My first read of this was they made a joke (not wise when scheduling for interviews sure but maybe funny) by intentionally responding that way.
This is because my brain couldn't fathom what is likely the reality here -- that someone was just pumping your email thru AI and pumping the response back unedited and unsanitized, and so the first thing you got back was just the first "part" of the AI response.
I'm with you. Looking at the way people respond online to things now since LLMs and GenAI went mainstream is baffling. So many comments along the lines of "this is AI" when there are more ordinary explanations.
Yeah I don't know about this specific situation, but as someone who is on the job market, is a good developer, but can come off as a little odd sometimes, I often wonder how often I roll a natural 1 on my Cha check and get perceived as an AI imposter.
That's a good point. The major LLMs are all tilted so much towards a weird blend of corpo-speak with third-world underpaid English speaker influence (e.g. "delve", from common Nigerian usage) that having any quirks at all outside that is a good sign.
Your perception of the reality is spot on. For this round I was hiring for entry level technical support and we had limited time to properly vet candidates.
Unfortunately what we end up doing is have to make some assumptions. If something seems remotely fishy, like that “Memory updated” or typeface change (ChatGPT doesn’t follow your text formatting when pasting into your email compose window), it raises a lot of eyebrows and very quickly leads to a rejection. There’s other cases where your written English is flawless but your phone interview indicates you don’t understand the English language compared to when we correspond over email/Indeed/etc.
Mind you, this is all before we even get to the technical knowledge part of any interview.
On a related hire, I am also in the unfortunate position where we may have to let a new CS grad go because it seemed like every code change and task we gave him was fully copy/pasted through ChatGPT. When presented with a simple code performance and optimization bug, he was completely lost on general debugging practices which led our team to question his previous work while onboarding. Using AI isn’t against company policy (see: small team with limited resources), but personally I see over reliance on ChatGPT as much, much worse than blindly following Stack Overflow.
A friend of mine works with industrial machines, and once was tasked with translating machine's user's manual, even though he doesn't speak English. I do, and I had some free time, so I helped him. As an example, I was given user manual for a different, but similar machine.
1. The manual was mostly a bunch of phrases that were grammatically correct, but didn't really convey much meaning
2. The second half of the manual talked about a different machine than the first half
3. It was full of exceptionally bad mistranslations, and to this day "trained signaturee of the employee" is our inside joke
Imagine asking ChatGPT to write a manual except ChatGPT has down syndrome and a heart attack so it gives you five pages of complete bullshit. That was real manual that got shipped a 100 000€ or so machine. And nobody bothered to proofread it even once.
I once worked in the US for a Japanese company that had their manuals "translated" into English and then sent on for polishing. Like the parent, it would be mostly "a bunch of phrases that were grammatically correct, but didn't really convey much meaning" . I couldn't spend more than an hour a day on that kind of thing; more than that and it would start to make sense.
Dear god this is pretty much what I went through when I started taking over a company with a 35-40 year old codebase. Files spread everywhere, no consensus, and supporting customizations for thousands of customers who we didn’t know if they were even still using the system.
It took five years and the firing of the long-time “head” programmer until some meaningful change was made.
Relatively. The amount of diacritics on Vietnamese surpasses European languages so text rendering becomes a challenge if a naive developer doesn't test with Vietnamese.
Is bringing back Chu Nom script going to simplify Vietnamese support on computers by a lot? It's unintelligible to CJK users, but as far as text rendering goes, it seems just simple Kanji/Hanzi.
> I used to say this about seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time after seen pictures/video of it, but the eclipse was at least 10x that experience.
I said the same thing about seeing Tunnel View in Yosemite for the first time. It's the closest thing that I can say that describes the experience and the eclipse eclipses (heh) that.
>Most advice you find online is useless. "Mommy-bloggers" have SEO spammed the internet with waste. It's either some form of extreme child micromanagement, or rituals designed for people with saint-like patience or time on their hands. Get your advice from real people - pediatricians, parents, friends, etc.
I wonder if someone else can chime in here, but I've found that ChatGPT's answers should be on-par with these mom-fluencers.
As a crossing guard at my local high school told me: "Welcome to the Brotherhood!"
Every baby is different and you should take all advice with a huge grain of salt, including the ones listed here.
Don't be afraid to ask for help. Everyone pays attention to the child but you and your partner will need help too managing this new life transition. Even if you're not the birthing parent, you too have also gone through this massive change in time, mental space, and life meaning.
Also, unless there's extenuating circumstances, don't make any big life changes (new job, divorce, new house) in the first year. You aren't in the right headspace.
I had to look up that last bit. There was a system I was working with whose developers told me “Assume Eastern Time” all the time (I'm on PDT/PST)…until the daylight saving time change in March. I missed some data from their end and their developers told me to “just fetch again and correct your code”
> While it may be safe to assume local time when communicating in the same time zone, it is ambiguous when used in communicating across different time zones.
I love how the time zone designator chapter on Wikipedia also illustrates a common complexity pitfall.
> So the zone designation for New York (on standard time) would be "−05:00"
Except for the other half of the year where it is "-04:00". If you, by chance, pick that offset up in logic, make sure that where you apply it it is still the same half of the year! Classical off by one.
It's cheaper to ship something from Shanghai to Los Angeles than from Bogotá to Cartagena, or so my classes taught me when I took a class on Colombia's economy.
>On New Year's Eve 1930, the Roman Catholic Church officially banned any "artificial" means of birth control. Condoms, diaphragms and cervical caps were defined as artificial, since they blocked the natural journey of sperm during intercourse.
The reason we know that infants can die when they’re not held is because of a law that made both abortion and birth control illegal. A truly gruesome lesson learned in the most awful of ways.
Romania Decree 770 Happened in 1967 and is the stuff of nightmares.
The candidate’s first response? “Memory updated”. That led to some laughs internally and then a clear rejection email.