As far as I know, you should be able to take a baby from like 30,000 years ago, put them through k-12, high school, and college, and they should be indistinguishable in terms of intelligence and capability. People mostly only think of humans from “thousands of years ago” as stupid because their lack of technology means their culture and thoughts didn’t survive until today. But their brain structure couldn’t have changed much. It’s just not enough time in terms of evolution.
Aristotle was like 2,400 years ago, for context lol
I will fully ack that I expect people from only 2000 or so years ago to be largely compatible with us. If not fully. But, I guess I can't bring myself to agree that early proto humans are where evolution stopped?
I get that evolution takes generations. But, it actually moves rather fast for some things, no?
Aside from knowledge, a lot of what has changed in the last couple thousand years comes down to medicine and nutrition. We’re taller on average than people from the past, for example. But that’s a nutrition thing.
Rather fast is like millions of years in evolutionary terms so 2,000 years is nothing. I don’t even think there’s significant evidence to show that Neanderthals were less intelligent than Homo sapiens and they were around from 400,000 years ago to 40,000 years ago or so. Human brains and also brain-body mass ratio wouldn’t have changed enough to make much of a noticeable difference if you teleport a human baby from thousands of years ago to today and put them through our education system.
It’s just easier to dismiss them as stupid because very little of their life has survived til today.
To the point, I mentioned that Aristotle was 2,400 years ago and you still landed on “largely compatible” lol. The pyramids were built over 4,000 years ago and they’re still a marvel of engineering. You just have a bias against people from thousands of years ago again mostly because a lot of their work didn’t survive to modern day.
I ack that I don't expect much difference in capabilities over 2000ish years, such that I expect I largely agree with you. You are taking "largely compatible" to be a left handed agreement, it seems? I... didn't intend it that way? I flat out agree that I am wrong if discussing people from most of recorded history.
My general question is largely the same, though. Do you think we haven't evolved with more intelligence since proto-human periods? Because that seems to be the claim, that we somehow evolved intelligence, and it has been solely knowledge acquisition since then. I suspect that is defensible, but feels off to me.
And my nitpicks would be that evolution isn't measured in years, but generations. And moves more rapidly when pressure on a population is stronger. Seeing how autistic so many "smart" people act, I confess I would expect more negative pressure on those behaviors in the past.
Yeah, I read “largely compatible” as sort of left-handed or like, not fully the same.
And no, I don’t think there’s a noticeable difference in terms of intelligence between us and someone from 30,000 years ago or even something more extreme like 300,000 years ago. We’re still the same species after all.
I do think you’d be more open to that idea if we had records of their thoughts and ideas. The early humans who came up with epic tales and the explorers who went on grand expeditions to unexplored territories. The people who used an early scientific method to come up with ways to preserve food or figure out what plants were safe to eat. The people who figured out better ways to build clothing for extreme weather. These weren’t dumb people.
I also think you are taking the worst version of my question. I'm not claiming they were dumb. Any more than I think my kids are dumb. But I have seen some of my kids and family where certain mental things "click" far faster than they do for others. To the point that I don't have much trouble claiming some of my family is more intelligent than others. Many of them more so than I am. Many less so, of course.
To that general idea, I similarly have zero issue with claiming some dogs are dumber than other dogs. They obviously all fail at what we would call language skills, in they can form a rudimentary problem solving ability just fine.
And, I can't remember what thread I said it in, but I do stress this isn't a transitive property. It is a lot like someone can be better at sports than someone else, but worse specifically at a specific sport.
You can do DMA cheating if that’s a non-negotiable for you but it is far more expensive. You install a direct memory access (DMA) card on your “clean” machine and flash it with firmware that hides the fact that it’s a DMA card since some rootkit level anticheats will look for that.
The card then sends memory data to a second computer (dirty) which has the cheat software installed but no rootkit anticheat. The dirty computer can then read all the memory it wants, look through walls, shows enemy health, etc. but on a second computer and monitor. Pretty sure there’s hardware to blend both monitor outputs, though most people do two monitors I believe.
> You can do DMA cheating if that’s a non-negotiable for you but it is far more expensive.
Cheap DMA cards go for couple hundred dollars which isn't all that much. Although unlike what most people tend to believe, the DMA cards do end up getting detected quite often.
> Pretty sure there’s hardware to blend both monitor outputs, though most people do two monitors I believe.
There’s someone from a company I worked at a few years ago that pumped out some trash on the last week before their two month sabbatical (or three?). I remember how pissed I was seeing the username in the commit because I recognized it from their “see you in a few months” email lmao
I get these missed beats occasionally, like a few times a year. Of course, they’re stress related for me. When I first got them, I also thought it was a heart attack and ended up in the hospital where they also ran a bunch of tests on me.
