When your shortcuts don't work anymore..

Hesitated for a while before posting this, as I don't like to whine in public but this should be therapeutical

Beware, it's a #longread

Years ago, I thought about how cool it'd be to have conversation-based interactive fiction on my phone. I remember showing early prototypes to my ex in 2012. It took me over 2 years to build up the courage to make it my priority and to take time off. FictionBurgers.com was born.

A few weeks in, a friend of mine forwarded me a link to Lifeline. I was devastated. I literally spent 2 days cursing my past self for not making a move sooner.

I soldiered on, worked 7 months straight on it. Now the tech is 90-95% finished, content is maybe 60% finished and I just... gave up. Every other week now, similar projects are popping up. I'm under-staffed and under-financed compared to them. Beyond the entertainment space, "conversation-based" is hot stuff in 2016, and I still can't seem to know what to do with what I have.

I feel like I had this fantastic opportunity and squandered it, which makes me miserable.

Anyway, just so you get some cheese with my whine, here are a few lessons I learned the hard way:

Lesson #1 : Don't go it alone. I thought I could hack it, and for over 7 months, I did. But sooner or later, shit gets to you, it's just human. That's when you need someone; just so that their highs compensate your lows and vice versa. Most of the actual writing was done by a freelancer (and he did AMAZING WORK, especially considering that I couldn't pay him much) but it's not the same as a partner, who's invested same as you.

Lesson #1.5 : Complementary skills. Just like my fiction project failed because I was missing a writer partner, my fallback plan of getting into conversational tech hit the skids for lack of a bizdev partner. It's great to stick among devs when ranting, but you need to mingle with a variety of people. Some of them are actually ok, y'know :)

Lesson #2 : Lean Startup, MVP. Google those terms if you're not familiar with them. My mistake here (after MVPing the shit out of the tech) was to let my content goal run amok : what made my app superior to the competition (or so I reasoned) was that it would allow for conversations with multiple characters! So I started plotting a story... with 9 characters. Not 2 or 3. NINE FREAKING CHARACTERS! Branching conversations with 9 characters is the stuff of nightmare -- and is the main reason I gave up.

Lesson #3 : Know your reasons. I wasted some much time early on, zig-zaging between objectives:
"I'm just indulging myself"
"No, I really want it to be a project that pays off"
"Nah, it's just a learning opportunity"
"Damn, why is it bothering me so much that someone else is doing the same thing ?"
"Doesn't matter, I just mine finished"
"What a waste of time !!"
etc etc
And it's still a problem now that I'm trying to figure out what to do!

So anyway, that's my story, thanks for readin'
Check out chatty.im/player/sugar-wars if you want to test the most advance version.

Also, I've also tagged this #startupfail, if any of you fine people want to share the lessons you've dearly paid to learn!

Searching for new jobs when i find this:

Backend Developer

Education:

Computer Science (Bachelor's degree)

Languages:

English (spoken proficiency: Conversational/Business written proficiency: Conversational/Business)

Skills:

Ruby on Rails (+5 years of experience)
HTML (+5 years of experience)
CSS (+5 years of experience)
.NET (+5 years of experience)
HapiJS (+5 years of experience)
ExpressJS (+5 years of experience)
Django (+5 years of experience)
Elixir (+5 years of experience)
Ruby (+5 years of experience)
Python (+5 years of experience)
Java (+5 years of experience)
Javascript (+5 years of experience)

The moment when you realize that you have no other conversational topics than technology, programming and how fucking annoying it is, to working with total douchbags :(

A Microservice Discord bot with a conversational AI using Tensorflow

Update on my Facebook and Booking.com interviews. I had them back to back today.

Even before I start, I accept and admit that I am a hypocrite. I hate Amazon yet order stuff from there. I hate Microsoft yet use their products. I hate Facebook yet went ahead to interview with them.

I fucking hate myself for compromising my ethics, values, and integrity. I had promised myself that even if I work for any major shit company, I'd never go with Facebook. Here I am after many years. Not an excuse, but I am doing it because I see it as an entry point into the UK. That's all.

Community's hate towards me is justified and I'd accept the discrimination from this community because this place is my digital home and you all are my family. Infact first thing I told mom was, dR boys are gonna disown me when they get to know about this.

Anyway, coming to the update part.

