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How has your industry changed in the past decade?
The other day I had to get new glasses, and I braced myself for my lenses to be incredibly thick and expensive to boot again - but then I had them made, they look normal, and they barely cost me a Benjamin. Clearly, the optometrist crowd has made some major developments in the past decade or so, which leads me to ask - if you're working in an industry most people don't really think about, what's happened in your space in the past ten years?
Fuck.
I’m super curious as to what the former top comment was, even in general terms.
It was about the global political situation, stuff about terrorism etc etc
I'm a developer so... enshittification.
Products used to do something useful for users. That has become increasingly rare.
I don't socialise on the internet any more, I pay subscriptions and consume 'recommended' content. Nobody I know posts anything to their personal social media pages any more because it's inevitably lost in the sea of ads and influencer jockeying.
A few niche services have gotten a lot better.
I had to return something on Amazon earlier this year and their chatbot was amazing.
An online game Ive been playing for about 20 years now has really found their stride, and the updates for the past ten years have all been amazing. Anyone who plays Oldschool RuneScape knows what I’m talking about.
I do love Discord. Its a significant improvement over AIM, IRC, Ventrillo, Skype, etc etc. Its not a replacement for message boards and I really wish people would stop using it for that, but it is an amazing messaging/video call app and I love that it works so well in a Firefox web browser.
OSRS is in it's golden age right now. It's amazing what happens when you listen to those who actually play and care about your game.
Discord has been a great service but I fear it will also fall to enshittificaiton at some point. I'm fairly certain it still is not profitable, and at some point that's going to come to a head the same way all these other platforms have. I'm going to enjoy it while it's good. Hoping it doesn't fall by the wayside.
Really not even with all the nitro stuff? I know a few people who pay for Discord.
The wine industry has changed quite a bit over the past few decades. I know your question was just 1 decade, but I am going to expand the scope to include multiple decades. The most recent decade is where the changes were large enough to start affecting winemaker decisions. Previous decades were affected, but not enough to change decisions.
Take a look at this graph. Source is available here, with a few other interesting graphs. This is for a wine growing area in Switzerland, but pretty much all regions in the world have graphs similar to this. The metric is the Huglin index, which is a grapevine specific temperature metric. In short, the goal is to sum the daily temperature, but only include temperatures relevant to the grapevine. Different indexes do this in different ways. The Huglin index only counts temperatures over 10C (grapevines can't grow effectively below this temperature), and incorporates the daily mean and maximum temperatures.
Starting around 1980, we saw a consistent increase in these temperatures. The effect depends heavily on the specific wine regions. For example, in Bordeaux grapevines were planted at around the coldest possible environment. In the past, hot years made for the best Bordeaux wine because the grapes were much more able to ripen fully. This is generally true throughout most of the old world wine regions. In order to handle this seasonal variability, Bordeaux planted many varietals. Some varietals, specifically Merlot, were relatively fast ripening, so were able to ripen fully in all but the coldest years. Some varietals, specifically Cabernet Sauvignon, needed much more heat to ripen, so would only ripen fully in warm years. In areas like these, climate change started out being very beneficial. Warm "good" years that only happened a handful of times a decade were now happening much more often.
Some regions plant varietals in areas that are much warmer than where they were traditionally planted in the old world. For example, Napa Valley is famous for Cabernet Sauvignon. Napa is significantly warmer than Bordeaux. Cab in Napa will ripen consistently every year without any assistance from global warming. For regions like this, global warming ranges from mildly inconvenient to significant problems, and doesn't really provide a benefit.
Now climate change is in full swing, and is having some pretty bad effects across the industry. The most visible change for consumers is the increase in alcohol content in wines. Some of this increase is because consumers seem to want higher alcohol wines, but some is also because of climate change. The final alcohol content of wine is directly related to the sugar available in the grapes. Sugar increases throughout the growing season, so harvesting later, or having a warmer growing season, increase the sugar and therefore the alcohol content in wine. We can't always just harvest earlier, since there are varietal aromas present in the wine that we want to be mature before harvest. There are also "green" unripe aromas that we want to decrease before harvest. So the effective result is just that the alcohol percent in finished wine increases. It is now quite normal for a Napa Cab to have 14% or 15% alcohol. This same increase is happening across the wine industry.
This is especially a problem where grapes are already at the high end of their growing ability. I mentioned earlier that Merlot in Bordeaux already ripened quite consistently. Now it is often getting overripe. I know of a winery here in Bordeaux that used a Reverse Osmosis filter to remove water from the juice (technically this is not legal, but there are a bunch of illegal things that happen across the industry). Bordeaux is also running experiments to find new varietals to add to the legal varietals here.