The wonderfully comical thing about mine is they’re stress related. So the first one happened, made me a little stressed because I thought something was wrong, which caused more of them, which made me even more worried, etc.
Twitch still does but the problem with twitch has always been discoverability. Previously, if you wanted to have an audience on twitch as a new streamer, one of the things you did was have a YouTube channel and grow that then convert your audience over to your twitch stream. Lots of streamers have had audiences on YouTube first before moving over to streaming on twitch.
Once TikTok really took off, you began to see twitch streamers pushing their TikTok a lot more and using that as a way to grow their community on twitch.
The problem now is that both YouTube and TikTok have significant streaming platforms. That means someone with a strong YouTube presence can just skip converting users to twitch as that is already hard enough and just stay on the YouTube platform.
My guess is that this is an effort to stymie that “leak” of twitch streamers that decide to stay on the platform where they’re seeing their biggest growth.
Definitely 100% not true. Discoverability on twitch used to be who has the higher viewer count until they added sorting by “recommended” which is still lacking. Nowadays you still supplement your twitch growth with YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
Purely from a user perspective it’s even worse now that every stream gets an ad before you can watch any of the content.
And purely from a user perspective it’s even worse because you have to go by game category then scroll through however many pages of channels there are in the category you’re interested in.
They did just add stories as a feature which might help if it’s implemented correctly.
There are a number of things I like about twitch. Top is searching by games. On YouTube I'm lucky if my results are related streams at all, where on twitch, it is 100% the game I wanted ranked high to low.
I also Like the raid mechanic for finding new streamers. Last, I like the twitch community where I find streamers because they are hanging out in other stream chats-something I have never seen on YouTube
Oh did you mean purely for finding livestreams? I think that’s where the disconnect is. Yeah if you’re just looking for livestreams to watch it’s way different because YouTube has always been really exceptionally bad for that. Content creators bank on getting a video or short recommend where they mention their stream.
I do agree on the twitch raid system too. It’s especially useful for smaller communities that tend to support each other and have relatively similar content.
I thought maybe it was some regulatory/gaming license sorta deal. But I'm looking at job listings for things like working on casino ATMs, repairing slot machines, and even a job listing for Revenue Auditor where the job description covers auditing slot machine drops, annual casino revenue, etc. None of these have US Citizen as a requirement. Seems very suspect, honestly. But I dunno how these things work on casinos.
> Expected Dates of Service 9-21-2023 through 10-15-2023 ... Hourly Rate: $100.00 per on 1099
That's a contract worker? So what's gonna happen is this poor soul is going to build out some hacked-together junk as quickly as possible, get replaced, and the replacements will have no idea how anything works. Some time down the line, a server isn't going to get a critical update because nobody even knows it exists, and this will all repeat again once the hackers find it. :)
I agree with this. Just getting to talk to a human is a massive effort in the hiring process. Before that it’s create an account on workday, have it automatically fill in the form with a pdf resume but it doesn’t change anything because I still have to go through it and make sure everything is correct, decide if I want to put effort into writing a cover letter, fill in all the manual questionnaires like “why do you want to work for us?” that I’m comfortable with, wait 2+ weeks for the automated rejection email, repeat!
This is also precious coming from an industry that uses automated emails for rejection. Yeah you don’t want to write 80 personalized rejection emails (probably way more) aaaand we don’t want to write 80 (or more) cover letters. I feel that’s pretty fair.
Also isn’t this the industry that uses keywords to automatically detect “good” resumes and skips the resumes that don’t have those keywords?
> This is also precious coming from an industry that uses automated emails for rejection. Yeah you don’t want to write 80 personalized rejection emails (probably way more) aaaand we don’t want to write 80 (or more) cover letters. I feel that’s pretty fair.
This is such a brilliantly good point!
Before getting my current job, I think I had applied to around 180 companies (getting about 10 callbacks -> 3 on sites -> 1 offer).
And I totally used an automated script I wrote for creating cover letters. It was basically a general template about me, listing relevant skills and interests, a blank variable for company name, and then an area where I could say why I wanted to work for XYZ.
Made that part of the process so much easier.
Interestingly, being on the other side, when I’ve reviewed candidate applications before phone screens or interviews, I always enjoyed reading cover letters.
This might fix it: charge the candidate some $amount for each application they send. Also charge the employer $amount * some_factor for each application they receive.
This can filter out candidates that aren't really interested, and companies that aren't really hiring.