I had applied leave at work from last Friday. 4 days of leave earned me 10 days off (including weekends and 2 days of Diwali company holiday).

Last Thursday I got to know that Facebook has scheduled their interview today (Friday). I spent insane amount of time preparing. Approximately 8 hours everyday including weekend. I added nearly 40+ hours preparing for it in last 7 days, because I had to get in. Failure isn't an option now.

I sacrifice my family time, preparing for the interview.

I sacrifice Diwali break, sitting in front of the screen and studying.

I sacrifice my only vacation of 2021, doing mock interviews as late as 11.30 PM.

I sacrifice my free time and enjoyment, stressing over what could happen.

I was prepared like perfect for screening stage.

Interview 1: this guy comes and ask 'what is the best compliment you have got as a PM?' and 'Why do you want to quit the current company?'

He wasn't supposed to ask those as per Facebook's policy and interview stage.

Then he gave me a shit problem to solve and rejected my approach and wanted it his was. I tried to follow him and made sure I was able to convince with the reasoning but he kept pushing me back. He kept putting me down. Did not listen to me or what I had to convey or what was expected as an answer. He had certain output in his mind and wanted me to come up with it as an answer.

For the uninitiated: Facebook gives ton of preparation material and tells upfront the kind of questions they'll ask they just focus on few things. Moreover, in Product interviews, there isn't right or wrong answer.

Anyway, this guy started making funny expressions which put my morale down and I stood my ground with losing my cool. I managed to get all my answers right and the key points the look into a candidate. It went decent. Yet the interviewers attitude was something I did not like.

Interview 2: the lady was really kind and warm. Very accommodating and easy person to deal with. It went amazingly well.

I have two observations I want to share with you all.

1. I hate what Facebook does. Lizardberg is awful human being. But I absolutely liked HOW they are doing things, at least from an interview stand point. They even had mock sessions by their PMs and upfront told how to prepare and how to answer.

2. While it seems to be a 5 star experience, I found them to function mechanically. No small talk, no human connection (ironic to their mission), no conversational flow of the interview (again something that they kept saying a zillion times in all their material). They came, formally introduced themselves, and had a checklist kind of attitude, and left.

I now await for the feedback.

In the next hour, I had Booking.com first round.

Amazing people. Warm friendly experience. Treated me as a human. Heard me. Made me feel part of the conversation rather than someone just being judged.

It went 1000x better than Facebook.

I await the feedback from them as well.

I don't know what's gonna happen but one thing for sure, the kind of expectations Facebook set for their interviews, was nowhere close to the reality. It was awful.

180° was for Booking.com

Guess the saying stands true, expectations always lead to disappointment.

Finally I feel de-stressed and my Diwali vacation starts AFTER Diwali ended. Or rather just a regular weekend.

2021 has been terribly awful year for me. Hope this shitty year ends soon.

I am beginning to hate the relationship between email and my clients. I never thought it would come to the point where email is the worst communication platform I've ever used because some of my clients simply don't know how to use it properly.

I have one client who never uses the subject header in his emails. This makes conversational threads very difficult to follow, and I can't just scan the inbox I have for him. I have to actually do searches on my emails just to find recent conversations.

For some reason nobody knows how to start a new email thread. I have multiple clients that will just take the last email that I sent them, regardless of what it's about, and start a new conversation completely unrelated to the other email by hitting"reply". I end up with email threads that are 60 to 100 emails long and contain many different subjects, which again makes it hard to find anything. Never mind that they've usually put two or three important attachments, or username password combinations, or other valuable information in there amongst all the noise.

Worst of all, I have a few clients and co-workers who insist on starting a new email thread whenever anything about a particular issue comes up. This means that just today I have five separate email threads about the same goddamn issue from the same damn person. Am I supposed to respond to each thread with the same damned information? One of these people is supposed to be both a media consultant and an SEO expert and really should know better. Also, if you do actually send me an email with a subject like "the robot.txt error", please don't give me one sentence about that and five paragraphs about what color you'd like the background to be. That's ridiculous. How the hell am I supposed to find that later? Especially since we already discussed this in the other email that sitting in my inbox.

I swear I am setting up a bug tracking system simply so that my clients can log in and leave me bug reports, and feature requests, and will stop filling up my poor email boxes with what amounts to piles and piles threads that I have to sort through.

