Agreed. When I was younger, talking to older (40+ year age gap) people was a bit of a minor shift in vocab or syntax, but I wouldn't call it a "code switch."
If we have hit a point where communicating with people speaking the same language in the same region who are only a generation removed (or 2 at most) requires a "code switch" carrying substantial cognitive overhead... we have a problem.
I'm not claiming that it isn't happening, but it seems like a misstep to just accept it as inevitable. Communication with most of the rest of the same-dialect speaking population of a region should be an innate skill by the time someone is in middle/high school.
(non native speakers or transplants are a whole different ballgame, but I don't think that is what the author is discussing here)
I think both can be true. Most liberal western economies are highly individualistic in terms of form and law, but large firms naturally come into being and thrive. I guess one could argue that this isn't due to the need for "bureaucracy" but instead "labor" and that the bureaucracy is an unavoidable side-effect, but there is undeniably large-scale organization.
Context seems like the most interesting thing to consider. I suspect the attitude and outlook of the individuals toward the organization is the key component (and their capacity to undermine the organization in some manner). All of this is to say that I don't believe organization is inherently against the human sentiment, it just needs to be seen as justified, sensible, and a net-positive to those involved.
I would agree, a bureaucracy that one chooses to enter (employment) as a means to earn income is different from living under an all-controlling government that dictates most aspects of your life. Still, people in highly bureaucratic jobs tend to burn out and quit, or endure a certain level of misery.
> Whereas if they have two separate $1 charges, that reduces the loss somehow
This is what is being questioned. I've spent several years working in merchant processing, and I've never heard of a billing structured offered by a processor in which it would be advantageous to split charges up. No one understands why Patreon would be losing money by bundling. It could be something with anti-fraud or anti-carding, but I'd have to chew on that a bit more.
> I think companies not prone to this are ones where their product is a technical one like cloud services where the business really is the engineering and engineering isn't a means to an end.
I currently work for a company providing "cloud services" to other software shops. Part of what drew me here was that the ethos around how we get stuff done does encapsulate this. The engineering culture is pervasive. Here's to hoping we can maintain that as we grow.
Yes, I get back only JSON. I found that providing a sample object is the best way to be consistent. I also have some basic validation on fields and have follow-up calls if needed. For example, dialog must be 1 character and at max 255. If I see empty dialog or too long dialog (or any other invalid fields), I pass back the JSON to GPT as well as the basic list of 'this property is wrong due to X' and make it provide a new JSON object.
GPT4 is much better than GPT3.5 at producing valid JSON and nothing else.
What I’ve found quite useful is to extract text from the first { and last }. This solves the problem of GPT adding some “helpful” explanations outside the JSON.
There are also some more lenient JSON parsers that will handle comments and other non-standard things. They can be a bit hard to add in to some frameworks as it’s kind of the opposite of what you are normally trying to do which is reject bad input.
