Would you say you are good at creating a meal plan or a work schedule by yourself, with no AI? I suspect if you know what a good meal plan looks to you and you are able to visualize the end result you want, then genAI can speed up the process for you.

I am not good at creative tasks. My attempts to use genAI to create an image for a PowerPoint were not great. I am wondering if the two things are related and I’m not getting good results because I don’t have a clear mental picture of what the end result should be so my descriptions of it are bad

In my case, I wanted an office worker who was juggling a specific set of objects that were related to my deck. After a couple of attempts at refining my prompt, Dall-E produced a good result, except that it had decided that the office worker had to have a clown face, with the make-up and the red nose.

From there it went downhill. I tried “yes, like this, but remove the clown makeup” or “please lose the clown face” or “for the love of Cthulhu, I beg you, no more clowns” but nothing worked.

I am not using it for this purpose, but churning out large amounts of text that doesn’t need to be accurate is proving to be a good fit for:

• scammers, who can now write more personalize emails and also have conversations

• personality tests

• horoscopes or predictions (there are several examples even on serious outlets of “AI predicts how the world will end” or similar)

Due to how good LLMs are at predicting an expected pattern of response, they are a spectacularly bad idea (but are obviously used anyway) for:

• substitute for therapy

• virtual friends/girlfriend/boyfriend

The reason they are such a bad idea for these use cases is that fragile people with self-destructive patterns do NOT need those patterns to be predicted and validated by a LMM.

Yes, it’s like the rubberducking technique, with a rubber duck that actually responds.

Sometimes even just trying to articulate a question is a good first step for finding the solution. A LLM can help with this process.

Meeting notes are the ideal use case for AI, in the sense that everyone thinks someone needs to write them but almost nobody ever goes back and actually reads them.

But when I got curious and read the AI generated ones (the ones from Zoom at least)… According to the AI I had agreed on an action that hadn’t been even discussed in the meeting and we apparently spent half of the meeting discussing weather conditions in the various locations (AI seems to have a hard time telling the difference between initial greetings or jokes and the actual discussion, but in this one it became weirdly fixated with those initial 5 minutes)

The historian Zeev Sternhell has traced the ideological roots of fascism back to the 1880s and in particular to the fin de siècle theme of that time

(Wikipedia )

So if you could timetravel back a bit more and see if rebooting fixes this whole thing…

One of the few areas where representation is fair is assholery. There are real assholes from all genders, ethnicity and religious backgrounds.

You can be non-white, non-binary, non-wasp and still be an asshole. And other assholes will accept you, if it helps shield their evil agenda from the most obvious accusations.

And guess what political side has learned to leverage that fact? I’ll give you a few hints. Neonazi AfD in Germany has a lesbian leader with a Sri Lankan partner, the italian far right party (staunch defender of family values) has a leader who’s a never married single mom (and now she’s Italy’s prime minister), then you already mentioned Trump and Vance.

Don’t get me wrong, Usha Vance, Melania Trump, Giorgia Meloni, Alice Weidel aren’t being exploited. They are all formidable persons who got to the top by out-assholing everyone else on their side and by actively banking on their “non traditional” status to emerge in ultra-conservative environments.

So they don’t need to rationalize anything. It’s all already quite rational and by design.

Was Steven Seagal ever relevant? I mean besides the “so trashy that it’s occasionally fun”, guilty-pleasure type of relevance he briefly enjoyed in the 1980s?

measles…

Hahaha, I like how you think and I’d like to know more about you. For instance what is your mother’s maiden name?

It is! Hence the realization that I got older. Sorry, re-reading my comment above I wasn’t clear

For me it clicked when pretty girls started tallking and being nice to me

I like this. Just a couple of additions, for the purpose of trying to improve on this lore.

First, Native Americans do have ghosts too (see https://allthatsinteresting.com/native-american-ghost-stories for instance).

If “ghosts” are just the embers of a particularly strong emotion that burned in a particular place, I suggest that “seeing” the ghost depends on being able to tune-in to that emotion and on having the cultural tools to interpret it and personify it.

So I might experience some faint, weird feeling going through a field where a battle between Native American tribes once happened but, as a white person imbued with a specific culture, I would not be able to recognize that particular mix of feelings and “see” that ghost. But a Native American might.

And if a big department store is built on top of that field, it would make it harder to both tune in to that particular faint feeling (among the confusion of so many other feelings) and to personify it as an old Navajo warrior, which would not make sense to us in that place

“illegal” is overrated, anyway. Trump did a ton of illegal stuff and yet, here we are.

