Something about how you phrased this makes me think you might appreciate Master of Five Magics by Lyndon Hardy. There are five kinds of magic, each with their own unique source, style, and pretty rigorous rule set, and the protagonist sets out to learn them all (unheard of, if not outright forbidden).
Strong opinion loosely held, but the U.S. immigration (not refugee) policy should be:
1. You are going to school? Great! Go to the DMV with reasonable documentation (student ID and registration paperwork?) and you get a year-long visa. Renew each year, welcome to America!
2. You have a job? Great! Go to the DMV with reasonable documentation (a couple pay stubs?) and you get a year-long visa. Renew each year, welcome to America!
3. You don't have a job yet? Great! Go to the DMV with reasonable documentation of self-sufficiency (bank statement?) and you get a 3-month visa while you look for work. Renew each 3 months for as long as you can prove self-sufficiency, welcome to America!
4. You have none of the above, but you are the spouse/dependent on someone who does? Great! Go to the DMV with them, with proof of the relationship (marriage/birth certificate or the person signing an attestation) and you get a visa to match theirs, welcome to America!
5. You have none of the above but you are a refugee? Not great for you, but: go to the DMV to register yourself and get a date for review. With the money we save on enforcement, that review should be within weeks if not days. Welcome to America! (for now, subject to review)
6. You have none of the above and run out of money? I'm sorry about that, please return to your home country.
7. You're on the national list of Certified Bad People? You're going back to your home country, No America For You. And we have biometric information on you to ensure you never come back. Did I mention the DMV gets FaceID and DNA swabs?
Kitting out the DMV will cost a fraction of what enforcement would cost. Oh, and quotas should be generous but not infinite.
Generally a sensible list, except I'm sure you have seen how the national list of "Certified Bad People" is used these days. A majority of people that ICE rounds up have no convictions or traffic type issues (https://www.cato.org/blog/5-ice-detainees-have-violent-convi...).
Yeah, I'd at least put the bad people list in some way under the control of the judiciary, but in the end you pretty much have to assume good faith when designing any system of supreme control.
One aspect of this is that apparently most people can't draw a bicycle much better than this: they get the elements of the frame wrong, mess up the geometry, etc.
There's a research paper from the University of Liverpool, published in 2006 where researchers asked people to draw bicycles from memory and how people overestimate their understanding of basic things. It was a very fun and short read.
It's called "The science of cycology: Failures to understand how everyday objects work" by Rebecca Lawson.
There’s also a great art/design project about exactly this. Gianluca Gimini asked hundreds of people to draw a bicycle from memory, and most of them got the frame, proportions, or mechanics wrong.
https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/
A place I worked at used it as part of an interview question (it wasn't some pass/fail thing to get it 100% correct, and was partly a jumping off point to a different question). This was in a city where nearly everyone uses bicycles as everyday transportation. It was surprising how many supposedly mechanical-focused people who rode a bike everyday, even rode a bike to the interview, would draw a bike that would not work.
I wish I had interviewed there. When I first read that people have a hard time with this I immediately sat down without looking at a reference and drew a bicycle. I could ace your interview.
This is why at my company in interviews we ask people to draw a CPU diagram. You'd be surprised how many supposedly-senior computer programmers would draw a processor that would not work.
If I was asked that question in an interview to be a programmer I'd walk out. How many abstraction layers either side of your knowledge domain do you need to be an expert in? Further, being a good technologist of any kind is not about having arcane details at the tip of your frontal lobe, and a company worth working for would know that.
A fundamental part of the job is being able to break down problems from large to small, reason about them, and talk about how you do it, usually with minimal context or without deep knowledge in all aspects of what we do. We're abstraction artists.
That question wouldn't be fundamentally different than any other architecture question. Start by drawing big, hone in on smaller parts, think about edge cases, use existing knowledge. Like bread and butter stuff.
