drmath

The California WARN act effectively requires 2 months severance for large layoffs at large companies (or 2 months notice, but companies almost always prefer severance).

One source of trouble here is that the agent's view of the web page is so different from the human's. We could reduce the incidence of these problems by making them more similar.

Agents often have some DOM-to-markdown tool they use to read web pages. If you use the same tool (via a "reader mode") to view the web page, you'd be assured the thing you're telling the agent to read is the same thing you're reading. Cursor / Antigravity / etc. could have an integrated web browser to support this.

That would make what the human sees closer to what the agent sees. We could also go the other way by having the agent's web browsing tool return web page screenshots instead of DOM / HTML / Markdown.

I could handle this style when it wasn't everywhere. But now I've developed a hypersensitivity and can't bear it. It's like suddenly most of the internet is in a language I can't read.

I wish almost every news article came with a statistics section. If you must, go ahead and write that article about a particular murder or traffic accident or drug trial or earthquake. But if you don't include statistics on similar events over time, geography, demographics, etc, you're misleading more than informing.

I'd _like_ to blame the reader -- inferring anything about how common something is based on how often it's reported is unreasonable. But readers do make that inference, and writers shouldn't pretend they don't know it.

And for most of us nowadays it's not about articles and writers. It's about eight-second video clips on TikTok and creators. So I don't have any hope that we'll become better informed.

Even in the just-photoshop-not-ai days product photos had become pretty unreliable as a means of understanding what you're buying. Of course it's much worse now.

> I've tried to ask dozens of companies that wanted to hire me just for how many shares were outstanding and/or authorized.

"Wanted to hire me" as in they made an offer, or an earlier step? At offer stage, I've never had a company refuse to answer these questions. I don't have "dozens of companies" worth of experience though, maybe one dozen if that.

Haha there's a pigheaded part of me that insists all of that is the "prompt," but I just read your bit about "inferred definitions," and acceptance is probably a healthier attitude.

Isn't "context" just another word for "prompt?" Techniques have become more complex, but they're still just techniques for assembling the token sequences we feed to the transformer.

Whether or not you're really outliers, it would be very surprising if "my friends and I" were representative of the general population.