Posted by speckx 11 hours ago
RIP good sir
Turing Award Legend.
Thank you for your work on ALGOL, you were multiple decade ahead of your time.
Rest in peace.
As a non-junior dev I realize how stupid that was.
The second enlightenment is that if you don't understand what the libraries are doing, you will probably ship things that assemble the libraries in unreasonably slow/expensive ways, lacking the intuition for how "hard" the overall operation should be.
The idea of 'genius' or in fact 'intelligence' being about speed isn't just a Hollywood thing though; it's also been a Silicon Valley thing as well; it's why most big tech interviews are time-constrained.
Over the years, I've also heard many tech CEOs say stuff alongside "There's only one type of intelligence" or "All intelligent people are intelligent in the same way."
These kinds of statements raised my eyebrows but now with LLMs being able to solve most puzzle problems rapidly but struggling with complex problems it's completely obvious that it's not the case.
What it says is frightening. The CEOs of big companies have been giving positions to people who have the same thinking style as them. Quick puzzle-solving tech tests are literal discrimination against the neurodivergent and also against geniuses. They've been embracing wordcels and rejecting shape rotators.
I think a guy like Tony Hoare would struggle to find a job these days.
You could argue that the issue extends beyond Hollywood and Silicon Valley... The whole education system is centered around puzzle-solving speed. It's hilarious that AI is now solving all these tests within minutes with better scores than humans. Crazy to think that LLMs could graduate from university based on current assessment policies! It's very revealing of what kind of education system we have.