I was confused why a package manager would need to import posts from a social network.

Why name a new product the same as a very popular existing product?

Huh. TIL. I always wondered why libraries treat ebooks like physical books.

It’s not lying or hallucinating. It’s describing exactly what it found in search results. There’s an web page with that title from that date. Now the problem is that the web page is pinterest and the title is the result of aggressive SEO. These types of SEO practices are what made Google largely useless for the past several years and an AI that is based on these useless results will be just as useless.

it doesn’t just have to be grape wine either

People in my country make hard spirits out of various fruits, but mostly plums, and in English those are being translated as fruit brandy.

Although if you want to make cognac (a type of brandy), it has to be grape wine.

Cognac, like Champagne, is about where it’s made, not just the recipe. I has to be made out of specific varieties of grapes harvested and fermented in the Cognac area in France. You can import the same grapes and follow the same recipe, but you’re not allowed to name it Cognac if you made it outside that area.

Yeah, I remember when I first got ZSNES and suddenly I had access hundreds of games I wasn’t able to play before. Played through Super Mario RPG, spent so much time in Harvest Moon, and finally played the first Final Fantasy games and Legend of Zelda.

I didn’t have any consoles, so couldn’t play a lot of those games. But on PC (and on 8-bit computer before that), I played hundreds of games. There were no copyright laws in my country when I was a kid and my dad got everything he could get his hands on. In the 8-bit era he collected over 40 cassette tapes (8-10 games on each). Then when we got the PC there were boxes and boxes of floppy disks (I remember Need for Speed was on over 30 disks). Then CDs came out and I remember one CD that had 200 games on it. And as my dad collected, I tried every single one of them.

That just goes to show the sheer amount of quality gaming that there was.

I made that top 10 list years ago from some silly Facebook game that was going around at the time. The hardest part was picking just 10. My initial list had about 70 games on it.

Add one more here. Some of the greatest games came out in that period.

I made before a list of the top 10 games that impacted me the most and a large part are from that period. In no particular order:

• Worms (particularly Worms World Party)
• The Settlers II
• Master of Orion II
• Heroes of Might and Magic (particularly the first 3)
• Phantasmagoria
• WWF WrestleMania
• Little Big Adventure
• Monkey Island (especially 1-3)
• Dizzy (all games in the series)
• Jet Set Willy

How is Monkey Island missing from the list? Those games were the peak of SCUMM.

Yes, but 15 spelling variations doesn’t mean the name wad spelled 15 times in total (as the comment I replied to says), because each variation can be used multiple times.

Ok, I now see the discrepancy in the article (“misspelled 14 different ways” and “spelled 14 different ways”). I was confused by the commenter’s phrasing (“spelled 15 times in total”)

How are crashlytics and firebase analytics profiting off of users? I cannot imagine not including those in an app you’re actually hoping to improve.

No it doesn’t. He could have his name show up 100 times in the documents, 30 of which are misspelled. The 30 misspelled occurrences would show 14 unique spelling variations.

Edit: I see what you mean now. He spelled his name in 15 different ways if he misspelled it in 14 ways (unless he never spelled it right)

I am curious how you’d deal with the ambiguity of contractions vs. ending single quotes

That’s the thing, nobody even asks this question.

you could just match on /[a-zA-Z]+/

That would already put you in the top 10% of solutions I’ve seen so far on this problem.

That is totally a non-trivial problem, which requires a lot more conception before it can be solved.

Most candidates don’t realize that. And when I say they split by single space I mean split(' '). Not even split(/\s+/).

Does “don’t” consist of one or two words? Should “www.google.com” be split into three parts? Etc.

Yes, asking those questions is definitely what you should be doing when tackling a problem like this.

If I got that feature request in a ticket, I’d send it back to conception.

If I got it, I’d work together with the product team to figure out what we want and what’s best for the users.

If you asked me this question in an interview, I’d ask if you wanted a programmer, a requirements analysis, or a linguist and why you invite people for a job interview if you don’t even know what role you are hiring for.

That would be useful too. Personality, attitude, and ability to work with others in a team are also factors we look at, so your answer would tell me to look elsewhere.

But to answer that question, I’m definitely not looking for someone who just executes on very clear requirements, that’s a junior dev. It’s what you do when faced with ambiguity that matters. I don’t need the human chatGPT.

