The difference between the "thanks" email and the "loser" email is that the second one is intentionally disrespectful.
I'm not convinced a polite but AI-written email hits the same note. At the very least it's unintentionally disrespectful, which isn't a direct challenge. Your boss doesn't care enough to write an email by hand, but also doesn't care enough to burn bridges and insult you.
> At the very least it's unintentionally disrespectful
There is ZERO CHANCE they have used ai unintentionally
> also doesn't care enough to burn bridges and insult you.
By actively using ai they are stating that you are so much beyond them that even a personal "eff you" is not worth the time. One would have to actively try and poke some personally hurtful areas to come off more insulting than use of ai.
There's a difference between your boss not caring about you (does any boss really care?) and your boss actively disliking you enough to call you a loser when they expect to gain nothing from it.
In the former case, disrespect is a side effect of laziness, while in the latter it is the whole point.
My point is that it's disrespect of the same kind as your boss forgetting your name when you've been working for them for ten years, not as being called a loser.
The problem with AI is that it tells you to say things you don't think, and can't tell you to say things which are original to you. Some things you will only say because they were presented to you by the bot. Others you won't say because they only exist in your head.
If you are bad enough with words that you can't write an authentic message, you are also bad enough with words that you won't understand the options with enough nuance to know what you are saying. The bot will put words in your mouth that aren't true.
It is generally better to write poorly and from the heart than to outsource your heart to a really big algorithm. What you accidentally say from the heart will still echo your thoughts, while the AI will not. ChatGPT can't suddenly remember the time when you and your wife went to the beach together and saw a penguin, and she was worried it wouldn't be able to reach the ocean, and then it was totally fine and she got embarrassed, but you felt really in love with her because she cared so much.
Why are you a CEO if you are bad with words. If a CEO's work can be reduced to picking the best option from AI generated text why do they make so much money, and why would anyone chose to invest in a company that could be led by anyone picking from a list of AI responses.
You do get how that's worse, right? The person rather spends their time arguing with the clanker than thinking about the person and putting
those thought into words, however unstructured they are.
Yeah, but communication is a two-way street. It might not matter to me that my words are unstructured, but it will to the person I'm writing to if they can't make head nor tail of what I'm saying, or worse, misunderstand it as being insulting when it isn't.
There is a whole industry built around [mis-]conception that people will take less offense on the content if it was presented differently. The predictable result is that it is actually rewriting content, not the presentation or tone. No amount of linkedinese corporate fluffery will wash off the core message that people are getting laid off unless you outright hide the message under ambiguity of double-speak like "slimming down operations", which can mean multiple things.
So essentially you have three choices:
1. Spend time writing (or have written by a copywriter) in corporate fluff dialect, where the actual message is still understandable by all parties. At the cost of appearing tone deaf.
2. Spend time reiterating with a bot that speaks some undefined sub-dialect of LLMinese where the reception of the message is unknown. At the cost of appearing even more tone deaf and insulting than a corporate cog.
3. Spend time restructuring message in genuine voice. At the cost of maybe being heard more harshly than intended.
I fail to see how option 2 can be perceived as anything but the worst, unless you assume that the target audience does not distinguish LLMinese from actual speech.
Totally agree. I don't understand why people are averse to working on their communication "soft" skills compared to other "hard" skills. People who find it hard to express themselves have my sympathy but at the same time I'm flabbergasted how they function in a team or in the workplace. Not to mention people for whom English is not the native language treating LLMs like the Star Trek universal communicator instead of helping with language acquisition.
And yeah, I know my tone is harsh and appears to lack empathy and I have only my writing skills to blame and a lack of time. That said I won't be the one to throw it in a LLM for "refinement" otherwise how would I improve? I'm not sure LLMs are to communication as are forklifts to lifting and moving stuff.
As a side note, the general advice regarding code review in my experience was not to take it personally and it's kinda funny to me for reasons I can't pin point how people (like me) have started giving unsolicited advice or criticism in regard to writing when in actuality both (code and writing) reflect personally on the human on the other side of the screen.
