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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2024

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  • Does anyone actually have jobs writing emails like that all day though?

    Ticket systems often have an auto-response like “did you turn it off and on again”.

    Most email clients or even gmail have canned response plugins.

    IDK. This probably is a great use case and someone doing this might be quicker and better than me using canned responses or whatever… but only incrementally, not by an order of magnitude.


  • This is my plan.

    Similar background. My parents just took the “everything is very bad” angle but it was very obvious that want true in a lot of cases. The result being a lot of risky experimentation with no support or guidance from an adult.

    I think the message is, life is about the journey, we’re here to experience everything we can and that includes sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The problem is that its very easy to make a mistake that will greatly diminish your experiences later on.

    With driving, and sex, a momentary lapse in judgement can irrevocably change the trajectory of your life. Simply being aware of that is hopefully enough to help someone make smart choices?

    Drugs and booze can be fun. I enjoyed the full range of experiences in that regard. The best I can do is to try to ensure my kids feel comfortable talking to me about things.

    Edit: yeah smoking is a real bitch. I got off that train a year ago thank fuck. IDK how to talk to a kid about something like that. Maybe just let them talk and challenge the misconceptions. The thing that trapped me is that I thought I wouldn’t get addicted because it was so awful. It took a lot of effort to get used to it. By then it was too late.



  • This thread has convinced me that LLMs are merely a mild increment in productivity.

    The most compelling is that they’re good at boilerplate code. IDEs have been improving on that since forever. Although there’s a lot of claims in this thread that seem unlikely - gains way beyond even what marketing is claiming.

    I work in an email / spreadsheet / report type job. We’ve always been agile with emerging techs, but LLMs just haven’t made a dent.

    This might seem offensive, but clients don’t pay me to write emails that LLMs could, because anything an LLM could write could be found in a web search. The emails I write are specific to a client’s circumstances. There are very few “biolerplate” sentences.

    Yes LLMs can be good at updating reports, but we have highly specialised software for generating reports from very carefully considered templates.

    I’ve heard they can be helpful in a “convert this to csv” kind of way, but that’s just not a problem I ever encounter. Maybe I’m just used to using spreadsheets to manipulate data so never think to use an LLM.

    I’ve seen low level employees try to use LLMs to help with their emails. It’s usually obvious because the emails they write include a lot of extra sentences and often don’t directly address the query.

    I don’t intend this to be offensive, and I suspect that my attitude really just identifies me as a grumpy old man, but I can’t really shake the feeling that in email / spreadsheet / report type jobs anyone who can make use of an LLM wasn’t or isn’t producing much value anyway. This thread has really reinforced that attitude.

    It reminds me a lot of block chain tech. 10 years ago it was going to revolutionise data everything. Now there’s some niche use cases… “it could be great at recording vehicle transfers if only centralised records had some disadvantages”.