nothing to do with your personal distaste (or favor) for particular cultural aesthetic expressions of masculinity.
Everything you've said about comfort and complacency is equally if not more true of scarcity though. Scarcity leads directly to short-term thinking because there's no future to plan for or maintain. Erosion of social bonds happens as desperation increases and people turn to grifting and taking advantage of each other. The original quote is a little too tidy, an oversimplification that fails to grasp a complex reality and seems to have its own agenda/bias. Which you presumably agree with or you would have caught it. The truth is that there are varying levels of easy and hard times, and either one can "create" either kind of man. (And I'm ignoring masculinity as an issue; everybody knows whether they're a man or not.)
Or I can reframe it one more way: If good times create weak men, then all the rich people currently running things corruptly and soaking up whatever 90% of the wealth, are weak, and all the discipline and virtue in society are among the rest of us. Cultivate competence, responsibility, purpose and pro-social ambition in the super-rich and you might have something there.
"Strongly" and "just like everyone else" are contradictory, no? Assuming "strongly" is somehow relative. If you have an absolute measuring scale for bias-bringing-to-bear, I would love to hear about it.
Just because it says "men" doesn't mean it's about masculinity. Rather, my reading of "strong men" is closer to "people with a strong work ethic, integrity, and zero tolerance for corrupt grifters," and my reading of "weak men" is "people with zero work ethic who are in fact, corrupt grifters."
I think inertia and determinism play roles here. If you invest months in learning an established programming language, it's not likely to change much during that time, nor in the months (and years) that follow. Your hard-earned knowledge is durable and easy to keep up to date.
In the AI coding and tooling space everything seems to be constantly changing: which models, what workflows, what tools are in favor are all in flux. My hesitancy to dive in and regularly include AI tooling in my own programming workflow is largely about that. I'd rather wait until the dust has settled some.
totally fair. I do think a lot of the learnings remain relevant (stuff I learned back in April is still roughly what I do now), and I am increasingly seeing people share the same learnings; tips & tricks that work and whatnot (i.e. I think we’re getting to the dust settling about now? maybe a few more months? definitely uneven distribution)
also FWIW I think healthy skepticism is great; but developers outright denying this technology will be useful going forward are in for a rude awakening IMO
that’s not what he claimed, just to be clear. I’m too lazy to look up the full quote but not lazy enough to not comment this is A) out of context B) mis-phrased as to entirely misconstrue the already taken-out-of-context quote
>"I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code," Amodei said at a Council of Foreign Relations event on Monday.
>Amodei said software developers would still have a role to play in the near term. This is because humans will have to feed the AI models with design features and conditions, he said.
>"But on the other hand, I think that eventually all those little islands will get picked off by AI systems. And then, we will eventually reach the point where the AIs can do everything that humans can. And I think that will happen in every industry," Amodei said.
you’re once again cutting the quote short — after “all of the code” he has more to say that’s very important for understanding the context and avoiding this rage-bait BS we all love to engage in
edit: sorry you mostly included it paraphrased; it does a disservice (I understand it’s largely the media’s fault) to cut that full quote short though. I’m trying to specifically address someone claiming this person said 90% of developers would be replaced in a year over a year ago, which is beyond misleading
edit to put the full quote higher:
> "and in 12 months, we might be in a world where the ai is writing essentially all of the code. But the programmer still needs to specify what are the conditions of what you're doing. What is the overall design decision. How we collaborate with other code that has been written. How do we have some common sense with whether this is a secure design or an insecure design. So as long as there are these small pieces that a programmer has to do, then I think human productivity will actually be enhanced"
> "and in 12 months, we might be in a world where the ai is writing essentially all of the code. But the programmer still needs to specify what are the conditions of what you're doing. What is the overall design decision. How we collaborate with other code that has been written. How do we have some common sense with whether this is a secure design or an insecure design. So as long as there are these small pieces that a programmer has to do, then I think human productivity will actually be enhanced"
uh it proves the original comment I responded to is extremely misleading (which is my only point here); CEO did not say 90% of developers would be replaced, at all
The system prompt is usually accurate in my experience, especially if you can repeat the same result in multiple different sessions. Models are really good at repeating text that they've just seen in the same block of context.
The soul document extraction is something new. I was skeptical of it at first, but if you read Richard's description of how he obtained it he was methodical in trying multiple times and comparing the results: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vpNG99GhbBoLov9og/claude-4-5...
> The model extractions aren't always completely accurate, but most are pretty faithful to the underlying document. It became endearingly known as the 'soul doc' internally, which Claude clearly picked up on, but that's not a reflection of what we'll call it.
Extracted system prompts are usually very, very accurate.
