In my experience, I've seen engineers try to take on more work to get promoted, but the key issue is that they were doing more work at their own level instead of focusing on work that would be their responsibility if they promoted. If an IC takes on more and more IC work instead of management responsibilities, it's harder to promote them.
> If an IC takes on more and more IC work instead of management responsibilities, it's harder to promote them.
This is one reason it's critically important for a company to have paths for ICs to take on larger responsibilities that aren't necessarily management responsibilities. Not everyone wants to be a manager, and not everyone is good at being a manager. Some people want to become increasingly senior engineers. (They'll still, ultimately, be responsible for things that involve other people, but that doesn't mean they want to be a people-manager.)
Great point. And I think this is why I love the framing in the OP.
“Do more” is a failure mode and path to burnout. “Do what I’m doing and you’re not doing” is a cue that an ambitious engineer can reflect on constantly.
That's also pointing to a big risk for certain jumps, as everything done in the list for, say, a cross team position means less work on your team. So a manager that isn't all that friendly can use an attempt at promotion as a great excuse for a PIP: I've seen that done around me at least a couple of times.
Yep, as a manager, I am explaining this conundrum often. You can be a rockstar SDE 2 or senior, but not be ready for a promotion because you aren’t leading enough.
If they do that, that's exactly why you don't want to promote them because it is clear they don't understand that doing x+5 work on your own is not as good as x*5 when you become multiplier by helping others.
Except the only way to do x*5 work is by your team hiring extra 5 people for you to manage... or, somewhat uniquely to our industry, through automating your own work.
Also, everyone else hears the same memes about "being a force multiplier" too. When everyone is trying to be a multiplier for the team by helping everyone else on it, the result isn't exponential productivity growth - it's drowning in exponential noise.
Like some other commenters correctly observed, the most significant factor is actually whether the company you're in is stable headcount-wise, or growing fast. In a stable company, promos are a contested resource, which makes the requirements arbitrary - you're graded on an ordinal scale, not a nominal one. In a fast-growing company, promos will happen to you, through no effort on your own - you can coast upwards on seniority alone.
In neither situation, consistently performing at the level above you is a differentiating factor.
I think primarily this victimizes all those all ready victimized by the CSAM in the training material and also generally offends the collective sense of morality our society has.
Simplistically and ignorantly speaking, if a diffusion model knows what a child looks like and also knows what an adult woman in a bikini looks like, couldn't it just merge the two together to create a child in a bikini? It seems to do that with other things (ex. Pelican riding a bicycle)
In principle yes, but in practice no: the models don't just learn the abstract space, but also memorise individual people's likenesses. The "child" concept contains little clusters for each actual child who appeared enough times in the dataset. If you tried to do this, the model would produce sexualised imagery of those specific children with distressing regularity.
There are ways to select a specific point or region in latent space for a diffusion model to work towards. If properly chosen, this can have it avoid specific people's likenesses, and even generate likenesses outside the domain of the latent space (which tend to have severe artefacts). However, text prompting doesn't do that, even if the prompt explicitly instructs it to: text-to-image prompts aren't instructions. A system like Grok will always exhibit the behaviour I described in my previous (GP) comment.
As I mentioned in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46503866), there are other reasons not to produce synthetic sexualised imagery of children, which I'm not qualified to talk about: and I feel this topic is too sensitive for my usual disclaimered uninformed pontificating.
It certainty depends on how the network is doing the packet scanning and the other measures in place. If the security measures include a allow list of DNS servers, then there's little that can be done to bypass it.
This may be more palatable for the company rather than calling the extra money for being in the office a "commute stipend", even though they are effectively the same.
It's fairly fundamental in languages, just hidden behind syntactic sugar like if/else and try/catch/finally. Outside of those it can be useful for de-duplicating cleanup and exit code from a function.
Even with the 1 in 10000 false negative rate, I bet someone is doing the cost calculation of risk vs how many hours it would take for a doctor to check 10000 scans. Doctors themselves are not perfect so they may even have a higher error rate.
Give the doctor an AI tool which is fast and 99.999% accurate. Since they have automation now, give them a massive workload, so they can’t reasonably check everything. Now the machine does the work and the doctor is just the fall-guy if it messes up.
The closest parallel I've found for this in English is the phrase "active listening" which includes this kind of interjection to reassure the speaker that they are heard.
I have seen this work several times. In many cases, it's easier to change roles inside a company than to switch to a dev role at a new place when you have no developer experience. Starting out in QA is a great way to develop domain knowledge, which can be more important than programming skill in many businesses.
