There are technical challenges that are so basic that a programmer should be able to regurgitate them even under normal-for-an-interview stress, and these are still useful filters. (e.g. For a front-end web dev role, we asked candidates to change the web page's text color. Half couldn't.) People who suffer from truly extreme stress at interviews are probably best off treating it as a medical condition to be managed.
I'm impressed by the author's gall in naming his idea an "iron law", without bothering to test how true it is. I suppose it'd get talked about a lot less if he had named it simply "Michel's Conjecture of Oligarchy".
Money is an imperfect but real solution. The simple thing is to charge a small sign-up fee. Obviously this dramatically increases the barrier to entry for real humans. But it should cut the spam even more sharply.
It "allows" people with vast resources to spam only until the moderator removes the account, and it ensures the moderator is paid to do so. But more critically, it removes the profit incentive to spam, so even if people with vast resources were "allowed", they won't.
A nasty SEO company with vast resources could create thousands of accounts, even if they have an entry fee, if it determines that the entry fee is cheaper than the value they would get by spamming.
Isn't this merely a technological change? "A few decades or a century ago", being location-specific was the only possible option for a social club. Now there are more options; location-specific options still exist, and location-agnostic options exist also.
You can totally pick a convenient cafe or pub and start hanging out there & inviting your existing friends. In time you'll start to recognize the other regulars, and you can make a point of chatting with them regularly (but not overstaying your welcome especially early on!), find out what they're interested in, offer & request small favors, crack jokes, eventually a bit of friendly competition, casual debate about mutual interests while intentionally trusting them enough to let them change your mind a little, etc -- all the things you'd normally do to build a social connection with another man. The upside and downside of a location-based approach is that it's a very weak filter. The other regulars may be people whom it's a real stretch to learn to connect with.
Location-agnostic social activities are typically focused on an activity or interest, e.g. people who want to hike, watch a movie, play a game or sport, do political activism, do community service, etc. So the social group comes with a filter attached that ensures you will have an easier time connecting with them. This is great! There are some downsides, too, but nothing serious.
There's a plausible argument for it, so it's not a crazy thing. You as a human being can also predict likely completions of partial sentences, or likely lines of code given surrounding lines of code, or similar tasks. You do this by having some understanding of what the words mean and what the purpose of the sentence/code is likely to be. Your understanding is encoded in connections between neurons.
So the argument goes: LLMs were trained to predict the next token, and the most general solution to do this successfully is by encoding real understanding of the semantics.
For in-person play with ordinary playing cards and an arbitrary number of players, keep the rules the same except:
* Start with 1 deck per each 2 players. Shuffle the decks together.
* Deal 10 cards to each player, & set ante at a constant 50 chips per player.
* At the end-of-round reveal, the common suit is whichever suit has the most cards. If there's a tie, flip cards from the remaining deck until the tie is broken and the common suit is determined.
