Until counting machines got ubiquitous, banks in India would count notes/bills by weight as well.

It wasn't very precise but you could move a lot of money in ball park with this method. Atleast internally across branches.

Up to roughly 100 bills it's pretty much bang on - even with a cheap $10 scale (American Weigh Scales Digital Pocket Scale has a bunch of different options). Each bill weights roughly 1 gram. So - accurate to within 1% - and presumably the banks have better scales.

I suspect at scale (moving either a lot of batches or large batches), you also need to take variance into account more. Some bills might be dirty or have stuff stuck to them, some bills might be damaged and have bits missing? And other things that occur in practice that I can't think of from the comfort of my armchair in 30s.

I've had this many times during interviews.

If you had a chat with me through lunch on some technical intensive questions, It would be a breeze. I could not only answer them, I could list limitations, how to address them, and I could even come with a working plan on how I could get it done.

Do the same in an interview, I will freeze.

I feel you.

This is also exactly my problem in interviews, even going back to university, in any oral exams.

I'm often so stressed in those situations, that I forget the simplest stuff and any logical thinking is sheer impossible.

Recently I failed a time-based 5 hour homework, because I couldn't think and overcomplicated my approach.

It is really annoying and frustrating and overall, this made my life soo much harder and more stressful.

>>If you build a walkable/bikeable city, you raise the exercise floor for everyone.

There are ripped men in prison.

>>That requires intrinsic motivation

How do you make some one do a thing, they don't want to do?

What does “there are ripped men in prison” have to do with anything? Those men have intrinsic motivation for working out, but not everyone does, that’s kind of my whole point here.

>> how do you make someone do a thing they don’t want to do?

You make it part of the fabric of daily life. If it’s easier to walk than it is to take a car, more people will walk. Of course there will be those who cannot or refuse to, and that’s okay, but systemic changes can lift everyone up on average.

> How do you make some one do a thing, they don't want to do?

You assume what you feel you want to do is intrinsic and not based on your environment. You are a product of your environment. If we change the environment, you will change with it.

By "you" I of course mean large populations over the course of decades.

Oh well had a talk with a director at office. He says, instead of using AI to get more productive, people were using AI to get more lazy.

1)

What he means to say is, say you needed to get something done. You could ask AI to write you a Python script which does the job. Next time around you could use the same Python script. But that's not how people are using AI, they basically think of a prompt as the only source of input, and the output of the prompt as the job they want get done.

So instead of reusing the Python script, they basically re-prompt the same problem again and again.

While this gives an initial productivity boost, you now arrive at a new plateau.

2)

Second problem is ideally you must be using the Python script written once and improve it over time. An ever improving Python script over time should do most of your day job.

That's not happening. Instead since re-prompting is common, people are now executing a list of prompts to get complex work done, and then making it a workflow.

So ideally there should be a never ending productivity increase but when you sell a prompt as a product, people use it as a black box to get things done.

A lot of this has to do with lack of automation/programming mindset to begin with.

The way I'm using it is I have AI generate the tool (python script) and then it will use it for the task and for future tasks. As time goes on, the AI has more tools to call on which makes it (and me) more productive (higher quality work in less time)

You are just validating the point that code is spec.

For your proposed system to work one must have a deterministic way of sending said spec to a system(Compiler?) and getting the same output everytime.

Input/Output is just one thing, software does a lot of 'side effect' kind of work, and has security implications. You don't leave such things to luck. Things either work or don't.

Absolutely let’s not do away with the determinism entirely. But we can decouple generation of the code from its deterministic behavior. If you are adequately able to identify the boundaries of the system and run deterministic tests to validate those boundaries that should be sufficient enough. It’s not like human written code was often treated with even that much scrutiny in the before times. I would validate human written code in the exact same way.

>>If the behavior of the system is specified well enough, then the code itself is cheap and throwaway. Why have a static system that is brittle to external changes when you can just reconstruct the system on the fly?

You mean to say if the unit and functional tests cases are given the system must generate code for you? You might want to look at Prolog in that case.

>>Might be quite awhile before you can do this with large systems but we already see this on smaller contextual scales such as Claude Code itself

We have been able to do something like this reliably for like 50 years now.

Start ups mostly move fast skipping the necessary ceremony which large corps have to do mandatorily to prevent a billion dollar product from melting. Its possible for start ups because they don't have a billion dollar to start with.

Once you do have a billion dollar product protecting it requires spending time, money and people to keep running. Because building a new one is a lot more effort than protecting existing one from melting.

This.

Once you have revenue you have downside to protect. Pre-revenue the worst that can happen is that you have to start again knowing more than you did.

One part of the system moving fast doesn't change the speed of the system all that much.

The thing to note is, verifying if something got done is harder and takes time in the same ballpark as doing the work.

If people are serious about AI productivity, lets start by addressing how we can verify program correctness quickly. Everything else is just a Ferrari between two traffic red lights.

Really? I disagree that verifying is as hard as doing the work yourself. It’s like P != NP.

>>It's funny to me how still so many don't realize you don't get hired for the best positions for being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank

Competitive coding is oversold in this generation. You can log in to most of these sites and you will see thousands of solutions submitted to each problem. There is little incentive to reward situations where you solved some problem which a thousand other people have solved.

To that end its also a intellectual equivalent of video game addiction. There is some kind of illusion that you are indulging in a extremely valuable and productivity enterprise, but if you observe carefully nothing much productive actually gets done.

Only a while back excessive chess obsession had similar problems. People spending whole days doing things which make them feel special and intelligent, but to any observer at a distance its fairly obvious they are wasting time and getting nothing done.

A women can at times, in extremely rare occasions have twins, or triplets, or quadruplets. In 9 months.

So that only goes some distance and then you face new limitations.