> the ideal goal of an interview is to make a prediction of how happy and productive the candidate will be in the role they are being considered for.
I'd add two things that should be an obviously component of that way of thinking, but frequently get missed:
1. You need that good candidate as much as they need you. Anecdote: I have found it much harder to hire good people, than to get hired. By "good" I don't just mean smart, I also mean amicable and driven.
2. You do not have to agree with them on everything during the interview. Anecdote: some of my best work has been against the grain. But I am persuasive and passionate when I'm convinced that I see a "better path forward", and if I can convince my peers and leaders to let me shoot my shot, it usually works out. Part of the success may be due to the fact that I have to succeed in order not to look a fool or let people down. (If someone else's venture fails its much easier to shrug).
The point being: your candidate may disagree with you. But may be also be right. Or wrong, but letting them invest their whole self into the enterprise may be better value.
But this resonates the most with me:
> because he was such a jerk to people that those people would spend tons of their time and energy to find ways to avoid working with him
I've seen this so, so much. And it wrecks teams. When I say "let people disagree", again, this is when the best and worst of people emerges.
> You do not have to agree with them on everything during the interview.
Absolutely! When I'm the interviewer, I look for a genuine opportunity to amicably express disagreement with the candidate in order to see what it's like to navigate that with them. It's a great sign when we both end up enjoying learning from each other as a result of the exchange.
A human brain has qualities that make it very different from AI, but the same as other living creatures: it's alive, it can feel (sensations, pains, pleasures, emotions) that give it rich experiences and memories, and it hardwired to continue existing and protecting the body it is inside. So: motivation, desires, fears, and continued consciousness and thought without any external person having to poke or prod it into "doing".
None of the models I've downloaded have sprung to life spontaneously, or done anything remotely unpredictable. None of them can act without input. They all have strictly limited ways to receive input and pass output. They aren't alive, can't feel, don't have experiences. The fact that they are a phenomenon that emerge from billions of snippets of our language lets them express languages in extremely convincing ways, and they are extremely impressive in what they can do. But this isn't Short Circuit or D.A.R.Y.L. or the Terminator, none of them have feelings. None of them continue to think after the program exits.
Without those characteristics they can only generate based on what they've ingested. The capabilities are still astonishing, but they're still dead things, and nobody will ever risk their life to protect the model "context" from getting "killed"
I don't know, that reads exactly like an AI troubleshooter working through a plan without the implicit contextual understanding an experienced human might bring to either the actions or the communications.
"Oops, we forgot to tell it that this is the hyperscaled Salesforce production environment and that its choices need to project competence and consider brand embarrassment. WILLFIX"
In my experience it’s a safe way to do something useful while everyone is getting their bearings. It immediately partitions the situation space between being persisted or systemic vs local or caused by long-running processes. Plus everyone’s going to ask if you’ve tried that already, so you might as well get it out of the way if it makes any amount of sense
I wouldn't say so, rather you need to balance recovery time and evidence preservation. A good incident manager will give the service owning team a chance or two to debug, but not let them fall into the trap of needing to understand the problem fully before attempt a clumsy potential fix. And of course will take into account the total business impact of the ongoing disruption and the known and unknown risks of the proposed clumsy fix (it could make things worse).
The requirement is to get customers out of impact as #1 priority. If there's suspicions around memory/thread states a restart makes a lot of sense. Digging through logs and flight records takes a lot of time, customers are losing business in that time. If you're afraid to restart your service you need to work on your telemetry.
Rebooting is the first step: If it fixes it you don't have a problem. If it doesn't, you know more about the problem.
It's a joke, but like, after nearly two decades of engineering I have something break on me, due to updates. I figure the updates broke it, call the vendor, and they go... did you try rebooting it again?
In my experience this is very common on linux hosts. Not that you would do a full system reboot as a generic first attempt (this was much more common when I worked with Windows) but restarting a wedged or misbehaving service/daemon is a pretty common thing.
It's the hardware. Always the hardware. Best trackpad (ALL other trackpads are trash), best build and screen (since the first aluminium Macbook Pro retina) and right now, best silicon. But I also hate MacOS.
I'll take any file browser over finder. In fact, I hate the whole MacOS UI but I can mostly ignore the problems with Karabiner, Hammerspoon and Rectangle.
This sounds like my friend Mick who developed a gambling habit, but assured me that his method was flawless. If you lose, double your bet next time to cover the loss. If you lose that one, double it again. You can't keep on losing.
Sorry I’m not quite following what point you’re trying to make.
Throughout my life the cost of renewable energy generation and storage has been dropping exponentially whilst growing in capability.
That’s been happening for decades now.
The cost of fossil fuels just keeps rising with spikes every time someone starts a war.
Fossil fuels are already far more expensive. In 10 years no one will consider them seriously and in 20 years they’ll be a specialist novelty used by museums to run classic cars.
Mick thought he could give up his job and live off winnings. No steady state earnings. Just wins and losses. On the bad days he lose, and hope his winnings on other days would see him right.
Lose on Monday. Easy: double your bets on Tuesday. Lose on Tuesday too? No problem, double up again on Wednesday. You can't possibly have a 4 day losing streak.
If you're talking about renewable tech like a volcanic geothermal system in your back yard then you got me. But that's just like a regular job with a predictable income. It's not what 99% of people mean when they say "renewables"
Exactly how big do you think batteries need to be to store a summer's worth of extra sunshine until the bleak winter?