Agree, it definitely rocks!

You’re in a situation you don’t deserve, but you are trying not to make it worse for your mom. I think you rock! I wish you all the best

I don’t want to get too deep into your business but just to understand better what you’re trying to communicate… Please tell me if I get this right: there’s current (not past) drama in your family and you think that not acknowledging father’s day at all would feed into that drama (maybe your dad’s reaction would be “see, you’re all against me” and he’d play the victim or something like that) . On the other hand you also don’t want to pretend everything is right with your father. So you want something to communicate “I don’t want to be against you, but I certainly am not on your side either; I just want to be left alone and talk to you the strictly necessary amount of times”. Is that it?

If that’s the case, yes, the standard-est, humorless “happy father’s day” card you can find, with nothing but your signature in it should convey that message pretty well. If you can’t find anything, just a white one with a handwritten “happy father’s day, [your name]” would do.

The medical field is ripe for some intrusive ads to boost revenues! Possibilities are endless:

Ad-supported hearing aids (“this conversation will resume after a quick message from our sponsors!”)

Pacemakers - want to watch an ad for 100 more free heartbeats?

Surgery - this will leave a visible scar, but how about we make the cut look like the Amazon logo ?

Implants - click the nipple and watch an ad to re-inflate the left breast for 10 more days

To be fair it was the NSFW tag that gave me the idea. I went “why would this have an NSFW tag? … Ooooh!”

Genitals. Both male and female. (Generally) awesome when in use but a maintenance nightmare otherwise. Reasons for being the worse (some depending on gender) include: initiating takeoff visibly and without reason, leakages, being very fragile, requiring more packaging than any other body part and others

This does seem to be the correct reason, at least statistically speaking!

serious answer: it depends on your definition of “worse”. There’s some study linking smelling farts (and specifically the component that makes them rank) to health benefits: https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2014/jul/14/silent-not-deadly-how-farts-cure-diseases

there’s an old joke about this:

man goes to doctor saying “I keep farting, doc; my farts aren’t smelly and luckily they are also silent but I am worried because I fart all day long. Even now, as I was talking to you, I kept farting the whole time”.

“I see”, says the doctor. “I will prescribe you this pill, to be taken twice a day for a week”.

“And will that help with the farting?”

“No, but it should help you with your sense of smell. Then come to see me after one week and we’ll try to fix your hearing”

John the Baptist is considered a prophet also in Islam, so local variations of the name John are not so infrequent in Muslim countries, at least according to Wikipedia, see Yahya.

Hahaha I was like that boy too.

Girl:does he have interests? Is he passionate about something? Do I see ourselves spending quality time together?

Boy: I’m on a date, my shirt is clean, I have mints for my breath, I have gone for the romantic walk in the park, this time I’ve done it all perfectly! I’ll get at least a kiss for sure!

I agree with this, OP. After some time has passed, it’s also pretty likely that the other person has just moved on anyway and that they also would want to avoid the awkwardness of that diacussion

Ah yes it’s that pre-emptive awkwardness of nearing the end of a date, knowing that (although nothing in particular went spectacularly wrong) you don’t really want to have more and trying to signal this to the other person.

I’ve been on the receiving end of that too and now, many years later and away from the dating game, I can retroactively see it and accept it for what it was but man, it would have stung back then to hear it in plain and simple words. Being ghosted seemed like a better option to me too in retrospect. Kudos to you for being mature enough to handle that conversation!

Sausage fingers + laggy phone. Sometimes I accidentally upvote or downvote while trying to scroll down. I remove the downvote when I realize but I’m pretty sure I must have left some around

Toilet break

I chose boredom a long time ago, you won’t tempt me with the hat life now

Plot twist: mind control does work and most of the Catholic Church woes are due to a super-intelligent but backward-thinking and sometimes pedophiliac race of hats

Well yes, I do feel we might have collectively given more thought to this here than my company has…

It’s just that I work in one of those places where a trivial change that our users are asking for requires a business case and endless discussion, so it’s weird to think that a big, life-changing decision like this would just be taken without a particularly strong motivation.

But maybe I’m just starting from the wrong premise here. The purpose of the business case is for us little guys to obtain buy-in from the top management, but if a decision comes directly from the top management they don’t need much more than their own gut feelings?

Maybe especially so if they have to make a decision based on an unprecedented situation with no data and no guidance from what other companies have done before.I can see how the least risky bet would seem returning to the previous, proven situation where most people were working in the office.

