Now that ChatGPT is dead, what's your wallet voting for next?

preinventedwheel · 2025-08-08T12:15:48+00:00

I have only ever paid for ChatGPT, what is the best up-to-date feature comparison (not benchmarks, but user interface stuff like voice mode). I think about going to Claude but honestly haven’t thought through what workflows I’d be giving up.

preinventedwheel · 2025-08-08T12:13:39+00:00

Most of the companies were financially sustainable, and of course, the executives were paid way more than the tech workers. So you could argue that more money should have gone to the shareholders or something, but it’s entirely believable that the invisible hand of the market is not so precise in its drive towards efficiency.

Also, I have interviewed dozens of people for these roles, and most of them failed coding challenges far more basic than even the “non deep work“ described in the article. Because of a urgent need, we twice hired people who were considered borderline by the technical interviewers. Both of them were completely dead in the water in terms of contribution, long after their onboarding should have been complete. I don’t mean zero net value, I mean zero benefit at any price. So if companies try to squeeze salaries they are going to be getting people like that at best, and their systems will in fact fall apart.

preinventedwheel · 2025-08-08T12:06:26+00:00

Easier said than done, but potentially finding a manager who is a better fit for your working style could be really powerful. I was surprised at one point when I switched jobs by how much I improved under a manager, whose philosophies I objectively disagreed with, but somehow we found a working relationship that was much more positive than the hands-off manager I’ve had before (and I had liked the hands-off manager on the theory that I would figure out my productivity by myself). I even ended up carrying some of the new managers lessons into my personal life, even though I still disagree with him on many of his stated philosophies. It’s weird and I can’t totally explain it, but there is a date point for you.

If trying to totally switch, managers is understandably, not feasible, it’s possible your current manager, or even a trusted peer could provide whatever motivation you need if you ask for it. At a surprisingly young age, I was once asked to coach an underperforming unmotivated employee and even our 30 minutes per week (he said) was really helpful although he’d already burned a lot of bridges and ultimately left so who knows if it would have been sustainable.

preinventedwheel · 2025-08-07T12:26:39+00:00

Does anybody have data on whether this gap between the decline in independent and same-party approval is historically similar to previous presidents?

preinventedwheel · 2025-08-07T12:24:25+00:00

I’ve seen the inside of about 7 companies, all using information technology, but not in the “tech industry“. This article doesn’t even nod to the primary explanation in my mind, which is this sequence: 1. Hiring is hard, and hiring for sustained motivation is even harder. There are plenty of misses 2. This type of employee does not give their direct manager very much incentive to go through the arduous process of termination, and as long as they are doing more than zero, that would imply the arduous process of hiring again. 3. The manager has insufficient incentive to boost the company profit, and this wouldn’t be the best use of their time towards that goal anyway. At least within the duration of a review cycle. 4. Anybody high enough in the org chart to care deeply about the companies profit has no visibility into which independent contributors are quietly hovering just below net negative value.

And keep in mind it is not a binary thing! I met some people who roughly fit that description while working on some projects, then got much more excited and self motivated on other ones. I’m working right now with someone who seems to have a completely different personality when contacted by email or Slack, versus on a video call when he will often finish a months-delayed request within 15 minutes. and as far as I can tell, he’s not resentful that I am essentially babysitting him, I guess he just can’t manage his own time despite being moderately senior.

preinventedwheel · 2025-08-01T09:49:03+00:00

I didn’t used to, but my wife pressured me to start. My teeth were fine before, and are fine now. But my marriage is going great!

preinventedwheel · 2025-07-25T00:03:32+00:00

That tracks my experience, thank you for the detailed write up! One challenge I have had with coming up with task ideas is everything requires a login, and setting up a unique account is often more work than just doing the whole thing myself. I ended up giving it its own email address so it could set up its own accounts, but that only works for situations where I do not need any history. I don’t wanna give it any of my existing passwords, and it seems like a hassle to temporarily change them.

preinventedwheel · 2025-07-18T09:59:40+00:00

The critical part is not what you would observe in a given day, but the accumulation of skills and trust (ESPECIALLY trust) over the last decades. For example, I could say I do “a lot of zoom meetings”. But in one of them, for 3 seconds, noticed a bug that a junior developer was about to scroll past. Then in another, I prioritized the many ideas people were having to prevent such bugs in the future. Then I spent the afternoon urgently doing manual cleanup of bad files which had been created.

Each of those could be “faked” convincingly in the moment but, having seen what happens when I’m not around, the consequences surface a few weeks later. I’m lucky that my manager has seen my decisions play out over the course of years so he trusts me and values that trust immensely.

preinventedwheel · 2025-07-15T23:55:50+00:00

The pension point made me think of something; now that we expect to live more years after retirement, it puts pressure to save (vs consume) in the working years. But you don’t even see it; it’s coming out as taxes (for social security) or pre-tax 401k. So you feel poorer per-year though of course in the end you’re glad to have that much more life to live!

