fastly was not a culture fit for me and it was dimming my shine

For the last several years, work-sample were our most important hiring decision factor.

We relied on them almost completely, and in doing so, we multiplied the size of our team and retained every single person we hired

It is all love with me and this observation and I make it as a card-carrying member of the tribe to which it is directed, but here goes: there may be no cohort of professionals less qualified to assess barely-tangible socio-psychological attributes like “passion” and “confidence” than the modern software nerd.

Even a mid-range Macbook can do 10x or 100x more transactions per second on its SSD than a supposedly fast cloud local disk, because cloud providers sell that disk to 10 or 100 people at once while charging you full price. Why would you pay exorbitant fees instead of hosting your mission-critical website on your super fast Macbook?

The computer scientist François Chollet has proposed the following distinction: skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills.

We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?

The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copyi... See more

Let me offer another generalization: any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it

Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium.