I want to believe the author, but it's difficult to read that there are hundreds of people 'enthusiastic about AI' and the best they could come up with was... a menu checker and a spam...
I want to believe the author, but it's difficult to read that there are hundreds of people 'enthusiastic about AI' and the best they could come up with was... a menu checker and a spam detector...?
No one thought to maybe, I dunno, connect your calendar and have an auto-OOO reply setup for when you go on holiday?
Or to feed it important emails you've sent, so that it can emulate your voice and you can just ramble at the LLM and it'll put it into a coherent client-friendly email for you?
.... You're telling me no one in their entire IT department is lazy enough to come up with that? Because ours sure did. And I mean that as an absolute compliment - our IT department IMMEDIATELY used LLMs to automate their ticket answering when it's stupid shit. They've got suggested replies, they have the correct teams auto-tagged and they even auto-clock every minute they spend to our time clocking software.
I am beyond curious how the hell OPs industry is database related, and... no one tried anything with... databases?
I got Claude to create an entire year's worth of fake seasonal campaigns across 30+ fake franchises, including fake campaign names for Google Ads, Meta, Pinterest, LinkedIn and generate statistics for each.
1000 rows of usable test data generated within less time than my lunch break. That would've taken me hours and hours to simulate myself from scratch with randomisation and excel.
Sorry for the long ramble, I'm just genuinely scratching my head here. I'm not saying LLMs are the end-all to everything, they're absolutely not and they're also pretty stupid and useless in a lot of applications...
But I have never seen one of my colleagues or my clients ask the LLM how... it's doing... as a feature... So... There's that.
The examples remind me of some complaints I see about Duolingo sentences sometimes. Sure, some sentences seem random sometimes ("The horse ended his relationship with the fish."), which makes...
The examples remind me of some complaints I see about Duolingo sentences sometimes. Sure, some sentences seem random sometimes ("The horse ended his relationship with the fish."), which makes people say that the app is teaching nonsense. It seems like people often don't have vision about how we can extend the things we learn. We're not specifically trying to learn how to talk about inter-species dating habits. If we already know the words for "woman" and "man" well, we might as well drill some animal vocabulary along with verbs and sentence structure.
If the demonstration is to ask the schedule for what's for lunch or interpretation on a simple email, it's to simplify that we can ask questions about a more relevant data set or a more complex document. Today I asked copilot to explain why a certain project was delayed in favor of another project, and it gave a good answer, providing relevant sources from files I have access to for verification (either I didn't attend the meeting when this was announced or I forgot). A coworker sent me a cryptic message with three parts I didn't understand (very brief response, probably because she was busy in a meeting). So, I asked copilot to explain, and it was able to interpret each statement and associate them to internal documents that helped me to learn about a process and advance the project without having to wait for a clarifying response or bog down a busy coworker with dumb questions.
So yeah. To echo, it's far from perfect, but it's also far from useless.
Great example with the Duolingo, I fully agree! The reason I gave the tone-of-voice email example myself is actually because that's the first thing I tell people to try when they ask me for tips...
Great example with the Duolingo, I fully agree!
The reason I gave the tone-of-voice email example myself is actually because that's the first thing I tell people to try when they ask me for tips on using 'AI' to help them in their job.
I've sat down with product owners, project managers, office managers, performance managers, digital strategists, etc., and the email example is always the one that makes the lightbulb go off in their head - because we ALL send emails, ALL the time.
I don't know about you, but it usually took me 5-10 minutes to check over the email I'd written and make sure my wording is correct for 1) this receiver and 2) the reason I'm emailing them.
I never have to do that anymore, it's such a timesaver. It also doesn't mean that I send out emails full of emdashes and LLM speak - I don't. But Gemini can emulate my speech patterns so well now, that I can just run-on sentence and tech-speak my way through an explanation, and Gemini will sort that shit into paragraphs and always add the 'Please feel free to reach back out if you run into any issues, I'm always happy to setup a quick meeting' part that I 'forget' to put in whenever I'm pissed at a client :P
I mean look at the above paragraph and tell me an LLM can't fix that mess in 2 seconds lol.
Maybe this is me being a technological boomer, but I found your message easy to understand. I often find people filtering themselves through LLMs become less clear because it obscures their voice....
Maybe this is me being a technological boomer, but I found your message easy to understand. I often find people filtering themselves through LLMs become less clear because it obscures their voice. For non-native speakers, it often sharpens sentences such that they take on unintended meanings.
If anything, I've found the best writers are even more valuable because they know what they mean to say, and they can effectively work with machines or people to get their voice across.
These two videos cover a lot of my feelings about AI writing:
I disagree. The nonsensical sentences do nothing to aid learning and can be detrimental. Context is important in language learning and by providing a nonsense sentence you are removing any...
