Here’s something I sometimes do to avoid boring content when using LLMs: I type out what it gives me and tweak it as I go instead of copy/pasting directly.
It helps me spot the bits that feel flat or don’t add much, so I can cut or rework them—while still getting the benefit of the LLM’s idea generation.
I think you're missing the point. You should be providing the ideas in any piece of text you write. The boring prose style is not the major objection being expressed here.
I can't find a good link, but I think that the average is dragged down significantly by infant death and that a life expectancy of 40 doesn't mean that you should expect to die at 40 if you've already made it to adulthood.
This is a fable. Many people reached old age in the empire and even the middle ages. A low "Life expectancy" doesnt mean people didnt grow old. It just means that many people die prematurely of (now) preventable things.
Death of the mother in childbirth ( 1 in 10)
Death as a child because of unsafe surroundings
Death as a child because of childlabour
Death because of infectious wounds
Death because of plagues and sickness
Death because of random violence
Death because of war
Death by famine
Death by accidents like fire in the house, occupational hazzard or hunting. Or the sinking of a ship.
All these things lower Life expectancy. But with luck and a good physique many of them could be avoided.
It's closer to a misleading truth or a fallacy. Life expectancy really was that low, but it was driven by child mortality, so knowing the mean life expectancy doesn't give an accurate picture of life expectancy upon joining the army in one's late teens.
I think the impact of AI is not between good jobs va bad jobs but between good workers and bad workers. For a given field, AI is making good workers more efficient and eliminating those who are bad at their jobs (e.g. the underperforming accountant who is able to make a living doing the more mundane tasks whose job is threatened by spreadsheets and automation)
Why should people who don’t own cars pay for highways?
Why should cyclist have to pay for public transportation?
Also children now will be your future doctor, nurse, bus driver, scientist, plumber, etc. so probably worthwhile making an investment in public goods that support their development.
Great work! I work in financial services and built a similar tool for sentiment analysis and topic modelling on transcribed earnings calls. The idea was to identify topics at a speaker-level (analyst, management, etc.) and evaluate the sentiment around that topic. For example, perhaps "foreign exchange" was discussed negatively by a given company in an earnings call, which would alert the analyst to review that call in greater detail.
Are you guys thinking about incorporating something like this into your product?
Thanks! Earnings transcripts sentiment analysis is not currently in our product roadmap. One of the reasons is that such tools are already available on the market. We wanted to explore more underutilized sources of information.
Something I’ve always wondered about the programming / software development profession: do people buy insurance for their hands?
My sister is a denturists and she has insurance for her hands. Curious if this is something people in our profession have considered to protect from incidents like this.
I do. One easily searchable phrase for it is "own-occupation disability insurance". It covers anything that prevents me from working in my profession, although there are payout time restrictions on hard-to-verify mental health ones to prevent malingering.
Automatically qualifying events include loss of sight, hearing, voice, use of any two hands and/or feet. After qualifying, I get paid $5k/mo until age 65.
That's a good anecdote. However, it doesn't bode well for the profession if the big draw is for people who are in a situation where they're smart enough for the academics but need to support a family fairly quickly. My mother was a nurse too, and did largely the same thing (she went to nursing school as a working adult). She got out of hospital work as fast as she could though.
Or... they think they do. "Current company" is too amorphous. Direct manager and team mates may know value, but it's harder to make that judgement (or to believe someone making the case for it) when you're not in the trenches with that team.
May also be a situation where the new company is actually able to extract more value from the person than the previous company.
There's a lot of assumptions going on in some of the replies here. Old company is going down the pan - regardless of how much value an individual can bring, if the company is incapable of translating that in to market value, you'll never get the raise (and may not have a job soon). New company - taking the same person with the same skills - may be able to extract much more market value from that same person.
That is basically the same thing the poster you replied to said, except from the perspective of the current company and not the new one. The current company knows his performance. The hiring company is making an educated guess from maybe 10 hours of interaction and a resume.
I don't doubt that the hiring company may be able to get more value from the individual, hence offering a higher salary. Market rate is highly dependent on the market, and "Software Engineer" is not a market. The current employer is in a better position to understand the employees current value to the company. They may not be tracking it, but they are in a position that they could probably understand the value of the individual, and determine if an increase in compensation is worth the current value or future value they are getting from them.
I wonder if it'd be possible to augment or replace the existing living spaces (and other spaces) on a rig. Maybe turn a rig into a hotel-on-the-water kind of thing.
The thing is: You're now effectively living on an island, albeit one that requires ongoing maintenance and other expenditures to remain seaworthy. And hope you don't have a big storm that you're very exposed to. Most people don't want to live someplace where they have to take a boat trip to go to work or the grocery store.
Some are fine with that but, guess what, you can often live on islands with a fairly low COL. There's tons of land in the US generally. It's just some specific locations of land that are expensive.
From an engineering perspective, you also can't build it up that much. When I worked on rig designs, every time we added equipment, we had to verify that the center of gravity remained within acceptable limits. You can't just build a multi-level structure atop the entire rig or it would become dangerously unstable.
They've tried floating hotels before, generally they aren't successful.
The problem with floating hotels is that they're all the disadvantages of cruise ships, mixed with the disadvantages of a hotel.
Like a cruise ship, you're still on a relatively small floating building, which limits the activities you can do, and you also have to deal with sea sickness and storms. Like a hotel you're stuck in one place, the main drawcard of cruise ships is that you're cruising between locations.
Now instead of a floating hotel, you could turn it into a little sovereign floating town for libertarians. People have proposed this and made efforts to manifest such a libertarian utopia, but have never actually succeeded.
aside from the significant engineering required, my guess is that most people who could afford to construct or live on such a structure don't actually find libertarianism that appealing.
It helps me spot the bits that feel flat or don’t add much, so I can cut or rework them—while still getting the benefit of the LLM’s idea generation.