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Tag: work

The ideal candidate will be punched in the stomach – Scott Smitelli

Whatever this job has given you—and to be crystal clear it has given you most of the down payment on a house—it is not enough to offset this sense of constant dread. Whatever you have given to this job, certainly things that cannot ever be quantified on a bank statement, there are now pieces of yourself that are missing. Pieces you didn’t even realize were being given away. Pieces that, in this moment, you worry you might never get back.

fiction, jobs, work, writing

18/03/2025
ChatGPT vs. Claude vs. DeepSeek: the battle to be my AI work assistant – WSJ

As I embark on my AI book adventure, I’ve hired a human research assistant. But Claude has already handled about 85% of the grunt work using its Projects feature. I uploaded all my book-related documents (the pitch, outlines, scattered notes) into a project, basically a little data container. Now Claude can work with them whenever I need something. At one point, I needed a master spreadsheet of all the companies and people mentioned across my documents, with fields to track my progress. Claude pulled the names and compiled them into a nicely formatted sheet. Now, I open the project and ask Claude what I should be working on next.

AI, chatbots, LLM, productivity, work

03/02/2025
Why has LinkedIn become so weird? – The Guardian

Much has been written about how tech is changing how we see ourselves and each other. Instagram pushing unattainable beauty standards and lifestyles, Facebook fake news chipping away at people’s belief in institutions, an X format that reduces a complex thought to 280 characters (no wonder nuance is impossible!), turning all of us into outrage addicts. Dating apps have commodified and gamified those most human phenomena: love and desire. Yet somehow LinkedIn has been left out of the spotlight. But here’s my contention: I think it is doing something to us, shifting how we see our accomplishments, what we assign value to and what we don’t. And perhaps most chilling of all, it promotes the idea that we are all just brands, and we must always – always – be selling. Apparently, LinkedIn is now being used as a full social network, a place where people talk about their marriages, make friends and maybe even date. What does that tell us about our lives outside work? Do we even still have lives outside work at all?

LinkedIn, marketing, psychology, social media, work

17/01/2025
‘Mainlined into UK’s veins’: Labour announces huge public rollout of AI – The Guardian

Under the 50-point AI action plan, an area of Oxfordshire near the headquarters of the UK Atomic Energy Authority at Culham will be designated the first AI growth zone. It will have fast-tracked planning arrangements for data centres as the government seeks to reposition Britain as a place where AI innovators believe they can build trillion-pound companies. Further zones will be created in as-yet-unnamed “de-industrialised areas of the country with access to power”. Multibillion-pound contracts will be signed to build the new public “compute” capacity – the microchips, processing units, memory and cabling that physically enable AI. There will also be a new “supercomputer”, which the government boasts will have sufficient AI power to play itself at chess half a million times a second. Sounding a note of caution, the Ada Lovelace Institute called for “a roadmap for addressing broader AI harms”, and stressed that piloting AI in the public sector “will have real-world impacts on people”.

AI, computing, economics, jobs, LLM, productivity, technology, work

14/01/2025
Getting started with AI: Good enough prompting – One Useful Thing

Instead, let me propose a new analogy: treat AI like an infinitely patient new coworker who forgets everything you tell them each new conversation, one that comes highly recommended but whose actual abilities are not that clear. And I mean literally treat AI just like an infinitely patient new coworker who forgets everything you tell them each new conversation. Two parts of this are analogous to working with humans (being new on the job and being a coworker) and two of them are very alien (forgetting everything and being infinitely patient).

AI, chatbots, language, work

26/11/2024