The examples remind me of some complaints I see about Duolingo sentences sometimes. Sure, some sentences seem random sometimes ("The horse ended his relationship with the fish."), which makes people say that the app is teaching nonsense. It seems like people often don't have vision about how we can extend the things we learn. We're not specifically trying to learn how to talk about inter-species dating habits. If we already know the words for "woman" and "man" well, we might as well drill some animal vocabulary along with verbs and sentence structure.
I disagree. The nonsensical sentences do nothing to aid learning and can be detrimental. Context is important in language learning and by providing a nonsense sentence you are removing any meaningful context from it.
Take the more normal sentence "the man ended his relationship with the woman". If I don't know the word for woman I can still get the gist of the sentence, and from that context infer the meaning of the word woman. Or at least make a pretty accurate guess.
But in your example, if I don't know the word fish I have no way of figuring it out, and lose out on an opportunity to learn. Or even worse, I might know the word for fish but end up second guessing my knowledge because my understanding of the word makes no sense in that sentence. If I don't know the word at all I might infer that "fish" is a type of horse, maybe another word for mare.
Do you have a source for this? I'm not a linguist or anything, but this statement goes against what I've read lately about learning. For example, in the book Moonwalking With Einstein the whole...
I disagree. The nonsensical sentences do nothing to aid learning and can be detrimental
Do you have a source for this? I'm not a linguist or anything, but this statement goes against what I've read lately about learning. For example, in the book Moonwalking With Einstein the whole premise of the title and a significant portion of the book is about how using bizarre sentences/imagery can help with retention. I haven't reviewed the literature a ton myself, but just a little googling suggests there is at leastsomeevidence that this idea works. An example from one of these articles is "The clowns laugh at the witch." I guess that's technically possible sentence, but it's hardly an everyday kind of scenario.
I'm not sure why you're putting the idea into a scenario where it's less likely to work. It's not like duolingo only uses bizarre sentences, just occasionally. Obviously if you don't know any of the nouns in the sentence you'll have trouble guessing at a bizarre sentence. That's not the use for bizarre sentences I was describing. If you have already been exposed to the nouns, it might be good for reinforcement to bring them back to you in a different way. I feel like this comment is like if I said that hammers are good for driving in nails, and you responded by saying that hammers are useless tools because they don't work for driving in screws.
Rhymes with "challenging financial headwinds this year, budget tightened, no new hires to backfill people leaving, but we also spent several hundred million dollars on stock buyback."
Rhymes with "challenging financial headwinds this year, budget tightened, no new hires to backfill people leaving, but we also spent several hundred million dollars on stock buyback."
My boss seems to have stopped using Gemini for anything but her weekly slack posts, which are blatant slop and often have errors. I used to correct the mistakes, now I just ignore her posts. If...
People can pretend they’re now doing something really important and groundbreaking while using the tool for completely mundane and worthless tasks that are better handled differently.
My boss seems to have stopped using Gemini for anything but her weekly slack posts, which are blatant slop and often have errors. I used to correct the mistakes, now I just ignore her posts. If she can't be bothered to proof read, then I can't be bothered to read them. Yet she still cranks out absolute garbage, amateurish spreadsheets when that is something Gemini is really good at doing now. It's so sad.
Oh gosh, I just imagined you using an LLM to automate your replies and corrections to the boss’ post, and then realised that would be creating dead internet theory directly in your own company!
Oh gosh, I just imagined you using an LLM to automate your replies and corrections to the boss’ post, and then realised that would be creating dead internet theory directly in your own company!
I want to believe the author, but it's difficult to read that there are hundreds of people 'enthusiastic about AI' and the best they could come up with was... a menu checker and a spam detector...?
No one thought to maybe, I dunno, connect your calendar and have an auto-OOO reply setup for when you go on holiday?
Or to feed it important emails you've sent, so that it can emulate your voice and you can just ramble at the LLM and it'll put it into a coherent client-friendly email for you?
.... You're telling me no one in their entire IT department is lazy enough to come up with that? Because ours sure did. And I mean that as an absolute compliment - our IT department IMMEDIATELY used LLMs to automate their ticket answering when it's stupid shit. They've got suggested replies, they have the correct teams auto-tagged and they even auto-clock every minute they spend to our time clocking software.
I am beyond curious how the hell OPs industry is database related, and... no one tried anything with... databases?
I got Claude to create an entire year's worth of fake seasonal campaigns across 30+ fake franchises, including fake campaign names for Google Ads, Meta, Pinterest, LinkedIn and generate statistics for each.
1000 rows of usable test data generated within less time than my lunch break. That would've taken me hours and hours to simulate myself from scratch with randomisation and excel.
Sorry for the long ramble, I'm just genuinely scratching my head here. I'm not saying LLMs are the end-all to everything, they're absolutely not and they're also pretty stupid and useless in a lot of applications...
But I have never seen one of my colleagues or my clients ask the LLM how... it's doing... as a feature... So... There's that.
