Or do things that actually work. Why, for example, can I not translate a PowerPoint using Copilot in Powerpoint? Why do I need to save it, then upload it into ChatGPT, translate it, then download it again, and open it in PowerPoint for further editing. But at the same time get all kind off nonsense I don't want pushed at me in Windows, like that MSN news clickbait crap.

I had a discussion yesterday with someone that owns a company creating PowerPoints for customers. As you might understand, that is also a business that is to be hit hard by AI. What he does is offer an AI entry level option, where basically the questions he asks the customer (via a Form) will lead to a script for running AI. With that he is able to combine his expertise with the AI demand from the market, and gain a profit from that.

I guess then, that he is relying on his customers not discovering that there are options out there that will do this for them, without a "middle man" as it were. Seems like shaky ground to be standing on, but I suppose it can work for a while, if he already has good relationships in his industry.

I think what he does is thinking in possibilities, just what an entrepreneur should do.

Nice tech! Would be great if this can also work on factual data, like design drawings. With that it could be used for BIM and regulatory use. For example to showcase to residents how a new residential area will look that is planned. Or to test the layout of a planned airport.

Because there is a huge market for resume builders and career guidance where AI can play a role. Using LinkedIn you can measure success and network performance and correlate that to the resume and posted content.

There's also real money in writing LinkedIn content that is believable enough for "influencers" to post. I'm currently contracting, and post on LinkedIn at least once a day, and I've added ~1k+ followers in the last month, but it takes effort. Meanwhile, those posts have gotten me work, and so if it was feasible for me to outsource it in a reputationally safe way, I'd consider it.

For me the bar for "reputationally safe" is really high because my market (cynical tech CTO's etc. don't respond well to things that sounds like ChatGPT) and so I don't expect to any time soon, but for many others that bar is pretty low as long as it's good enough for LinkedIn's algorithm to give it impressions.

I hope you realize that if everyone can do "computational influencing", everyone will.

A Nash Equilibrium of automated bullshit, it'll just make everything more miserable, programmatically.

I think if you read LinkedIn posts you get what you deserve

>I'm currently contracting, and post on LinkedIn at least once a day, and I've added ~1k+ followers in the last month, but it takes effort. Meanwhile, those posts have gotten me work, and so if it was feasible for me to outsource it in a reputationally safe way, I'd consider it.

If you need to pay the bills and this helps, good for you.

But boy howdy does this sound terrible. It's amazing to me that there are people out there who take anything on LinkedIn seriously. I mean, it's not like the posts are inherently bad, but the entire point of the site is to "influence" and sell to each other. It's horrible. If I were looking for talent, it'd probably be the last site I'd use.

> people who say they learn a ton of useful work-related stuff from reading LinkedIn posts

I suspect this says more about what the reader doesn't know and their mastery of info self-exposure than it says about the contentfulness of LinkedIn posts*.

* Not counting content originating elsewhere re-posted on or linked to from LinkedIn.

So all LinkedIn posts are of the same quality then? Would you also say that all HN comments are of the same quality too? You're painting with an awfully big brush.

Look I get it, there's a lot of crap on LinkedIn for sure, and it's pretty obvious this crowd is generally against "influencers".. I also see no value in them generally speaking.

But it's reductive, and inaccurate, to say that there's zero value across the board on there and that every post is low-value influencer-spam. Not everyone is trying to build an audience or push their newsletter.

Some people just want to share their knowledge and interact with their professional peers, and for better or worse LinkedIn is the most known place to do that..

You could say the same thing about this place. Why are we all here?

> You could say the same thing about this place. Why are we all here?

Not to preen or self-promote or "network". Most here are anonymous.

Both of us use names, and you have the meethn and I have a "we are hiring" ... Still, I don't think either of us is here just to meet people or just to hire. My profile has only said that for a couple of the more than a decade I've been here.

You also have your LinkedIn CV posted on your profile. ;-)

Anyways, I feel like we've gotten off-track.. Sounds like we both agree that all the brand-builders and influencers on LinkedIn provide dubious value.

But I still think there is other value on LinkedIn from people who just want to connect and discuss work topics with peers or other professionals in their circle.

I've personally had some good discussions, much like I've had on here, in comment threads on LinkedIn.. Definitely not as much as HN, but if you're smart about the content you engage with (like any other social network) then it can still be useful and rewarding.

I don't think anybody said influencers don't put effort in it. The only argument is that the added value by influencers is zero, be it on Instagram or LinkedIn, so if AI can take that kind of job the net loss is also zero. Of course of course there's an audience for influencers, like there was an audience at Tupperware shows, but they'll be happy to move on to the next fad so again zero loss.

Once again, AI will automate checkboxing tasks—-things that some people think some other people value so it has to be done even though basically no on values it so no one wants to do the soulless task.

:insert Christoph Waltz meme: You're sheltering LinkedIn slop, are you not?

I'm guessing the real money linked in wants is in the hiring and firing, B2B. Now, every resume gets answered and your first interaction with a company is a poorly scripted AI who goes from manic enthusiasm to depressingly rote in the actual job requirements and probably will still ghost you and continue the imbalance of application effort vs employer response.

The converse will be true, but the price of AI will just make poor people have to suffer even more

Just the long march of wealth inequality and it's time sucking capitalism.

This seems to imply that machines would ghost humans to save on token fees. I wouldn't rule it out.

> the imbalance of application effort vs employer response.

