I think this is a relatively unique outlook and not one that is shared by most.
If you use a tool to automate sending emails, unrelated to LLMs, in most scenarios the behaviour on the receiver is different.
- If I get a mass email from a company and it's signed off from the CEO, I don't think the CEO personally emailed me. They may glanced over it and approved it, maybe not even that but they didn't "send an email". At best, one might think that "the company" sent an email.
- I randomly send my wife cute stickers on Telegram as a sort of show that I'm thinking of her. If I setup a script to do that at random intervals and she finds out, from her point of view I "didn't send them" and she would be justifiably upset.
I know this might be a difficult concept for many people that browse this forum, but the end product/result is not always the point. There are many parts of our lives and society in general that the act of personally doing something is the entire point.
It doesn't sound like utopia to me, hence the quotation marks. Eminently achievable, but not actually good. Only those engaged in utopian thinking - with a heavy slice of ignorance of basic economics and history - would think it is utopia or leads to it.
What is an example of a "high-end page-layout program" referenced in that document? I mean, of course I assume they exist for professional type setting, book publishing and such, but I have never seen or heard of the actual software.
We used Adobe InDesign at my last work, which I believe is an industry standard. Affinity Layout if you don’t want to sell your kidney to Adobe. Scribus is an open source project but I’m not sure how the quality is in that.
> Scribus is an open source project but I’m not sure how the quality is in that.
I am not a typographer, and I’ve never used it in a professional capacity, but v1.6 (early 2024) improved Scribus a lot. I’ve used it and liked it for some personal projects for years, but the improved typography in 1.6 is big.
There is only Adobe InDesign. Even though you can make high quality layouts in other programs (Affinity, Scribus) once you get to actually printing in pro printer the whole pipeline is InDesign. It's Adobes secret money printer, software that many don't realize it rivals Photoshop in usage.
No, the pro pipeline is PDF. You might argue that, if you are risk averse, you only trust Adobe’s tools to produce optimal PDF. This is of course Adobe’s moat. But Scribus’ export to pdf is excellent, in a pro setting
Thats not what I am talking about. Your PDF might be identical but printers often require either their specific InDesign settings or straight up packaged InDesign project as source for printing (they used to require postscript lol).
I am not gonna argue if they are correct or not but the reality i've experienced is that at minimum socially the printing industry is married to InDesign.
I don’t know how you ever get the opposite, in been working for 12 years now at 6 different jobs everyone has been fine at the job apart from a cheeky hack here or there.
Every entertainment market is saturated. Even if every creative endeavour stopped now, there would still be more freely available content to last more then any individual human life span.
Unless you’re the type of person that actively considers them a fan of something and goes out of their way to consume a specific niche, there isn’t much reason to pay much, or anything for entertainment.
>Unless you’re the type of person that actively considers them a fan of something
to be fair, that's a billion dollar business of an audience. Bandcamp is still a thing because people like that exist. So I wouldn't readily dismiss that.
But yes. We're in an age where people treat TV shows as "second screen entertainment", the silver screen is dying out, and where Spotify is flooding its library with white noise and AI slop. And people at best shrug. There's never been less respect for the arts, and it reflects in wider consumer patterns. Any future artists will need to appeal to a shrinkingly few fanbase of those who care about quality.
Feels like the more important question is how are you going to do all these things when Slack cuts you off, or there is some new Slack policy that prevents it, or they increase their pricing by 1000%
Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over?
> Feels like the more important question is how are you going to do all these things when Slack cuts you off
I pay Slack $50k/year. They have no reason to shut me off.
> or there is some new Slack policy that prevents it
Prevents what exactly? The new API pricing they introduced doesn't apply to internal apps. I suppose they could apply it to internal apps. We'd have to figure out a path around it
> or they increase their pricing by 1000%
1000% increase in pricing seems incredibly unlikely. That would not only disrupt thousands of companies but would likely kill Slack entirely
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> Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over?
Not really. We service clients through Slack. Could we switch? Sure. Would it be a pain? Yeah. Would it be costly? Yeah.
But there's also no reason to switch. And if a new platform comes out (like the one this thread is about), I would expect them to have the features to compete with Slack if they are posiitioning themselves as a Slack competitor
Every third party you contract with can pull the rug from under you this way, even this new startup with its 'forever free tier'.
You plan for it as a potential risk just like anything else and, if the time comes, you can work on migrating out. Companies will off board third parties all the time if the financials don't add up.
$50k a year? Those are rookie numbers. You're actually fine, as a small fish going belly up isn't the end of the world. You can start a new business. For some big tech companies this is potentially near existential. I would know.
Ok, but what stops same from happening with any other solution? There are two things that would "fix" it:
* Fully open and interoperable protocol: We had it (XMPP), it was flawed, but at one beautiful moment in time it worked and using same protocol I could contact both google and facebook contacts. Then the companies decided "no, we would prefer to keep a walled gardens rather than make it easy to move to competition.