I'm tied into the local wine industry as well, and have been familiar with the changes in the region's products over the past 30 years. First autumn frost is now 6 weeks later, and last spring frost 4 - 5 weeks earlier, seasonal average temperature 5 °C higher.
You'd think that an additional 2+ months of growing season would be beneficial, but you'd be mistaken. The risks of erratic weather (polar vortex freezes, prolonged droughts and rainy spells, hail, windstorms), fire, fungal diseases, changes in insect pest ranges, and the aforementioned changes in ripeness profile are driving growers and vintners crazy.
The costs of adaptation are massive. Grape vines take a minimum of 5 years of growth before they produce consistent fruit, so changing varietals planted isn't trivial. Vintners who could count on adequate temperature control from earth-sheltered cellars are now having to invest in climate control for whole buildings and tanks. It's also a challenge to have picking crews out multiple times due to the changes in optimum ripening periods, when it was usually just one or two pickings to get everything harvested as close to frost as possible to allow adequate ripening.
They're going not out of business here, mind you. The local 2024 crop is being called "best ever" due to the ripeness of red varietals. The climate used to be more like Alsace, and now it's trending towards what Bordeaux used to be. However, 45° N latitude, so we'll never have the heavier wines that take 1800+ hours of sunlight. There are rumors growers are going to start planting Syrah and some other heat-tolerant varietals.
One grower/vintner friend is saying he's harvested a white grape (my recall of the conversation isn't perfect, but I think it was Sauvignon Blanc) with so much sugar it will hit 14% alcohol on fermentation. This is actually a problem, because white varietals generally have more delicate flavors that are overwhelmed by too much alcohol, and low acidity can make the wine flat and flabby-tasting. What would have been a premium single-varietal wine is now going to be part of a blend.
Gewürztraminer and Riesling used to be lovely wines, but they're now going flabby and weird-tasting, with off ester profiles and too much TDN.
Chardonnay has gone from light-bodied fruity wines made without oak, to almost California intensity. We've been making some fabulous methode Champenoise bubbly, but it's now age-worthy.
Lots of change, for better and worse.
That's fascinating, I had no idea of the relationship between temperature and alcohol content. Is there an expectation then that we'll be seeing vineyards popping up in regions that historically were unable to sustain winemaking before?
Absolutely! Here is a fantastic website I found that shows the Huglin index change from 1981 to 2020. I think the map speaks for itself pretty well. Huge swaths of Europe that were previously unable to ripen any wine grapes* are now in ideal conditions for many varietals. That was the best map I could find, but the same scenario is playing out worldwide.
* The map I liked shows averages over large swaths of land area, and there is a lot a grape grower can do to combat a low or high Huglin index. If you are familiar with French wine regions, you may notice that only parts of the Burgundy region are shown as having acceptable temperature ranges, and the entire Champagne region is missing. As these are some of the most widely known wine regions in the world, this is obviously not accurate. A grower can, for example, plant on a southernly facing slope to get more sunlight throughout the season. They could also plant on rocky soil. Rocks will absorb sunlight throughout the day and radiate that back to the plant, which allows them to ripen faster than they otherwise would be able to. Champagne is designed to use underripe grapes because that is all they could grow in that region consistently. That map doesn't show the entire story.
Also in that map, you can see how stark the climate change is. For example, take a look at the Netherlands. Previously the Netherlands could only grow hybrid varietals. (Almost all wine on earth is made from a single species of grape, Vitis vinifera. Different "varietals" are just different clones of the species. Hybrid varietals involve crossing Vitis vinifera with different grape species to make them more resistant to something, in this case to cold weather. Usually hybrid varietals have significant drawbacks for wine quality.) We are starting to see some vineyards in the Netherlands growing non-hybrid Vitis vinifera plants. I have also heard of some vineyards popping up in the British isles making still wine. Previously British wine was almost exclusively sparking wine since the grapes don't need to be as ripe.
In short, yes. Many places that could not grow quality wine before can now because of global warming. I can't say I like the ecological and societal damage global warming will cause, but there is a lot of new opportunity in the wine industry.
I'm in and around emergency medicine. The explosion of mental health emergencies has absolutely devastated much of emergency medicine. I started in the field as a firefighter/paramedic responding to 911 calls back in 2010. Calls for suicidal ideations/attempts were there, but not anywhere near the frequency I was responding to those calls when I left in 2019. I left to go work in a pediatric emergency department, when I started in 2019, we had 3 "lockdown rooms" situated for patients experiencing such emergencies. Situated so that the room could be "locked down" and remove access to any practical way to self harm. Since then, the hospital had to build an entirely separate behavior unit with 7 new lock down rooms. They are typically all occupied, and patients experiencing these behavioral health emergencies often need to be overflowed to 1 of the 3 old lock down rooms. Room space aside, these patients are often ranked very low in priority as well. Not that suicidal ideations aren't an emergency, they are, but their vitals signs are stable and the person down the hall has decompensating vitals and failed their Bi-PAP trial and is about to need intubation and vasopressors. The need for dedicated mental health resources, providers, facilities, is there. But the overlap of "we can't treat the mental health emergency til we know the physical health is stable" has led to a culture of "screen 'em in the ED, however long that takes, then ship 'em to a psych facility", and it feels very bureaucratic and inefficient, not to mention minimally helpful (if at all), to me.