It's a slightly noisy process, and there may be minor changes to wording and formatting. Worst case, sections may be omitted intermittently. But system prompts that are extracted by AI-whispering shamans are usually very consistent - and a very good match for what those companies reveal officially.
In a few cases, the extracted prompts were compared to what the companies revealed themselves later, and it was basically a 1:1 match.
If this "soul document" is a part of the system prompt, then I would expect the same level of accuracy.
If it's learned, embedded in model weights? Much less accurate. It can probably be recovered fully, with a decent level of reliability, but only with some statistical methods and at least a few hundred $ worth of AI compute.
It's very unclear to me how it could be recovered if it wasn't part of the system prompt, especially how Claude knows it's called the "soul doc" if that was an internal nickname.
I mean, obviously we know how it happened - the text was shown to it during late-era post-training or SFT multiple times. That's the only way it could have memorized it. But I don't see the point in having it memorize such a document.
There are a few weirder training methods that involve wiring explicit bits of knowledge into the model.
I imagine that if you use them hard enough with the same exact text, you can attain full word for word memorization. This may be intentional, or a side effect of trying to wire other knowledge into the model while this document is also loaded into the context.
Someone would have to create many testing situations where they trigger each and every sentence from this document. But thats actual engineering and not anything ai people are ever going to spend time and resources on.
If this is in fact the REAL underlying soul document as its being described: then what is most telling is that all of this is based on pure HOPE and DESPERATION at levels upon levels of wishing it worked this way. That just mentioning CSAM twice in the entire document without ever even defining those 4 letters in that sequence actually even mean is enough to fix "that problem" is what these bonkers people are doing, and absolutely raking the worlds biggest investors.
I actually have no sympathy for massive investors though, so go on smarty-pants keep shoveling in that cash, see what happens
genuinely asking, how do you network to get a job? esp. if you’re a new grad
where do you network? what do you network with these other humans on?
I do think I could get a job from my network because I’ve worked in the industry for years and done good work; I’m a little skeptical of advice to network to junior/new grads. I at least ignore those LinkedIn requests
Full disclosure, I'm the original author of the post.
Unfortunately, if you network to get a job, you're already months behind.
As I talk to college kids, I try to get them to find opportunities to network while they're in school, before they're desperate to get that first internship or job. They want to come at their search from a place of confidence, not anxiety.
There are so many meetups at universities (at least at the one near me) that they can mingle with the working world, and they stand out because they're there when it's mostly professionals.
Student or not, networking works best in-person when possible (conferences, meetups, professional events) where you get to know people and get truly curious about them. But after that, it involves following up and keeping the relationships warm, showing that you are interested in people professionally and can possibly help them with their problems, and that's no trivial investment.
If you do that enough, then you will build trust and rapport to create some opportunities, but it's admittedly a long game. It also has to be genuine or else people end up feeling used.
I think that there is a blocker that a lot of people have against networking in general because it feels gross and insincere. We've all seen people do it poorly, and so we avoid it, but it can be really fulfilling if done well.
I agree. For people that need a job right now, attending events to broaden your network could work, but first try to connect with people already in your network that you have established trusting professional relationships with. Preferably, you've talked to them recently and you have a good rapport, otherwise, it may not come across well.
I have had so many people reach out to me out of the blue when they're looking for job, after literally leaving me on read in LinkedIn DMs. And giving them the benefit of the doubt, I meet with them and try to help them out, and then I never hear from them again after they find a job. It doesn't feel great, which is why I always suggest being intentional about nurturing your close professional relationships. It doesn't have to be anything grand; just being kind and courteous goes a long way.
For anyone still in school, networking is easy for students who take initiative. This doesn't mean going to networking events. It means actually doing things with actual people: get involved in undergraduate research, sports, arts, Greek life, volunteering, on-campus part-time jobs, etc. Universities have those low-barrier low-risk things going on that you can just try out. Students who do this get the inside track on opportunities that aren't broadly advertised, so they face far less competition and are likely better fits for those opportunities due to the experience they got by being involved.
Stop applying for jobs and get involved in Greek life, sports, arts and working part time in the cafe serving food? You will meet so many people who are involved in your field and you get labelled as something other than a programmer.
This is terrible advice. Apply, cold call, create projects, job fairs, get co-op opportunties and ambush are better ways. Hackathons, github projects or small businesses can help. 9/10 CEOs will ignore your cold outreach but some won't.
Getting too busy making friends at the Greek houses will land you a marketing role if you are lucky. People need to associate you wish your craft. If they know you as a social guy you will get social roles. Any developer too social is suspect for many and ends up at best a pm.
When I was coming up people went into hardware/certifications to bridge the gap but moving from hardware to software was a gap too big for many as they became typecast.