Anyway, I pretty much went off on my own tangent here with an apparent lack of empathy to boot but if we end up disregarding such fundamental human skills then what's to stop us from becoming dunces in a few generations? Sure, I'll add another abstraction layer even if it has a lot in common with reading tea leaves because it's not like I manually flip switches to input a program but I'll try my best to keep my individuality where it matters to me, specifically when it comes to expressing myself.
You are contradicting yourself: either presentation is not important so LLM use does not matter (as long as core message is still there), or it is important and and LLM can change how the message is received (by improving presentation or making it worse).
I don't see a contradiction. What they are saying is that no amount of non-ambiguous presentation can make poor content acceptable. They never said the presentation was meaningless.
Example: A friend has died and consolation is given. No amount of consolation makes the death a good thing for you, but there is still a difference in how that consolation is presented to you.
My primary experience is subscription ecommerce (starting in tech support and moving into fullstack engineering) and fincom. I'm always happy to learn new tech, but I've mostly done Python and JS/TS in the past few years.
> If excess beef consumption were reduced to healthy quantities, as defined by the EAT-Lancet healthy reference diet, and substituted with chicken in forty-eight higher-income countries, the lost calories avoided would be enough to meet the caloric needs of 850 million people.
It's really impressive how efficient chickens are compared to beef. Obviously thinks like legumes are way more efficient, but we've really bred chickens to be meat machines in a way we haven't with cows.
They aren't just amazingly efficient in converting calories to protein, they're great at eating things without much other (agricultural) value to us. They eat the invasive spotted lantern fly!
True for chickens in general! But the Cornish Crosses in the factory farms probably never see a lanternfly, and wouldn't want to get away from the feeder long enough to go after one.
Actually, the last time I looked into it, if you grow 2 acres of corn and 1 acre of soy, and feed it to chickens, you get out a similar number of calories (and more protein?) as 3 acres of soy.
Corn produces something like 15M calories per acre, soybeans like 6-8.
When you feed those 36M calories to chickens, you get back 12M calories of chicken, which is actually less than 6 x 3 = 18M calories for the soybeans, so I'm misremembering something (maybe it's just an equivalent amount of protein? maybe chicken feed is a 3:1 corn:soy ratio?) or was just wrong.
Legumes and soy in particular is a pretty common allergy... it's nearly impossible to get sufficient protein without meat if you have a legume allergy.
The impact of non-natural feeds on the overall nutrition profile for chickens and pork are larger than with ruminant animals. Chickens have been bred and changed a lot through environmental manipulation to grow much faster than in nature.
There are a few breeds of cows that are producing more muscle mass than most, they've gotten quite a bit larger through breeding as well, though the difference in time to maturation doesn't come close to what we've done with chickens... I'm not sure it's for the better though.
Overall legume allergies affect 1-5% of the population, this is all legumes combined including peanuts etc. Soy allergies are 0.3 - 0.5%, not sure what you qualify as pretty common. For the record I have a fairly serious peanut allergy and abstain from meat and dairy with zero issues.
FWIW, I have pretty bad reactions to most foods outside of eggs and ruminant meat... so whatever the limited number of the population; across billions, you're still talking about millions of people. And it's pretty bad when you're one of those people, and there's others literally want to outlaw your food supply.
It absolutely is and in some ways we've only just started! Although we definitely shouldn't move fast and break things with living animals and our food supply;)
On the other hand I read chicken is much worse than beef in terms of animal suffering. But that's much more dependent on the producer than the energy calculation and climate impact I guess.
Yeah, the kurzgesagt episode on meat production did note that overall cows have a pretty good life right up until the final fattening feed lots which is pretty bad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sVfTPaxRwk
They did note though, that it wouldn't cost that much, relatively, to give chickens pretty good lives. That really we're doing this just to drive the price down by pretty small amounts.
