Dylan bettle talks about this in one of his presentation. He made a website that did actor and actress recommendations, I believe for like extras to be hired. They kept getting alerts around 7-715am and then around 12.30pm to 1245pm.

Eventually they figured out that casting agents typically woke up, checked email, and submitted the requests on the website. The actors and actresses typically had other jobs and had to wait till lunch to check and apply.

They had to redesign the system and buy more bandwidth to handle these spikes.

He’s a great presenter and I highly recommend watching all of them, even if you’re not a programmer. And I probably got most of the details wrong… But it was a talk at one of NDC conventions.

In an apartment complex I used to live there were 2 “police incidents” which were way overkill. A week or two after I moved in I got home and there were easily over a dozen cop cars in the parking lot. Cops were walking around with assault rifles and body armor. Shortly after I got home I got an email from complex stating there was a emergency situation and everyone was to stay in their apartment if home or stay out if not home. After a few more hours everyone left. What was the cause? A homeless man broke into a empty apartment but with no power had no a or fans and died of heat stroke. When the apartment was rented, one of the maintenance people went in to “prep for move in” and found the body.

Second incident was worse. First 2 cop cars appeared, then atleast 6 more. The complex was on a corner of 2 roads and each of those were shut down by cops blocking them. There was 3 trucks with “swat” written on them. Then they started calling out on a PA system to come out with your hands up. This went on for 3 hours. Finally I hear/feel a shake/bang. Turns out they decided to use an explosive on one of the apartments to gain entry. The apartment was empty. I talked to some neighbors and found out some girl broke up with her boyfriend. She and another friend were home when he showed up and decided to beat her for breaking up with him. He didn’t know the friend was there and the friend walked up behind him and hit him with a bottle. The two girls then ran out of the apartment. They ran to a gas station and called the police. It was about 10 minutes until the police showed up and about 30 minutes before they shut down the roads, the complex was less than a mile from a major interstate highway. In addition the apartment was a first floor and had a sliding glass door to a small patio area. This meant they could a. See in the apartment and b. Just break the glass instead of using explosive on the front door. C. Just ask the office for a key instead of using an explosive. Seriously this was such overkill over nothing, yes guy was asshole and beating people up is never right but since it was about 45 minutes before the cops blocked the roads he easily could got away and onto the highway…

One time I got a “promotion” at work. I knew it was coming as I did training etc. A manager comes to me and asks to speak privately. He tells me that 1. Here is your new title and salary 2. He is retiring on Monday (this was a Wednesday).

It took about 9 months to replace him. My only assigned duty in that time was to every 2 weeks go into a backroom, log into about a dozen computers than log out. This was because the computers were backups and after 30 days without logging in they would be kicked off the network.

This was a 10 minute task every 2 weeks. That’s it. It was horrible. I was bored out of my mind. There were several other issues. I literally was going to other people asking “what can I help you with”…

Ouch! Tell her I’m sorry, and I’m sorry for you too. All the accountants I worked with did alot more than just reports. Not to mention that sounds great until the Ai says 2+4 =2*4 and now the company owes 20 billion on taxes…

Plus in a lot of cases people don’t submit records in identical format, the number of excel workbooks I’ve seen where the data was on “sheet 2” for some unknown reason…

Maybe its just me, I always provided raw data on sheet 1, analyzed data on sheet 2, and if needed complicated formulas on sheet 3. I would be willing to bet their Ai would break on that format.

I don’t know but implication the other poster is making is “a human can write 2 articles, a Ai can write 5, I’m being asked for 5 which is impossible. I can use Ai and risk trusting it or not meet my required outputs and also get fired.”

I made up those numbers but that’s the accusation. You are damned if you use the Ai to meet your goals. You are damned if you don’t meet your goals.

Possible but back when smoking was much more common (not like 2010s, I mean like 1930s when a pack was included in mre kits given to soldiers in ww2 and the Flintstones cartoon had sponsored segments where Fred and barney had “smoke breaks” and talked about the “smooth and delicious taste” of I think it was camel cigarettes ) There were many more companies making cigarettes. It was only really consolidated in I think the 80s due to lawsuits for causing cancer, false advertising, lying to congress etc. Most of the companies couldn’t afford all the fines and were bought out.

Really? If 1% of customers of a restaurant got food poisoning… Well that’s exactly why we have a health department and food inspectors

Now if by slop you just mean “not delicious” people would probably stop going and stop recommending. Some places may be able eat that loss(pun intended) but many would go out of business. Related, sorta, there have studies that one aspect of McDonald’s that added to its huge success is consistently being same basically everywhere. Yeah there’s some regional differences but you can eat a big Mac basically everywhere. And they are basically the same.

No, I don’t think it was an opinion. My point is in a lot of cases something really bad would never hit 1%. Like commercial airlines, most do several hundreds of flights a day(just a guess but for the large ones seems reasonable across all airports). If one airline had say 3 crashes in a year I can’t imagine them still being active.

Population of us in 2024 was 340,000,000. If it effected 1% that would be 3.4 million people. That’s like 1/2 of the holocaust victims.

I believe most companies would be done at 0.01% if that. Only company I can think of with that body count is nestle… I don’t even think Raytheon has killed that many.

I think you drastically overestimating 99% vs 1% at scale. For example look at the Chicago Tylenol case. Atleast 7 people died. 31 million packages of Tylenol were recalled, the entire line of powder filled capsules was eliminated, nationwide redesign of medication packages was done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tylenol_murders

Nope, just a funny wholesome story from my past.

Years ago I was a young white guy with long hair and a short ish beard. Someone at my job decided I looked like shaggy from scooby doo. The name kinda stuck and became my nickname.

Few months later, I was at work and one of the guys came over and asked for some favor. I forget what it was but it wasn’t like a 30 second thing, it was like a multi hour task. I denied the request and made some excuse. He then reached behind his back and pulled out a box of scooby snacks. They were like small graham crackers in the shape of a dog head like scooby. “Would you do it for a scooby snack?” Everyone around started laughing, even I started laughing.

I didn’t end up doing it and the task was just made up for the joke. It was pretty funny though. He said he saw them over the weekend when grocery shopping for his family and thought the joke was too good.

Side note, they still make scooby snacks and the kid I’m basically raising actually really likes them.

In the US, I’m my experience, you typically have 10 to 15 minute conversation with hr(or separate agency) first. Basically this is for ensuring you will have a chance of fitting in. It’s not to test technical skills or abilities. For example and I had one recently where after basic greetings the rep said the job was local for 3 months and then expected about 95% of the time was international travel, was I ok with traveling that much? Long story short basically no. Meeting ended in about 5 minutes, never even met the hiring manager. I’m another case I met with a rep from an agency for a job, after the conversation he told me I would not be a good fit (basically it was a manual labor job and almost everyone spoke Spanish which I don’t). That said, he then said but I have another position you would fit and I ended up at that company for many years.

They shouldn’t (and don’t in my experience) ask specific details. It’s not like “what is the timing offset on a Ford 438 engine?” or “how do you transform a spreadsheet of financial data to a presentation for management?” those are for the hirering manager. They ask questions like are you legally allowed to work here? Are you ok with travel requirements? Will you be able to communicate with coworkers? It’s short, basic and basically a screen to verify you are worth the manager time for the real interview.

If people were obviously lying about their knowledge and abilities, I’d see how far they are willing to push it. “So how much experience do you have with python 4?“or” please write on this board how to do the well known programming problem fizz buzz, in sql”

Depending on your office building, “please demonstrate how you would handle the sliding window problem?” let them write for a few minutes. When they are done tell them “incorrect” and then walk over and open the window in your office.

Don’t actually do any of these. They would make you a huge asshole but it would be funny.

An ide is obviously an “intentional dog emoji”. You see someone showing their cat pictures and you tell them this is a dog environment.

BTW yes I know it’s an integrated development environment which means basically a text editor, compiler, linker, debugger and in many cases linter. I’m also unemployed and looking for a job so…

He did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee and was knighted for it. Just funny that my understanding is his most recent resume claims he’s a “web developer” just like someone fresh out of a boot camp. No, you are THE web developer.

Thanks. I guess it was rails and not ruby but still same idea. Rediculous that a creator doesn’t have enough experience. As I said I understand it’s probably hr and “people persons” writing stuff for “tech people”. Not an excuse just fact. It’s a sad, horrible fact. Anyways thanks for confirming my memory from years ago.

Agreed, sorta. The one caveat is that people hiring are typically hr, not technical people. In large companies they are there to fill out paperwork and limit company legal liability. They don’t need to know the difference between a unsigned char and a long variable in c.

The people is charge should have hired better people to have those roles. Also whoever wrote those requirements messed up. I learned a long time ago there are basically 2paths forward professionally, technical and management. issues arise when then the needs of those two mix and the person doing so is not up to the challenge.

People can design a 120 to 12 volt power supply on graph paper. Others can talk to 5 stake holders on a new product about what color the plastic container should be and have 1 answer and everyone happy that they won at the end. Both skill sets are valuable. The main issue is we, society, put so much value on the second group and severely limited the potential of the first.

Also the correct color is blue 😋

If you are also deaf maybe I can eat cheesey broccoli around you…

There was a viral post from Twitter or linkedin years ago of someone posting saying they wanted to hire someone with “10 years of experience using ruby”, a person replied, was told they didn’t meet the requirements, they said something like “look at my profile” …if you looked at the person’s profile they were the creator of ruby, they literally wrote the language. The language was only 7 years old.

I don’t even remember if it was ruby but the story is basically the same. Impossible requirements written by people who don’t even know what they need.

Also fun fact Tim berners Lee used the job title “web developer”. He is THE web developer… He write http and html. He literally created the world wide web. Yet he only claims “web developer”.

True, i get that. My question is who called them? Not asking for doxxing information just that who ever it was is probably angry and hateful in general and should be ashamed of themselves.