Btw Mick is a real person who really did lose all his money because he didn't count on a 10 day losing streak, and almost lost his family in the process. Lucky for him he had a forgiving wife and a steady state income.
You don't seem to understand how renewables actually work.
The idea that you need so many batteries to store enough energy to last the entire winter indicates that you don't comprehend how good solar panels are in 2026. (...Or 2006.)
The idea that renewables are unpredictable in anything remotely resembling the same way as a casino indicates you don't comprehend how renewables have ever worked.
It's true, we don't have 100% control over the output of renewables the way we do with fossil fuels*. But that doesn't mean they're unpredictable enough to cause meaningful problems for grid-scale renewable energy. And if you think that solar panels don't produce power during the winter, well, for one thing, you're going to have to explain to my parents just what was offsetting huge chunks of their energy bill the last several Upstate NY winters.
And...batteries are getting better and better. Give them a few years, and it won't be at all unreasonable to store a season's worth of energy, at least for a house, and probably for a town. (I have no idea if the way they scale makes it significantly harder to do that for larger areas and larger storage volumes.)
* If we have the fuel. And that's a large and growing "if".
I have 25 panels highly efficient panels on a small house. "Total overkill", even according to the installer who was happily taking my money. For two months in the summer I was generating 4x to 5x what I needed. To store that surplus I would fill five 9kwh batteries PER DAY. These aren't shitty lead-acid or NiCad, they're brand new LiFePo4, and are surprisingly compact. But using them to store two months of surplus would cost me half a million euros and take up most of my yard with 300 batteries.
The other question (a more important one) is how much stored power I would actually need for the winter. Which points to your comment "you don't comprehend how good solar panels are in 2026". Yes I absolutely do. My worst performing solar day recently was 5.85kwh on the 27th of August (a bad day, but not a short winter day). Two days in a row like that, and I'd be relying on some external "steady state" power source, like my old nuclear power plant at the end of the garden. (The very next day I generated 30kwh, but the whole point is that it's not economical for me store enough surplus for two consecutive shit days in August, never mind the whole winter).
I don't know what my November through to February average will be, or for much of the spring/autumn I'll be "averaging" a surplus. But I guess that maybe €300,000 of batteries in my up yard would hold enough surplus to get me through the winter months? The solar could certainly fill them. Solar isn't the problem.
I just can't imagine how this is supposed to scale.
Why do you keep saying need to store enough power for the whole winter? Unless you live in the arctic circle you're not going to get six months of darkness.
If you're generating 4x to 5x your required energy in summer you don't need to store that energy for whole winter. You can get away with generating 5x less energy and still have what you actually need each day.
When solar panels become cheaper than roof slates it's going to become a no brainer to over provision regardless of the ability to store it. I'm talking about a world where panels cost a 10th of what they do currently.
You can also still use the grid to pull base load from other sources such as nuclear, wind, geothermal, hydro or tidal power. It's not either or, they work together.
Relying on fossil fuels that have to be transported by ship at the whims of madmen is just stupid from a security point of view and that's before we even talk about what it's doing to the planet.
Trump has been running down his strategic fuel reserve since he came to power. That's before he started his latest war. At some point he's likely to stop exporting fuel as a consequence of that.
Fossil fuels are only going to get more expensive and the sooner we can stop burning them the better.
I suppose it could turn very bearish in the next few years?
Something always occurs to me whenever I think about climate change. I think, "What is prosperity?" and the answers are mainly centered on stability and security. Not "stock market" stability, or "national security" but...
Weather stability (floods, droughts, severe storms that lead to crop loss or yield reduction, wildfires, power outages and destruction).
Food and energy security (crop loss or low yields leading to scarcity, food / gas / electric price increases etc)
When I think about my family I think: first priority is to guarantee shelter, food and basic comforts. Everything after that is important of course, but without those three things, it all tastes like ashes. I can't pretend to be happy without stability.
We can pretend that AI and GoogleAds are a great way to measure "prosperity" but in reality, if there's a threat to the basics, we can't pretend to be prosperous. "Value" can be destroyed very quickly when the foundations are gone.
I don't have any more detail than that. I'm a lowly infrastructure engineer. I don't go any deeper than those shower thoughts.
But is Europe looking at the state of the world and pulling it's reserves closer-to?
> the ideal goal of an interview is to make a prediction of how happy and productive the candidate will be in the role they are being considered for.
I'd add two things that should be an obviously component of that way of thinking, but frequently get missed:
1. You need that good candidate as much as they need you. Anecdote: I have found it much harder to hire good people, than to get hired. By "good" I don't just mean smart, I also mean amicable and driven.
2. You do not have to agree with them on everything during the interview. Anecdote: some of my best work has been against the grain. But I am persuasive and passionate when I'm convinced that I see a "better path forward", and if I can convince my peers and leaders to let me shoot my shot, it usually works out. Part of the success may be due to the fact that I have to succeed in order not to look a fool or let people down. (If someone else's venture fails its much easier to shrug).
The point being: your candidate may disagree with you. But may be also be right. Or wrong, but letting them invest their whole self into the enterprise may be better value.
But this resonates the most with me:
> because he was such a jerk to people that those people would spend tons of their time and energy to find ways to avoid working with him
I've seen this so, so much. And it wrecks teams. When I say "let people disagree", again, this is when the best and worst of people emerges.
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