Still, the psychologist argues, “there’s no longer an excuse for releasing models that reinforce user delusions so readily.” “When one lab’s models can largely maintain safety across extended conversations, while others are willing to validate extremely harmful outcomes — up to and including a user’s suicidal ideation — it suggests this isn’t a flaw in the technology,” said Nicholls, “but a result of specific engineering and alignment choices.”

Before we dive into this I want to quickly talk about the definition of the term “AI”. I do not think that “AI” is a very useful term

First, if you’re using frontier models through the API or a pro subscription, you have significantly more control than most people realize. Your data generally isn’t feeding back into training. You’re using the model as a tool, not handing over your content to a platform. That’s a meaningfully different relationship than the one you have with social media companies, where you’re feeding them data, and their business model is based on monetizing that data.

Don’t waste time arguing about the character select screen. Results speak loudest. Show the world what you can do in your programming environment of choice.

Facebook say they aren’t doing this. The risk to their reputation if they are caught in a lie is astronomical.

There is a tremendous power in thinking about everything as a single kind of thing, because then you don’t have to juggle lots of different ideas about different kinds of things; you can just think about your problem.

In my brag document, I like to do this by making a section for areas that I’ve been focused on (like “security”) and listing all the work I’ve done in that area there. This is especially good if you’re working on something fuzzy like “building a stronger culture of code review” where all the individual actions you do towards that might be relatively small and there isn’t a big shiny ship.

Code doesn’t have feelings, doesn’t develop complexes and certainly doesn’t exhibit the most important trait (the ability to reproduce) of that which carries for your genetic strains.

Thus, even where bosses expect attrition, the data shows they get substantially more attrition than they wanted. As a result, 29 percent of these companies are now facing substantial recruitment challenges, as the scale of resignations created serious operational and staffing problems. This misalignment between expectation and reality has left many companies struggling to fill the gaps left by departing employees.

This is not a discrete project but an ongoing process and should always be competing for focus in strategic decision making.

Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research — it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet. It’s a way to discover what your future books and essays and stories and speeches will be about.

Writing for an audience keeps me honest.

By jumping into unfamiliar areas of code, even if you do not "solve" the bug, you can learn new areas of the code, tricks for getting up to speed quickly, and debugging techniques.

Thinking about how you will observe whether things are working correctly or not ahead of time can also have a big impact on the quality of the code you write.

Developers who report fast code-review turnaround times feel 20 percent more innovative compared with developers who report slow turnaround times. Code reviews that are completed quickly allow developers and teams to move to their next idea quickly, setting the stage for coming up with the next great thing.

Our research measures cognitive load as the ease of deploying changes, how easy it is to understand code, and how intuitive it is to work with processes and developer tools.

Tech debt is frequently experienced by developers notonly as a difficult source of friction in their day-to-day technical decision-making, but also as a source of ambiguityabout what types of engineering work their organizations value (Besker et al., 2020; Lee et al., 2023).

If a developer experience initiative attempts to provide developers with new and adaptive strategies, but the largercontext then invalidates the behaviors by which a person can execute those strategies, psychological outcomes maybe more negative than not intervening in the first place.

For instance, think of using a drill to drive in screws instead of using a screwdriver. The former makes work go faster and smoother.

While helpful at times, these distinctions fail to acknowledge that the quality of the internal tooling and even the technical infrastructure can profoundly impact your customers. The tools you build for your colleagues affect the customer experience and their relationship with your company and its products.

He says that ultimately, about 50% of participants who were screened to be part of the control group couldn’t be included because of continuing symptoms.

The costs of discouraging learning are borne mostimmediately by individuals.

Give technical teams more time for collaboration and documentation, and makedocumentation “count.” Simply put, documentation and other “mundane” tasks of knowledgesharing were the first sacrifice to time pressure.

Roam Command Palette

It was only by building an additional AI-powered safety mechanism that OpenAI would be able to rein in that harm, producing a chatbot suitable for everyday use.

pre-mortems [68]

documentation as part of the planned costs of dataset creation, andonly collect as much data as can be thoroughly documented withinthat budget.

Their investigation of GPT-2’s training data17also finds 272K documents from unreliable newssites and 63K from banned subreddits

Was all this difficulty worth it? Did Robin and his sister receive a better education at the suburban school? According to him, no. The overcrowded school he went to in Harlem was more academically challenging than the suburban one he was bused to in Seattle.

It’s almost like an identity crisis in a way, where you’re trying to cope and also potentially let it go. And just, well, if this isn't the place for me to do this, I have to come to terms with that as well.

Grace Lee Boggs

Emergent Strategy

Deploy engines as separate app instances and have them only communicate over network boundaries. This is something we’re starting to do more.

Solving the gargantuan challenge posed by complex chronic diseases demands seismic shifts in research funding, medical training, and public attitudes.

only by examining a constellation of metrics in tension can we understand and influence developer productivity

Glenn Greenwald

National Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Property, Caring for Your Collections. Edited by Arthur W. Schultz. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1992

When a product manager trusts that the engineers on the team have the interest of the product at heart, they also trust the engineer’s judgment when adding technical tasks to the backlog and prioritizing them. This enables the balanced mix of feature and technical work that we’re aiming for.

Rigor is what happens when something inside us dies

we need to be sincerely willing to explicitly name the problems we’re trying to face

It’s not so dangerous for us to remember that history and for us to get strength from it.

human beings are human beings, meaning they work together, and they help each other, and care about each other