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As someone who's in his late 20s and didn't (consciously) witness the dotcom crisis I want to ask the older people here: was this also part of the dotcom bubble era? Were people working in bookstores angry at Amazon, people working in retail fashion angry at fashion ecommerce stores, etc?

Wouldn't you get >50% of the usefulness and 0% of the risk if you add read+draft permissions for the email connection through a proxy or oauth permissions? Then your claw can draft replies and you have to manually review+send. It's not a perfect PA that way, but could still be better than doing everything yourself for the vast majority of people who don't have a PA anyway?

It feels like, just like SWEs do with AI, we should treat the claw as an enthusiastic junior: let it do stuff, but always review before you merge (or in this case: send).

For me it's a bit of both. I'm working on exciting energy software with people who have deep knowledge of the sector but only semi-decent software knowledge. Nearly every day I'm reviewing some shitty PR comprised of awful, ugly code that somehow mostly works.

The product itself is exciting and solves a very real problem, and we have many customers who want to use it and pay for it. But damn, it hurts my soul knowing what goes on under the hood.

I should have read this 12h ago! This afternoon, I tried to create my first simple agent using LangChain. My aim was to repeatedly run a specific python analysis function and perform a binary search to find the optimal result, then compile the results into a markdown report and export it as a PDF.

However, I now realize that most of these steps don't require AI at all, let alone agents. I wrote the full algorithm (including the binary search!) in natural language for the LLM. And although it sometimes worked, the model often misunderstood and produced random errors out of the blue.

I now realize that this is not what agents are for. This problem didn't require any agentic behavior. It was just a fixed workflow, with one single AI step (generating a markdown report text).

Oh well, nothing wrong with learning the hard way.

You call it silly because you could be doing useful stuff on your phone. I'd go one step further and say that even if you're slacking off that's not necessarily a bad thing. Everybody, including politicians, slacks off from time to time. Be it due to stress, awful sleep because the neighbor's dog barked all night, illness, or something else. It's just human and there's little wrong with it as long as you do your job well most of the time.

> Bezos nailed it on this topic: “[...] [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' [or] 'I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things [...] will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. [...]”

> You should consider what won’t change, and the following is a (non-exhaustive) list of things that I think won’t change: I believe AI is and will continue to gain intelligence

Okay, but that way you can frame every ongoing change as a constant. "Change X will continue, and because it's already ongoing and will simply continue, I consider it a constant and therefore add it to my list of 'things that won't change'". But that's clearly not what Bezos meant.

> Except Dairy Queen, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s outside of the U.S. don’t have this problem.

Heck, even Ikea has successfully been selling ice cream (from self serve machines!) here in the Netherlands for like 20 years now. €0.50 back in the day, €1 now. Can't remember the last time all machines (yes, they do have at least 2 usually) required maintenance.

I was under the impression that Netflix was not deemed video sharing platform because they don't actively dictate what is and is not allowed on the platform the way YouTube does. But maybe it was the 10,000 rule, who knows. To my knowledge the EU never made explicit why companies were not deemed gatekeeper.

Multiple reasons:

1. Size. DMA requirement is >=7.5b turnover in the EU, or worldwide market cap >=75b. Not the case for Spotify.

2. Non-provision of core platform services. It's not just "important gateway between business users and consumers", it's "important gateway between businesses and consumers *in relation to core platform services*". Core platform services are e.g. search engines, operating systems, browsers, app stores and so on. This is why Spotify isn't a gatekeeper.

And the exact same reasoning applies to American companies. Video streaming platforms like Netflix are also excluded for example, even though Netflix has a market cap >=75b.

Most people buy pea protein isolate. This is a more complex product where the protein has actually been separated from the remainder of the peas.

(Not sure if it would qualify as ultra processed though.)

> he made his students work use pens while taking his tests

This is very common in the Netherlands, I think that's why it was a rule of his.

In general, the Dutch education system seems to be against pencils (at least this was the case until recent; I'm Dutch and mid 20s). You're tought to write using a fountain pen, not a pencil. In high school, you're allowed to switch to ball point but absolutely not to pencil. In university, write with pretty much anything you want, but... not with a pencil. If you do take your test with a pencil, there's genuinely a chance your teacher will give you a 0, although most of the time they'll probably be forgiving.

I majored in CS in the Netherlands and every test was done with good old pen and paper. Students still make mistakes all the time, which is why everyone uses a scrap sheet.