For a person who suffers with a form of ADD this is extremely frustrating. Why is it so difficult for my colleagues and clients to write good emails with good subject lines, and reply to the right damn emails?

Am I just being too anal, or does this bother others as well?

I have come up with a weight loss program with developers in mind. It involves scaring the crap out of your fellow developers while they work and play on a computer. When you are scared you expend a bunch of energy reacting to the scare. Any number of scare tactics can be employed. They can be surprise (jumping out), conversational (your fired type), screamer videos or programs, etc. The type of scare is up to you. Get creative.

I am calling this program: Boo-Lean

You can choose to use this program or not.

-release an app (legally)
-stay healthy + avoid sickness
-speak conversational Mandarin
-build passive income (optional)
-get out of toxic work relationship/s (optional)

"The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite." - Paul Graham

!rant
We've got a small army of foreign contractors working with us both in the office and overseas. Syntax has become the thing that stands out to me the most. We can all speak the same language, but our partners don't quite have the syntax down, resulting in some rather amusing email exchanges. I can't fault them, if the shoe was on the other foot, I guarantee I'd be butchering any other language's conversational syntax. Overall, the experience has been a bit of an eye opener for me.

That feeling when your chat with Uber's conversational AI proves to be your most fulfilling interaction all week. 😭

Deep learning is probably (????) the only research branch where every successful paper title needs to be a stupid acronym or meme

I work in a conversational AI startup and the new intern that joined yesterday didn't understand half the memes or acronyms (especially all the Simpsons related) because apparently he's "Gen Z" and all the paper title is "Millennial" humour

He's only 2 years younger than me. Am I literally at the millennial - GenZ border ? Or the intern is out of touch ?

Speciality: Conversational interfaces / NLP

Why I chose it: It appeared to be the only area where my previous academic background (Law) was relevant, so they didn't consider me to have 7 years of blank on my CV.

"Life is conversational. Web design should be the same way. On the web, you’re talking to someone you’ve probably never met – so it’s important to be clear and precise. Thus, well structured navigation and content organization goes hand in hand with having a good conversation." - Chikezie Ejiasi

AI boffins. Get a move on with this conversational UI stuff. Typing is getting old now.

Then two years later, when I'm bored of that, I want to just *think* the text onto the screen.

Leave mention here when ready.

So our our next role, what we are really looking for you to have is:

- manipulating PM’s so they fight with each other and not me ✅
- ignoring people when they don’t say anything of substance ✅
- practicing music and drums while in meetings ✅
- getting conversational with people strategically✅
- saying no to HR ✅
- confusing clients into doing what I want them to ✅
- dancing while coding ✅
- creating illusions ✅

😡 Rant Time: ChatGPT Development Frustrations! 😡

Hey fellow devs, I've been diving deep into ChatGPT development lately, and let me tell you, it's been a rollercoaster ride! From tackling those tricky conversational contexts to fine-tuning models, it's both a challenge and a thrill.

I've come across some valuable resources for ChatGPT development services that have been a game-changer. It's amazing how expertise in this space can make a difference.

I'm curious, how's your ChatGPT journey been? Any frustrations or victories to share? Let's commiserate and celebrate together! 🚀💻 #ChatGPT #DevRant #AI #Development

Sofia like conversational robot possible with GPT-3, GTP-J-6B ?

Nobody likes chatbots/conversational UI for anything other than chat, right?

I have a savings app with conversational UI. I press one of a number of options e.g. "Savings". There's this artificial delay after the network request has been made so that it looks like the app is typing back at you. Why???

You then get another limited set of options, or you can tap "Back". These options are supposedly as if you typed it back as a response.

I can get three "questions" (levels) deep, let's say to deposit cash, only for it to turn around and say that I've reached a daily/weekly limit? At each level there's this awful delay, and you already knew I wouldn't be able to perform the action regardless of my responses after my very first "message"!

Why is this good/popular? And the whole thing totally breaks if there's any loss of connectivity.

Stop it. Please.

Does anyone know of some good research papers around NLP AI capable of situational awareness? General conversational awareness... i remember trying cleverbot a few years back and it left much to be desired. Even Google is sub-par when it comes to asking follow-up questions.