That is interesting because at my emergency department where I work it’s been the opposite. Pre-covid, our hospital used to get absolutely slammed with mental health.
We only have 21 rooms and nearly every day we would get so clogged up that over half of our department would be boarding psych patients and it made such a strong funnel effect we couldn’t get medical patients out of our lobby.
Post-Covid, I very rarely see intentional overdoses or young suicidal ideation patients. We still get a decent amount of psychosis patients, though.
On the medical side on the other hand, our volume has tripled and the acuity is much higher. It hasn’t quite recovered from that yet. I believe that we are still seeing the impact of routine medical office visits getting cancelled/too competitive to get into.
That's terrifying to see the exponential growth for that need.
Is there a consensus for the drivers? Too much technology? Unengaged parents due to technology or having to work too much?
Very sad.
I'm sure people much smarter than me have some inclinations on the driver, if not evidence based research to point us in a direction. I couldn't say, as research has never been my passion, mine is putting the results of the research to use by putting hands on people who need help (guided by evidence based best practices).
In any case, I would suspect it's some kind of generational change catalysed by social media in some form or fashion, with no clear cut solution, as we wouldn't want to interfere with the capitalistic freedom of social media companies. Even in the name of mental health for minors.
🙄
Been working in IT for around two decades now, and some things are the same. Like I still use vim and all the basic Unix tool skills I picked still applies. SQL is still SQL and so forth. Of course the whole containerization and Kubernetes is radically different than just ssh into a server and manually do stuff. Which is for the better.
On the less technical side, I feel there is definitely a time before and after GDPR. Before data was just data, and there wasn't much thought into whether anyone kept more data than they needed. Not just internally, but also customers expected we sort of always had their data and that it was easily accessible. Now we have to deal with a whole lot of compliance work, to justify what we keep in our logs, what we have in our database, for how long, who has access, logs of who accesses and for what purpose and so forth. This is a great thing to be forced to handle and good for consumers in the end, but it also comes with a whole lot of frustrations when people are interpreting laws very differently and lawyers without technical knowledge who has absurd demands almost forbidding to keep any sort of backups or system logs, while still demanding we process their data.
Ooo GDPR is a good one, which I definitely echo. I'll add onto that that with GDPR came a heavier focus on data security in general - probably because GDPR forced companies to hire actual data security consultants. Suddenly there's courses on preventing social engineering we have to pass, and the guillotine for those who leave their desk with their computer unlocked! Not complaining mind you - I used to be the only data security 'nag', but now suddenly every other day an email went out from up top scolding everyone about the shit I'd been pointing out for years, LOL
Slack has become the prevailing method of IM for my team, more documents are saved and shared via cloud storage instead of a centralized document folder, so they can also be worked on in real time remotely, everything is digital now (thankfully), more of my team is fully remote, so office management of the team needs is very different, but still somehow the same. Everyone needs the same stuff, just at home instead of in the office.
Oh yes, cloud file sharing. I definitely do not miss the days of trying to manage a shared Samba drive across two continents over VPN with crappy rsync scripts.
At one of my first jobs we used IRC for internal communication while everyone was still on email. Good simple times. Which is what made the company that created Slack pivot in the first place.
I don't miss the days of working on events or marketing materials with my sister office and having to literally drive up to SF from the south bay because we only had desktop computers and having to have a meeting scheduled to work on some Illustrator or InDesign document together because we needed to make sure it was compliant with the brand package.
I'll mention one thing among many:
The average web developer seems much more tolerant of friction now. Cloud deployment, devops configuration, forests of dependency packages, supply chain injection, app bundling, SPAs, microfrontends (hello again, iframes), test suites too big to run locally, flaky tests, frameworks upon libraries upon other libraries, linting just to avoid talking about linting, containers, containers needing other containers, containers for local dev not fitting in local dev, PR actions, merge checks, pre-commit checks, commit text linting, secret management, force pushes...
I miss the days when I could just Save in my editor, then see my change in my browser.
This is much of what drove me from Java/J2EE to Ruby/Rails then to management then to unemployment and now try to start my own (physical) product business but not expecting much but hoping hard. That product isn't about getting rich but trying to do some actual small good in the world and just maybe paying my bills if I'm really really lucky.
