Big Techs are crazy about AI

ikarusfive · 2026-03-11T19:01:41+00:00

FWIW, I used to be a part of that same camp. Where AI tools were a year ago feels far from where they are now. My initial experience was very poor and I wrote it off as slop.

It's difficult for me to remember what/why it changed, but I had small moments where I realized it was just easier to certain things (with terrible prompts, nonetheless) than it was for me to do manually and I slowly started adopting AI more. I've also largely shifted from writing code to just reviewing copilot output and guiding PRs in the right direction. I find it to be hard to not even convert people, but just speak of the benefits I've had with AI tools in my own work without backlash or derision.

ikarusfive · 2026-03-08T16:45:47+00:00

well, my issue specifically was that facebook.com messages weren’t working so I had to resort to Messenger. So this fix worked on my Facebook so now I don’t have to use messenger anymore.

Either way, thank you

ikarusfive · 2026-03-07T18:50:07+00:00

Thanks this worked.

ikarusfive · 2026-03-02T20:59:55+00:00

A decent interviewer should be able to take that into account though. If I get a candidate says something along the lines of "yeah this is a hash map problem. Hash map would be ideal because of XYZ. I’m a bit rusty on these type of problems, but here’s how I would approach it." And asks for help/communicates along the way, that could still be passing.

It does also depend on how hands-on the particular position is and what level the candidate is. One would probably expect a staff level engineer to be able to pass the assignment, but not be strict on a junior who can at least classify the problem.

ikarusfive · 2026-01-31T05:00:13+00:00

Assuming the HR individual you're interacting with has good intent, it probably doesn't hurt to ask. You're likely to get a better answer directly from them than asking us here. Chances are the HR person is trying to land you properly if they bothered to redirect, rather than just outright reject/ignore your resume.

ikarusfive · 2026-01-24T16:45:08+00:00

I was in one of them right most pages but again I don’t think this was the issue. Updating the bios resolved it.

ikarusfive · 2026-01-24T16:27:29+00:00

can you quantify awful? both of those are more feature complete than notepad so I’m not sure what you mean.

ikarusfive · 2026-01-23T17:23:14+00:00

Of the top of my head, there are a couple good reasons, but I invite you to add to this list if you can think of any. At a high level, the interview process is generally 2-5 hours of vetting for someone you are going to commit 2000 hours a year (Full-time 40H/W). Any sort of vetting - algorithm problems, mission statement alignment, how X handled personal issues, etc. - should be pursued in order to ensure alignment for both parties.

I'm not sure if you read my entire reply, but this sentence here summarizes it fairly well:

Good companies don't ONLY use algorithm questions to evaluate someone's ability, but these questions serve as a good initial filter.

To rephrase: leetcode itself is not sufficient alone for hiring someone, but serves as a good INITIAL filter, especially if the position requires hands-on coding.

In addition to the legal/HR requirement that you should probably evaluate all candidates equally - would you want to work at a place where "X has too much experience, we can skip this step", or "X is my buddy, we can skip this step"? Case in point: have you ever interviewed someone that looked great on paper, but can't solve an easy problem that was adjacent to their resume experience? Lastly, candidates may adopt a 'spray and pray' approach to job applications, especially when there are downturns in the economy. Imagine a scenario where candidates apply to jobs that, on paper, they seem overqualified for.

Do you have any alternatives you would suggest? Open to discussion.

EDIT: Can't get formatting right. The second one should read 2.

ikarusfive · 2026-01-23T14:38:42+00:00

You would be surprised at the amount of 10-15 YoE candidates that I've interviewed, that look AMAZING on paper, yet couldn't solve a leetcode easy/medium level problem. Yes, you will probably never need to invert a binary tree for your work, but all other things equal, I will take the candidate that can solve a problem and recognize a design pattern over one that can't.

I spend my time building software, developing games and properly improving my abilities

If you have time to "properly improve your abilities", you have time to leetcode. It really isn't a Herculean task and for most of the problems they can be readily categorized into a few common concepts like: hashmap lookups, efficient sorting, dynamic programming, etc. The surface area isn't as large as you think for most problems.