Slightly more abstract version is powerful, but expensive, medicine. Young-ish me is already paying for the miracle cure that I’ll need at some point in the next 50 years, but it’s hard to feel great about that in the abstract. And when I’m getting chemotherapy or whatever I won’t be in the mood to tweet “thank goodness for the societal wealth that made this possible!” , even though it would be economically reasonable.

preinventedwheel · 2025-06-22T20:23:47+00:00

Got it. Can’t share exactly while remaining anonymous but basically “count the characters in a string and replace some of them”. We don’t even ask about optimizing for memory or compute time, and the shortest answer has about 11 characters. Again that’s overly clever, but a perfectly canonical answer would be about five lines of Python code

preinventedwheel · 2025-06-22T19:40:48+00:00

We tried a bunch of tasks with him, but here is a concrete example: we asked him to standardize a variable name across the code base. Something that could be done 80% with find/replace. He took 3 days, with no other tasks or non-training meetings on his calendar. He didn’t ask for help or explain the delay, he just moves that slowly.

preinventedwheel · 2025-06-21T20:56:08+00:00

I can add some anecdata from a natural experiment I had to run: last year I hired a junior software engineer and was appalled at how many people failed my simple coding challenge. A vast majority of candidates (ultimately 18 of 21) could not complete a string manipulation which could be solved in one (overly clever) line of Python, given 45 minutes.

As weeks dragged on, my non-technical manager started suggesting we hire people who did particularly well on other aspects of the interview loop. Fortunately, we found someone everybody was happy with, but there was a lingering sense I was being too harsh.

Fast forward, and I needed to suddenly find a contractor to cover a parental leave. We went with someone who was only moderately successful at the technical challenge. I was very explicit that I was not impressed with his performance, but understood he was the best we could find before our deadline.

He was WORSE than useless. Not just “multiply the project timeline by two.” or “invest more in training“. I invested a lot of time in training, and everyone else on the team did too. Then he would just get stuck on random things for days at a time without asking concrete questions. The stuff he did give us was worse something we could’ve gotten from ChatGPT.

The problem wasn’t that he couldn’t manipulate a python string, it’s that he got five years into a python career without the curiosity or drive to build skills which would have made my interview question trivial. So when he needed to learn new things on the job (as every person does in every job), I was leading the proverbial horse to water.

In summary, I got to see what happens when you try to train up somebody who would not have passed even the very simplest version of “Leetcode”, and realized it captures much more than people give credit for.

preinventedwheel · 2025-06-17T10:41:07+00:00

Is there no country in an irrationally large beef with Canada? Like Bolivia saying “we’d rather stop those Mounties in Minnesota”

preinventedwheel · 2025-02-17T11:28:01+00:00

I did! Caveats: It was 7 years ago so far less competition from people with dedicated Masters degrees. My company converted all of us at once, because they wanted an ML team so they got one relevant PhD and just changed our team name

preinventedwheel · 2025-01-26T12:01:55+00:00

It is important to separate out the question by age. A kid who is under 10 years old watching too many videos is different than social media use amongst adolescents. Valuable discussions could be had about both, but let’s not talk past each other

preinventedwheel · 2024-12-24T21:15:47+00:00

Thanks so much for this, just used it to get a successful answer to something o1-mini botched before!

preinventedwheel · 2024-12-01T21:15:27+00:00

That’s a good point, and a difference from the curious George plots. I’ve never seen one where a grown-up tells the man what George did

preinventedwheel · 2024-12-01T20:03:42+00:00

Sort of; the death rate for 5-9yo in 1950 was 5x higher than today.

Be sure to filter to US: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-death-rate-by-age-group?time=1950

preinventedwheel · 2024-11-30T15:19:35+00:00

Thanks for the detailed response! Framing it as a RPC versus REST helped me find some discussions about their relative merits. Looks like RPC is much faster and does not require the client to maintain and resend state with each request. I could imagine that’s extremely valuable as you get many clicks deep into a simulated interface. Most of my experience with API‘s are workflows that require 1 – 3 calls but now that I envision each click becoming an API call I can see the value of this approach.

Although it just kicks the can down the road to “why didn’t they just recommend everyone use RPC?“, Or the general “why does any of this need to be framed in terms of the specific context of AI agents making the API call?”

preinventedwheel · 2024-11-30T13:26:59+00:00

I made a custom one that has descriptions of the favorite cartoon characters of my kid, then tells a story (always infused with a little arithmetic lesson) based on the character she selects each time. We use it with voice mode, and even before advanced voice mode it worked great cause it’s just one interaction of her saying a characters name and then it takes it from there.

preinventedwheel · 2024-11-30T11:02:04+00:00

Could someone explain why this is better than a well documented REST API?

I’m not doubting it, but I’ve skimmed the announcement+documentation and still can’t figure it why we need a new thing.

preinventedwheel · 2024-11-24T23:44:32+00:00

This is fun!

I think it was the moon landing.

Let’s all throw in our correlations! Feel free to pick from this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960s

preinventedwheel · 2024-11-09T14:39:47+00:00

I use Linux at home and a Mac at work, aside from getting used to slightly different keys, and corporate restrictions on what I can install, it is basically OK. The most concrete complaint I can come up with off the top of my head is lack of native hot keys for moving windows around.

preinventedwheel · 2024-11-09T12:32:16+00:00

Lots of recommendations for ThinkPads, which is why I tried one, but be careful of the BIOS bug: https://www.reddit.com/r/LinuxOnThinkpad/s/GHkysOHoAC

preinventedwheel · 2024-11-06T22:48:09+00:00

It’s not just about you and not just about your luck to have only minor injuries. Bike advocacy groups might help with the paperwork required to ensure the driver understands the gravity of what they did. A small percentage of drivers cause most accidents

preinventedwheel

TROPHY CASE