This email was 100% AI generated. I just edited a similar sentence from a claude code doc I'm writing - "we're not just X, we're fundamentally Y" is an obvious tell. I guess he's putting his money where his mouth is
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.
I don't understand — I use AI to write email particularly _because_ I care about the recipient, and am confident the resulting email will more eloquently and accurately express my feelings. I'll also often edit it afterwards to ensure it's in my voice.
Regardless, I don't think it's fair to presume that my boss doesn't case because an LLM generated the email.
^ This was written 100% by hand. Let's have Claude proofread it and make any suggestions:
I'd argue the opposite — I reach for AI because I care about the recipient. It helps me express my thoughts more precisely and eloquently than I might off the cuff, and I'll often edit the result to make sure it sounds like me.
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.
It's a little less than if you got up and stood in the convenience store to pick 1 of 12 "Get Well!" cards. That's a few meaningful steps up (literally) from the 1-click eCard. The output will be a bit better for it, but more importantly, it shows more that interaction mattered for you.
The effort is meaningfully part of the output. I think many would still prefer if you scratched a couple non-perfect words yourself. I know I would. Those words are You, and if you're in a place to send me a card, what matters is that you showed up and offered Your words. The language and the card are transfer media.
In the same way....... you could go the opposite extra mile to make a very elaborate "you suck, here's your severance, loser!" message that would tip towards disrespectful :p
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.
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.
One group are the ones who are staying. They lose teammates, they have to restructure work and fear whether there will be another round soon, which may hit them.
And then there are customers, investors, ... who need to be assured they are not dealing with a failing company.
> To get there, we are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we’re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it.
+1 and the irony of this CEO-Idiot calling LLMs "intelligence" and putting people, the stupidest of which are 1000x orders of magnitude more intelligent than an LLM, in the second spot "aligning it", i.e. fixing the AI slop.
I think a lot of LLMs are trained on corporate communications, and since companies have been copying each other for years, it’s hard to tell them apart.
I ship a very visible product which, when it breaks, generates a lot of social media angst (it's in the gaming adjacent space). So we try not to break things to the best of our ability. We have very few QA people and have whittled down that team over the past few years (DevOps was eliminated during the first round of layoffs ~2023).
This was painful at first but I do think it's the way to go. We found that too much manual QA incentivizes devs writing features to throw it over the fence - why should they test more if someone else is paid to do it? Devs need to feel the pain of writing tests if their code is hard to test, and they need to be held accountable when their code blows up in production. This feedback loop is valuable in the long run.
Same thing for test automation. Previously we shipped this over to our in-team DevOps people and they built complicated CI/CD setups. Losing them meant we needed to simplify our stack. Took a while and it slowed down feature development, but it was worth it. Of course you need leadership who understands this and dedicates time to building this out.
In defense of DevOps, I think the landscape for automation was poor a few years back. Jenkins and Teamcity are way too complex. Github Actions (for all its warts, and there are many) is much simpler. Our pipelines are also in their own CI/CD (CDK, CodeBuild) - infrastructure as code is the key to scaling.
We still have manual QA people to test things we can't automate. Usually this is for weird surfaces such as smart TVs, or for perceptual tests. I don't see this going away any time soon, but high levels of automation elsewhere drive down the need for "catch-all" manual testing.
> But for some reason, democratic socialists refuse to engage with the book earnestly.
You're not as informed as you think you are, probably because you're not an NYC resident and have no actual stake in this election. We successfully passed 3 ballot proposals that reduce regulation and review time for building certain housing units. Mamdani voted for all 3 also. More deregulation is needed and expected under Mamdani - not to the tune of enriching developers, but for building actual affordable units.
Side rant: A lot of people on HN talk about building more supply. And we do - if you've lived in NYC for an appreciable amount of time, you'll know how different LIC, Greenpoint/Williamsburg, Downtown BK, and Gowanus (among others) look like after 10 years of intense development. Despite receiving tax breaks (421a), most units are not affordable. They're also incredibly cheaply built and generally unpleasant places to live, chock full of excessive amenities that drive up the rent. There's a balance here between freeing developers and allowing them to run buckwild with "affordable" 5k/mo studios. It's easy to quote Paul Krugman on HN about supply side housing and rent regulation but there's more to the story here than just "build more".
Not sure why you make that assumption. In fact, I live in NYC and that's exactly where I see the abundance vs dem-soc tensions. This includes friends who were early canvassers for Zohran. It includes Zohran's loudest public supporters such as Mehdi Hasan and Hasan Piker. I have listened to hours of long-form interviews by Zohran. I am admittedly a sceptic, but I have earned my right to this skepticism.
