you have a fixed pool of resources and more demand than there is availability. do you sort the queue by a impact on quality of life heuristic or do you sort the queue by willingness to pay money? in one system, people are more inconvenienced; in the other system, people with no money die or are saddled with debt.
anyways the crazy thing to me was recently learning that americans often still have to wait long periods of time in ERs and to see specialists. you're telling me y'all waste dozens of hours navigating insurance plans but you still have to wait an average of 50 days to see a dermatologist or wait for 6 hours in the ER?
believe it or not i don't wait that long here in canada
This of course does lead us to our next question, which is "why is there more demand than there is availability?"
Also for what it's worth, in all of my recent ER visits in the States (which, to be honest, are not often, perhaps 3-4 in the last decade), did not have long wait times at all. I was always seen by an initial triage doctor within a half hour
Triage doctor? Fancy. In France we're talking nurse or even "volunteer" (ie. those med students everyone hates on, I hear there are actual volunteers too but I've mostly seen students) that do triage.
In the USA, I think most of the times it is a specially trained triage nurse (Usually an RN with additional special training), not an doctor, and not a random volunteer or medical student.
If they didn't limit the number of doctors that can be trained, there wouldn't be as much of a finite supply of resources. Furthermore, how does one decide "quality of life"? What the politicians and bureaucrats think is "quality of life" rarely matches what the patient thinks. Often, it the politician and bureaucrats prioritize what benefits them the most.
As far as wait times in the USA, yes, we have bureaucrats and politicians artificially limiting supply. But, it is only as bad as you say in select areas of the country, and in most cases urgent matters ate attended to faster.
Also wait times are longer in Canada. And an anecdote: I went to the ER last Monday. No wait. And had a referral to a surgeon that same day. And surgery on Wednesday!
this strikes me as the responsible way to use AI period - test it out, see what works then clean it up until its something you understand & can feel good about.
Yes, treating it as an occasionally flawed/wrong personal tutor (instead of a code genie) seems like a good use of it. Nothing wrong with learning by whatever means necessary IMO.
tbh to me if the AI company writes all of your code & your eng don't even review it anymore then… the AI company _controls your company_. maybe that's ok if you make widgets but less ok if you do anything in dev tooling, security, or [insert market they may suddenly decide to compete in].
If you have enough money to burn you don't care about efficiency. I personally blame VC model. Efficiency and profitability doesn't matter. Just make line grow up. And when same mindset is applied to those companies with money to waste... Yeah waste will happen.
i feel like ppl have magical beliefs about type systems. just because it's _probably_ (did it use unsafe?) memory-safe doesn't mean it does what you want it to do
That's obviously true. On the other hand its also true this is more likely to work because it is rust compared to python or js for example. And that's not only because of memory safety. It's because static typing gives an automatic proof of a certain level of correctness of the code. That correctness is correlated with correct business logic bugs. So it is valid argument to make.
Of course that doesn't mean that there are no businesses logic bugs.
javascript is like… unusually messy and weird, so maybe that colours most people's perspective. you don't have to worry about type coercion and weird kinds of equality and so on in python and ruby to anywhere near the same extent.
>Type systems restrict which programs can be expressed and increasing expressiveness often requires increasing type-system complexity (which, speaking from experience, both humans and agents will struggle with). Plus they are not the only mechanism to assert correctness (they only validate a subset of your program correctness and do not replace tests)
This articulates a lot of my own thinking wrt type systems, speaking as a downstream user without a lot of exposure to prog language theory, and I wish this debate were more often framed in these terms.
Another reply to this comment hinted that it might be more about giving LLMs feedback loops and that to me also seems like a more likely mechanism.
I'm not an elixir user but I've watched it from a distance over the years – thank you for your efforts and your experimentation.
i like how when a company obviously discriminates against women and minorities by hiring almost entirely white guys that's fine that's to be expected but if you try to fix that discrimination it's an evil conspiracy
The fact that the company is majority white does not make discrimination legal. If the Perkins Coie wants to do things like anonymize its interviews, or send fake interview packets to its recruiters and looking for disparities in call back rates then that would be a genuine attempt at identifying potential discrimination.
the discrimination already happened! it's not possible to end up 80% white guy without discriminating. it's curious that the status quo isn't nearly as concerning.