The examples remind me of some complaints I see about Duolingo sentences sometimes. Sure, some sentences seem random sometimes ("The horse ended his relationship with the fish."), which makes people say that the app is teaching nonsense. It seems like people often don't have vision about how we can extend the things we learn. We're not specifically trying to learn how to talk about inter-species dating habits. If we already know the words for "woman" and "man" well, we might as well drill some animal vocabulary along with verbs and sentence structure.
If the demonstration is to ask the schedule for what's for lunch or interpretation on a simple email, it's to simplify that we can ask questions about a more relevant data set or a more complex document. Today I asked copilot to explain why a certain project was delayed in favor of another project, and it gave a good answer, providing relevant sources from files I have access to for verification (either I didn't attend the meeting when this was announced or I forgot). A coworker sent me a cryptic message with three parts I didn't understand (very brief response, probably because she was busy in a meeting). So, I asked copilot to explain, and it was able to interpret each statement and associate them to internal documents that helped me to learn about a process and advance the project without having to wait for a clarifying response or bog down a busy coworker with dumb questions.
So yeah. To echo, it's far from perfect, but it's also far from useless.
Nonsensical Duolingo sentences is just good engagement bait marketing.
It is also that, but I doubt it’s exclusively that.
Great example with the Duolingo, I fully agree!
The reason I gave the tone-of-voice email example myself is actually because that's the first thing I tell people to try when they ask me for tips on using 'AI' to help them in their job.
I've sat down with product owners, project managers, office managers, performance managers, digital strategists, etc., and the email example is always the one that makes the lightbulb go off in their head - because we ALL send emails, ALL the time.
I don't know about you, but it usually took me 5-10 minutes to check over the email I'd written and make sure my wording is correct for 1) this receiver and 2) the reason I'm emailing them.
I never have to do that anymore, it's such a timesaver. It also doesn't mean that I send out emails full of emdashes and LLM speak - I don't. But Gemini can emulate my speech patterns so well now, that I can just run-on sentence and tech-speak my way through an explanation, and Gemini will sort that shit into paragraphs and always add the 'Please feel free to reach back out if you run into any issues, I'm always happy to setup a quick meeting' part that I 'forget' to put in whenever I'm pissed at a client :P
I mean look at the above paragraph and tell me an LLM can't fix that mess in 2 seconds lol.
Maybe this is me being a technological boomer, but I found your message easy to understand. I often find people filtering themselves through LLMs become less clear because it obscures their voice. For non-native speakers, it often sharpens sentences such that they take on unintended meanings.
If anything, I've found the best writers are even more valuable because they know what they mean to say, and they can effectively work with machines or people to get their voice across.
These two videos cover a lot of my feelings about AI writing:
I disagree. The nonsensical sentences do nothing to aid learning and can be detrimental. Context is important in language learning and by providing a nonsense sentence you are removing any meaningful context from it.
Take the more normal sentence "the man ended his relationship with the woman". If I don't know the word for woman I can still get the gist of the sentence, and from that context infer the meaning of the word woman. Or at least make a pretty accurate guess.
But in your example, if I don't know the word fish I have no way of figuring it out, and lose out on an opportunity to learn. Or even worse, I might know the word for fish but end up second guessing my knowledge because my understanding of the word makes no sense in that sentence. If I don't know the word at all I might infer that "fish" is a type of horse, maybe another word for mare.
Do you have a source for this? I'm not a linguist or anything, but this statement goes against what I've read lately about learning. For example, in the book Moonwalking With Einstein the whole premise of the title and a significant portion of the book is about how using bizarre sentences/imagery can help with retention. I haven't reviewed the literature a ton myself, but just a little googling suggests there is at least some evidence that this idea works. An example from one of these articles is "The clowns laugh at the witch." I guess that's technically possible sentence, but it's hardly an everyday kind of scenario.
I'm not sure why you're putting the idea into a scenario where it's less likely to work. It's not like duolingo only uses bizarre sentences, just occasionally. Obviously if you don't know any of the nouns in the sentence you'll have trouble guessing at a bizarre sentence. That's not the use for bizarre sentences I was describing. If you have already been exposed to the nouns, it might be good for reinforcement to bring them back to you in a different way. I feel like this comment is like if I said that hammers are good for driving in nails, and you responded by saying that hammers are useless tools because they don't work for driving in screws.
The author doesn't mention it, but I sure hope they're looking for a new job. Don't expect things to ever get better.
Seriously. The opening paragraphs were nothing but "Run from this company ASAP".
Rhymes with "challenging financial headwinds this year, budget tightened, no new hires to backfill people leaving, but we also spent several hundred million dollars on stock buyback."
My boss seems to have stopped using Gemini for anything but her weekly slack posts, which are blatant slop and often have errors. I used to correct the mistakes, now I just ignore her posts. If she can't be bothered to proof read, then I can't be bothered to read them. Yet she still cranks out absolute garbage, amateurish spreadsheets when that is something Gemini is really good at doing now. It's so sad.
Oh gosh, I just imagined you using an LLM to automate your replies and corrections to the boss’ post, and then realised that would be creating dead internet theory directly in your own company!
That would at least be amusing