With all the AI rollout in customer support, I’ve essentially built up a habit of almost immediately trying to get in touch with a human if the bot doesn’t give me what I’m looking for right away. My experience is that in most cases, the bot will try to walk me in circles, recommending that I try stuff I’ve already tried (that’s why I’m contacting support). In all those cases, the bot isn’t saving the company any time, it’s just wasting my time and making me irritated.

In some cases it does save them support capacity, if only because I eventually give up on getting any support and just quit the service.

Thanks! I very much enjoy my profession, but I can also clearly understand that it’s not for everyone. My major impression after lecturing for different engineering courses is that chemistry differs from most in that you need (even) more basics before things start getting cool. Most of the other engineers can start doing actual cool projects in first or second year, while the chemists don’t really get to the good stuff before third or fourth year. On the other hand, I’m very glad I pulled through to the cool stuff at the other side :D

I seem to remember reading that the guy who invented the Rubik’s cube (Rubik?) thought for quite a while that it was impossible to solve until he uncovered the first algorithms for solving it by essentially just messing around.

“Wisdom”: You’re a sorcerer with a long beard. “Intelligence”: You’re the annoying engineering type that breaks the DM’s beta in creative ways.

I’m a chemist, and I lecture in some engineering-related courses (mostly thermodynamics and mathematics)

It can be legitimate to ask “why do you want to do X” so that you can help find a solution to the underlying problem. Saying “you shouldn’t do X” without knowing what the underlying problem is is the epitome of unhelpful and overbearing.

It’s literally a meme that devs have some obscure problem, and the only online resource they find is a forum post with one of

• nvm, I fixed it (no further explanation)
• Marked as duplicate (link to question about something different but related)
• “You shouldn’t do this, here’s how to do something else” (cannot do Y, that’s why I’m trying to do X)

I remember as a student when I couldn’t understand how professors could “just see” the solutions to problems. I’ve been reflecting after teaching a bit that I’m becoming that person, and how it just feels natural now, and that it’s really just because once you’ve seen enough problems in your field everything kind of just fits together, so new problems don’t really look that new anymore. It feels good to be honest, but I have a hard time thinking of it as wisdom, more just accumulated experience (then again, what is really “wisdom”?)

The question isn’t who exclusively has a landline, or why OP needs to call a landline. They’ve stated that they need to be able to call a landline: It’s safe to assume that they are aware of the existence of smartphones and internet-based calling services, and have concluded that it doesn’t serve their needs, which is why they’re asking for help calling a landline. Responding that they don’t need to call a landline reads like the classic stackoverflow response of “you don’t need to do <thing the question asks how to do>”.

This reads like a good old stackoverflow answer:

I want to do X, can anyone help?

X is dumb, and you shouldn’t do it. Here’s how to do Y.

I was just basing myself off OP’s scale, where 10 was “average” and 30 was “world class”, which I interpret as shifting the scale compared to how it would be in a dnd-game, such that the whole scale applies to actual humans.

In that spirit, I think it’s fair to put a talented engineer at 20 int, and an absurdly talented polymath at 30 int. My personal experience is that engineers with some years of field experience are often more “intelligent” (i.e. better at general problem solving) than most PhD’s.

I’m fun at parties, please believe me!

Follow up question: You say that 10 is average and 30 is world class, but what kind of distribution are we talking about, and what is the variance?

If I’m the strongest guy in a randomly selected group of 100, I’m far above average, but still miles away from being world class, but does that put my strength at closer to 15 or closer to 20? (Please note: I would not be the strongest in a random group of 100, unless all the other 99 happen to have severe muscle atrophy)

If 10 is average then anyone above the mean is above 10? Strongmen, Olympic lifters etc. are close to 30 str, since that is “world class”.

I would guess that a lot of “ordinary” people have at least one stat where they are above average, just based on how low “average” is for a lot of stats, and how most people are decently good at something.

Edit: This depends on the distribution of course, but stuff like strength, IQ, etc. are typically close to normally distributed, in which case about half the population is above average in any given stat.

