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.

Des Moines is like this - they have one main municipal Fiber trunk running everywhere and the ISPs rent it out. GFiber does it out there that way, and feels like the way to go.

This is super true, and I wonder how it will play out. Maybe the temus and shiens of the world will just start shipping through other countries. Although it will take a lot of time for the 10s of thousands of small manufactures to figure out new logistics.

And sweat-shops had already moved to other countries as labor standards are rising in China.

I wonder if the review process has become better over the years. I remember several SUPER popular talks that turned out to be based on bad data. Like the power-pose lady. https://www.ted.com/pages/amy-...

I've read that MS image creator is the tool of choice for the AI 'say amen' to Shrimp Jesus / Sexy Flight attendant / Developing country homemade toy industry on FB. https://www.404media.co/facebo...

Which is interesting given that there are SO MANY image LLM and pipeline tools out right now. Weird that MS has the cheapest / fastest way to do this still.

It's hilarious that LinkedIn is mostly AI slop, and most of it extoling how you need to get AI to grind harder and get rich and productive. And then internally, all companies are all worried about security and information quality and demanding that employees don't use it. Even in the job search the discrepancy that they will absolutely use AI to speed up talent acquisition, but are appalled that it might be used on them. And given the anthropic statement you have to sign - they know that human generated content is inherently worth more.

Cory Doctorow writes about this a lot in his books - in particular where DRM and x-as-a-service models forces consumers and the entire logistics chain down to farms to be beholden to private equity and hedge fund groups. Where jailbreaking your toaster is a crime, even if the servers it needs to run at all go dark. Super black mirror and just about happening right now.

I walked into a Target that did this and turn around and walked out to find a normal store a couple blocks down. I'm absolutely not rewarding a store that treats shoppers like this. There's no way I'm going to call a employee over 17 times every time I want to pick or look at the label of a product. Let the store crumble until they learn it's more expensive to treat people like shit and stop it. That's capitalism. Don't reward bad behavior.