Snoozle

Enlighten me then as to the secret meaning behind the words used to communicate in the language we call English. Saying that AI is really transforming the company is fine. Saying that 20% of staff need to be laid off is fine. Those are understood terms. How do they relate? There's no explanation. Did cost need to be reduced? Did those people no longer add value? Was there certain projects that weren't profitable? Nothing is explained because meaning is avoided.

The sentence is not confusing, the sentence doesn't mean anything. There's nothing confusing about it, but there's no information either. "We're making great strides in AI" and "We need to cut 20% of people" are simply two statements without any connection aside from the fact that they are next to each other in the sentence.

"We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere." As an English enthusiast, I'm getting very frustrated at how the language is consistently abused in executive communications to write words without saying anything.

The implication that is NOT said is that suddenly 20% of people were sitting around without any work to do because AI was making everyone so efficient and productive. This does not, however, seem to be the reality, based on conversations within the company. It appears we have yet another case of economic downturn disguised as increasing velocity.

"We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere."

As an English enthusiast, I'm getting very frustrated at how the language is consistently abused in executive communications to write words without saying anything.

The implication that is NOT said is that suddenly 20% of people were sitting around without any work to do because AI was making everyone so efficient and productive. This does not, however, seem to be the reality, based on conversations within the company. It appears we have yet another case of economic downturn disguised as increasing velocity.

I meant rather the market for human writing will vanish when 80% or more of the population views LLM text as good communication.

Why does this entire article read like chatgpt? Kind of ironic considering the content.

Big llm smells: 'Not "AI helps you autocomplete a function." Not "AI explains a stack trace." I mean the full-on narrative:'

'Sure, it's a weird language. It looks archaic. Sometimes it's hostile. Sometimes it's beautiful.

But still—if you know what you're doing—you can sit down with a keyboard and turn words into:

a product a workflow an automated business process a system that makes money while you sleep a tool that saves a team thousands of hours That's real power. It's leverage.'

'Not because we're lazy. Not because we're gatekeeping. Because building real systems is hard, and the number of people who can reliably do it is limited.'

Sometimes I think we get too caught up on what chatgpt will do to the economy, software, and businesses, and forget the most insidious aspect of this type of technology - we will no longer know how to write and all human text communication will confirm to a specific pattern.

Are you really winning when your win is being anxious and working all the time?

Nobody was suggesting solutions, but in regards to GLP-1 agonists as solving the 'problem' perfectly, no, it's just solving the symptoms. The problem is scientific advancement creating hyper palatable food and drink with no nutritional value and low satiety, combined with the food drive increases that comes with eating and drinking that food, combined with the removal of general fitness and mobility as a core requirement to being able to receive food and drink. I'm not saying there's a way to put back in the box but let's not kid ourselves that these drugs are a perfect solution either.

I suppose theoretically, as wealth grows, the competition for labor to create that wealth will elevate those at the bottom.

I'm no big lover of short form video content, but Cal Newport comes across as a bit obtuse in this article. Why is he surprised about these videos being used for consumptive purposes? I find the short, attention grabbing videos ala reels, tiktok, shorts, or vine not much different than modern tv. Have you tried watching TV from your peripheral vision? It's nothing but rapid, jarring cuts and bursts of color.

A few weeks ago, I read a 1300 page fantasy book. A few weeks before that, I read a 400 page nonfiction book on a subject I'm interested in. I've also read philosophy, wrote in a journal, watched tv shows and movies, browsed TikTok for hours, and took many walks around the park. I really can't say I find any of these experiences any more meaningful than the others. Anti-consumptive behavior has its place when a life is out of balance, but we're all going to die, so does it really matter in the end?

From reading about this and Ozempic it appears the main functionality is reducing appetite / blood sugar spikes which results in weight loss. I am curious for those who are using it who have traditionally had a relatively poor diet (refined carbs, sugars, etc), has it changed what foods are desirable or does it simply reduce the amount eaten? In addition, when using these products and switching to a healthy diet such as high protein, which already typically affects satiety, does it cause the inability to eat an adequate amount of calories to function properly?

I don't have any discussion on the LLM factor of this conversation, but I'll weigh in on cover letters. As a hiring manager running a fully remote team with medium-low on the pay scale, I can tell you that any open position I post is inundated with 700+ resumes. This is after initial HR filtering. There is no way realistically for me to review all of these resumes, and cover letters I will just completely ignore. I basically draw arbitrary lines in the sand to reduce resume count below 100 (college degree, no unemployment gaps, at least 2 years exp at each job), and even then it feels like throwing darts to pick a reasonable amount of candidates to interview (10-15). And don't even get me started on the candidates that don't actually have any of the experience that is on their resume, or that are googling every question I ask, or are showing up on camera in sweat pants and a tank top.