The cost to an employer to accept (not review) 100 applications is about 1/100th of the cost to the candidate.
Employers have more information about the applicants individually and in aggregate but candidates don't about the companies.
Employers don't give much basic feedback to candidates, like underqualified, overqualified, not sure, something else.
I understand companies not wanting to write personalized rejection emails. I'd settle for them sending automated ones. 2/3 companies that I apply to don't bother to do even that.
> 2/3 companies that I apply to don't bother to do even that.
Your record is far better than mine! I don't think I've ever been informed when I was rejected for a position. I just don't hear from the company again.
How does that have anything to do with the OP and their company? A bad behavior in the industry doesn't justify taking the revenge on one small company. If anything, it creates a negative feedback loop.
> Please don't do this. I spend time going through the resume, the various links in it, and then responding to everyone who applied. But this time, with so much AI-generated verbiage I simply don't want to.
Congratulations, now there's one more company "that uses automated emails for rejection". And rightly so, if you ask me.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with OP or their employer.
Because if someone’s experience is that their cover letter never gets read, and they finally get the chance to automate writing a cover letter, they’re just going to follow the pattern they’ve always experienced.
I also love that the way things have worked for decades is applicants have to do everything by hand, but employers can automate as much as they want. Now suddenly applicants can automate just the writing of the cover letter and suddenly automation is bad and it’s all about being personal and what happened to the human touch lmao. This is just over a cover letter, by the way.
Also this is likely not applicants that are filling out one job application. We’re talking applicants that have probably spent weeks trying to apply for jobs. Spare then the 5 minutes of writing a cover letter for a job they’re probably not going to get for the 50th or whatever time.
yep, you hit it on. I was going to reply the same thing to OP. when companies use AI to determine which resumes/candidates are good, no one can complain, but when candidates use AI to generate cover letters and all that garbage (for the 300 companies they have to apply to) they are literally hitler
This, exactly this! I've been looking for a job for a while now, and of course I automated it... genuinely asking, who reads the 100s of cover letters anyway?
So the era’s gone then. Nobody raises their hat seeing another gentleman on the street anymore. Now that the power of automation is in both hands, everyone has to adapt. Next month we’ll see a medium article about using AI roleplaying chat-instruct mode to bypass the filters and generate what OP finds acceptable or human.
Just a heads up, if a field isn't required in Workday, don't fill it in. That includes career and education. Or, maybe just include one of each and delete the rest.
Those fields are mainly for Workday's data gathering anyway vs what hiring managers review.
> Yeah you don’t want to write 80 personalized rejection emails (probably way more) aaaand we don’t want to write 80 (or more) cover letters. I feel that’s pretty fair.
A rejection letter is meant to convey a single fact. A cover letter is meant to convey important information that is relevant to the hiring decision. The two things are not equal.
When I've been hiring, cover letters have often been really critical to making these decisions. If an applicant omits a cover letter or uses one that is clearly boilerplate (or AI generated), that applicant is reducing my ability to assess their suitability for the position. As a result, they're less likely to land the job.
A rejection letter conveys a single fact because you want it to convey a single fact. You could also write personalized rejection letters that tell the applicant why they weren’t selected to continue with the hiring process. That could help the applicant in their future job applications. But you don’t do that. I wonder why!
And it’s your pickle to put however much stock you want in the cover letter. That’s not what this is about at all. If I were applying to jobs and I know a significant percent of my cover letters will never be read by a single human on earth, I might be tempted to have an AI write it. If you happen to read it and reject me based on whatever likely-subjective metrics you use to determine it was chatgpt that wrote it, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. You could also reject me on a million other factors I don’t control. Either way, I saved however many minutes.
“ You could also write personalized rejection letters that tell the applicant why they weren’t selected to continue with the hiring process. That could help the applicant in their future job applications. But you don’t do that. I wonder why!”
Dear lovehashbrowns,
We are unfortunately decided to proceed with other applicant this time because even if you have roughly the required work experience for the position, based on your cover letter and resume you seemed to be generally unpleasant people to be around.
> As a result, they're less likely to land the job.
And you are less likely to hire someone that is a good fit for your role but couldn't put an insane amount of time to apply to your job post and a 100 more.
When I've been hiring I found cover letters to be useless. I just ignored them and looked at the CV to determine whether the candidate was worth an initial screening interview.
Cover letters used to be a good indication of communication skills. And I don’t mean English skills, I mean the ability to convey a set of facts in an intuitive way. If you can’t write a coherent cover letter then God help us when I DM you on Slack about a problem.
Cover letters can be useful in some instances. I was very grateful to write a cover letter when I was changing careers because I wanted to explain why my prior work experience was seemingly at odds with my intended role.