- share your work online (twitter used to be the far-and-away best place for getting eyes, but this is a bit less clear now. youtube can work well, maybe also tiktok or sites like medium?)
- go to events/conventions/join clubs related to programming (need to be located near a large city for this)
- talk to other students/self-learners and wait for them to get to the next step
I’ve been unemployed a long time and have been thinking of improving at networking. These are what I came up with.
IMO, the first thing to recognize with networking is that there are at least 3 tiers of people you know, with regards to their ability to help in your job hunt. Tier 1 are the people who know your technical ability, and can directly vouch for you being a good contributor in your role. These people are great to have, but new grads simply don't have them, for the most part. Most of the people able to directly vouch for their competency are their equally looking-for-work peers, or pretty distant from industry professors. Tier 2 are the people who know you well enough to assert that you're not an absolute pain to be around. They don't necessarily know whether you're a genius double-stack 12x developer or a codemonkey, but they know you're reasonably likeable. Then there's Tier 3, who don't know anything about you personally, but they know people who know you.
New grads (myself included, back then), tend to discount Tier 2, because in their head the hiring process is looking for the single applicant with the best technical skills. When in reality, it's a lot more of a "who can we get quickly, who won't have a negative impact on team output or morale". Parents, Parent's friends, friends, and friend's parents all can fall into Tier 2, and absolutely should asked about whether their workplaces are hiring, and if so, if they could provide a recommendation.
Tier 3 is mostly useful for finding out about positions that don't necessarily get publicized, but depending on mutual connection to the shared acquaintance, might be willing to offer a recommendation.
With regards to where to network, that comes down to engaging with social gatherings that bring together a spread of people that aren't exclusively your direct peers. That's the stumbling block a lot of new grads find themselves in, which is that all their social time is spent with other new grads (or worse still, nobody at all). Clubs, parties thrown by friends' parents, university alumni events, hell, join the Oddfellows (YMMV, some lodges stopped recruiting after Vietnam). Conferences, whether technical or not. Hell, a step I recommend for everyone is going to bars and talking to strangers. Not highest density networking opportunity (except some gay bars in SF), but it's a pretty good environment to practice casual communication with people you have approximately nothing in common with, with very low stakes.
People are free to network right here on HN, and they do. I placed a friend I found here with another friend, so it does work.
However, it takes time.
If you need a job right now, it won't happen via ordinary networking, by which I mean networking with people whose job isn't recruitment.
If you think of networking as a pleasant way to keep some interesting ideas flowing and making some friends, circulation will get you things that you never even thought of.
(The best professional recruiters actually stir the pot for years and years before getting a return. Constantly keeping up with what various people are doing, just in case the time is right for someone to move on.)
I'm actually a bit surprised, because as a young guy I didn't do any networking beyond connecting with colleagues, which certainly helped. But I'm finding lots of young guys will reach out to me for advice. It's a good habit, but one I suspect more than half the population doesn't practice.
The other responders have it: forego the "networking" apps like LinkeIn. (It's really just a graph analysis tool for salespeople.). Do thinks with actual face-to-face connection. That's what will make you stand out.
If you are a new grad: go to alumni events. Go to alumni events! GO TO ALUMNI EVENTS.
If you are still in school: talk to your alumni and career office; they will be able to connect you better.
If you are in High School: consider a university with a co-op program.
The value of fact-to-face connection should not be underestimated.
Again: this may be uncomfortable for some people, but it is the way of the world.
do you have any evidence that the author used a LLM? focusing on the content, instead of the tooling used to write the content, leads to a lot more productive discussions
I promise you cannot tell LLM-generated content from non-LLM generated content. what you think you’re detecting is poor quality, which is orthogonal to the tooling used
Fair point, to be constructive here, LLMs seem to love lists and emphasizing random words / phrases with bold. Those two are everywhere. Not a smoking gun but enough to tune out.
I am not dismissing this as being slop and actually have no beef with using LLMs to write but yes, as you call out, I think it's just poorly written or perhaps I'm not the specific audience for this.
Sorry if this is bad energy, I appreciate the write up regardless.
counter example: me! autocorrect, spam filters, search engines, blurred backgrounds, medical image processing, even revenue forecasting with logistic regression are “AI” to me and others in the industry
I started my career in AI, and it certainly didn’t mean LLMs then. some people were doing AI decades ago
I would like to understand where this moral line gets drawn — neural networks that output text? that specifically use the transformer architecture? over some size?