I dread interviewing and will almost always just ask my network or coworkers for referrals because posting positions online seems such a terrible way to source candidates these days.

I feel like I watch both threads casually every first of the month, and nothing felt weird or different about this one to me. I haven't ever kept track of total posts, more of the ratio between who wants to be hired posts vs who's hiring posts. Is it possible that a majority of posts aren't made on the day of the post?

One big difference between life in 1719 and today is the pervasive feeling that humanity is somehow bad or immoral and that the sustainability of the lives that we live are precarious. The combination of the internet, advances in science and our understanding of the world, the complete inundation of all media with news, and the fact that bad news is easier to engage with, has created this curtain of gloom across the educated spheres of the human race.

I personally believe this phenomenon is the cause of a great many of the current problems we have today. Excessive greed and hoarding is a fear response. Rabid political polarization either to try to fix the problems we face or ignore them and protect our mental health. There is a large shortage of faith in the future, and there's a lot of realization that technological advancements of the past have created some of the overwhelming problems we face today.

Distraction and nostalgia are the best selling items in the modern world. Depression and suicide are the highest they've ever been. The social fabric is unwinding, and communities are dying, and an article like this comes along that makes me wonder just how it would feel to struggle and strive in a world in which the future had so much potential.

Who knows though? Maybe this feeling is something that was pervasive in these times.

I read the article and agree with a few points. It is important to recognize the decline of community and family dynamics in the west and how that impacts people. Some conclusions, however, I don't agree with.

1. The author posits the idea that we will become boring or unlikeable, even if we were not this way before. I personally don't see that take place in my surroundings. People's personalities don't tend to change too much, and barring some radical illness such as dementia (which the author mentions), I find it hard to believe that someone generally found as interesting would become boring after a certain amount of time.

2. The author points out the dichotomy between people wanting independence from community for most of their lives, while also wanting care when they are in need, but from my experience, people who desire independence strongly also desire it in times of weakness. I know many people in my extended family who have been independent and they continue to ask for nothing and want nothing even as their bodies fail.

I'm also a little confused as to the notion of people desiring independence from community. While I know many people that desired independence from local community microcosms, such as church, small rural towns, or disagreeable family, many of those people still want community. I really am not seeing the issue that this author refers to in the article of people essentially wanting to be independent and optional from all communities in order to maintain wealth. In my experience the main issue people are having is that we don't have ready made replacements to traditional communities and online communities are not fulfilling the social requirements of being a human.

I see a lot of this argument when social media is brought up. A lot of people generally agree with the idea that there are a lot more supportive environments available on the web than in a traditional small town with narrow ideals. I would argue though that the statistics do not bear this truth out: if having these communities and support groups are so necessary, then why is suicide and mental health worse now than they were prior to the internet?

I've read almost every one of these interesting articles that have come up on this site over the past year or two regarding teenage depression. My own step kids are morbidly depressed, with my step daughter of 14 having attempted suicide and my stepson of 17 becoming a racist incel.

My own observations compared to my depression free childhood, which was not a happy one, is simply one of exposure. When I was young I had both online and offline communities, but the point is that they were my age, and my culture. I had no idea what was going on in the greater world, the scandals of the 90s being mere background noise to my Pokemon and Zelda and WWE. I could never remember who was president even in high school, and kids were more concerned with social drama rather than being socially correct.

Kids these days grow up in the adult world. You can blame social media or the Internet but the result is the same- kids share their space with adults, they have opinions on politics, they joke about economics and social issues, they bemoan capitalism without having ever participated in the system.

I think children operate best when adult life is a mystery, some intangible and incredible future that will happen but is not understood, and unfortunately the society we have constructed post 2000 has destroyed the ability for any young kid to be ignorant.

Very in depth article but the short of it is that there will be colder than usual weather across northeast usa and Canada as well as slightly colder than usual in Northwest Europe. This will occur most likely in March.

I can provide my anecdotal evidence. Got COVID and the vaccine at around the same time in April 2021. Had a lot of random chest pains and fatigue for a while. Was finally able to work out again after 6 months, though lost a lot of progress. Now, 1.5 years later, I have finally surpassed where I was prior to getting sick, and feel no ill effects.

Which is exactly why they are A waste of time. I have yet to meet a developer that doesn't have an idea for a notes/calendar/organizational tool. The point is that organization is such an individual problem that it always needs a custom solution and yet each solution will only be valuable to a handful of people.