One of the ways big, established companies look at change is this: “will this change make it easier or harder for new competitors to enter our market and take some of our business?”. Depending on the answer, big players will ask for that change or will oppose it (and try to maintain the “status quo”, I.e. things the way they already are).

In other words, what is called the “barrier to entry” for new competitors must be as high as possible.

For instance, when OpenAI’s CEO started giving interviews on how dangerous AI like their own ChatGPT is and calling for more regulations, they are probably doing it to make it more difficult for new AI companies to enter the market and close the gap with them.

So, with that in mind, how would a big company view WFH? if a company already owns an office that they can’t easily take off of their balance sheets and remote working can now be an effective, cheaper alternative, then a new competitor could enter the market and do what your company does at a cheaper cost (not having the office cost). WFH is a chamge that lowers the barrier to entry, so big companies will tend to oppose it (or at least delay it)

That could be a consideration, yes. Funny enough, our whole Legal team has been consistently the one with the LEAST attendance in person in the office… Overall it seems like forcing your call center employees in office because you’re afraid they’ll leak strategic company secrets is a bit of an over-reaction. I doubt that the most high-level, secret discussions on mergers and acquisitions or mass layoffs have ever happened in our office to begin with.

That could be a driver, yes. The problem is that the first people to go are usually the ones companies want to keep, either because they are star performers or because the job market requires their specific skills more (so they find something else easily and their roles are also harder to fill again).

But yes, I can see how a company might be more or less lenient applying their return to office policies, so that attrition is concentrated more in some teams. And firing people does have side-effects too on PR and morale of the remaining employees.

I do generally see more people leaving my company than new hires, though, so you might be on to something with the attrition rates…

Also for me there is value in occasionally seeing people in person. The exact ratio will depend on the job, but for me it would be about 2-3 days per month in the office. We see each other, talk about how things are going, blockers, stuff we need to change, a little office gossip and then off we go again.

In that sense, a lax hybrid schedule works best for me personally. However, for it to work, everyone should agree to be in the office in the same days. Coming to an empty office and doing the same zoom calls you could have done from home is less than useful.

And since, again, the ratio of individual work Vs collaborative work varies by person and team, we’d need to find an average that sort of works for everyone and agree on a common schedule That is where I think the idea of hybrid comes in: 2 or 3 days per week in the office for everyone. My company is trying this and asking (but for now not forcing) people to concentrate attendance in the days in the middle of the week.

This clearly works better for some and worse for others.

I heard from a colleague that some companies are trying a different model. They shut down the offices and used part of the savings as budget for managers to create more frequent team events, so teams can e.g. meet in person at a restaurant a couple of times per month. I have no idea who these companies are and how this approach is going.

This is true. I just had trouble picturing the CEO of a big company going “I’ll force everyone back to the office! WFH is sooo convenient but I can’t do this to Mr Joe’s hamburger joint around the corner”.

However as someone else pointed out, if WFH becomes the norm, a lot of business might be impacted and fail, generating turbulence in the economy. This I can picture getting a CEO’s attention

Thanks I agree. Pre COVID, my company closed some very small offices to only keep a few HQs and a handful of people were offered fully remote contracts. They were generally very unhappy, being basically cut off from training, career growth, most of the context around work discussions, company events…

WFH is great when working from home is the norm for everyone. The office ALSO works only when most colleagues are in the office (otherwise you just add commute time to the same zoom call you could have from home).

I saw someone else pointing out in the thread that fully remote companies would, in time, probably adjust their salaries too. (EDIT: ah, oops… it wasn’t someone else, it was always you!! Sorry!)

As an employee, in the short term, I like to e.g. keep a London salary and save on housing and commute by moving to Manchester. But in a fully remote company there would be no “London” salary or London office at all, so salaries would be likely reflecting a blended national job market.

The transition is certainly awkward for existing companies, though, as nobody wants a salary cut (which by itself could be a good explaination for them wanting to maintain the previous in-office status quo).

Thanks for the article, it’s an interesting one and it’s one of the few I’ve seen that describes actual research on WFH productivity

Thanks, that’s a very good point! A physical office is a great bargaining chip for a large company. I remember a few years back when several cities and states engaged ina kind of auction to host the next Amazon HQ. It probably also works at the international level, where I imagine it will be easier to enter a market (from the perspective of local laws and permits) and sell your product there if you also open an office and create thousands of new jobs there.