I'm so disillusioned with the tech industry. We haven't just enshittified the customer experience but also our own daily lives. At some places the pay is terrific—you just have to trade your soul to get it. The industry is inhuman; we have all been cogs in a machine that pretended to have a heart. That heart has proven out to be an automaton for converting people into capital for billionaires.
What product are you working on?
Honestly, afraid to go into it lest it become "brain crack" (see Ze Frank). Keeping it a close hold not because it's a secret but to keep myself accountable.
We're not allergic to complexity like we should be. Simplicity can mean less functionality, sure, but it also means more resilient, easier to learn and fix. Unfortunately, designing for simplicity is hard. It's less work to just keep adding stuff and the downsides only come home to roost years later.
It all seems a little crazy to me too. All that fuss when some large percentage of things deployed could function just fine as a Rails app behind nginx+unicorn (and maybe varnish if load is high enough that cache helps) on a cheap VPS box. No it’s not sexy or trendy but it also gives me a reasonable chance of being able to understand and hack on everything I’m deploying.
Of course uploading PHP files over FTP is even simpler but I personally find the structure offered by something like Rails to be appealing, even if I don’t want to complicate it too much further.
I’m a developer so…. AI.
I don’t Google things any more I ask ChatGPT.
Can you share more about how you effectively use genAI? I've tried time and again to use it and without fail it's incorrect to the point of being a waste of my time. In fairness, I can't use ChatGPT specifically due to corporate policy, but can use other state-of-the-art models.
I think part of my problem is with the code I work on: the context is just too large, with too many internal libraries. But even asking questions about well-known libraries in widely-used languages (the interaction of GSON and Lombok being my latest attempt) has yielded results that are useless at best, and often have made the problem worse.
Don't try to get it to do anything smart with your entire code base is my advice. I don't trust current LLMs to write code directly for me. Except maybe for one-off throw away scripts I need to use once.
I basically use LLMs as rubber duckies who actually talk back. I explain issues, get a response and sometimes the response is really useful and other times it is crap, but through the process I have gained new insights. I also like to play different models out against each other if I need ideas on how to approach a specific code issue. I ask them both for input and then ask them to review the response of each other. Works pretty well!
Basically, I mostly use them as tools to get through various tedious tasks. Helping me go through obscure errors, stack traces, decipher spaghetti code someone else wrote and a lot of the tedious Google searches.
The benefit of a chat style LLM is that you can follow up on it and ask it questions. I don't expect it to be perfect, but it gives me a jumping off point for a lot of things that previously would have cost me more time.
To give a few slightly more concrete examples.
Again, it isn't perfect. In fact, I can only use it like this because I have knowledge and experience myself that allows me to ask the right questions and validate answers.
I'm a developer who recently became a manager. I have been using ChatGPT to help me write job postings. It's all stuff that I know enough about to check for accuracy. I just hate writing that style of document, and ChatGPT does a really good job of producing the first draft that I can then polish.
Not OP, We use a combination of things here but MS CoPilot seems to have improved a lot over the last 6 months. It's still not the same as ChatGPT, but we are getting a lot of great use cases set up with it.
I've found the question / answer pattern of chat bots to be really unhelpful, it doesn't seem to line up well with the way I think or work.
What I've found far more useful are the AI autocompletion tools like Codeium in vsCode. I admit that at first I found them more annoying than helpful, but I started just letting them do their thing during an RSI flare-up and it drastically cut down on the amount of typing I needed to do. I still need to go in and fix things, but that involves a lot less typing. I think it has sped me up, in a similar way to how snippets speed me up.
I use it for things I know I can Google.
GitHub worklfow documentation
It didnt have the up to date documentation (a feature was added) so I gave it the link and then it was able to answer. The most complex part about it was creating a timestamp in one step to reuse in multiple other steps, I had to get it into a specific format. That bit would have taken me a whole day by itself if I had to Google it and read through linux documentation.
I needed to choose a text similarity algorithm, so I asked it what are the best python libraries for my use case and I talked to it for like 30 mins to narrow it down one.
I use it to generate text samples for test data all the time. Stuff like “write me a customer review thats 180 characters” …. “Shorten that to 100 characters”
Not to be dismissive of your specialization, but LLMs are a lot more useful when there’s a wealth of relevant training data — and (anecdotally) I’ve never heard of GSON or Lombok, so I presume those are just too obscure to have meaningful coverage. I work with JavaScript and React, which are embarrassingly common these days but the upside of that popularity is that AI is really good at answering questions about those. I hit more issues when I ask for help with TypeScript, and it’s totally unreliable when I need help with specific JS libraries, even ubiquitous ones. By this point I can usually intuit what subjects are safe to ask about, and which are likely to end in nonsense hallucinations.
