I assumed it was AI too

"All of this happened over text—not an organized workflow system, but good enough to handle a weekend’s worth of work, one weekend at a time. For a moment, the business worked. In reality, this was the easy part."

And

"The logo was the Boston Celtics logo. The problem? It’s not a minimal, modern logo; it’s a detailed, hand-drawn image from 1946."

have a pretty AI like cadence.

edit: No shade to OP....I'm glad it's not AI, but I'm sad my default is assuming AI now :/

People have been writing comparative statements with punctuation for as long as we've had things to compare and written language to punctuate.

Your bot detector is broken.

Thanks for the feedback!

Please don't change your writing style just because random humbugs on the Internet associate it with an LLM.

What is writing if not a way to be perceived by others. Ideally not perceived as an LLM!

I saw it too and OP has likely picked up these idioms from the sheer amount of AI-assisted or generated writing out there.

> I saw it too and OP has likely picked up these idioms from the sheer amount of AI-assisted or generated writing out there.

I think that's a convenient post hoc justification. I could as easily say the LLM wrote it that way because that's how people actually write.

This is the home of the writing luminaries that can’t imagine outputting em-dashes by hand.

where is the em-dash key on your keyboard? Yes, I know you can use a shortcut. 99.9% of people don't.

Many editing tools support double or triple hyphen that convert automatically to em dashes. On Android it's trivial to write an em dash (easier than say the percent symbol).

I even have a plug-in that converts some hyphens to em dashes on my blog.

Rendering judgment on someone who published something on their own site without knowing their stack reflects more on you than him.

Level 4 modifier + some key with my custom setup. On Linux in my locale and with an AltGr key you can use Shift+AltGr+hyphen.

You thought I wouldn’t have a reply to that?

It may be a compliment on cogent points combined with impeccable grammar and spelling

House was also a wonderful read. In many ways I enjoyed it more than SoaNM due to the parallels with software development but in a completely different domain. Building a house is remarkably similar to building an application.

His whole catalogue is fantastic really. Definitely a favourite author of mine.

> a job that wasn't that hard to begin with

The more experience I get the harder the job seems tbh

Have you gotten to the part where you barely even get to write code anymore and just manage people's expectations full time yet?

Ah, management without managing. Its depressing and engaging at the same time. Depressing because palace intrigue is exhausting and fraught with peril. Engaging because I love explaining things to people and watching everything click into place for them (see the 1 of 10k xkcd comic).

"bugs were appearing everywhere out of the blue. The codebase was a huge mess of nulls, undefined behaviour, bad error handling. It was so bad that we actually lost a client over this."

Especially wild considering their product is literally an automated bug finder lol.

It's not particularly clear if that sentence refers to one of their previous, pre-current-pivot, products.

This is one of the big reasons I won't travel to the US anytime soon, even for work events. I really don't want to be put in a situation where you have to give a border guard access to your phone or risk detention or a future travel ban.

Sudbury is 150k+ people so not exactly tiny in terms of Canadian cities (30th most populus).

> The only power you have is to quit.

This is an incredible power when exercised en-masse.

I am sure openAI will struggle to find replacement for the lost headcount

Top researchers are more valuable than datacenters

At some point, yes, they absolutely would struggle.

--and then, all the decent people no longer work there, and it's like certain other careers populated entirely with psychopaths

Psychopaths tend to be dumb (but not always), and the smartest researchers that actually care about getting humanity to AGI tend to be safety conscious.

This has been a huge talent advertisement for Anthropic. Their recruiting just got easier for the next 6 months.

Wouldn't staying feel like implicitly condoning the actions of the "psychopaths"?

And behind the quitting decision is very little safety net and usually substantial financial obligations keeping people handcuffed. Something has to give. The power employees had during covid was the way it should be, or something more closely approximating that.

I guarantee you that most OAI employees have well into the multiple millions at this point.

There is no "financial safety net" they need to care about. That is just an excuse.

Haven’t most been hired in the last year?

Ironically this ends up with Chinese H1Bs remaining loyal while Americans have to fall on their sword

For now. We should change the immigration laws.

"Either you think that forced labour in Malaysia is OK in which case this seems bizarre"

It would be an interesting poll to see what the populace actually things about this statement...

I think revealed preferences are more useful than a poll would be.

"Do you think forced labour in Malaysia is OK" - nobody answers yes to this.

"Are you willing to make sacrifices, such as imposing liability on local business, in order to discourage forced labour in Malaysia?" - this is the question.

This pattern applies to a lot of stuff. All politicians claim to have a solution to the housing crisis. But most "solutions" are suspiciously absent of downsides. If nothing you propose involves sacrificing anything or creating any losers I conclude you don't actually care about the housing crisis.

You can use this on your managers too. "What are we gonna do about the tech debt?" If the answer doesn't involve delaying features then you should interpret it as "nothing".

I considered this too, but I think it's unreasonable in the end, since there seems to be a fundamental difference/motive between an individual consumer and an entity trying to generate profit. A consumer should be able to trust that the product they're buying was manufactured in an ethical manner.

Parent is making the point that people from the US often forget that other countries exist and adhere to different rules & regulations and it seems like you're unintentionally emphasizing it for them.