> it's not possible to end up 80% white guy without discriminating?
This is untrue, though. The fact that a company does not have representation that is exactly equitable with the general population is not evidence of discrimination.
In fact, you can end up with disparities much larger without discrimination. It's even possible to actively discriminate against a group, and still have that disadvantaged group be overrepresented by a factor of 3 or 4.
That was the case with the Harvard admissions lawsuit. Even though the university was actively discriminating against Asian applicants, the undergrad population was ~20% Asian, despite ~6% of the applicants being Asian.
>The fact that a company does not have representation that is exactly equitable with the general population
i didn't say exactly equitable, i said 80%. it's not possible to have 80% white guys and not be discriminatory.
you're making a bad faith apples to oranges comparison, to say nothing of the merit of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. your viewpoint and disinterest is very clear, i don't know why you even bother arguing about it.
Yes, it is possible to have an 80% white organization without discrimination. Perkins Coie is ~80% white but is gender representation is much closer to parity [1], so I'm not sure why you're referring specifically to "white guys".
The relevance of SFFA vs. Harvard is to demonstrate that it's possible to have a substantial overrepresentation - over 3x in the case of Asians at Harvard - despite actively discriminating against the overrepresented group. Whites are only ~1.2x more common at Perkins Coie relative to the general population.
You can keep repeating the line that because a company has X% of Y race it must be evidence of discrimination as many times as you want, repetition doesn't make it true.
not going to debate bad faith right wing cause celebres arguing the inverse.
i see it with my own two eyes when i have to yell at recruiters to stop bringing me all-male candidate slates, i see it from studies in social sciences, and i know it from having seen the progression over my own career and listening to my female colleagues. at the end of the day a lot of men don't see women and minorities as people with full agency.
If you did a cursory review of the social sciences on this topic, you'd know that the demographics of people going through the prerequisites to working at a place like Perkins Coie does not match the general population. College attendance has racial disparities, as does law school attendance. Whites have half and 1/3rd the fail rate at the bar examination as compared to Latin and Black people respectively. Even absent discrimination, there are plenty of factors that drive law firms to have larger representation of white people.
> it's not possible to end up 80% white guy without discriminating.
That is not remotely true. Individual choices, as well as experiences which shape the candidate pool, can cause such lopsided numbers. In my view, the single biggest problem with the (quite well intentioned) diversity initiatives is that they assume, without evidence, that any organization with lopsided demographics must therefore be discriminating. But that is a fallacy and undermines the entire endeavor they are engaged in.
there's loads of evidence, y'all just don't like engaging with it cos you don't like the answer because fixing it is work and fundamentally women and minorities are not seen as people with full agency.
i'm old enough to remember when software engineering conferences were _2%_ female. it's exhausting to be having this same conversation decades later.
What is the evidence? Did we send identical applications, differing only by ethnicity, to Perkins Coie, and did they respond to the non-white applicants at lower rates? Did Perkins Coie institute policies like withholding bonuses if leaders hired too few white applicants? What indicates that Perkins Coie is preferring white applicants over equally qualified Black or Latin applicants?
You insist there's evidence of discrimination, but all you've done is point to the % of white people at the company and insist it's too high.
But as a counterpoint, 40% of the developers at my company are Asian, despite them making up 6% of the US population. That's an overrepresentation of over 6X. In fact, whites are slightly underrepresented. Does that mean we're discriminating against non-asians? Is this evidence that whites are discriminated again, on account of their underrepresentation? Of course not.
anyways the crazy thing to me was recently learning that americans often still have to wait long periods of time in ERs and to see specialists. you're telling me y'all waste dozens of hours navigating insurance plans but you still have to wait an average of 50 days to see a dermatologist or wait for 6 hours in the ER?
believe it or not i don't wait that long here in canada