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How to write stuff no one else can

thewritetoroam.com

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Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#51

Post by munificent »

austin-cheney wrote: post #44

The article misses something super critical: why? . More specifically why a key few hires can change the trajectory of a company. The answer almost always comes down to one word and applies companies of any size: leadership . Leadership is a concept largely foreign to the software industry for two reasons. * Most software developers are never exposed to strong personalities and have no idea what strong leadership loo…

I'm sure all software developers have been exposed to strong personalities. Often in the form of bullies, primadonnas, class clowns, big men on campus, pointy haired bosses, etc.

The problem is that—as a generalization—strong personality tends to correlate inversely with competence, and software engineers esteem the latter above all else (because a machine is not swayed by charisma, after all).

Good leadership is really the combination of strong personality and competence. That combination is so rare that for most software engineers, the safest bet is to simply try to avoid employers with strong personalities entirely.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#52

Post by soneca »

Aurornis wrote: post #38
soneca wrote: post #35

I was kind of curious in what the author had to say, but his sole motivation being ”getting ahead of competitors” really put me off. Not really much thought or deep reflection on my part,I just feel that they are a type of person that I don’t want to be or follow advice. So I stopped reading.

The daily newsletter business is a crowded space, to say the least. The barrier to entry is as low as it could possibly get and the unit economics are brutal. Getting ahead of competitors isn't some abstract, arbitrary goal. It's the only way to survive in a business like this. If your goal is just to write for the sake of writing and you don't care if anyone reads it, this article probably isn't for you.

I think it’s almost there. I care if people will read me (I am an amateur fiction writer), but not a competition to read me and not others. Or praise my writing more than they praise others.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#54

Post by Madmallard »

munificent wrote: post #51
austin-cheney wrote: post #44

The article misses something super critical: why? . More specifically why a key few hires can change the trajectory of a company. The answer almost always comes down to one word and applies companies of any size: leadership . Leadership is a concept largely foreign to the software industry for two reasons. * Most software developers are never exposed to strong personalities and have no idea what strong leadership loo…

I'm sure all software developers have been exposed to strong personalities. Often in the form of bullies, primadonnas, class clowns, big men on campus, pointy haired bosses, etc. The problem is that—as a generalization—strong personality tends to correlate inversely with competence , and software engineers esteem the latter above all else (because a machine is not swayed by charisma, after all). Good leadership is re…

"strong personality tends to correlate inversely with competence"

citation needed

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#55

Post by Aurornis »

willsmith72 wrote: post #49
austin-cheney wrote: post #44

The article misses something super critical: why? . More specifically why a key few hires can change the trajectory of a company. The answer almost always comes down to one word and applies companies of any size: leadership . Leadership is a concept largely foreign to the software industry for two reasons. * Most software developers are never exposed to strong personalities and have no idea what strong leadership loo…

what you call the "software industry" aligns with my experience in the "enterprise software industry" outside of that, it couldn't be further from my experience. many many defiant and confrontational founders/PMs, who often actively avoid the accepted "best practice" and rethink what they're doing if they find themselves in the majority

> many many defiant and confrontational founders/PMs, who often actively avoid the accepted "best practice" and rethink what they're doing if they find themselves in the majority

My experience as well. Big enterprise software companies reward keeping your head down and toeing the line, but "confrontational and defiant" personalities trying to reinvent the wheel are a common feature at every other type of software company.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#56

Post by edmundsauto »

Aurornis wrote: post #39

> For example, on LinkedIn, someone may say they were CMO of a company for just three months, and if you take that data at face value, you may think something very bad must have happened for a company to hire and lose such an important role in so short a time. > But when you look closer, you see that this person was a sophomore in college at the time, that the company was just a month old, and that actually, it wasn’…

This is funny because Facebook was famous for adopting this attitude early on. Hire people with potential instead of credentials.

If you have a good perf review system and don’t mind false positives it can work. Maybe it worked better before boot camps.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#57

Post by edmundsauto »

Madmallard wrote: post #54
munificent wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure all software developers have been exposed to strong personalities. Often in the form of bullies, primadonnas, class clowns, big men on campus, pointy haired bosses, etc. The problem is that—as a generalization—strong personality tends to correlate inversely with competence , and software engineers esteem the latter above all else (because a machine is not swayed by charisma, after all). Good leadership is re…

"strong personality tends to correlate inversely with competence" citation needed

Not to support the generalization but this describes my bias. Just as the flashy person with diamonds and a nice car does not indicate class.

It also kinda makes sense if you think it through. Strong personality types receive less feedback. Feedback helps us grow.

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#58

Post by p1esk »

cycomanic wrote: post #41
wordpad25 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI so much much more than retrieval since it knows how to correctly apply exist concepts to previously unexplored areas. You can ask ChatGPT how one might implement and enforce laws in a world where magic exists. Or time travel. Or whatever. Because it knows laws and it knows common fiction tropes and can reason well enough to surmise how to apply them together.

Well in my experience it more knows how to incorrectly apply existing concepts to incompatible areas and exert great confidence while doing it. I have just two recent examples where I thought it would be faster to use chatgpt instead of reading the manual. 1. How to asynchronously (e.g. asyncio) record from the microphone in python. Chatgpt gave me good which looked elegant, but didn't work. Well turns out pyaudio is…

When you say ChatGPT, do you mean 4 or 3.5?

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#59

Post by wgj »

Aurornis wrote: post #45
austin-cheney wrote: post #44

The article misses something super critical: why? . More specifically why a key few hires can change the trajectory of a company. The answer almost always comes down to one word and applies companies of any size: leadership . Leadership is a concept largely foreign to the software industry for two reasons. * Most software developers are never exposed to strong personalities and have no idea what strong leadership loo…

> Leadership is a concept largely foreign to the software industry Maybe in the companies you’ve worked for, but I haven’t found this to be true at all > An excellent software developer tends to score high in agreeability, but a strong leader knows how to turn that down to 0 for maximum confrontation and/or defiance Hard disagree. “Maximum confrontation and/or defiance” has never been a goal of good leaders who are t…

> tends to score high in agreeability,

>> Hard disagree. “Maximum confrontation and/or defiance” has never been a goal of good leaders

Re: How to write stuff no one else can

#60

Post by oldandtired »

encomiast wrote: post #33
ethanwillis wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The specific behavior you get is a result of the programming. what does "beyond the programming" mean? I think it's actually a meaningless statement. I would love to see an actual example where a program does something not encoded in itself already.

In what sense is a novel, never-before-seen image that comes out of DALL·E 3 "encoded in" in the system? The image may be, in a sense, encoded in the latent space of images, but so is every image (of the same dimensions) that ever has been or will be.

The images generated are based on two things:

1). the code within the systems

2). the data entered into the system.

Those images are the result of how the data is processed by the code. Even if you put in a random number generator, the code processes those numbers based on it internal code constraints.

Now a well designed and built code base may be able to generate every image of the same dimensions. You can certainly write code that can exhaustively generate every possible image, but the question here is whether this exhaustive generation is intelligent.

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