This is the kind of proposal that might fly well when it comes to the discourse over meat. People say “but we could be growing other crops instead of feed for cows”. Well yes, but you need protein in the diet. You can’t grow potatoes and veggies and expect people to survive only on that. Then there’s the question of land utilization. Historically cattle was raised for meat and dairy where agriculture was more difficult as compared to grazing cows, sheep, goats etc. The modern corn, soybean and alpha alpha farms may be able to grow other crops, but would they be able to support the crops that are needed in nutrition? Chicken and other more efficient substitutions may be the answer here.
> You can’t grow potatoes and veggies and expect people to survive only on that.
I'm sure most medieval people survived (without food types being a detriment to their health/lifespan) on vastly less meat than most of us eat nowadays.
I don't want to live a "medieval peasant" lifestyle, obviously, but I don't think the food part of it would be unhealthy (assuming enough food).
Medieval people were a lot shorter too. When I was in Saint Basil Cathedral in Moscow I was amazed how narrow and low were the corridors inside those side towers. I hit my head multiple in that church.
(In the world graph towards the end the height seems to decrease since 1990s-this is because countries with shorter people have a higher birth rate. Within the same population the height is still increasing)
At 6' I'm unlikely to ever dunk on my 6'4" brother, which is a bummer, but ego aside I'm not really impacted much by my height since I can secure food and shelter by pressing buttons and pushing a mouse. From an evolutionary perspective I understand the preference to be bigger, but I wonder if it's still a logical aspiration for modern humans. More cells means a higher risk of cancer, after all.
Yes, I believe we could cut beef consumption in half in the US and probably be healthier for it, without even compromising people’s standard of living (beef more as a “treat” than everyday ingredient).
We’d be healthier, and the reduction of water use from all of the crops grown for feed would eliminate all water shortages in the west
Starving people in North Korea are surviving (since per definition they are surviving if they are not dead). Doesn’t mean North Korean diet is something we should strive for.
Average North Korean is now about 3 inches shorter than the average South Korean [0]. 70 years ago they were the same people with the same height... Both nations have very little in the way of immigration so this difference is all due to the environment (i.e. in this case nutrition).
I've been building a Thunderbird extension that gives me the mail view I want.
So far it's mostly just configuring hotkeys to tag messages, and settings to hide or fold messages by tag, but I can trivially add functions to parse common messages, send things to my todo list, etc. It's great how easily programmable this is. I threw together a "summarize message with Gemma4 on Ollama", and it wasn't useful, but was a quick and easy experiment.
Thunderbird extensions are just Javascript using the Thunderbird API, and Claude knows the API, so it's a super-low barrier to get started on your own personal extension.
Most people who use Google services don't know about this or simply do not have bare minimum technical knowledge required to set this up or even know why they would need to do backups
It doesn't require any technical expertise to set up--you click a button--unless you want to import into something else. I agree it should be more advertised, but I don't see how an open source tool would require less technical knowledge or be better known.
I've heard this a few times lately, but this past weekend I built a website for a friend's birthday, and it took me several hours and many queries to get through my regular paid plan. I just use default settings (Sonnet 4.6, medium effort, thinking on).
I'm guessing Opus eats up usage much, much faster. I don't know what's going on, since a lot of people are hitting limits and I don't seem to be.
I waited until off peak hours to use Opus 4.6 to do some research. One prompt consumed 100% of my 5h limit and 15% of my weekly usage. Even off peak it's still insane. Opus didn't even manage to finish what it was doing.
Even with Opus I don’t usually hit limits on the standard plan. But I am not doing professional work at the moment and I actually alternate between using the LLM and reading/writing code the old fashioned way. I can see how you’d blow through the quota quickly if you try to use LLMs as universal problem solvers.
I don't think this is true. Humans typically prefer "thanks for the hard work, here's your severance" to "you suck, here's your severance, loser."
Humans like being treated with respect, and words are a big part of that. Money is nice, but it's not the only thing we care about.
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