I don't know what service you're talking about (truecar?) But carvana is basically online CarMax

Are you discounting the absolutely massive gaming industry? I have never met a single person in real life that uses Linux, and those that used Macs were only casual computer users

The thing I fail to understand about socialism and government as a form of alternative to corporations is this:

Corporations are groups of people focused on a given goal. Your solution to a group of people making what you consider to be bad decisions or morally wrong decisions is to involve more people? People are the problem. It doesn't matter what they call themselves - a country, a government, a corporation, it's all people all the way down. Why will one of those supposedly be a benefit and somehow make better and more ethical decisions?

Small world! I started using hevy in 2020 to track weights and haven't used anything else since. By the way somehow the timer noise always makes me jump.

I have lived in Austin for 10 years and Dallas for 20, and I think Dallas is in every way better than Austin.

Less expensive

More things to do

Real airport with good fares

Better weather, not as hot in the summer time

Variety of businesses so it's not just tech bros and poor mexican labourers

More cultural variety

I think about this a lot as I have been fully remote since 2019, but have yet to execute on a family move.

If I didn't have a dog, I would definitely spend a few years in places like Portugal, Thailand, Vietnam, and other countries in which I could have a nice experience relatively cheaply. The time zone is a bit of a challenge though, as work starting at midnight makes it hard to enjoy.

For settling down, though, I would have a hard time living too far from a big city. I've tried to live the quieter life, but I just need the energy that comes with those large communities. Boston, NYC, London, Toronto, Chicago. Preferably a small town house near public transportation.

Another concerning thing I've noticed is the ease in which some aspect of a person, such as if they are hesitant about getting the new vaccine, are tied to this group of other personality traits, such as anti-science, racist, conservative, Trumpist, anti-lgbt.

It's ridiculous how easily we are able to draw lines in the sand and push other people to the other side. I wonder what the attitude towards vague personality groups of the 'enemy' were like in countries that engaged in genocide and if this is a stepping stone to something worse. If you combine fear of economic failure or physical health and a group of people to blame for it, it seems a dangerous mixture.

I agree with your general skepticism - I believe there is evidence of every generation claiming that the younger cohorts are no longer up to par. Still, even without specific evidence to back up my claims, I can't imagine that childhood exposure to the internet and video games hasn't had a profound effect on our youth.

I am limited in my ability to only experience my immediate surroundings, and statistics are limited by sample sizes, bias, and reporting techniques. I can tell you, however, that the children I have direct experience with are generally worse at writing, reading, focus, and the ability to troubleshoot and critically think.

It is difficult to make comparisons to childhoods other than my own experience, but I was not an exceptional child. I made poor grades in high school and college, and was generally considered average in most subjects, and yet when I compare my skills and abilities at a similar age to the children I see now (most who are in exceptional private schools), I feel as though my toolbox was much more robust.

Granted, I was not nearly as good at memes and youtube and online social etiquette as children are these days. They are still learning quite a bit. I just worry that what they are learning does not prepare them to live a life in which they have to participate in society.

What makes you believe they are better informed? From my experience of: 1. being a not-quite-old person (33) 2. step son (16) 3. step daughter (15) 4. having a step mother teaching elementary school 5. my mother teaching middle and high school

I see kids as overly exposed to dramatic information. Both of my kids thought they were gay prior to hitting puberty and realizing they weren't. Both of my kids have taken political extremist positions, one identifying as communist and the other identifying as a libertarian. Most of the children I know are participating in very adult discussions without giving any hint of their age. Children are exposed much earlier to sex and pornography and fringe groups.

In addition to this, reading and writing skills have anecdotally declined considerably. When I was 16, I read at least one book per month, usually one per week. Most of the children I've had experience with will never read a book unless ordered to, and have no desire to read one either. Children are unable to write coherently; they pump out barely understandable slang prose, throw it through grammarly, and assume that it's good.

Hell, for one other anecdote, my wife is in college right now and I've been reading her peers' essays for English and History class and I can't imagine how these people are capable of operating in society with their absolute bottom of the barrel writing ability. Professors are having to give passing grades to what could be considered 6th grade writing levels in order to not fail the entire class.

Maybe things were the same when I was a child and I just wasn't exposed to it, but I don't have a lot of hope in the education of the future generations with access to social media. I do feel a lot of job security, however.

I have yet to see any convincing case of someone who has the wealth to afford a computer, internet, and time to spend on Twitter whose "lives are threatened", and no hyperbole causes a larger eye roll from me.