Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about people who don't have access to a mentor? If not AI then what is their option? Is doing tutorials on your own a good way to learn?
So, so, so many people have learnt to code on their own without a mentor. It requires a strong desire to learn and perseverance but it’s absolutely possible.
Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
241–250 of 419 posts
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't find anything wrong with this It’s not about being wrong, it’s about being ironic. We have LLMs shoved down our throats as this new way to communicate—we are encouraged to ask them to make our writing “friendlier” or “more professional”—and then one of the companies creating such a tool asks the very people most interested in it to not use it for the exact purpose we’ve been told it’s good at. They are aski…
The LLM companies have always been against this kind of thing. Sam Altman (2023): "something very strange about people writing bullet points, having ChatGPT expand it to a polite email, sending it, and the sender using ChatGPT to condense it into the key bullet points" 3 years ago people were poking fun about how restrictive the terms were - you could get your API key blocked if you used it to pretend to be a human.…
https://x.com/sama/status/1631394688384270336
Thanks for this heads-up, by the way, I've missed this particular tweet, but eventually got into exact same observation.
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…
I strongly agree with this comment. Anecdotal evidence time! I'm an experienced dev (20 years of C++ and plenty of other stuff), and I frequently work with younger students in a mentor role, e.g. I've done Google Summer of Code three times as a mentor, and am also in KDE's own mentorship program. In 2023/24, when ChatGPT was looming large, I took on a student who was of course attempting to use AI to learn and who wa…
Absolutely true. However:
The real value of AI will be to *be aware* when at that local optimum, and then - if unable to find a way forward - at least reliably notify the user that that is indeed the case.
Bottom line, the number of engineering “hard thought battles” is finite, and should be chosen very wisely.
The performance multiplier that LLM agents brought changed the world. At least as the consumer web did in the 90s, and there will be no turning back.
This is like a computer company around 1980, would be hiring engineers but forbade access to computers for some numerical task.
Funny, it reminds me the reason Konami MSX1 games look like they do, compared to the most of the competition: having access to superior development tools - their HP hardware emulator workstations.
If you are unable to come up with a filter for your applicants that is able to detect your own product, maybe you should evolve. What about asking an AI how to solve this? ;)
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think I'm just very much out of tune with the zeitgeist, because I can't imagine not going along with what's a polite request not to use AI. No, what you are is ignoring the context. This request comes from a company building, promoting, and selling the very thing they are asking you not to use. Yes, asking you not to use AI is indeed a polite request. It is one you should respect. “The zeitgeist” has as much peo…
I didn't miss that context, I understand who Anthropic are.
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It reminded me of the time Roy Wood Jr visited a pro-gun rally where they argued guns make people safe, while simultaneously asking people to not carry guns because they were worried about safety. The cognitive dissonance is worth pointing out. Well, no. It's irony, but it's only cognitive dissonance in a comedy show which misses the nuance. Most pro-gun organizations are heavily into gun safety. The message is tha…
These are the same people that insist we arm elementary school teachers and expect those teachers to someday pull the trigger on a child instead of having proper gun laws. There is no irony.
I have no illusion that safety or education is an actual concern in public schools in general.
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with your sentiment. But coming from a generative AI company that says "career development" and "communication" are among their two most popular use cases... That's like a tobacco company telling employees they are not permitted to smoke tobacco
Well, they probably aren't permitted to smoke tobacco indoors. I honestly fail to see even the irony. "Company that makes hammers doesn't want you to use hammers all the time". It's a tool. But if I squint, I _can_ see a mean-spirited "haha, look at those hypocrites" coming from people who enjoy tearing others down for no particular reason.
Even when squinting I can't see a genuine argument for why Anthrpoic shouldn't be raked over the coals for their sheer hypocrisy
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#247Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#248Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#249This feels similar to asking devs to only use vim during a coding challenge and please refrain from using VS Code or another full featured IDE.
If you know, and even encourage, your employees to use LLMs at work you should want to see how well candidates present themselves in that same situation.
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#250I'll be the contrarian and say that I don't find anything wrong with this, and if I were a candidate I'd simply take this as useful information for the application process. They do encourage use of AI, but they're asking nicely to write my own texts for the application - that's a reasonable request, and I'd have nothing against complying. sshine reply above is coming from a very conflictual mindset. "Can I still use…
Observation/Implication/Opinion:
Think reciprocal forces and trash TV ethics in both, closed and open systems. The consequences are continuously diminished AND unvarying returns. Professionally as well as personally, in all parties involved. Stimulating, inspiring, motivating factors as well as the ability to perceive and "sense" all degrade. But compensation and cheating continue to work, even though, the quality of the game, the players and their output decreases.
Nothing and nobody is resilient "enough" to the mechanism force - 'counter'-force so you better pick the right strategy. Waiting/Processing for a couple of days, lessons and honest attempts yields exponentially better results than cheating.
Companies should beware of this if they expect results that are qualitatively AND "honestly" safe & sound. This has been ignored in the past decades, which is why we are "here". Too much work, too many jobs, and way too many enabling outs have been lost almost irreversibly, on the individual level as well as in nano-, micro-, and macro-economics.
Applicants using AI is fine but applicants not being able to make that output usefully THEIRS is a problem.