* Fully open source (no open core nonsense, latest Mattermost rugpull from OSS part users being one example why) chat platform with corporate backing and SaaS option - there is Matrix but afaik it is lacking feature-wise, tho I havent used it much. With plugin app store so it is possible to make and even sell integrations with other systems.
Second option seems more viable but it takes a lot of effort to make something as good as Slack or Discord
Obesity rates have never been higher and the top fast food franchises have double digit billions in revenue. I don’t think there is any redemption arc in there for public health since the 90s.
those statistics really gloss over / erase the vast cultural changes that have occurred. america / the west / society's relationship to fast food and obesity is dramatically different than it was thirty years ago.
I'm genuinely curious about the changes you are talking about?
Keep in mind, thirty years ago, I was a kid. I thought that fast food was awesome.
My parents would allow me a fast food meal at best once a month, and my "privileged" friends had a fast food meal a week.
Now, I'd rather starve than eat something coming from a fast food.
But around me, normies at eating at least once a day from a fast food.
We have at least ten big franchises in the country, and at every corner there's a kebab/tacos/weird place selling trash.
So, from my POV, I'd thought that, in general, people are eating much more fast food than thirty years ago.
In the interim America got obsessed with fitness and being out of shape much less obese became dramatically less popular in the middle / upper class.
Like now it's possible to go days in some cities without seeing a single obese person. It's still a big problem. Outside of the cities and in lower class areas, but... I think the changes are trickling down / propagating? That's been my impression at least.
Surprised by your take on fast food, by the way. When I complain about fast food like was ubiquitous in the 90s I think of McDonald's and other highly processed things. The type that are covered in salt and cheap oil and artifical smells and where the meat is like reconstituted garbage, where lunch is 1500 calories, where everyone gets a giant soda, where kids are enticed with cheap plastic crap.
But a corner kebab or taco place seems like an unequivocal positive for society, I have no complaints about their existence at all. I feel like most people eating at corner shops for half of their meals is pretty much ideal--if it's affordable to do so then it is a very sensible and economically positive division of labor. On the condition that the food be of decent quality, of course. Which sometimes it is. Perhaps not as much as it should be though, but people do have standards and will pick the better places.
Since you talked about "the west", I applied your comment to my situation also (France).
But it seems that some things were and are still different.
Related to fitness, sure, there's millions of people who "go to the gym" at least one a week and buy food supplements and protein powders...
But they'll happily eat fast foot several times a week.
And if we talk about ultra-processed food, it's even worse.
> But a corner kebab or taco place seems like an unequivocal positive for society, I have no complaints about their existence at all.
That's probably a big difference, because nobody here will dare say that those place serves actual food.
Not because of the cultural aspect, but just because it's the case.
They use the lowest quality in every ingredients, use lots of bad oils to cook, put tons of salt and other additives...
And don't get me started on the hygiene side.
People are perfectly aware of that and they'll even joke about it while eating their 50% fat kebab.
At least McDonald's have the hygiene on their side!
We don't have the same obesity epidemic, partly due to portion sizing and mobility, but almost half the population is overweight and figures are still going up.
The middle and upper class, city people, are just a fraction of the population. If there's been progress, it's not bearing out in the data. Though there appears to be a slight inflection point around the 2010, it seems the trend is still up. Though this data isn't recent enough to include the effects of semaglutide.
I personally don't think ultimatums are a tool that you should ever employ in an employment situation outside of collective action.
You can just leave off the ultimatum and attempt to improve your situation by communicating it in a way that is directly actionable (I'd like to work on X instead of Y, can you arrange that?). You'll have your own internal deadlines of course, but you shouldn't communicate them.
Ever is too strong, but remember the less often you give an ultimatum the more powerful it is when you do. When you have a long standing reputation (must come first) as a 'team player' a sudden ultimatum will get a lot of attention, but it will be years before you can give another.
if like many you switch jobs every few years you can never develop that reputation needed for an ulimatum in the first place. (Staying for years is never 100% in your power but some jobs have better chances of it)
Just be careful - some will see it as having their arm twisted. You may get what you want in the short run, but in the long run, when you negotiate with leverage, people dislike that.
It is the nuclear option, and you will lose the trust of your leadership chain.
If you use a tool to automate sending emails, unrelated to LLMs, in most scenarios the behaviour on the receiver is different.
- If I get a mass email from a company and it's signed off from the CEO, I don't think the CEO personally emailed me. They may glanced over it and approved it, maybe not even that but they didn't "send an email". At best, one might think that "the company" sent an email.
- I randomly send my wife cute stickers on Telegram as a sort of show that I'm thinking of her. If I setup a script to do that at random intervals and she finds out, from her point of view I "didn't send them" and she would be justifiably upset.
I know this might be a difficult concept for many people that browse this forum, but the end product/result is not always the point. There are many parts of our lives and society in general that the act of personally doing something is the entire point.
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