ChatGPT and LLMs have had a significant impact on my wife's life. She's a second language speaker, and having ChatGPT available to draft and proofread professional sounding emails and text messages has drastically increased her self-confidence and ability to communicate with colleagues. I think that's amazing.
Two uses for me (as a native English speaker who writes pretty well on my own):
1. Reformatting notes or bits of information into something more formal (something I consider actually counterproductive in a way, since formal is often more verbose, but that's expected in certain contexts...)
2. Sifting through the crap of the internet to answer obscure questions. The Google replacement that has been needed.
It's helped me incredibly to proof-read a novel I wrote in Spanish and translated myself into English to make it sound more native. I review ever single suggestion an LLM provides (as I would do with a native proof-reader!).
I think this type of job suits LLMs perfectly... At the end of the day it's just a statistical NLP tool.
For second/new language users, search enabled LLMs are great for finding information. You can instruct it to search in the target language and provide the results in your native language, helping greatly when you're not even sure what the relevant search words are.
I wouldn't trust the analysis on anything important, but that gives you the source links so you can still verify yourself.
The downside to doing this is that you'll sound like an LLM. LLM-generated text is very obvious to anyone with basic reading comprehension and once detected will cause some people to summarily dismiss the sender as a bot.
This is more than acceptable if it allows you to confidently send of an email in less than a minute that would otherwise take you 30 minutes of agony to write and still not be confident about.
Also, these aren't cold calls. The recipients aren't critical about how "botty" the email sounds.
I feel like the fact that you are able to say this, and the sentiment echoed in other comments, is a pretty decent sign that the "movement" has peaked. It was just a few years ago that anybody voicing this kind of opinion was immediately shot down and buried on this very forum.
It will take a while for DEI to cool down in corporate settings, as that will always be lagging behind social sentiment in broader society.
I see it more as the simple truth. There's only so much influence you can wield working one day a week as an executive advisor. By his own admission he could have steered things better if he'd been more involved, but he didn't want to be more involved. He's got his own startup to work on.
Oh yeah I was assuming we were talking about when he was actually working there. That whole consulting gig felt like a slow quit.
> By his own admission he could have steered things better if he'd been more involved
My reading is that back when he was full time, he was busy with actual product work and coding, and he could have possibly made a difference by going political, but there would have been no guarantee and it would have taken a lot of his time.
Yup. I had the misfortune of being in Michigan, unemployed, at a particularly bad time. I applied to about 30-40 gas stations, movie theaters, fast food places... Everywhere I went I was told the same thing, "I'm required by law to give you this application form, but we're not going to hire you. Good luck." I didn't know anybody and couldn't get a job cleaning floors let alone flipping burgers.
unfortunately it does take time but eventually those not paying you, me, us all, they stop making money by sitting on it, then they have no choice but to spend
> I find multi-letter variable names extremely old fasioned
Sometimes I read things here on Hacker News that throw me so hard I leave the site for a month or two. Congratulations, this time it's your fault. Goodbye.
One-letter variables have all approximately the same physical size; this makes the “tokenization” step of reading a formula faster.
They are also less descriptive, and this makes the semantic interpretation more difficult.
Usually mathematicians read entire papers, or large excerpts, at a time. In this situation the semantic association symbols<->concepts is often made at the beginning of each section and reused for several formulas, making mathematical notation more effective.
Programmers instead often look at code in smaller fragments. They don’t have thesame level of contextual information readily available and so they often prefer to embed this information in variable names.
Add that programs are written mostly in ASCII, on a keyboard, with autocomplete, in a single typeface, and math by hand, on paper or blackboard, with much more graphic possibilities.
No. I've been at AWS for over 7 years in a few different roles. Came to the serverless space >2.5 years ago because I felt passionate about it (could have literally done almost anything). Again, sorry for mis-posting under my older personal account, it was rarely used fwiw.
I wasn't criticizing you. I was pointing out that an equally likely and more charitable interpretation is that you posted as a fan of AWS before you started posting as an employee.
Turns out I was wrong in this case, but you've explained the situation and everything is hunky dory.
Yeah after 1-2 presentations I built a template and just drop stuff into each slide I have defined. Then if I need more slides I copy the framework bit for a single slide. Super easy.
Eh, I agree it's kind of a strange choice of words, but you don't really expect people to want to spend more time with somebody who doesn't provide any value? Just being pleasant company is useful and has value.
Agree except for the apologizing part. Especially if you're the kind of person that over-thinks things, like me.
There are two situations that I can think of where apologizing is appropriate and appreciated:
1. You did something bad, rather than just saying something. Like puking on a friend's couch. Go out of your way to make amends.
2. Immediately after you said something and realized how insensitive or offensive it was. Conversation moves fast, if it hasn't already moved on briefly retract and apologize, then let others talk for a while.
I tend to fixate on things I've said in the past that I regret. I have a rotating roster of my "most awkward moments" that my brain likes to randomly replay for me without prompting. In the past I used to go out of my way to find a way to apologize for these moments. Almost always the encounter was awkward enough to give me something new to fixate on. Most of the time they don't even remember the conversation in question.
Don't take yourself too seriously. There's a certain amount of hubris in assuming that something you said in passing deeply affected anybody else. Forgive yourself and let these small fixations go and others will too, probably much faster than you do.
I replay awkward (or bad) moments occasionally, too. You can actually break that habit, though. When you catch yourself remembering them, just make the effort to blank your mind. "Don't think about cheese" and all that.
That's also the only use of LLMs we've found.