I much more question your reaction to the joke than using it as a hypothetical interview question. I actually think it's good. And if it filters out people that have that kind of reaction then it's excellent. No one wants to work with the incurious.
If it was framed as "show us how you would break down this problem and think about it" then sure. If it's the gotcha quiz (much more common in my experience) then no.
But if that's what they were going for it should be something on a completely different and more abstract topic like "develop a method for emptying your swimming pool without electricity in under four hours"
It has nothing to do with “incurious”. Being asked to draw the architecture for something that is abstracted away from your actual job is a dickhead move because it’s just a test for “do you have the same interests as me?”
It’s no different than asking for the architecture of the power supply or the architecture of the network switch that serves the building. Brilliant software engineers are going to have gaps on non-software things.
That's reasonable in many cases, but I've had situations like this for senior UI and frontend positions, and they: don't ask UI or frontend questions. And ask their pet low level questions. Some even snort that it's softball to ask UI questions or "they use whatever". It's like, yeah no wonder your UI is shit and now you are hiring to clean it up.
> Without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.
People have been debating what "real" development is for as long as there have been computers. "That's not real software development, you're not even controlling which registers you use!" "How can you say that's real code when you aren't even managing your own memory!" "That doesn't look like C, must not be code!" and on and on.
At the level of the old adage about whether the horse-drawn buggy-makers are in the buggy business or the transportation business, it's all telling the computer what to do in the context of providing a customized tool that you or others might use. So in this context, a customized Excel spreadsheet counts. And so does a vibe-coded app.
And of course, wringing our hands about what it looks like now totally ignores the fact that it's not going to be like this for more than a year or two at most.
How long until a user can reasonably say to Claude or similar, "I need Bob here to track production at my factory. Lay out a set of tools to do that, and make sure they're layered with help and tutorials so Bob can learn on the job because he doesn't know anything. Don't let him make any mistakes."
That's probably not coming next year, but certainly it's not ten years away.
I'm not a rocket scientist, but how do they plan to dispose of all the waste heat? The ISS carefully maintains its temperature, and it's not running racks-full of servers.
I have a Concept 2 rowing machine. I've measured: it's about 65db when I'm rowing easy, 70, maybe a bit more, when I'm rowing hard.
Most times when I row, it's for half an hour or so, but it can be up to 45 minutes to an hour, or sometimes up to an hour 40, or rarely 3.5 hours (I row a marathon once or twice a year).
There are two components to the noise it makes: there's the whirr of the gear as I pull on the chain, and the rush of wind from the fan it spins.
I think the whirr is more prominent/annoying. I've carefully crafted a box to fit over the section of the rower where the gears are. That dampens the noise a great deal. There's still the opening where the chain goes in, so if anyone has ideas for that I'm happy to hear them.
I also have foam pads for the thing to rest on, in case it vibrates at the feet (I don't think it does).
At my old high-rise apartment I'd row until midnight, and no one ever complained. Now I'm in a brownstone, so I'm keeping it to before 10pm. Hopefully that's enough that I'm not a bad neighbor.
And like I, Robot, it has numerous loopholes built in, ignores the larger population (Asimov added a law 0 later about humanity), says nothing about the endless variations of the Trolley Problem, assumes that LLMs/bots have a god-like ability to foresee and weigh consequences, and of course ignores alignment completely.
I'm also one of those pesky folks who keeps bringing reality and "thinking about consequences" into the otherwise sublime thought leadership meetings. I pretend it's to keep the company alive by not making massive mistakes but we all know its just pettiness and trying to hold back the "business by spreadsheet", mba on the wall, "idea guys" on the room.
I created two videos that contained nearly the same content. I recorded both by hand in one take, so they're not identical, obviously. Each talked about this issue. One used the term "Frozen Water," the other used "ICE". After eight hours:
The "ICE" video has 5 views
The "Frozen Water" video has 419 views
Again, N=1, and of course the "Frozen Water" video is more appealing to conspiracy theorists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_the_Five_Magics
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