Also, I’m not looking for someone perfectly solving that problem, because it doesn’t even have a single clear solution. It’s the process of arriving to a solution that matters. What questions do you ask? Which edge cases did you consider and which ones did you miss? How do you iterate on your solution and debug issues you run into on the way? And so on

I always feel bad when I try out a new coding problem for interviews because I feel I’m going to offend candidates with such an easy problem (I interview mostly for senior positions). And I’m always shocked by how few are able to solve them. The current problem I use requires splitting a text into words as a first step. I show them the text, it’s the entire text of a book, not just some simple sentence. I don’t think I’ve had a single candidate do that correctly yet (most just split by a single space character even though they’ve seen it’s a whole book with newlines, punctuation, quotes, parentheses, etc).

It’s not about cheating, it’s about making a profit. Nobody cares if you modify your save files (they do, there are ways they try to prevent that, especially in competitive multiplayer, but it’s not a legal issue). But once you start selling them, that’s when you’re officially in trouble.

Deep learning did not shift any paradigm. It’s just more advanced programming. But gen AI is not intelligence. It’s just really well trained ML. ChatGPT can generate text that looks true and relevant. And that’s its goal. It doesn’t have to be true or relevant, it just has to look convincing. And it does. But there’s no form of intelligence at play there. It’s just advanced ML models taking an input and guessing the most likely output.

Here’s another interesting article about this debate: https://ourworldindata.org/ai-timelines

What we have today does not exhibit even the faintest signs of actual intelligence. Gen AI models don’t actually understand the output they are providing, that’s why they so often produce self-contradictory results. And the algorithms will continue to be fine-tuned to produce fewer such mistakes, but that won’t change the core of what gen AI really is. You can’t teach ChatGPT how to play chess or a new language or music. The same model can be trained to do one of those tasks instead of chatting, but that’s not how intelligence works.

Any type of content generated by AI should be reviewed and polished by a professional. If you’re putting raw AI output out there directly then you don’t care enough about the quality of your product.

For example, there are tons of nonsensical articles on the internet that were obviously generated by AI and their sole purpose is to crowd search results and generate traffic. The content writers those replaced were paid $1/article or less (I work in the freelancing business and I know these types of jobs). Not people with any actual training in content writing.

But besides the tons of prompt crafting and other similar AI support jobs now flooding the market, there’s also huge investment in hiring highly skilled engineers to launch various AI related product while the hype is high.

So overall a ton of badly paid jobs were lost and a lot of better paid jobs were created.

The worst part will be when the hype dies and the new trend comes along. Entire AI teams will be laid off to make room for others.

See the sources above and many more. We don’t need one or two breakthroughs, we need a complete paradigm shift. We don’t even know where to start with for AGI. There’s a bunch of research, but nothing really came out of it yet. Weak AI has made impressive bounds in the past few years, but the only connection between weak and strong AI is the name. Weak AI will not become strong AI as it continues to evolve. The two are completely separate avenues of research. Weak AI is still advanced algorithms. You can’t get AGI with just code. We’ll need a completely new type of hardware for it.

https://www.lifewire.com/strong-ai-vs-weak-ai-7508012

Strong AI, also called artificial general intelligence (AGI), possesses the full range of human capabilities, including talking, reasoning, and emoting. So far, strong AI examples exist in sci-fi movies

Weak AI is easily identified by its limitations, but strong AI remains theoretical since it should have few (if any) limitations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence

As of 2023, complete forms of AGI remain speculative.

Boucher, Philip (March 2019). How artificial intelligence works

Today’s AI is powerful and useful, but remains far from speculated AGI or ASI.

https://www.itu.int/en/journal/001/Documents/itu2018-9.pdf

AGI represents a level of power that remains firmly in the realm of speculative fiction as on date

All progress comes with old jobs becoming obsolete and new jobs being created. It’s just natural.

But AI is not going to replace any skilled professionals soon. It’s a great tool to add to professionals’ arsenal, but non-professionals who use it to completely replace hiring a professional will get what they pay for (and those people would have never actually paid for a skilled professional in the first place; they’d have hired the cheapest outsourced wannabe they could find; after first trying to convince a professional that exposure is worth more than money)