One surprising use for AI I’ve been leaning into more is Copilot’s terminal integration (in VS Code, maybe available in other ways too?). If there is a specific command or args I’m looking for but don’t know off the top of my head, I just type a couple words explaining what I want and it’ll put the right thing in. Previously I would’ve had to pull up a man page or google around; this has been an unexpected timesaver and for my needs it’s been quite reliable.
In case you ever move to Java later, Lombok takes care of the getter/setter boilerplate. It looks like gson is a json serializer, not the one I used to use when I was in Java land.
You not knowing GSON an Lombok is simply down to the ecosystem as anyone working with Java will very likely know both. I also haven't had real issues with LLMs and java as there is a plethora of data out there they are trained on.
Not OP, but I use it to look up simple things. How can I refactor this basic algorithm more cleanly? Why isn’t this laying out as I expect? How can I return an array dropping the first index. Things like that size. I will rewrite the code as a simpler generic example before giving it to ChatGPT.
I have also started using Xcode’s ai code completion. It’s kind of ok, but kind of bumpy too. Want to try code pilot.
I’m a brewer and all my special/seasonals have become IPAs. Only thing that sells consistently and that the most vocal customers want. Sure i could make something else but then it sits eating fridge space. Make an IPA and it’s gone.
Meanwhile, I've moved on from IPA's and am looking for lagers and pilsners. I just want something light and flavorful, is that too much to ask?!
Preaching to the choir
Those other customers are why I can't find decent beer anymore.
I've long since moved on to whiskey/bourbon/spirits. Better/more flavors, fewer "trends", more cost effective.
I'm in the Credit Union industry, and technology vendors have become quite the "fire hose" over the last few years. I'm sure it's the same in many industries but AI is in literally everything we are pitched. Even when it isn't necessary. The problem we are seeing is there is way too much overlap in what vendors can do for us, and the costs have skyrocketed because of the "AI".
I lead the institution in selecting vendors mainly because of my mid ground knowledge of AI, it has been busy for sure. We also have to wade through the good partners in the sea of technology to find the one that truly fits ours needs.
There are some groups trying to help our industry find the correct partners but I feel like there is a bit of lobbying and money passed around for those recommendations.
Looking at your comment and @jackson's comment above, genAI is creating both time and financial costs for workers and companies. What's fascinating to me is that some users insist that, when wielded properly, genAI can save tremendous amounts of time and mental energy. Others find that it requires so much prompting and checking over copious output that it doesn't actually save them any effort.
I wonder where the discrepancy in perception of genAI's usefulness lies. Is it truly that some people just aren't putting the time and effort into effectively using genAI, or are they doing different kinds of work, or are they inaccurately estimating the time/energy expenditures with/without it, or something else?
For myself, I prefer to work on a problem myself than supervise a computer that pretends to think. Prompting output is so much worse than producing output. I don't want to deny that some people are having positive experiences with such tools. At the same time, I see high costs and low benefits, resulting in negative value overall.
I’m convinced everyone who finds it cumbersome is asking too much of it.
Before, when Id google things, its 1. Type the question 2. Look through the search results 3. Pick a search result that seems promising and click on it. 4. Wait for that page and all its ads to load depending on what machine I’m using and then sometimes 6,7,8 rinse and repeat cause all these search results suck or I’m asking the wrong question.
With chat gpt, I ask a question, I get an answer. If the answer makes no sense, I’m asking the wrong question and I need to rethink how I’m going about the problem. The whole turn around time is down from 5-10 mins to like 1-2 mins. Its a huge life improvement.
I fully expect chat gpt will one day introduce ads and all the nonsense that enshittified Google results, but today its still amazing.
You describe the exact problem I have with it - Trust.
If I'm asking it about a topic I don't know the answer to, I would be foolish to trust any output because it might be confidently incorrect. There is real value being able to trust answers first time and I don't see how LLMs can achieve that.
A reasonable middle ground might be to flag an answer with the text "This output may be inaccurate due to insufficient training data" or something, but god forbid these companies admit the limitations of current tech.
Oh, and your point about putting ads in AI answers? It's already happening :)
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-ai-overviews-ads-mobile-3500919/
Yeah I know ads are coming, for some reason chatgpt has either actually kept them out of the answers or included them in a way thats not obvious at all. To be fair, I don’t ever ask chatgpt for shopping tips, so if it had ads I wouldn’t know.
Ive really never had an issue getting trustworthy answers. Generally, I can tell when an answer makes no sense, and in that case I go and look it up separately. I’m asking it things that are easily Googleable, anyway.
That might be. I usually find the answers to be some combination of wrong, fictional, and overly generic. Also, while there are some heuristics for the reliability of a webpage (domain authority, amount of ads/popups, formatting), all of that is stripped away in genAI. Even tools like Perplexity that cite their sources are not trustworthy on their own, so (in my case) I'm back to reading through source material to determine accuracy and reliability. For finding answers to questions, I find it god-awful.
