At Meta, when this mass push for the rename happened across the industry, a few people spent nearly the full year just shepherding the renaming of master to main, and white box/black box to allowlist/blocklist.
This let them claim huge diff counts and major contributions to DEI and get promos.
Seems like a bad faith question, unfortunate that it was asked multiple times. Blacklist is derived from a definition where black means "evil, bad, or undesirable". When you say that ink is black, you're using a different definition, which relates to color. I don't know if I see the objection to blackbox, which uses a definition of "unknown". Personally, I think the harm is small but I look to people of color for guidance and prefer the more descriptive deny-list where I can. Cuts down on possible confusion for non-native English speakers too.
Blacklist and Whitelist come from the behaviour of light on coloured surfaces. A black surface absorbs all light, a white reflects it. There is also Graylist.
I don't know of any connotation of black meaning "evil, bad, or undesirable". If anything black means "missing or vanished". Maybe that is different in your culture, but I never heard of it until now. Tons of things in everyday life are black including the most letters, signs and a lot of devices. The only thing that comes to my mind is tooth decay or pestilence, but that is hardly anything connotated with the colour per se.
A quick web search for "define black" and "etymology blacklist" readily finds "from black (adj.), here indicative of disgrace, censure, punishment (a sense attested from 1590s, in black book)" and several similar results. But I didn't immediately see an etymology based on absorbing light.
I'd be curious to see a regional reference that shows an absorb/reflect etymology.
The irony is that the term "Black" was precisely chosen by Black civil rights activists in the 1960s. This wasn't a term given by white people, it was specifically chosen by Blacks, because of its negative connotations. They wanted to embrace its negative connotations and turn it on its head, and that's where terms like "Black is beautiful" came from. They didn't want to be ashamed of it, that's why they embraced it. Black was not a term of shame, it was a term of power.
Now, the left wing activists have turned it on its head again, and now saying that the term "black" is shameful and racist. It's bizarre how ignorant people are who say the term "blacklist" is racist.
There are 67 million baby boomers in the US. How can you rationally blame them all? Roughly 20% of the population.
Saying the "boomers ruined everything" is not sophisticated, we can't move forward from a blame game, we have to diagnose the actions and actors that implemented them, but of course this is much more challenging.
Ancedotally, I know plenty of poor boomers. Have you seen who works at a Dollar Tree lately?
The popular dialogue that boomer=rich and greedy, millennial=poor and exploited is not productive, it's a fabricated generational war that distracts us from the real issues.
My parents are poor boomers, but if they had to live as I do, they'd be rich boomers. They have no financial discipline and burned through cash like crazy. If they would have saved even a little bit in the 80s and 90s, they'd be in a much better situation.
Looking at the world, it really makes me wonder if "human" is what we want to model these machines on. It's not obvious to me what else we should choose, but working together peaceably and effectively doesn't seem to be our strongest attribute when writ large.
They are just predicting the next token. In human text it's more common to talk to other people than a computer, so they end up talking to the computers like they were people.
It's not meant as a slight against Iranian engineers, I believe Iranian engineers can be as talented as any engineers in the world. I just imagine they may be resource constrained. So the question is more about geo-politics, who stands to gain by transferring technology to the Iranian government that allows them to surveil the Iranian population and maintain absolute control?
In my opinion as a hiring person at FAANG for almost 20 years, what’s described here has always been the goal. Lots of people work at FAANG who don’t meet this bar because a need to fill seats exceeded the need to hold the line / bar on quality. So tenure pedigree doesn’t say much.
But this candidate profile is the best anywhere. It’s also a bit like writing an article and saying “you shouldn’t try to buy shares in the most well known tickers, try to buy things that are undervalued but will be great in the future”. Yeah, but also duh.
Those are fair points. The bit of nuance I would add here is that:
1. Having FAANG-level budgets to hire vs three packs of ramen and a spool of string at the average startup makes it so that you have to learn how to spelunk through less obvious talent, you're looking at very different pools of potential hires.
2. This is written with the first-time YC-style startup CTO in mind who might be in their early 20s and might have never had to interview a single person until that point. I remember none of this being obvious to me the first time around, and I'm still refining my thinking all the time as the projects and markets change
When LLMs first came out, they weren't very good at it, which makes all the difference. Sometimes the thing that's really good at something gets a different name. Chef vs cook, driver vs chauffeur, painter vs artist, programmer vs software developer, etc.
I started doing it as soon as ChatGPT 3.5 was out.
“Given this file tree and this method signature, implement the method”. The context was only 8k so you had to function by function. About two editor screens worth at a time.
Using an LLM to code isn't the same as vibe coding. Vibe coding, as originally coined, is not caring at all about the code or looking at the code. It was coined specifically to differentiate it from the type of AI-assisted coding you're talking about.
It's used more broadly now, but still to refer to the opposite end of the spectrum of AI-assisted coding to what you described.
Yeah, I've been working with LLMs since openai released that first model. What I'm doing today is VASTLY different than anything we thought possible back then, so I wouldn't call it "vibe coding"
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