But I only bother with putting that kind of care into a cover letter if I think I have very good odds of getting the job. In this case, I knew my chances were good because one of their top employees was recommending me.
I work for a retailer where the service I’m responsible for is used by every cash register around the world for certain operations. When I came in, the RDS DB for this service had 60GB allocated to it, had literally just run out of space and caused an outage. The last team just gave it an additional 20GB. A month later, I was put in charge of it and it was already 5GB away from running out of space again. I put an end to that and gave it 250GB. The cost is minimal compared to a store not being able to open due to an outage.
The instances for the service itself had 20GB of EBS allocated to them. Luckily they don’t need much local storage. But that’s typical here. There’s a Jenkins instance that is even more of a pain. I’m not responsible for it but every week or two one of the worker nodes runs out of space because they’re given 8GB of storage space. I’m just watching the disaster unfold over the course of a year and a half as I’m constantly telling that team to just up the storage space on the worker nodes instead of constantly having to fiddle with cron jobs.
It’s not even an expense thing. They just… don’t want to increase the storage space. It drives me insane.
I'd guess the worry is that once you increase the storage, you never decrease it again. Ever. It's a one-way street. So, once everything is 5x over-provisioned, then the services tend to fill that space anyway (cause why not be wasteful if it doesn't cost anything) and a year later you are in the same seat again.
I'm not saying this is real, but the worry certainly is.
That's certainly real and something to consider when provisioning systems. I'm fully on board with that. The problem is when the cost of the cost-savings solution vastly outweighs the cost of over-provisioning infrastructure. Like this Jenkins issue bubbling up ~2-4 times a month vs just giving the worker nodes more storage space. There's been times where it happened during the night and people got paged.
Or comparing the cost of one store not being able to open on time because the RDS database's space ran out. VPs and directors start yelling and there's suddenly like 20+ people involved in figuring out why this one store didn't open on time. What's the cost of that compared to just giving the DB 250GB of space so this never comes up again?
But you are also 100% correct and I've seen that happen here, too. There's some instances I'm responsible for that were using EFS for their local storage. Costing thousands of dollars every month for absolutely no reason. I switched those to reasonably-sized EBS volumes and that alone was half of my annual savings goal.
I was completely flabbergasted seeing these instances using EFS while others were stuck on 8GB EBS volumes. Backups on the EFS drives had ballooned to the many TBs. And the backups were worthless! Instances themselves are ephemeral. They use S3 for long-term storage & metadata is on a database. Those are the things that should be backed up & their cost compared to EFS is minuscule.
> compared to just giving the DB 250GB of space so this never comes up again?
As long as there is reasonable confidence in that this is actually the case, then just provision the space and be done with it. That requires a certain understanding of future space requirements/expectations, and anything even just so slightly running away / leaking space will hit any limit given enough time. So, due diligence requires looking at whether it's actually needed.
Yup, I implemented a bunch of graphs and alerts. Right now it's at 100GB of usage so it's still growing but at a fairly predictable rate. Another nice thing to know is if it's possible to reduce that usage. I haven't been able to look into that but I know one of the causes of the usage increase. The service uses the DB to store some indexing data. There's a team forcing it to re-index and I can tell when they deploy because the storage spikes a little bit every time they do a deployment. Nothing I can do about that, sadly.
I tried to do some other fun things like going row by row with each row only contributing one letter and seeing what’s the longest word I could come up with.
If I start at the top row and go down, I can make TAXES but couldn’t think of a longer word. The third row having no vowels makes it so hard.
Starting at the bottom row and going up, I came up with CHICKEN which is delicious and neat that it ends where it started. Chickens is longer but ends on the middle row which is not as neat I feel like :(
> If I start at the top row and go down, I can make TAXES but couldn’t think of a longer word. The third row having no vowels makes it so hard.
A dictionary search turned up "paxwaxes" as the longest word I could find that starts in the top row and goes down, wrapping around to the top every three letters.
> Starting at the bottom row and going up, I came up with CHICKEN which is delicious and neat that it ends where it started. Chickens is longer but ends on the middle row which is not as neat I feel like :(
Chickens is indeed the longest.
If you start at the bottom row and go up-and-down: cataclysms, or catamarans.
If you start at the top row and go down-and-up: escapable.
If you start in the middle and go down-and-up: scarabaean
If you start in the middle and go up-and-down, I didn't find anything longer than 7 letters, and there were 39 seven-letter words, including "discard", "grandpa", and "stacked".
Aristotle was like 2,400 years ago, for context lol
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