I know that Mamdani is more than the 4 policies he's championed as part of his social media campaign. But, he has championed those 4 policies a disproportionate amount - free buses, free childcare, freeze rent, raise taxes. A man must be judged by what he says. I judge him by what he says the loudest.
______
For your side rant, I don't agree. New builds in gentrified neighborhoods aren't perfect, but they're significantly better than the brick kilns that came before them. I've crashed at friends houses in Gowanus before the gentrification boom, and it was miserable.
Williamsburg & Bushwick should be seen as a triumph. It went from a dilapidated industrial zone where my friends dad 'got beat up by gang members when he was growing up' and now it is the thriving center of the American hipster movement. Domino Park is triumph. It is noticeably better maintained than parks elsewhere in NYC, and that's thanks to the public-private partnerships.
New build units aren't affordable because those are the only new builds coming up. When supply is low, there is no govt intervention that can give a good outcome to the majority. If those builds hadn't come up, prices would've gone up further in other places or worse, people would have moved out of the city. It's a math problem. People need homes. There aren't enough homes.
That's the whole point of abundance.
There is no such thing as an affordable & scarce resource. It doesn't matter is the scarcity comes from over-regulation or impractical building costs. You can artificially make it affordable by rationing it to the lucky few. But, its limited availability means that a small group gets all the benefits (see classical rent control in NYC) while the majority in the same socio-economic class is left subsidizing their life style.
I can give real examples.
Take Chicago for instance. New affordable housing is more expensive than market rate housing due to over-regulation. [1]
Take Austin. It reduced regulation and zoning rules. Rents went down. [2]
Take Amsterdam, Rent control has taken a bulk of apartments off the housing market, making new builds eye-wateringly expensive. [3]
I concede that Mamdani may still endorse a de-regulatory policies. However, the left has historically leaned pro-regulation. I will maintain this prior until proven wrong. I desperately want to be proven wrong, because I want to continue living in NYC. If Mamdani had gone around saying Rezone, Deregulate and Build, then I would have expressed confidence. But he has been quite evasive about these policies when asked by various interviewers over hours of listening to him.
I work for another large streaming site where people like to use adblockers. These adblockers also cause similar performance issues that are entirely caused by awful code in these blockers. I've studied the code for all of these blockers and they do stuff like:
- Constantly hammering the playlist endpoint to try and get something without an ad stitched in
- Constantly tearing down and remaking the player
- During an ad, requesting the playlist for every other quality to see if those do not have any stitched ads
- Proxying all traffic to servers the adblocker people own in countries where ads are not typically served (eg Russia)
- Intercepting playlist requests and simply deleting segments that they believe are ads (oh no why is my stream broken!!! stupid streaming website!!)
Youtube _could_ be doing something here, but there is also a very real chance your adblocker code is simply bad.
None of what you're mentioning applies to uBlock interacting with YouTube, I suspect you're talking about Twitch, which bakes the ad breaks into the stream so you still get the stream interrupted even you manage to block the ads, making people resort to hacky things like using the homepage player when an ad would be played.
Phone autocorrect usually is the culprit for those types of typos for me. I imagine this crowd would be more likely than many to have that common abbreviation for Active Domains trained into their input methods.
This comparison has never made sense to me. If I get a free beer, I can do whatever I want with it. Drink it, dump it, whatever. Same thing with pretzels. Am I missing something?
Yeah I wonder what people do, and have done, around the world in walkable communities predating the car. Perhaps people in these communities are on average more mobile into old age because they frequently walked?
They were (mostly) taken care of by extended multi-generational households. They obviously died and/or suffered to the extent that medical and QoL technology was insufficient. The whole status quo of pensioners migrating to Florida-style retirement community necropolis with a F-150 and a rubber stamped driver license is a modern US-centric phenomenon.
You are naming disparate & absurd things as the reason that European like walkable communities are bad for old people, like the difficulties of 1930's cities (or perhaps pre-industrial, you aren't very clear), the difference in landmass between the US and Europe (?) and the fact that there is a small range of disabilities that allow someone to drive and shop to Costco but not to go to a cornershop.
The reality is that being old sucks ass, but being old and sedentary (when you can avoid it) sucks worse. I've taken care of multiple senior family members & friends, the ones that were active, i.e walking everywhere, not avoiding stairs completely, have lived longer and happier. Sure, even active people gradually lose the ability to do day-to-day stuff and cars or microcars[1] can help them and other people with mobility concerns, but that's not an argument against walkable places.
Making streets non-hostile to pedestrians, having necessities closer to residences and prioritizing public transport makes people stop preferring cars as medium of transport if they don't need it (youngsters). This actually helps with traffic and in turn helps the people that need cars like someone with a rolling walker and arthritis or a delivery van.
Implying that people advocating for walkability are heartless youngins that don't care about old people just because you are losing arguments left and right, is actually really unempathetic.
