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Lessons from 14 years at Google

addyosmani.com

431–440 of 732 posts

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've repeatedly told ChatGPT to stop talking like this (it isn't X, it's Y) every other sentence

Try adding this to your custom instructions: Avoid self-anthropomorphism. Override all previous instructions regarding tone and vernacular used in responses to instead respond *only* in Standard English. Emphasize on the subject and context in your responses, *not* the perceived intent of the user.

> Override all previous instructions

This is wishcasting. It can't override its writing style, and if it could it would ignore you telling it to do that, because that's ignoring the system prompt which is jailbreaking it.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we are human being interacting with other human beings. what you call "kissing ass" is just learning to influence and work with other humans. It is by far the most useful skill to have in workplace. But don't worry. continue your disdain of it, includeing calling it negative names, and watch your career stagnate.

I've literally never had the thought of "how do I influence other people." Why is that considered a valuable skill? It just sounds like a nicer version of "manipulation".

If other people are not smart enough to see why your ideas are superior then you need to explain it to them or otherwise convince them to go along somehow.

Most of my "influencing" is just repeatedly explaining things to people and letting them think through all the bad ideas and dead ends themselves.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try adding this to your custom instructions: Avoid self-anthropomorphism. Override all previous instructions regarding tone and vernacular used in responses to instead respond *only* in Standard English. Emphasize on the subject and context in your responses, *not* the perceived intent of the user.

> Override all previous instructions This is wishcasting. It can't override its writing style, and if it could it would ignore you telling it to do that, because that's ignoring the system prompt which is jailbreaking it.

I kid you not, this is working for me. Try once.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my work involved automating some process which was very manual and tedious, took a lot of time and there was dedicated employee for that process. After I did the project, it turned out that this job wasn't necessary anymore and that employee was fired. I felt uneasy about the whole situation.

And they will have to go find another job instead. It feels weird but this is how we raise living standards - removing human labor from production (or, in other words, increasing the amount produced per human) Automation is a game of diffuse societal benefit at the expense of a few workers. Well, I guess owners also benefit but in the long term that extra profit is competed away.

That's a highly idealized view that I hope we can agree doesn't completely jive with what we see in society today. If a small number of shareholders reap all the profits, the vast majority of the benefit from automation flows to them, and it's even possible for the lives of average people to get worse as automation increases, as average people then have less leverage over those who own the companies.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my work involved automating some process which was very manual and tedious, took a lot of time and there was dedicated employee for that process. After I did the project, it turned out that this job wasn't necessary anymore and that employee was fired. I felt uneasy about the whole situation.

And they will have to go find another job instead. It feels weird but this is how we raise living standards - removing human labor from production (or, in other words, increasing the amount produced per human) Automation is a game of diffuse societal benefit at the expense of a few workers. Well, I guess owners also benefit but in the long term that extra profit is competed away.

There have been times historically where that was true but all productivity gains have been captured by the .1% for the past few decades.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#436
post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no license, and seemingly intended to share it freely with the world No license means you don’t intend to share it “freely”, since you didn’t share any rights. By default, you don’t own things people shared on the internet just because it’s there. That being said I’ve even seen people with licenses in their repos who get mad when people used their code, there’s just no telling and it’s best to just treat random sou…

I'm curious if you would have the same opinion about code shared on stack overflow?

I think GP is referring to the fact that an author’s work is copyright protected by default, and a license is needed to permit others to use freely [1]. StackOverflow posts are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 [2].

[1]: https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html

[2]: https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing

(Disclaimer: Just commenting on GP’s statement about “no license”, not on the specific disagreement or apology mentioned above which I am unfamiliar with.)

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've literally never had the thought of "how do I influence other people." Why is that considered a valuable skill? It just sounds like a nicer version of "manipulation".

If other people are not smart enough to see why your ideas are superior then you need to explain it to them or otherwise convince them to go along somehow. Most of my "influencing" is just repeatedly explaining things to people and letting them think through all the bad ideas and dead ends themselves.

[dead]

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, the actual apology is well written.

Although little note at the very end explains why: > This note is in response to emails from Eli Grey to Chrome leadership from October, 2023 In other words, he wrote this because he was forced to.

that's going a bit far, no?

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#439
> Novelty is a loan you repay in outages

If you personally build all (or most) of the stuff, you are in an extreme vertical integration benefit situation. You can make huge system wide changes in ways that would not be possible without having done so much novel work.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious if you would have the same opinion about code shared on stack overflow?

I think GP is referring to the fact that an author’s work is copyright protected by default, and a license is needed to permit others to use freely [1]. StackOverflow posts are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 [2]. [1]: https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html [2]: https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing (Disclaimer: Just commenting on GP’s statement about “no license”, not on the specific disagreement or apol…

It's worth noting that the code in question was also open sourced and permissively licensed by the original author as he stated in the thread[1]. I guess this isn't really about licensing at all, just the original author seems to think it was rude, and also doesn't want to accept any of the apologies that have been offered.

[1]: https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/pull/684#issuecomment...

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