Maybe my questions are just more simple?
I tend to ask it things like syntax, best way to do something in blah language, generally things that don’t need a lot of context.
I wouldn’t google how to use some internal tool that my company has, or why a previous employee chose one data structure over another or what a hard coded error message could possibly mean.
I've been bit hard even doing so. Gemeni told me to use a non-existent Android property and it was acting so confidently, and I ended up wasting a good hour trying to find it kn docs till I realized it doesn't exist.
This means I can't trust an LLMs output at all: 90% accuracy is as good as 0% accuracy, and if I'll end up reading through sources anyway, I might as well cut the middleman and google those sources directly.
The problem is sometimes you don’t even know what to google. LLMs give you a starting point.
I find them particularly useful for things like finding the idiomatic way to do things in a language, because that’s very hard to google.
I actually do agree with you here. LLMs are a great calculator for languages, good for searching for a word I don't remember and fuzzy search in general.
Interesting, Ive never used Gemeni.
Chatgpt has only been wrong a few times for me and it was because there was a new feature I was trying to use and Chatgpt had old documentation.
It’s also really not good at syntax, cant grasp the need for quotes on some statements.
But thats it really. It gets me closer to the solution quicker than Google would.
Chef here. Across the board there has been an explosion of special diets.
"Special diet" is not the same as a genuine allergy or ideological/ religious diet. It means nowadays about a fifth of the people who walk into the dining room want to feel special. They want something off menu, they want some trendy ingredient they saw on the food network, they want some influencer's most recent fad diet.
Because of this explosion of requests, it is affecting labor cost and menu prices. It takes just as much time to create a bespoke meal for one person as it takes for a menu listed meal for twenty people. One of my sous chefs spends about a third of their workday taking care of all the special diets (and those are the ones who have had the decency to give us advance notice).
Diners are also paying more because of ingredient costs, as anyone who has bought groceries has noticed.
Since you mentioned sous chefs, I'm assuming we're talking about a moderately priced to more upscale restaurant?
One thing I hate to do at restaurants but pretty much have to is request "no onion" on items that have onion. I'm not allergic, but I absolutely hate them in solid form and they ruin meals for me. Onion powder or similar is totally fine. It just makes me feel like a picky eater when I have to make that request on everything from fast food burgers to more upscale items that have grilled onion or similar. (And I make a conscious effort to try onion again every so often. At least once a year. I just don't enjoy it.)
All that said, I hope I'm not the type of diner you're discussing. If I am, I'm sorry to make your life harder, but I'm just doing what I have to in order to appreciate the food you put so much effort into.
Not at all an issue! Negations ("no this") are usually easy to implement during the time taken to build the order.
Onions, in particular raw onions, are a common negation. They tend to give heartburn, bloating, or gas to many people.
Yes it is upscale dining. An Applebee's price point isn't going to care much about the trendy diet you just saw on tiktok.
I work as a ‘creator’ I guess we’re called (I consider myself more as an artist for a mainly online audience), and in the eight years I’ve been doing this, there has been a tremendous power struggle between creators - social media companies - tech/payment companies which has been very interesting to be a part of. AI has only intensified that struggle, because some social media companies are betting on generating their content without any need for humans/creators.
For us, we’ve always focused on owning our own platform and mainly use external platforms as advertising outlets for our work, which has served us well. Creators that depend on external platforms for revenue and connection with their audience our struggling + it has become a lot harder to convince people to sign up for an external mailing list. I think that’s only going to get worse.
I’m wondering if those more private social media apps, like WhatsApp with group chats and communities, will ever generate the amount of ‘free publicity’ you need as a creator to get a working business of the ground.
Interesting years ahead!
I've worked in childcare/early childhood education for the last 15 years. Some anecdotal changes I've seen:
Parents seem less willing to establish and maintain boundaries or expectations with their kids. This seems especially true among the younger crowd. To be clear, this is not a good thing.
Children are struggling more with basic tasks. Skills like potty training, motor skills, and socialization/emotional regulation have been coming later than expected. The number of children requiring intervention services has increased across the board, and I'm not convinced it's simply that we're identifying more deficits. The children born in the years leading up to covid seem most affected.
More recognition of a need for support/improvement/funding. At least in my state (Illinois) there has been a push to increase early childhood enrollment, with incentives for care providers, parents, and those who want to become educators. I was able to get on a scholarship (full ride) to complete my bachelor's and get my teaching license. I see this as a good thing. My state has also consolidated many disparate departments into a new department of early childhood education.
