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Average is all you need
11–20 of 111 posts
Re: Average is all you need
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everyone can be average. Half of people will be below average. I might not agree with the point, but I can see that idea that many things just need to be "good enough" (which we might define as "average") and we save our real expertise for the things that really matter.
> Half of people will be below average. s/average/median
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Re: Average is all you need
#13Average is all we need ! I mean, working 50% is enough, right ? A car that starts 50% of the time ? A plane that stops on 50% of the flights ? A pacemaker that beats only 50% of the time ? David Goodenought said that average is enough ..
A car that starts 50% of the time isn't "average". The average new car starts more or less every time. (And if you said 'modal average', I'd say the modal average new car starts every time).
It is not average today because people in the past tried to do better, not average things
Re: Average is all you need
#14> But this is a pain, first because, if you do anything that is not selling a product online that people can buy right when they click a button, it is a drag to create those attribution models effectively: is it last click, first click, weighted attribution... who knows. Nobody knows. Everybody gives up and just adds it to a dashboard and pretends it makes sense.
Yes, thinking about your data and how to check it is so annoying. Much better to do something average, see if the result puts you in a good light, and share that insight into your company's working with ~~everyone on the internet~~ your boss.
Rarely have I seen "we help you create meaningless slop more easily" advertised so explicitly. Or is this also average?
Re: Average is all you need
#15how do you know those queries are actually correct without domain knowledge?
Do you know enough about JOINs and how they work to be able to break those big queries down and figure out whether they are doing exactly what you're asking for in English?
Re: Average is all you need
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everyone can be average. Half of people will be below average. I might not agree with the point, but I can see that idea that many things just need to be "good enough" (which we might define as "average") and we save our real expertise for the things that really matter.
> Half of people will be below average. s/average/median
I don’t believe this is a meaningful distinction when we’re not going to agree on how to judge performance of software engineers. If this were solely about income, it might be an important distinction.
Re: Average is all you need
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everyone can be average. Half of people will be below average. I might not agree with the point, but I can see that idea that many things just need to be "good enough" (which we might define as "average") and we save our real expertise for the things that really matter.
> Half of people will be below average. s/average/median
The article assumes a normal distribution, making the distinction moot
But it is useful to question whether that is true in all cases. The cases that aren't normal-distributed might be exactly the cases where it pays off to be neither average or median
Re: Average is all you need
#18Average is all you need, if your needs are average.
But, you see, our needs are above average because we target above average exists so we only hire from the top 1% of software engineers, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, etc.
The Business simply cannot admit that it’s really doing nothing above average. If they did, investment dries up.
Re: Average is all you need
#19adding LLMs to the incompetent doesn’t transform them
if anything it makes the world more dangerous
a reckoning is coming
the top decile will be janitors for the rest
Re: Average is all you need
#20Being average is a just stage LLMs pass through as AI makes its way towards 'expert' and 'super human' levels.