prepend

The expected return on lottery is -30-50%.

ETFs have sold for $1 for quite a while.

Isn’t this similar to all ads for useless stuff.

We’re being targeted to buy $100k cars we don’t need. Not much worse than being targeted to gamble an extra $10k.

My 2017 macbook air still gets security updates. And I play lots of games through steam.

My 2020 XR still gets updates and runs every app I need- uber, school stuff, office stuff.

I gave up on using Siri for my lights because 1/3 of the time it would get caught in a “who is speaking? Please go through the voice configuration to identify yourself.”

This was frustrating for me as it always prompted “who cares? Just turn off the lights.” As well as would drive my parents and other guests batty.

And I suppose Google has very little interest in stopping this, even though they should be able to detect it with their advanced “AI.”

Who does this benefit other than Google?

How does a bot farm make money off this?

How is it entitlement? Seems more efficient than me driving somewhere and my car sitting there for 10 hours unused.

The same argument was made when elevator operators went away.

Some things work well with automation (taxis, washing machines, copy machines) while others work better with humans (chefs, masseuses).

50 years ago, I would have needed to dictate this note to a secretary who would distribute a memo. Does it further isolate ourselves that we can type and communicate directly? Would 1980 uses think it was awful to us?

> I love Waymo, I don't have to chit-chat with the driver and bear his horrible music

This is a reason I love Waymo. I don’t like talking with people and like avoiding it when possible.

There’s also may other, more important to me, reasons I like Waymo: they never cancel on me, their car doesn’t stink, no tipping (cheaper), not worrying about them rating me poorly.

> It’s making me want to be a lot less collaborative with such individuals.

I have the same conclusion and am getting a growing list of mental blacklisted people who I just sort of ignore or greatly discount their efforts.

I suppose I always did this if people were time wasters but what used to be a tiny list of “idiots” is now getting much, much bigger. Hopefully it doesn’t grow to everyone I work with like an AI Nothing.

If you FOIA’d them, then why would you need to redact?

If you can’t show evidence, then it’s probably best not to cite that evidence. At that point it seems to me that you’re asking people to just trust your claim. You seem like a nice person, but what sort of rational reader trusts an internet stranger.

This is an important issue and you seem interested in the topic.

I have friends who are expats and they’ve done this for years. I had one family member who left every six months to renew their visa.

It’s a chore, but very common around the world.

This reduces your credibility. If I was reading, I wouldn’t think “not llm,” I’d think “not detail oriented.” You may want to find some better way that doesn’t make people think less of you.

Perfect grammar and punctuation is par for any publication.

Robots

I think the end game is to only do interesting things and automate all the mundane parts of life.

We used to have to wash clothes by hand and it took all day. Now we have a washing machine and it takes 2 hours.

People used to spend time washing clothes and now we have more members of the household working.

I think the future from scifi that I remember (eg, Star Trek) is that humans are just being creative. Usually some sort of post scarcity where there’s no more need for money.

Perhaps I missed your point.

I’m kind of lucky to be in the position where if you don’t read my email you will regret it because something bad happens. Or at best you miss out on something cool that would help you.

I expect everyone I send my email to to read it and pay attention to it, or I don’t send it to them.

Also, I’d love to have only dozens of email. I expect me and most of my coworkers go through 50-200 emails per day. And this isn’t a problem. I probably spend about 20 minutes a day, twice a day. And it’s way quicker than talking with everyone I want to talk with.

Maybe you’re working with a scale where it’s even possible to show up in person instead of emailing. But even when I worked in small teams and small companies we emailed a lot. For building software, I want to get stuff written down and iterated on (email, issue trackers, spreadsheets). I don’t want to have errors that come out of primarily verbal conversations.

I think you may be right. Fortunately, I work with like 10k collaborators who are all science/tech oriented and it works quite well.

I wouldn’t want to work in an org where people can’t read email and want to talk to everyone instead.

I use a git-generated static site that has good search, so if people want to find stuff before asking that’s the go-to.

Otherwise, I can search email quite effectively. And oddly, its one of the few things Office Copilot is goos at.

I don’t email is a collaboration tool. It’s an information sharing tool and maybe workflow. Just today I had to email out to like 20 people a data call with a couple paragraphs of instruction. It’s much better than Slack for this. And I can search and find my email and their responses for all of eternity (I’ve got every email going back 20+ years instantly searchable in outlook, good luck finding a slack message from a month ago much less a decade).

This is really neat. How much does it cost to use? I see that I can start for free, but couldn’t find anything in your docs about usage fees.

It’s legal consent. It’s the version that matters if you’re trying to limit what your employer can do with everything you write at work. And sufficient to allow anything in the US, and many other countries.

I disagree with this and think it’s a bad thing. If I founded a company, I would explicitly disallow this and make communications private and not resellable.

But it exists, sadly.

I don’t think there’s only writing. I agree that brainstorming serves a very important function.

But I’ve never encountered someone trying to brainstorm over email. If I did, I would certainly want to talk, instead.

I was referring to someone saying that said it’s almost always better to talk than write.

Good “content” is very hard to produce. It’s not a commodity. Again, I work in science and tech where truth is difficult and complex and precise. And it’s important to be systematic and correct. It’s not important that we produce content, but that we execute effectively.

I’m usually not tailoring to a single recipient, but trying to write something that’s understood and used by dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands of people.

I agree that there’s a lot of blargh written that’s a waste of time. I’m not proposing to write more crap. My point is that thoughtful prose is frequently the best way to convey an important concept. So I want more well written man pages than people who want to talk to me to explain how to do something.

RTFM is a luxury that we need to invest in, not throw away.

Tell that to ios’ autocorrect that seems to really suck at it lately. I’d like to have an llm that doesn’t screw up and replace actual words with what it probabilistically thought I was saying.

I think some people suck (myself included) at writing and are amazed that they can finally generate text (fortunately not myself).

So their output from an llm has the halo/ikea/endowment effect and they want to show off what they “wrote.”

Writing is actually super easy. Editing and writing well is the hard part. It’s like co-workers who wrote a terrible book being excited just because they wrote a book.

It’s funny to me how I judge some cultural aspects as being worse. Of course it’s my own cultural bias, but I think the following things are “bad” for cultures to do:

1) long voice memos over succinctly typed notes

2) not forming lines/queues and just mobbing the train/shop/etc

3) habitually late or not on time

> good sign your documentation has some challenges: dense; intimidating; inaccessible; or not easy to search for the specific information you want

Of course it does. And it’s not “my documentation” it’s ours. And everyone is responsible for improving it. It’s not about pointing out that documentation sucks, it’s about working to improve it.

I don’t have a documentarian on my team. No one’s main job is to write docs. So we all get to help each other by gradually improving the docs. And if I help someone with something not in the docs then the recipient gets to include that missing info into the docs to help the next person.

We also added a hat for a rotating role called “Benevolent Documentation Czar for the Quarter” where that person gets to explicitly improve team docs. Maybe like 5% of their time.

Minimizing human interaction is a feature not a bug.

I like to point people toward ESR’s “how to ask questions the smart way” [0] to new people as it takes some work to learn that questions are about investigations and collaboration, not tasking.

[0] https://catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

I like to go straight to #4 and skip the phone call or face to face.

Oddly, I find the search in Slack, Teams, and Discord to be so horrible I don’t create any “knowledge there.” It’s like trying to write a paper on the telephone.

Anyone putting long form stuff into an IM system is taking the way of pain.