Tightening/updating of standards, as well as a refocus of specific skills to teach, especially regarding literacy. We are once again swinging towards a heavy focus on phonics-based literacy, which the science supports as the most effective way to teach reading and writing skills.
If there are any other educators out there that can help add more detail or nuance I would love to hear it.
I’m a mobile app dev, so:
Im a landlord and there are a few notable changes, although the first one is location specific: I have houses in cities that experience boom and bust due to oil and gas money. So when the economy is soft, rents are lowest and no one even mentions us or cares that we exist. But recently, in a boom time, rent prices have risen dramatically, along with house prices, taxes, insurance, maintenance and everything else related and suddenly we are being vilified in the press and online as if we created the boom and the massive influx of workers and immigrants who are flooding our province and crowding the market. That never used to happen in past boom cycles, probably because there was little social media and few places to vent.
Another good change is that there are far more resources available to landlords to vet potential tenants. This is a very good thing. It used to be that I could only go on a gut feeling which is difficult when you only have a few minutes conversation and a paper application to go by. I got conned more than once by a sweet talking but highly irresponsible or in some cases, downright criminal tenants. Now there's social media, which tells far more than most tenants imagine, and there are credit checks that search credit history and criminal history. And now, at least in Canada, there is an online database of court cases against delinquent tenants who have caused thousands in damages or are serial 'professional tenants' likely to move in and never pay rent again. Its getting easier to protect yourself from the grief of a malicious tenant.
What do you do if a person doesn't have social media presence? Are you willing to go off good credit score and no criminal history, or do you pass on that person altogether?
The social media presence is just a bonus, and usually confirms what's already been shown in the credit score, walkthrough interview and reference checks.
But its definitely revealing when people leave them open and dont restrict their privacy.
You may not have created the boom/influx, but you have helped to create a scarcity of housing by hoarding multiple properties for your own benefit. Every home you own outside of your primary residence is a home another family cannot own, cannot create equity, cannot have the stability of, or any other of the myriad of benefits of home ownership entails. Every excess home you own drives up the prices of the other homes that are put up for sale.
I have mixed feelings on this perspective.
On the one hand, I agree with you. On the large scale, housing scarcity must be influenced by those who own homes but do not live in them.
But there's two points that make me hesitate to go down the "all landlords are inherently evil" path:
While it's more or less non-existent in the US, state-owned housing is a thing that can exist. You can argue that in that circumstance the state is your landlord, but it can differ in terms of profit-motive and does not necessarily have the same effects on the market as ownership by private landlords.
Sure, just as there's some people that prefer to be homeless. However, the number that do is so few that it's statistically insignificant and yet the housing crisis (cost and availability) is perpetuated and exacerbated by the landlording industry.
As sparksbet said, there would be public housing to fill the gap. I'm not saying that gowestyoungman is inherently evil, just that the predatory industry they willingly participate in most certainly is, and acting like they aren't part of the problem/shouldn't be criticized because they didn't create the "boom" or invite the "massive influx of immigrants".
Just to set expectations, I agree with you. The bigger solution is state owned housing when needed.
That said, I think it's very disingenuous to imply that being homeless is approximately equally as desirable as renting. There are lots of reasons to prefer renting.
I didn't imply (or intend to) that renting is equivalent homeless, just that the "some people prefer renting" is an extremely common, and indefensible, argument used by those that support the status quo of hoarding homes for personal gain. Just as "some people prefer to be homeless" is a frequent, and indefensible, argument used by those that are opposed to measures that address homelessness.
In my opinion, one of those arguments is reasonable and the other is made in obvious bad faith.
Then we will have to agree to disagree, as I both support efforts to address homelessness and find the the private hoarding of homes for personal gain to be unreasonable and untenable.
You're assuming two things, both of which are big oversights.
One is that if I didnt own a home that the person Im renting to would be able to buy it. Highly unlikely. Homes have high prices because it costs a heck of a lot to build them. There are a ton of people who all want to be paid and that makes them expensive whether I own them or not. At least where I live that's true - you cant build a house here for under $350/sq ft. So whether I own it or not that house is still going to be 350/sq ft because land, taxes, lawyers, realtors, contractors, tradesmen, utility installation and especially building supplies are all expensive. Add another 100k for the lot. And we're considered a 'reasonably affordable' place to live in Canada.
