It’s still there in libraries and bookstores, and even online. It’s not going anywhere.

My son enjoys reading the collection I had when I was young.

At that rate I think you can assume most clicks were accidental.

You don't know my mother

Messages like "Hi I found this podcast episode, you should listen to it!", not fitting her usual or the chat's tone at all. The link goes to the last 19 seconds because she finished listening and the thing tries to be helpful (took me a minute, the first time, to realise she didn't actually mean to share the fragment at that timestamp). At least it matches her native language I guess, looking on the bright side (the message isn't actually in English)

A simple "copy link to episode" button would have been so much more helpful. Not just for me but also any recipients that are as tech-savvy as she is and don't understand why it doesn't show them the whole episode for example, or why it is she's implying it's so important (the template wording is just off because she didn't write it)

I'm pretty confident that my accidental click rate is much higher than one in 476, especially on touch screens, although you'd need to divide that by the total number of links on the page, to get the probability of accidentally clicking on any specific link.

> Cancer kills about 25 per cent of the population and would kill maybe 35 per cent in absence of modern medicine. Granted, most of its victims are old people.

You have to dig a little deeper with your numbers, because everyone is going to die from something. Deaths from cancer would probably go down without modern medicine because most people wouldn’t be living long enough to die from cancer.

GP seems to prefer the 1960s, which would mean that the "not living enough to die from cancer" would likely be off the table.

Working 2 days a week is a 60% reduction in work, thus the 60% reduction in salary.

A race to the bottom of… unpaid work that eliminates the paid work? Can you elaborate?

We don’t need to speculate do we, there are tons of real non company run OSS projects

Now I personally wish lawyers and plumbers also got into the free work thing but here we are

Lawyers have a term for it, pro bono, and they do it for good causes. Turns out they're as human as software engineers.

> Turns out they're as human as software engineers.

Lawyers start out as humans but something about going into law school and then private practice, and feeding them after midnight turns them into... something else entirely.

Arguably the same is true for some software engineers. One minute they're a good friend that you respect, next thing you know they're building killbots or AI non consensual porn generators or surveillance platforms that are illegal for government agencies to operate. Perhaps it happens more often to lawyers?

Water is a key ingredient to the transformation. Nerds are less likely to shower than bougie lawyers, so we transform less often.

Plumbers are realistic and don’t live on ideals. They set their rates and set their hours. Lawyers; well if if only people behaved we could have nice things in life, but here we are with people trying to screw each other and misbehave…

Digital assets or work are a bit different in that making a second copy is trivial. It’d be different if every computer in the world were bespoke and needed its own bespoke software. So that makes OSS a viable option for those who can but we also can’t expect everyone to default OSS. We can default to asking that the service and prices be reasonable though.

Now I'm imagining a plumber who fixes a drain, then stands up a "fix drain as a service" website where people can put their credit cards in and their drain gets fixed remotely at effectively zero marginal cost to the plumber.

(And then, of course, the plumber gets VC money to expand the business and the drain fix becomes a drain fix subscription, and if you cancel or your credit card expires all your drains instantly block back up again.)

AI-slop PRs automerged in response to AI slop bug reports.

Curl is so important that if it had a heartbleed and didn’t patch, someone would and people’d just apply it until it was fixed in tree.

Individuals don't but lots of companies do, so that they can threaten to rugpull it later if you don't pay them millions.

> I get a disturbing number of people who say things like "I would communicate with the person asking for this to see what they're really intending blah blah"

Sounds like they know this question is a “gotcha” question but just misinterpreted which direction you were going with it.

Some will ask a question like this expecting you to treat it like a puzzle and outline how you’d solve it as-is; others ask it as a way to probe how you’ll deal with strange or misguided requests (the case you noted as disturbing); and others yet will ask it to see how you’d practically solve it (your intention).

Seems like a bad interview question without context regarding kind of answer you’re looking for.

No, it's a pretty good interview question because it tells me if somebody's instinct is to reinvent the wheel or not. What I didn't expect was how many people couldn't say how a wheel even works.

People are not generally answering interview questions based on instinct, but rather based on what they think the interviewer wants to hear to get the job. I would have interpreted this is as a leetcode style algo question and started by treating it as such, even though IRL my first instinct would be "get a lib that does it". Awful, awful strategy.