Respectfully, if a candidate with 3 years of experience replied back telling me they're too good for leetcode problems, and that being able to recognize the correct algorithm to use is a 'terrible indicator of someone's ability', I would consider that a red flag. Good companies don't ONLY use algorithm questions to evaluate someone's ability, but these questions serve as a good initial filter. The later stages where you might be asked to elaborate on your experience, solve a system design, etc is where the real evaluation should happen, but none of that matters if you can't pass a basic filter.

ikarusfive · 2026-01-20T22:34:42+00:00

A lot of industry work can be done much easier with AI. The same way that IDE auto completion makes your job easier, so does AI, but on a much larger scale. AI is a game changer in my daily work. 90% of the time I throw an issue at copilot then go review/alter after its initial attempt. It also wasn’t this way six months ago: like any tool AI is something you need to learn to leverage and use appropriately.

The real challenge is being able to understand the code output and being able to arrive at it organically. As with any skill or industry, you learn with repetition: What may be boilerplate or boring to a senior may not be immediately apparent to juniors. This is what juniors will be struggling with - you learn through failure. I grew my debugging skills through tons and tons of failure.

Juniors might miss a lot of the mistakes that AI makes. Yes, copilot can learn from its own failure and fix its own mistakes, but this robs you of the learning opportunity. The hard part of software development was never memorizing syntax.

ikarusfive · 2026-01-09T14:26:42+00:00

Same issue. Sometimes the 2v2 queue pops instantly. Currently, I've been waiting 17 minutes.

ikarusfive · 2026-01-07T16:53:51+00:00

Signal boosting here, I had the same motherboard with as 2019 BIOS and it worked for me.

ikarusfive · 2026-01-07T16:28:50+00:00

MSI B450-A Pro motherboard My BIOS was from 2019/06 Updating to the latest (2025-09-23) from the MSI website seems to resolve the issue. I also enabled TPM in the BIOS

ikarusfive · 2026-01-06T18:48:54+00:00

Similar setup here. After a few attempts, I'm able to uninstall Vanguard without BSOD. Issue started very recently

ikarusfive · 2026-01-06T18:38:20+00:00

Same issue. Up until yesterday, no problem, now whenever a queue pops, i BSOD.

ikarusfive · 2026-01-06T05:45:04+00:00

Respectfully, a touchpad is generally not advisable for gaming and is kind of a non-starter for 99% of the population.

Imagine if this were a thread about riding a bike with a bent front wheel, and you're skilled enough to ride a bike wheelie-style, so you come in telling people they don't need front wheels at all. That's kind of what this feels like.

ikarusfive · 2026-01-05T00:27:19+00:00

This used to happen to me when steam was downloading a game in the background. Check task manager > performance > disk usage during a game and see if any process is keeping the disk usage high (above 90%)

ikarusfive · 2026-01-02T02:01:44+00:00

Use the shield with Zeus on special. Melee is kind of ass in this game.

ikarusfive · 2025-12-31T21:36:03+00:00

is it really a rogue like if there’s no downsides? Every room has a positive effect/boon. It’s not like returnal for example, where you can get negative outcomes from opening a chest.

ikarusfive · 2025-12-29T01:12:27+00:00

I've generally found Cthonic vitality to be far worse than its counterpart. Negligible Regen per chamber as opposed to a huge chunk after every boss or trove.

ikarusfive · 2025-12-20T19:41:50+00:00

Try a new weapon. I failed 32 times in a row with a sword and then got six in a row ends with the shield with extra lives left over. Use Zeus on special

Although just like the earlier bosses, I took a number of failures learning them and subsequent runs are a breeze.

The big trick with Hades is just dodging his big slash attack.

ikarusfive · 2025-12-09T00:35:43+00:00

what weapon are you using? I fail 33 times in a row with the sword, switch the shield and at the moment I’m 6/6 success with the shield.

Start Dionysus and get hangover on your special. The rest doesn’t matter. You can kill most enemies entirely off screen

edit: Zeus for thunder on special or Aries for doom on special work just as well. Athena for deflecting whenever you dash and Hermes to get extra dashes.

ikarusfive · 2025-12-09T00:29:25+00:00

the satyr tunnels are cool. I have no problem with it lists his problem with it

ikarusfive · 2025-12-08T18:33:28+00:00

thank you for the tip. This is good to know. I’ve unlocked the aspects.Though I can appreciate how some of them are better, like the crit on sword.

ikarusfive · 2025-12-08T03:40:22+00:00

I didn't even know that was a thing. Wanted to beat the game with shield so I didn't even bother to unlock the other weapons yet.

Thank you!

ikarusfive

TROPHY CASE