For painting, realism was really what made works great for a long time. Then photography came along and realistic depictions of things were no longer novel, so painting became about representing things in a more surreal way, and novel representations of perspective and emotion became great. Meanwhile with photography initially just capturing a clear image was impressive but now you need to capture something truly rare to have a great photo.

With AI I'm struggling to imagine what will be hard enough to achieve that it remains novel.

If Trudeau had actually pushed for election reform like he'd promised to, maybe we'd be in a better place. But people forgave him for that because he made weed legal...

For example, I used to do integrations for sports betting sites. AI is going to help with the basics, like understanding the default puck line is 1.5 in hockey. AI is not going to realize that Bet365 changes their API endpoints for each season, so you need to be ready to fetch the updated ones before the new season starts, whereas most other sportbooks have consistent endpoints that you don't need to keep updating.

How much domain knowledge is actually unavailable to AI is going to vary by domain, as will the value of that. Chess is probably one extreme, where all knowledge is public, whereas something like military R&D might be the other extreme where domain knowledge is tightly guarded.

Talking requires that the interviewer be competent and care. Which seems like a low bar, but it easily degrades. When an engineer is burned out, or is interviewing for a project they have less stake in, or has business requirements forcing them to hire someone fast, the bar lowers. Those engineers now are the gatekeepers, and they let in even weaker engineers.

Even worse, any utility from this is predicated on the founder making good hiring decisions. If they don't understand how to hire a competent engineer and make them care about the company, then it's dead from the start. And a lot of founders or execs in general are awful at this.

Companies that maintain an excellent work culture such that engineers deeply care about the team and have stake in any project they conduct interviews for will do well with this model. I hope we see it used by them.

And it's also true that certain sub-cultures will judge you differently. Like if you're all beefed up and dressed in a suit, you're probably not getting an invite to Dungeons and Dragons club. I would say in general following your country's norms for attractiveness will result in more social success but if you present yourself inauthentically you certainly can end up attracting people you actually don't want to associate with.

Relationships are inherently transactional. You won't want to spend time with someone if you don't get something out of it, barring certain unconditional loves like your immediate family. When making new friends, proxies like attractiveness and social standing are how people judge if someone is likely to add value to their lives or not.

So yes, unfortunately, if you talk to someone and you're just some small quiet guy with no interesting characteristics, you'll probably be written off before you get a chance to develop a friendship with them. Whereas if they see you have muscles, or know you're successful in your career, or know you have other friends, they'll be more likely to assume you might be worth getting to know.

Things like working out, dressing well, learning to speak well, etc. all help. However, there is an alternative shortcut to building close friendships - forced interaction. When you're stuck sitting next to someone in class for a year, you don't have the privilege of swapping that person out for someone who seems cooler, you just have to get to know them. When you're stationed in the military with a squad you don't get to swap that squad out for people you think you might like more, you just bond with them. But there are few opportunities like that in normal life, you have to seek them out. Go on a 2 week long canoeing expedition, join a start-up incubator with a small team, play an MMO at a competitive level where you have scheduled runs and are in voice chat. Do stuff that forces you to interact with people for a long time and puts you in environments where you can't just leave and seek out people more like you.

Like look at the sentence "it has felt to me like all threads of conversation have veered towards the extreme and indefensible." The casing actually conflicts with the tone of the sentence. It's not written like a casual text - if the sentence was "ppl talking about this are crazy" then sure, the casing would match the tone. But the stodgy sentence structure and use of more precise vocabulary like "veered" indicates that more effort has gone into this than the casing suggests.

Fair play if the author just wants to have a style like this. It's his prerogative to do so, just as anyone can choose to communicate exclusively in leetspeak, or use all caps everywhere, or write everything like script dialogue, whatever. Or if it's a tool to signal that he's part of an in-group with certain people who do the same, great. But he is sacrificing readability by ignoring conventions.