It appears that either answer would be accepted, and so I'm fine with it. If it really is there is one correct answer then I'm against this. This feels like a problem where a good enough solution can be done in the time of an interview if you do it by hand (though if anyone knows about dates they will expect there is a lifetime of fixing special cases left if you don't use the library)

I prefer fizz-buzz as a question because it is obvious there isn't a library. It is also a problem you should be able to do in an interview. It has enough weirdness that there is no best answer, despite having several workable paths you could try.

I mean, any answer is "accepted" in the sense that the whole point is to let me see how you think about solving simple problems. What has been distressing is seeing the number of applicants who can't even try, when it's the trying I want to see.

It is shocking how often there is one acceptable correct answer and they don't care about the approach to solving problems only the score in a pass fail way.

Nope, not remotely awful. I've made great hires from it, which is its point.

Its not. Any interview question where you are looking for a specific answer is already suspect, but especially if you don't properly provide context for the question in what you would expect, things become a shit show.

If you would ask someone to write a piece of code, and a part of the problem is this conversion, then you would be right to expect they reach for a library, but even if they don't you would be giving them the opportunity to explain themselves, and judge the explanation, not the answer. Also, if your test is "does this person reach for a library at the right time", you could do a lot less esoteric and confusing by just asking them to add 10 days to a date. If you just ask this one specific problem, it is likely they assume you are looking for them to demonstrate the skills involved in actually solving the problem, i.e. leetcode.

This is also why some people give you the blabla answer, because it is indeed very unlikely that someone needs to do this legitimately. This is because its a toy problem. Someone's professional reaction to the problem in isolation should indeed be: this is weird, I've never been asked something like this, what's up?

Finally, even though the question is terrible, I would still rate the "whatsup?" response higher than the "leapyear" response. I would want a developer to triple check that this problem needs solving, before they would solve it themselves.

Finally finally, if there's one answer to one question that, when answered trivially in a way literally taught in most basic programming courses (use the standard library / a third party library), makes them a "guaranteed hire", I also have significant doubts about the level of talent you are bringing in, as any experienced interviewer will tell you that qualified people will get important questions wrong, and unqualified people will get important questions right.

I understand that this reaction might be quite harsh, and I know better than anyone that its hard and time consuming to do good interviews, but please consider that you are rejecting people who may be very confused and sad by this way of rejection.

But that's why the context of the question is important. It's not clear from your comment, but I'd give a different answer if the question was strictly academic in nature (reinventing the wheel) or focused on practical work realities (use a library).

Even using a library isn't that practical. It may be the zeitgeist in JavaScript but that doesn't mean it's actually a good idea. Nobody remembers left-pad? If you're writing Java or Python then checking if your date class can already do it is a good idea.

I've managed to work in tech for 30 years without ever significantly coming into contact with javascript professionally. I hire Ada and C programmers for a stodgy defense contractor where we have to wear ties and it takes 6 months to get a new library approved; unicorns don't really thrive in this environment (or in Fairfax County in general).

Is absurd to put the onus of making sure your agent doesn’t waste money on other people.

They are free to ask the bot to do anything, and the bot is free to refuse or its owner can shut it down. The onus is on the owner to make sure the bot does not waste money.

I will not go through life worrying about the billing practices of random ai bots.

Sadly there are lots of unintelligent people out there who are incapable of taking responsibility for their own actions.

US lawyers keep filing LLM-generated pleadings and refuse to check citations. It's taken state discipline committees a long time to get there, but they're close to figuring out that any option other than prompt disbarment just increases the pain for people who are actually qualified to practice and doesn't noticeably increase the number of practitioners who see the error of their ways.

The ABA will eventually make sure that this behavior is identified in law school and people who don't want to take responsibility for what they file are expelled well before graduation, but in the meantime there are a ton of screwups in the profession and all you can do is kick them when they identify themselves.

Microsoft will then bribe the government to abolish this antitrust scheme for lawyers known as "the bar" which anticompetivley prevents AIs from doing law.

Speak for yourself. I highly value other people’s time, to the extent that I should probably value my time higher than I do for my own sake.

Doing something that wastes other people’s time or makes more work for them than necessary makes me feel awful.

I’ve always worked in a way that respects other people’s time and I always tried to make sure I did everything I could to minimize the work I’m asking someone to do for me.

Humans also generally have the will to live.

Indeed. It's almost like the LLM was the one that invented the "tactical" nuke in the first place.

No, that would be Douglas MacArthur