This feels pretty handy for applications that don't have API hooks that are painfully slow (I'm looking at you, Adobe Experience Manager). Could just get Claude to automate things that would require a human to run the interface and have it grind away at tasks 24/7.

I can't think of a single manufacture in the US. Not even Cisco makes them here. I'm sure it's carefully worded in the regulations that it just has to be designed in the US. Or even just the firmware. Otherwise literally all routers and network gear would be banned.

This has been a pet-peeve of mine for years with resumes. I've literally reached out to Adobe Acrobat product managers on LinkedIn to try to get them to listen.

Standard HR systems like Workday are HORRIBLE at ingesting and reading resumes from PDFs. Thus why you have to not only upload a PDF but also painstakingly enter standardized fields. And you end up making the resume super ugly to make it as readable as possible. The market for job seekers is HUGE. Millions of people submitting to jobs all the time.

Adobe could fix this with a super low-tech answer. They could even charge a subscription. It would require setting an industry-wide resume data standard - but if anyone can do it, it's Adobe and their marketshare. All they have to do is create a back-end metadata entry specifically for resumes that is hidden from humans but readable by machines. Standard fields like Job 1 Title, Job 1 Company, Job 1 Description, Job 1 dates. People fill this out once and are done.

The other upside to this is it would free humans to make resumes that are easier to read for humans on the other end. No ORC required.

I will die on this hill haha.

I seriously looked into this when I was unemployed for 6 months as a marketing designer. I'm pretty handy with construction and have done many remodels on my own. I have friends in construction who make a similar salary, but they all have supervisory and licensed roles and have been doing it for many years and it would take me many years to get the same place. I'm currently in my 40s.

Also, some fields require significant training, certifications and tests like electricians. The inner kid in me also kind of wanted to get into running some kind of heavy earthmoving equipment, or maybe a crane. But those are also difficult areas to get into quickly.

The one area where I could jump in and get a pretty similar salary quickly was doing cell tower repair. But that requires a ton of travel and clearly is dangerous and my partner nixed it as my body isn't what it used to be.

Eventually I got back into corp life, this time in pharma, and I'm doing just fine. But I do wonder what my life could have been like.

Also, fuck private equity. They squeeze the life out of almost every business they touch, and move on to the next target after having maximized shareholder value.

The thing that infuriates me about this as somebody who used this hellscape of a site for 2 years while looking for a new position is the total lack of real AI search for jobs - literally the ONLY AI feature I would be interested in. The current job search function is trash. But it could actually be useful to be able to ask it questions that involve actually looking at people's work history in their profile.

I'd love to be able to ask - show me all jobs that have a similar job title to [x]. ONLY at companies where one of my direct connections works currently or has ever worked in the past.

It's not possible to search this now and maybe it's because it can't read profiles and work history? It's crazy that's not possible right now. And it forced me to painstakingly write out the work history of every relevant connection and create a million custom alerts.

HR policies at big and small corporations need to be changed too - not only just fraud. When they plan on doing an internal hire, the default policy should not be 'we need to post this externally for a week too'. If you are concerned that your org has become too insular and not enough fresh ideas and people are coming in - posting externally on principal is just a fake band-aid on that problem.

And it just makes the world a worse place for job seekers who get excited about a job that doesn't really exist as an opportunity that they could ever have.

Audiobooks and a significant library inventory boost of titles were a game-changer for me in the last 10 years. I listen to a couple books a month when I'm driving, or doing anything around the house. I have shit to do, and can't always sit down and just do that.

Sometimes when working if it doesn't require writing. It would be expensive without the library - although if I really want a particular title I'll reactivate Audible. I wonder if the study counted listeners?

Also I'd be interested to see a gender breakdown. I think being open about reading for entertainment is way more common among women. Most people promoting books on tiktok I've seen lean towards majority women. Also people who appear to have a comfortable amount of money (although with debt, looks can be deceiving).

Reminds me of when Amazon had those Go stores with hundreds of cameras and claimed that AI with computer vision would tally up your cart and keep track of produce etc. But in reality was just people from India watching the video feeds. I wonder how many more AI companies are just Mechanical Turks.

I wouldn't want that job for sure. But you can bet that top AI software devs are like gold these days and they are getting paid A TON (I mean, not Sergey Brin money, but it's literally not possible to become a billionaire by earning money). But top AI people will probably be able to retire early if they want to.

I think one trick tho is to make sure you're in the right kind of AI. I read a while back that ML people are in way less demand now, even though it's still an objectively useful and important kind of data crunching.

Feels like there should be a system like ASCAP for music. A system registers that AI uses your book, you get a royalty that is - if not the whole price - something. It's telling that tech bros see art - written and otherwise - as BOTH having no value and being critical to success. Paying NVIDIA for processors to make the model - critical and a 'real' business expense towards the effort and worth billions in investments. Tossing authors 50M for the content that the processors use to make the models? Unnecessary.

I still don't understand his obsession with in-office work. Judge people on their output wherever they are. If someone is underperforming, managers should be able to tell regardless of where the employee is working.

Massive commercial investment banks aren't taking cash deposits, and probably most of what they do (investing electronic money, accounting, IT, and marketing can all be done remotely).

Yeah - I've been a professional print/web/video designer for 19 years, I'm PRETTY familiar with Adobe's "fine tools" monopoly. Maybe I should have clarified, but I'm suggesting that this tagging standard be included in the paid, Acrobat Pro version (not the free Acrobat Reader or Bob's PDF export plug-in). And I agree they have meta tagging tools already - but the big point is the STANDARD, and featuring those standards and tags as a job hunting / recruiting tool that the whole talent ATS system would have to conform to.

The software change would be so easy - like you said, the ability to add meta tags exists already. If they wanted to increase Acrobat Pro sales (and the flurry of random ads I've been seeing for it lately indicates they want to) they could have a separate 'job hunting' edition creative cloud Acrobat Pro edition.

The real key would be Adobe approaching the applicant tracking system companies and getting this standard over the finish line.

Prodigy was our first ISP when I was a kid that ran on our IBM XT. I hadn't thought about it in years - I love wild stories like this. Reminds me of how the band Live was part of a fiber ISP scheme, and there was a lot of drama around their finance manager Paywalled article(https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/live-alt-rock-band-crime-lawsuits-1234677011/)

With millions of people looking for work right now, Adobe has a golden opportunity to make PDFs relevant and useful again. AIT bots are about as bad at reading PDFs as trying to copy paste info out of them. They do a terrible job and you end up re-entering 90% of your info anyway. Any page layout formatting that makes it easier for humans to read just make this worse.

With almost no effort, Adobe could add meta tagging to PDFs to separate the content layer from the formatting later. Store your tagged info inside of the PDF for computers to read with 0 AI guesswork. Name, contact info, job 1 title, job 1 Company, job one job description, etc. You could make the actual resume look like whatever you want, and shitty systems like Workday could fill in your application in 2 seconds with no edits needed.

And only Adobe has the industry weight to go to applicant tracker systems like workday and force them to use their standard. If some random company tries this, the 100 different AIT systems will never standardize. BUT I don't think Adobe will ever do this, because they literally don't care about their cash cow that brings in a little money without actually improving the product at all.