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I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

grell.dev

331–340 of 419 posts

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#331

Through a friend of a friend, I found out that Anthropic had an open position "Coffee" with the friend of a friend would he better strategy than a cover letter in that case...more work, but better strategy. Because logically, getting hired requires demonstrating you are "the kind of person we want to work with." Being qualified on paper is not necessarily required.

You basically need to avoid putting your name into the main queue as long as possible. Make them do it manually on their side and keep track of it. If they want you, then you’ll bypass all the crap this way.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, as this is so often the case, many times good, relevant applications are missed. I hope that this Hacker News post will get to one of the key people at Anthropic and they change their minds.

> I hope that this Hacker News post will get to one of the key people at Anthropic and they change their minds. Honest question: what leads you to believe they should change their mind?

first of all because the key point is they didn't even look at his application, and by any objective criteria he should have easily got through a "worth a human looking at it" screen. but also, hiring the developer of an open source library that you want to use internally and paying them to both integrate the library and work further on it is an excellent way to have a sustainable open source ecosystem, which both anthropic and the developer will benefit from.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#333

Hey, I'm the author of the blog post. Thank you for submitting this. If you have any questions feel free to ask and please let me know how the writing was. It's one of my first posts so I'd like to improve

You should change the license to AGPL and 'custom, contact for payment details', and provide a link to this as why you did so. Simply put, anything not a viral license like GPL allows parasitization by companies effectively living off FLOSS devs, with absolutely nothing to gain. Human rights under GPL were meant to apply to humans, not '3 lawyers in a trench coat' (corporations). They can make their decisions (snubbi…

> It also reaffirms that my decision of AGPL for everything is the right one. They can contact for custom terms.

Since your replies below are focusing on compensation: have you actually made a nontrivial amount of money with that model?

I would expect that should be a prerequisite to reaffirm it was the correct decision, especially if you're giving unsolicited advice to strangers about how they should license their software.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And until I'm independently wealthy, I too will license AGPL. If you're making money on my stuff, I want a cut. Simple as that. A. So much for "Not everybody has to be chasing money..." as missing the point B. What hubris to claim that just because you wrote something it is now "yours" in any meaningful way. The copyright lobby has infected everywhere.

So, what is your net-worth, in that you fight for freebies to corporations? What net worth should I strive towards so I can be nonchalant and passe about money? I'm certainly not there. Also more curious, is the AGPL doesn't affect humans doing stuff. It affects companies when they grab, modify, and host and not share contributions. Read about anti-TIVOization. That's why the AGPL. I'm guessing you know this, and why…

> Also more curious, is the AGPL doesn't affect humans doing stuff.

It does affect humans doing stuff that isn't malicious, like if you need to solve a problem by modifying the code then now you also have to make that change public which is a hassle, I'd rather not have to track or maintain such things. I'd rather not have to think about that, and I care more about such nuisances than I care about the possibility of companies stealing it.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#335
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is not something that happened, even according to Max Howell himself: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... > I feel bad about my tweet, I don’t feel it was fair, and it fed the current era of outragism-driven-reading that is the modern Internet, and thus went viral, and for that I am truly sorry.

Building popular software doesn't mean you're a good programmer, especially since at that point Google was looking heavily at CS concepts and he admittedly wasn't good at that. It's also possible he would have been hired if he applied for L-1. A lot of people get an ego check applying to Google where they're a senior staff engineer or a CTO at a small company and get an L5 offer.

True but surprisingly grinding leetcode puzzles also doesn't mean you're a good programmer. In fact, in my decades-long now programming career, I've had to take many more decisions of the homebrew kind (e.g. how the thing is going to work, how the API is going to look like, will the users love or hate that feature, etc.) than the leetcode kind. And now I am thinking the former is even more important. If you get the leetcode part wrong, worst thing your code would be slow. Not a good thing but also not a complete disaster - you can come back and optimize later. If you screw up the design and interface part, nobody would be using it - or worse, they'd be using it in ways it wasn't supposed to be used - and then it doesn't matter how fast it is.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#336
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it kind of happened, he went through seven interviews. from the same post: > But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that.