But the second one, and its a huge one, is that you're assuming that everyone WANTS to buy a home. No, they dont. Just a few examples of my many renters:
a) Newly separated who dont have any cash and wont be seeing money from their divorce for another three years
b) University students
c) Professionals on temporary job assignments for one or two years
d) "Snowbirds" who only live here in summer
e) Couples who only met less than a year ago and have no idea if they are long term or not
f) Handicapped individuals with no desire to do home maintenance
g) Young people who like moving frequently and just want to 'try out the city'
h) Seniors who are done with home ownership and are quite happy to let someone else deal with it
i) Contractors in town for a specified job who would rather be in a house than hotel or AirBnB
j) Newly employed young professionals not sure where they want to live once they build up their savings
k) Extremely highly paid individuals who much prefer buying more 'man toys' or investing than buying a home
Sure all those people COULD rent from a big corporation that owns an apartment building, but as a landlord who only rents out houses I can tell you that most people much prefer a house with a yard and a place their dog or cat or kids have a place to roam.
And unlike Big Rental Corp. my renters pay for things that promote the local economy like the tradesmen I hire to fix plumbing, electrical, roofing, painting, landscaping instead of paying Big Rental Corp's CEO, accounting, PR department and most of all, their shareholders.
I have plenty of happy renters and I intend to keep them that way. I celebrate the ones who save up enough to buy their own houses and I keep the rest happy with safe, comfortable housing thats just under market value. Which is why I like being a landlord and they like having me as one.
Cheers.
ps I started with a rental nearly 40 years ago when there was no 'scarcity' issue. Just because the press decided its NOW a problem doesnt make it my responsibility. Someone forgot to build more houses and lessen our massive over immigration issue (at least in Canada) Just because the gov dropped the ball and failed on planning, oversight and put up a ton of hurdles to new builds doesnt make it MY problem now,
Back then for company infrastructure you'd rent a colo and rack a couple of servers for your business to get a file share, email or install a business app. Your side of the business was essentially scoped to a particular country. Now I can explore public API documentation, get an API key, write some code and get something provisioned in minutes that teams or entire departments in other countries can start using tomorrow or in a few hours.
Want a marketing system, let's see what Hubspot can do. Need monitoring for our SaaS app? Sentry and Elastic looks good over there. Hiring a bit of a mess? Let's try out Greenhouse.
We run the company completely online connecting a bunch of disparate services together with a level of automation that can be done between them thanks to the ubiquity of APIs and excellent open source software. We're in a position where we are not totally beholden to Windows and Office (except maybe the salespeople), so we run a lot of Mac and Linux workstations, Slack/Zoom/Google Workspace for collaboration and a lot of open source software to support the rest of the infrastructure on Google Cloud for cheap. Our production Kubernetes clusters auto-upgrade, which would give fits in a more traditional setup which I'd argue forces us and the dev teams to build resiliency and scaling properly from the start.
Our offices across multiple countries are essentially closets with a few desks and an access point on the rare occasion someone wants to come in.
I work in pest control in California. Just in the last 5 years we've had SO many products reclassified and now we can't use it. Customers think it's great, and it is in theory. Less harsh chemicals in the environment is fabulous! But if we're taking away the good stuff you have to realize the stuff we can use isn't going to be as effective.
I work in power generation in the US, and I haven't been in it a full decade... but it still has changed drastically since I joined and will likely continue moving forward.
When I started:
Nuclear was evil, coal was evil, but we're going for renewable mainly with sun and wind, and we supplement with natural gas, which is a fossil fuel so evil too, but, we're working on that solar and wind...
Now:
Nuclear is trying to make a comeback, coal is still evil but necessary in some places (also, see: lobbying and burning trash for electricity), batteries are what make sun and wind actually worthwhile, and the extremely increased electric demand from both data centers and to counteract the fossil fuels (cars, houses, etc) are still requiring copious amounts of fossil fuels to be utilized for power generation to cover for lack of adequate battery options nationwide, as well as nuclear still looking like an evil option.
... What a time to be alive!
Hopefully not too late to the party, but I work in macromolecular crystallography and adjacent structural biology fields, and one interesting change is how automation has taken over to a degree where submitting a crystal/protein/macromolecule is a straightforward, almost Amazon-like process.
Before, you'd have users coming to the facility, inputting experimental parameters, and needing sufficient knowledge on tuning and operating the desired equipment. Nowadays, with automated optical analysis, crystal quality, loop centering and structure solving are "taken care of" instead. So the skill barrier is much lower, and this means that there is less of an incentive to fully understand parametrisation for experiments. It's almost as simple as saying "I have a crystal, I don't know how well it'll diffract, but I'll trust the computer"
We've had users who treat the facility as a "black box" and aren't well informed of the physics behind it, which is all fine and good, but means that we might reach a point where we'll be in short supply of people who can interpret results "manually", instead relying on computers/models/algorithms to do the work.
Another interesting change is scale. Unattended data collection is now much more commonplace, and since robot arms can work 24/7, we can go well over a thousand samples a day, which is unattainable with human-controlled processes (these normally top out at 12 samples/hour, if you're good). This has picked up massively since Covid, given measures for remote operation had to be in place, and it was a natural jump to move to unattended collection.