The CD player is the big hit for my 10ish y.o. kids. Physical ownership and control of music is a huge boost for little kids and really suppirts musical exploration.
The key point is there is plenty of proof that consciousness is emergent, not structurally baked in. An excellent counterpoint is the "They're Made Out of Weights" post. There are plenty of emergent systems that clearly show intent and what we consider intelligence, like how ant colonies act as a unit.
If you want to get evolutionarily technical, humans are made of cells which began as individual organisms and coalesced into higher life forms. So the concept of a "life form" is very much flexible, so is every capability of a life form, including consciousness.
The wildest part of this is that the salary negotiations were open to a group of interviewers. Why in the world would engineers need to be a part of that?
I think it was supposed to be an "off the record" thing from the hiring manager to other engineers, and I happened to be part of that group. I don't remember the exact circumstances.
I wouldn't particularly worry. Big picture: don't base your future on the fears of the present. AI is a tool for humans, so be curious about it and use it if it can help you. Otherwise, ignore the noise.
I really like the core of this idea (haven't tested the tool yet) - solve context-breaking not by better prompting but with a validation step that lives after the result but before human review. Solves the "CAPLOCK PLEA" approach completely, if not token-efficiently. But nowadays an ounce of determinism is worth its weight in plutonium.
It is almost reassuring to think that rich and powerful people all know what they are doing every step of the way. A handful may, but most certainly do not. Most are also terrified of AI. Stable profits are always better than transformative change, if you already have power and riches. Look at how insane companies are acting right now with token quotas for employees and mandates AI usage - the goal is not to milk profits but to not fall behind every other company in case this becomes table stakes. They are trying not to be devoured by a beast they don't understand.
When the AI bubble pops, large companies will be extremely relieved to stop throwing money into the wind playing this game. For most companies, the AI arms race is a huge hassle. They are fine with losing money in the short term and even in the long term as long as they can find a stable path forward.
This is the exact same trajectory as when the internet came out and every insurance company and toothpick manufacturer spent gobs of money to have a brochure website built because everyone else had one. This will play out differently, but recognize most companies are acting entirely from a place of fear right now.
The thing is AI can maintain systems. The key point is that it can't do this without human intent, but human intent can be encoded into skills and tied together with orchestration.
Rough example: have an LLM generate a plan. Have a skill that refines the plan considering security risks, another that ensures codebase structures are followed, another that considers the infrastructure and usage demands, etc. Then write code and tests. Another process to validate the tests, validate all the above, simplify the logic, etc.
The key is that an LLM can do every task capably, even in a complex system. We simply have not built reasonable orchestration of all the human intent behind each filter, and many of them are constantly in flux. It may be that some elements resist encoding because the complexity of encoding is not worth the hassle to maintain.
For better or worse, managing intent, orchestrating narrow agentic tasks and solidifying patterns into deterministic code (i.e. validation/tests) is going to be the focus of engineers going forward.
20+ year dev here, successful CTO, built many production systems, etc. I tend to bomb >50% of tech interviews.
I started doing better when I realized most tech interviews are not aligned with my brain, and that is ok. I have bad recall for syntax or even for things I've built in the past if I'm not currently engaged with them. This can come across like I am a bullshitter, or wholly incompetent. I also stumble through leetcodes - I remember enough to identify to right approach but fumble knocking out solutions in 15 minutes.
But this is fine! If everyone at a company has focused on powering through leetcodes to get the role, or the job demands photographic memory of HTTP codes ("what is code 428 used for?" An actual interview question I have seen...) I am probably not a good fit and won't enjoy the work or the culture.
Once you focus on the things you do well and find companies whose interview process emphasizes those aspects, things become much easier. Let go of the feeling that every interview is a minimal bar that any functioning SWE should be able to pass. If it was, they would be hiring every other applicant.
Some roles they give you a task and fail you quietly if you don't solve it using TDD, even if they don't mention that as a requirement. Or if you don't ask details about requirements, even for narrow toy problems. You are never going to guess all the gotchas that a company can throw up in front of you, so my advice is to confront each interview by working in the way you like to work. Show off your good attributes when you can. Listen to hints of course, but represent yourself honestly and assume at least half the companies will reject you no matter what you do, and that is fine.
Often that attitude will earn you more marks than trying to conform to what you guess the company wants to see.
Yeah, thank you for that response, I agree it’s more about how you and interviewer see some problems and solutions and if you match you can work together with great performance
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