Yep, I remember being told that it doesn't matter which major I pick because there would be jobs that wanted just any bachelor's degree.
I'm sure high school kids are still being told that today, and it might not be entirely false. Decent-paying jobs have certainly become more specialized for specific college majors, but I still see local job listings on the lower end of the white collar pay scale that ask for a BA/BS without expressing preference for a specific major.
When only the self-selecting intelligent/diligent/driven went to college, selecting college graduates was a huge win.
So then everyone decided everyone should go to college - to me that's manifestly not the case, but that's where we are; plumbers doing quite successfully for themselves with a degree in something or other that doesn't matter at all.
One I've noticed, and it might just be Claude, is putting "The" in front of titles and headers. Its documentation will have one section after another with headers like "The Architecture", "The Caveats", "The Fixes".
The typical answer when people ask why Dropbox doesn't have a cheap low tier is that the more expensive plans are more likely to be underused, and therefore more profitable than a 100GB plan that users constantly max out.
But I'm also curious about whether they've studied the long-term growth impact like you mentioned. I first needed to pay for cloud storage as a broke college student. I'd used Dropbox's free tier in high school and only needed a bit more space, and I certainly didn't have $120/year to spend on it. I ended up switching to Google Drive's $2/month plan and never looked back at Dropbox. If Dropbox had offered a comparable plan, I would have stayed and ended up upgrading to the $10/month plan when I got my first job. Looking at how much data I'm using right now, I would have become exactly the type of underutilizing user they want.
I enjoy reading really old programming books, the 1997 edition of Learning Perl mentioned in the article being a perfect example. I don't fret over the exercises, but if it's well-written it gives a glimpse into how people thought about technology/code/computers at that point in time, like the tech equivalent of flipping through old newspapers.
I agree. I also read a few books written by Microsoft people back then. I really enjoyed the writing style and the more hardcore programming environment back then. Wish I could live through that era.
LLMs are very helpful for transcribing handwritten historical documents, but sometimes those documents contain language/ideas that a perfectly aligned LLM will refuse to output. Sometimes as a hard refusal, sometimes (even worse) by subtly cleaning up the language.
In my experience the latest batch of models are a lot better at transcribing the text verbatim without moralizing about it (i.e. at "understanding" that they're fulfilling a neutral role as a transcriber), but it was a really big issue in the GPT-3/4 era.
I have a project where I'm using LLMs to parse data from PDFs with a very complicated tabular layout. I've been using the latest Gemini models (flash and pro) for their strong visual reasoning, and they've generally been doing a really good job at it.
My prompt states that their job is to extract the text exactly as it appears in the PDF. One data point to be extracted is the race of each person listed. In one case, someone's race was "Indian". Gemini decided to extract it as "Native American". So ridiculous.
I was attempting to help someone who runs a small shop selling restored clothing set up a gemini pipeline that would restage images she took of clothing items with bad lighting, backgrounds, etc.
Basically anything that showed any “skin” on a mannequin it would refuse to interact with. Even just a top, unless she put pants on the mannequin.
Photoshop's AI tools will fail constantly if you try to say, remove an extraneous wire or a tree branch etc in a photo that has women showing any bare arms or legs etc. Works fine with men with no shirts on.
It pops up some moralizing text and refuses to continue.
It doesn't surprise me at all that this is going on. There are lots of social media fan pages that are run by real people who post real content 99% of the time but are willing to post promo material for a fee. Usually that fee is pretty high, easily $100-500 depending on the account's follower count, with different price points for how long it stays up (pay more for a permanent post, pay less and it gets deleted after X number of hours). It's really effective because those accounts already have a well-established presence and function as tastemakers.
It's simple (both in terms of gameplay and graphics) and it's the fastest Civ game to complete a full playthrough. Later releases made the game slower and more complex.
This has been the message at the F100 that one of my relatives works at. The CEO's increasingly aggressive message to their hundreds of thousands of employees is that they should figure out how to get 10x faster with AI or their job is on the line. The average non-technical white collar employee doesn't know the details of how LLMs work or any of the day-to-day changes in tooling that we see in the tech industry. All they see is elites pouring all their resources into a machine that will result in Great Depression 2 if it succeeds. Millions of people whose lives depend on their $50k office job in Middle America are hoping and praying that it fails.
I live in an area that's not a tech hub and lots of people get confrontational when they find out I work in tech. First they want to know if I'm working on AI, and once they're satisfied that the answer is no, they start interrogating me about it. Which companies are behind it, who their CEOs are, who's funding them, etc. All easily Googleable, but I'm seen as the AI expert because I work in tech.
My career is built on people not knowing how to Google lmao (IT)
To most people, AI is chatGTP. Maybe Gemini.
Claude? No idea.
VS Code, Cursor, Antigraivity, Claude Code? Blank stares.
Same as when the computer came, some will fall behind. Excel monkeys copy pasting numbers will go, copywriters, written word jobs = already gone. Art for simple images = AI now all done by one person.
Unless you want a Soviet system where jobs are kept to keep people busy.
> I don't care that when I click "delete", the item may not disappear from the screen immediately.
The disconnect here between tech people and non-tech people is that most users do care about stuff like this.
I run a popular website as a solo project so all the feedback/complaints are routed to me, and one thing I've learned is that users really don't want websites to "feel old". Sure, they want it to be fast, but they also want all the bells and whistles like loading indicators and animations.
If you show Hacker News to someone who's not a developer, especially if they're under 30-35, their reaction to the layout and functionality will be visceral disgust. I really can't stress enough how much modern users hate the traditional plain HTML look. If you're trying to convince users to use your site and it looks or functions anything like HN, they'll get angry and close the tab within seconds to look for an alternative. Even if you've made a SPA with plenty of bells and whistles, users will still get upset if anything feels "clunky", which is often user-speak for "this component needs animations and a transition state". They don't know or care that all the fancy stuff increases the complexity of the codebase.
Every software project hits a point where the super clean abstractions the developers came up with start to clash with the messy way it's used in the real world. This is the frontend version of that. We have no choice but to give users the UX they want.
I'm sure high school kids are still being told that today, and it might not be entirely false. Decent-paying jobs have certainly become more specialized for specific college majors, but I still see local job listings on the lower end of the white collar pay scale that ask for a BA/BS without expressing preference for a specific major.
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