When Stable Diffusion and GitHub Copilot came out a few years ago is when I really started seeing this "immoral" mentality about AI, and like you it really left me scratching my head, why now and not before? Turns out, people call it immoral when they see it threatens its livelihood and come up with all sorts of justifications that seem justifiable, but when you dig underneath it, it's all about their economic anxiety, nothing more. Humans are not direct creatures, it's much more emotional than one would expect.
The immoral thing about gen-AI is how it's trained. Regardless of source code, images or audio; the disregard of licenses and considering everything fair-use and ingesting them is the most immoral part.
Then there comes the environmental cost, and how it's downplayed to be able to pump the hype.
I'm not worried about the change AI will bring, but the process of going there is highly immoral, esp. when things are licensed to prohibit that kind of use.
When AI industry says "we'll be dead if we obey the copyright and licenses", you know something is wrong. Maybe the whole industry shouldn't build a business model of grabbing whatever they can and running with it.
Because of these zealots, I'm not sharing my photos anymore and considering not sharing the code I write either. Because I share these for the users, with appropriate licenses. Not for other developers or AI companies to fork, close and do whatever do like with them.
I find copyright itself immoral. Intellectual "property" is a made up fiction that shouldn't exist and only entrenches existing players, see Disney lobbying continuously to get higher and higher copyright durations all to keep Mickey under their control, until very recently; patents too are not filed by individual inventors anymore, it's massive corporations and patent trolls that serve no useful purpose. There is a reason many programmers like open source and especially copyleft, the latter of which is an explicit battling of the copyright system through its own means. Information should be free to be used, it should not be hoarded by so-called copyright holders.
I believe I failed to convey what I'm trying to say.
I'm a strong believer on copyleft. I only share my code with GNU/GPLv3+, no exceptions.
However, this doesn't allow AI companies to scrape it, remix it and sell it under access. This is what I'm against.
If scraping, closing and selling GPLv3 or strong copylefted material is fair use, then there's no use of having copyleft if it can't protect what's intended to be open.
Protecting copyleft requiring protecting copyright, because copyleft is built upon copyright mechanism itself.
While I'm not a fan of a big media company monopolizing something for a century, we need this framework to keep things open, as well. Copyright should be reformed, not abolished.
Consider regulatory capture though. If we have such entrenched copyright that only big companies can afford to pay the licensing fees, then we'll never have actually democratized open source models. It's actually a method of entrenched players of a market to want regulation because they know only they can comply with them, effectively turning it into a de facto monopoly. That is precisely why I want all information to be free, and to allow anyone and everyone to copy my works. And also because copyleft exists only as a response to copyright, otherwise those that favor copyleft would just prefer no copyright at all; many only prefer it because that's the only way to enforce their wishes to have copyright be abolished. In my mind, I see the higher order effects of only allowing big players to pay for copyright, because it's not as simple as licensing it to them. Hopefully I have changed your mind as to copyright, otherwise I'd be happy to continue the conversation.
Yes, copyleft exists as a response to copyright, but it builds something completely different with respect to what copyright promises. While copyright protects creators, copyleft protects users. This part is generally widely misunderstood.
Deregulation to prevent regulatory capture is not a mechanism that works when there's money and a significant power imbalance. Media companies can always put barriers to the consumption of their products through contracts and other mechanisms. Signing a contract not to copy the thing you get to see can get out of hand in very grim ways. Consumers are very weak compared to the companies providing the content, because of the desirability of the content alone, even if you ignore all the monetary imbalance.
Moreover, copyleft doesn't only prevent that kind of exploitation; it actively protects the user by making it impossible to close the thing you get. Copyleft protects all the users of the thing in question. When the issue is viewed in the context of the software, it not only allows the code to propagate indefinitely but also allows it to be properly preserved for the long run.
Leaving things free-for-all again not only fails to protect the user but also profits the bigger companies, since they have the power to hoard, remix, refine, and sell this work, which they get for free. So, it only carries water to the big companies' water wheels. Moreover, even permissive licenses depend on the notion of copyright to attribute the artifact to its original creator.
Otherwise, even permissively licensed artifacts can be embedded in the works of larger companies and not credited, allowing companies to slightly derive the things they got for free and sell them to consumers on their own terms, without any guardrails.
So abolishing copyright not only will further un-democratize things, but it'll make crediting the creators of the building blocks the companies use to erect their empires impossible.
This is why I will always share my work under strong copyleft or non-commercial/share-alike (and no-derivatives, where it makes sense) licenses.
In short, I'm terribly sorry to tell you that you didn't convince me about abolishing copyright at all. The only thing you achieved was to think further on my stance, fill the mental gaps I found in my train of thought, and fill them appropriately with more copyleft support. Also, it looks like my decision not to share my photos anymore is getting more concrete.
feels like the right layer of abstraction for remote APIs
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