When you look at how strongly obesity correlates with everything from back- and knee pains to weakened immune response to sleep issues and cardiovascular disease…

When a severely obese person has any of the above, it’s reasonable, scientifically backed diagnosis/prescription to say “these issues will probably go away by themselves if you lose weight”. This is about treating the cause and not the symptoms: When severely obese people are heavily over-represented among those with a certain disease or problem, you can try treating the symptoms, but should expect that they return rather quickly.

Of course, there are cases where the issues come from something else, but no matter who goes to the doctor with health issues, their first response will be to try to treat the post probable cause.

I definitely have a hangup on students I teach saying something along the lines of “I don’t know how to get started on this, I asked GPT and…”. To be clear: We’re talking about higher-level university courses here, where GPT is, from my experience, unreliable at best and useless or misleading at worst. It makes me want to yell “What do you think?!?” I’ve been teaching at a University for some years, and there’s a huge shift in the past couple years regarding how willing students are to smack their head repeatedly against a problem until they figure it out. It seems like their first instinct when they don’t know something is to ask an LLM, and if that doesn’t work, to give up.

I honestly want shake a physical book at them (and sometimes do), and try to help them understand that actually looking up what they need in a reliable resource is an option. (Note: I’m not in the US, you get second hand course books for like 40 USD here that are absolutely great, to the point that I have a bunch myself that I use to look stuff up in my research).

Of course, the above doesn’t apply to all students, but there’s definitely been a major shift in the past couple years.

You’ve never been with a woman that taught you what it feels like to be pressured for another round when you just don’t have anymore in you?

You should try it sometime, it might teach you something about women’s libido.

I think this is the major issue to overcome for the humans. In training soldiers, we’ve known for several thousand years that everyone stands a higher chance of surviving if we commit as a group, even though that means each person is working against their individual survival instincts. We also know that it takes training to help people overcome that fear and actually throw themselves at the danger, in order to increase everyone’s chances of survival.

If the humans are capable of committing to a massed pile-on, the gorilla doesn’t stand a chance. On the other hand, if the humans falter, the gorilla will have time to tear them apart. The last option is that the humans taunt and avoid the gorilla as best they can, and pile on it whenever it gets someone, forcing it to run around exhausting itself before they can kill it.

We often forget how obscenely well conditioned fit humans are compared to other animals. We’re built like a slow-ass terminator of the animal kingdom that just keeps going and refuses to die.

Other animals regularly die from stuff like shock or broken bones. Even without modern medicine, humans are built to survive and recover from absolutely horrific injuries.

Other animals often quickly tire out due to overheating and having trouble regulating their breath, while well conditioned humans can keep going at a medium-low pace for days on end if needed. Without sleep.

I imagine the gorilla would wipe out a sizeable portion of the men, but I would bet money that it would be exhausted to the point of being helpless while there were still more than enough guys left to kill it.

This is actually a good question. For pretty’s much any previous president, the chance that they will be shot heavily outweighs the chance that they will shoot someone while in office. With trump, I think it’s more of an open bet.

You’re missing a key point here: Management is a secondary function, in the sense that management doesn’t in itself produce anything of value. When done correctly, it enhances the productivity of those actually producing something.

In order to be effective at management, you need to have a good idea of what the people you are managing do. Otherwise, you won’t be able to appropriately manage resources and help people be effective by moving support to the right places. “Management” as a degree aims to teach people how to manage resources they don’t understand, and more often than not ends up producing managers that have no idea what the engineers and technicians they’re managing actually do. These managers are usually more of a burden on the people they’re managing than anything else. Every good or decent manager or leader I’ve come across has a background from the field of the people they’re managing.

The next best time is now

If my Easter break gets boring I might just start cleaning up that Python library… It’s the prime example of something that developed from a POC to a fully functional code base, was left largely unused for about a year, and just the past weeks has suddenly seen a lot of use again. Luckily we’re strict about good docstrings, but type hints would have been nice too.