I mean, he's also the same guy who apparently thought "Unix ideas that have worked for literally decades, nah fuck that. I know better". It took over a decade before the project made some improvement on how the default install path is handled. To my knowledge it still has absolutely atrocious dependency resolution relative to things like DPKG. Not hiring this guy is honestly like a fancy restaurant not hiring the guy…

Google is not a fancy restaurant. Five-guys private consultancy is a fancy restaurant. Google is the McDonalds of all McDonaldses, it makes software that is used by everybody, whether they want it or not, and you can't turn a corner without hitting something they control.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#337
post #251
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - people in HR departments are often female and often clueless, but I don't see the parent denying this. The wording of OP connected both though, which is sexist and can be considered "evil".

Funny enough, I see this whole framing as sexist itself. Nobody would have bat an eye if he said "clueless guys" or "clueless gents", and given the prevalence of women in HR, that wording would actually have more chances of having a sexist background to it.

“guys” is gendered but is very often used to mean a general group.

>given the prevalence of women in HR, that wording would actually have more chances of having a sexist background to it.

The reason there are more women than men in HR is clearly because the men they do hire are too clueless and get fired faster. Ever have an HR department with all men? Most dysfunctional department I’ve ever interacted with! “Clueless HR men” is just redundant. The ~25% that exist are DEI hires. So it wouldn’t be sexism, it would be reality.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#338
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, "we didn't review your CV" is a great way to get sued in the US if the name of the applicant is in any way potentially indicative of the applicant's gender, race, religion, or any other protected status.

And we now see a lot of proof that that is warranted: lots of people in the US are now openly racist and/or have other prejudices. It is fair to assume many people don’t get a fair chance because of this.

The first company I worked for (a smallish business) interviewed a guy who seemed normal and knowledgeable enough in the screener call. At the time, they just asked that people being in code samples to discuss in the second interview (this predated GitHub) and he brought in some obviously copy-pasted code that didn't fit together.

He then, without prompt, in the middle of a conversation mentioned that he was the second coming of Christ. The interviewers ignored the comment and continued the interview.

When he didn't get the job, he sued the company for religious discrimination. Fortunately, the interviewers could honestly say they didn't discuss or ask about his religious beliefs, and he lost. It was said he did this elsewhere as a a scam, though I never verified it.

The simple matter of fact is that it doesn't matter how neutral you are; there are enough people out there who will look for any way to perceive and benefit from a grievance that you must assume they will.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#339
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like the copyleft idea, however, I think you did nothing wrong, IMHO, because if large corps like an idea, they will rather reimplement it rather than even bothering with ways to conform to AGPL or buy an alternative licence. Particular in the age of AI, all source available code has become pretty much public domain (value is still in maintenance, etc). License have mostly become a compliance/ideology game t…

Copyright is but one pillar of intellectual property law. I’d like to see an attempt by useful freedom respecting software projects to deploy patents to combat non-free reimplementations. A GPL license that grants you rights to the backing patent as long as the software you develop with it is also released under the GPL license. Use the library for closed source software? Copyright violation. Reimplement the software…

Not sure of the rest of the world, but at least in the US, patenting “software” is a pretty murky subject legally (at least it feels that way when trying to do some basic research on it) Something that seems common among sources discussing it is that “Software Related Inventions” (eg, a computer that does XYZ) can be patentable, but software/code itself is not literally patentable. Seemingly, because we’re talking about libraries that would be pure software, not a product for sale based on it, you wouldn’t be able patent libraries like you’re talking about.

I’d provide links to some discourse of this, but honestly I think it’s better to search “can you patent software in the US” and do a brief read of various sources, because the terminology between them can seem somewhat counterfactual to eachother.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#340
post #92

I'll say it: why would they pay him if he's already doing the work for free from their PoV? Oh, they ignored him. I am not sure if that puts the company in a better light.

Lets make a new license: If you wont hire me, use my library and make over $100m in revenue a year, you must pay a commercial license to use my software equivalent to the total cost (equity grants included) of an average principal engineer or director who manages 50+ people at your company in your highest COL metro, whichever is higher. For OSS work that isn't mostly one author, make it go to the foundation for the O…

That would just open the door to commercial competitors to undercut the price by reverse engineering it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design). You'd be playing on the proprietary software industry's home turf and they will straight up curb stomp you.
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