That was never mindless if you look at it from the perspective of Cheney's friends at Halliburton. We'd be inclined to think the opposite really if US military absorbs all the risks and costs and they absorb the profits.
Think about it: suddenly, in the middle of the desert in Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria/Niger/Djibouti a bunch of people start using a fitness tracker every morning (and the clusters show up in Strava). Did some village suddenly jump on the "get fit" bandwagon? Or could it be a bunch of US Marines/SpecOps/etc people trying to keep fit.
A friend of mine got two such "fake" candidates for a coding interview. His experience reminded me of those "Nigerian Prince" emails from 20 years ago.
These two gentlemen had western names (like "Brandon Smith") but Asian features and a tenuous grasp of spoken English; even though they claimed to have undergrad degrees from US universities. And he could tell they were looking at another screen to copy code from. After just a few minutes he realized what was going on, but continued the interview just to get the experience.
Frankly sounds like many "real" candidates I've interviewed.
The tenuous grasp of spoken English despite a degree taught in English is also not unusual.
Setting aside the fraud for a moment (which is an insurmountable barrier to employeeing them).
To some extent I'd be satisfied if they actually had a degree and were productive. They obviously need good enough receptive and written English to work.
Especially if they are earning 5k per year as the title suggests.
2) You realize they're fake 1-2 weeks into the role. They are unreliable. They don't show up for meetings. You have trouble communicating with them
3) You fire them
But they've already won the game. They collected a single paycheck. And for an intermediate (even junior) dev position, collecting even just a single paycheck is a big pay day for them.
The main cost to the company is time wasted, needing to open the role once more to find a real candidate who can actually do the job.
I think it's incredibly rare for these candidates to actually do the job well. (They also have fake resumes, all of their experience is made up -- so if you're expecting expertise, you're likely not going to get it)
This is a little baffling to me, if you're suggesting this is an actual method people employ to make a living. Interviewing is difficult and stressful. Or maybe their approach is a shotgun strategy, so they don't care?
> Especially if they are earning 5k per year as the title suggests.
Not sure that's how the math goes. TFA mentions every employed worker has a team behind them, and is often successful in their job as a result.
Kinda fascinating. Here we are, usually dreaming about how one person could do multiple jobs. There they are, having multiple people do one job in the best (looking) way.
When I was at a FAANG, we used to joke that when senior leadership is totally out of ideas, they announce a hackathon. It was a way for them to continue the charade of being "leaders" without having any ideas.
This generally just keeps being the "the Emperor has no clothes" moment for all these AI bull companies.
Microsoft just replaced their native Windows Copilot application with an Electron one. Highly ironic.
Obviously the native version should run much faster and will use less memory. If Copilot (via either GPT or Claude) is so godlike at either agentic or guided coding, why didn't they just improve or rewrite the native Copilot application to be blazing fast, with all known bugs fixed?
Agreed. I mean, where did the COVID mRNA vaccine come from? Which company makes the GLP-1 inhibitors like Ozempic and Mounjaro? Are these American companies?
Not to threadjack, but this is a question that I've had for a while and I've been looking for the right forum to ask: are there any "open source" earbuds? I would like to take a pair of earbuds and invert the noise-cancellation curve: basically, amplify any ambient noise (with filtering of course). My grandma (not in the US or EU) is hard of hearing, and the only options available to her are random Chinese junk. I would like to try this experiment, where I just invert the noise cancellation curve and make the ambient noise louder.
AirPods Pro 2 and 3 can amplify ambient sound. Sinus/ear infections cause one of my kids to temporarily not be able to hear well due to fluid in the ear, and AirPods help.
Lots of earbuds have transparency mode. I have Earfun Air Pro 4+ (which were big too big for my ears). They sound very good and have really good transparency mode. The company keeps releasing firmware updates every now and then.
Also got a nothing Ear. They are very comfy, and have very good sound. But transparency mode in those is awful. Other things are bad too.
The later versions of Nothing headphones/buds got pretty good.
I actually have their budget brand CMF Buds 2 plus and they are straight up great even before you consider the price. Pretty good headphones are commodity now, everybody makes them. Apple is just winning the branding game.
For what it's worth, Airpods Pro 2 or 3 have a Hearing Aid mode out of the box, but I understand plenty of other earphones out there these days have something equivalent that just can't call itself that because they don't have the clinical certification Apple got.
I read the first 5 paragraphs which were all "Noam", "Noam", "Noam" and then lost interest. The letter should have started by first acknowledging the heinous crimes committed against innocent children.
What crimes did Noam commit against children?? The only thing we know is that he got involved with Epstein. There’s no evidence or suggestion in anything that was divulged so far about Noam having been directly involved or even knowing about Epstein’s exploitation of young girls.
Very well written. Thank you for putting down your thoughts so succinctly; I'm often at a loss for words when I try to express the same thoughts in a coherent manner.