A recent issue in the job application realm is AI application bots that will apply to 100's of jobs on your behalf, which is the opposite problem. Seems like both sides are racing to make applications as useless as possible as quickly as possible.

If you don't have a network, good luck in the future.

We're heading for the 1990's vision of agents negotiating on our behalf, except less exchange of reliable data and more attempts at bullshitting each other.

Anecdotally, I think a fair chunk of writing CVs (and to a smaller degree, cover letters) is already outsourced. Adding an AI to the mix will only make things worse.

I have seen a number of CVs over the past few months that fall into two eye-rolling categories. First, those that have the same set of skills in the exact same order, and routinely sport identical expressions. Over time I've come to associate them with low-grade content farms. Second, a smaller set of exceptionally polished ones that feel unique and really want me to interview the candidate. These candidates will then utterly bomb in the interview, to the point where I'm often asking myself whose CV it was they had submitted.

Signal-to-noise ratio is tending towards zero.

>Anecdotally, I think a fair chunk of writing CVs (and to a smaller degree, cover letters) is already outsourced. Adding an AI to the mix will only make things worse.

This is why "I've submitted 1000 resumes in 3 weeks and can't get an interview!" posts on social media are rampant.

I was going to say that it's the streetlight effect but this makes even more sense.

LinkedIn, like GitHub and (to a degree) OpenAI are under Microsoft’s umbrella.

Of all this amazing stuff, I learned today they were considering using solar panels on a zeppelin in 1936. I really though solar panels were from the 1980’s onwards.

1876 for selenium based solar cells.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selenium#Solar_cells

Silicon solar cells are/were massively more effective, and came to light just before their popularization in the space race.

This does need the context that you would communicate much more with your hive then just death and weddings. You need to build a relation with them. Ask permission to enter the hive, take good care of them, all that. And yes, there are people (like me) that still do it that way. And yes, I do think our bees / colonies recognise me and my wife as their keepers.

I think this is a good approach and the right attitude. I think that people tend to discount insects because they are small, simplistic, and ephemeral. Yet, social insects such as bees are part of a larger organism: the colony/hive. And collectively, that hive carries a lot of sentience, memory, and agency. We didn't coin the term hive mind for no reason!

So while this custom seems perhaps superstitious and frivolous, it carries actual layers of meaning and importance, because animal husbandry, even insect husbandry, is steeped richly in tradition and knowledge handed down across generations, for millennia, more than we can even comprehend.

Could you share more about why you think that, or your relationship with your bees please? How do they recognize you and behave to you? Do they have a group intelligence or do individuals know you?

I ask because I’d love to keep bees myself someday and the relationships people have with bees are something I don’t know well, or don’t understand, but am fascinated by. (The tradition linked for this thread is one I’m familiar with, for example — but what I don’t know is what makes people believe it. What is the experience of beekeeping that leads people to believe bees understand?) It’s one primary reason I’m keen to become a beekeeper, to experience and to learn. I’d love to hear whatever you have to say.

I keep bees and I like them, but there's a reason you wear a protective suit to work on them; they aren't all that keen to be friends. Tame bees will pretty much just ignore you, and that's probably the best you can hope for. But you do get to see what they're up to and watch them work which is pretty impressive. It's not particularly hard to get started keeping them if you want to give it a shot.

My wife and I are not bee keepers, but we have a hive nearby and our garden receives many bees during the day, particularly when looking for moisture during dry times. It is so beautiful watching how calm they are with my wife sharing the garden with them as she potters and they swirl.

i keep Asian honeybees on Lantau Island / Hong Kong - fully agree with you, there is so much more to it the more time one spends with bees. you will like this book a lot [Song of Increase]: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/28862364

If you ever went 4x4 driving, you use driver / passenger to indicate the direction someone has to go to. This is because the navigation often is done from someone standing outside the car, where using left/right can be rather confusing.

In UK a [experienced, older?] driver gives another driver instructions with "right hand down" and "left hand down". That is, you give directions to move the steering wheel.

I've the vaguest recollection that sailing/steam boats used to say which side to move the wheel towards to steer; that begging opposite of the way the boat will go??

The assumption following this revaluation is that this is an incentive for Apple to keep this secondary market as small as possible. A google search in ios safari means a revenue for Apple. Another browser does not. With this, there is a double vendor lock-in.

Although I like most of the posting, some thoughts: First of all, we think with all inventions we have excluded human beings from being required. In the end we get more efficient, but we still need workers. The trend though is to go to core business and standard following the industrialisation, I see ai as an opportunity to have more custom and service driven business on an industrial scale though, that is the real promise. This can start with service desk providing service rather then unusable rubbish ad they do now. For the art and text: this industry is relatively new, and came with internet and PowerPoint decks. And yes, probably this will be impacted by ai, but do we really have to be sorry for that? We will have the same page filling nonsense created by ai, that is now created by cheap labour. Look at recipe sites, all kind of crap to make recipes into content so the copyright is somewhat addressed, but nobody reads that anyway. As for all other changes we have had before: there will be some impact on business and life as we know it, but not as much as anyone expected upfront.

And don’t forget the energy and materials you need to build something where you can actually grow things indoors. Total waste of so many things here. We know that we can grow stuff in greenhouses. We know wheat is a cheap commodity too, where it is hard to gain a profit on. What are they trying to accomplish here?

Dunno. In some places agriculture is fried with climate change at the gates so trying things to regain control over culture conditions could worth it. Could be useful also for keeping isolated varieties non contaminated with genetically modified pollen. Just in case something go wrong with that.