Well, they definitely had a lot of Cap’n McCains left over, and we also had more than a few boxes of Obama O’s inside JTV. We would eat them as office snacks.
I was told that we were given them, but maybe they were surplus? Either way, real boxes.
You can find a medical professional to basically claim anything these days. I could go into specifics, but there's a whole industry of ethically questionable doctors that can help you take advantage of well-intentioned accommodation policies with a subjective diagnosis. While I agree there are cases of serious stress disorders, there are also a bunch of people claiming a disorder for personal benefit.
The opioid epidemic where the pharma companies were the ones paying to bribe the doctors?
I don't think pet-food companies will be paying doctors to approve support animals, so probably most of this will have to come from the patients themselves.
> Opioid epidemic disagrees that only the rich can get shady Rx written.
Chinese fentanyl typically doesn't need a script.
The pill mill part of the opioid epidemic was decades ago. Today, access to pain meds is better described as a war on pain relief. People in chronic pain with no history of abuse are denied everywhere, every day.
I know a number of people who turn to the black market because it is their only option.
That fits my experience. All the rich kids I went to school with had doctors notes that gave them extra time on tests, or even let them take the test at home when everybody else had to take it in a proctored hall. They gloated about it too.
I suspect strongly that the people worrying about it being abused outnumber the actual instances of it being abused. I don't think there is rampant unchecked fraud.
What's so bad about the Spotify app? For the most part, it looks like a bunch of lists (not so much spreadsheets) to me...
As someone that is only tangentially in the design space, why do you think collaborative design works so poorly? I have noticed that, in engineering reviews, complex backend designs get scrutiny, but rarely "I feel..", "I prefer..." types of comments, whereas frontend teams get all types of those comments. Is it a matter of too many cooks in the kitchen or something else?
It is a bunch of lists, but the UI is sometimes the lists are scrolling horizontally album covers, sometimes they are popping up from menu buttons, sometimes they go full screen and scroll normally, sometimes they are cut short to 5 elements and you cannot see more, sometimes they continue to 20 elements and you can press to see more, sometimes it's a list with headers that all contain more than a presentable number of elements and you have to tap the header to see more, sometimes it's a mix of horizontal and vertical scrolling sections, sometimes it's squares and sometimes it's rectangles, sometimes your whole list is shrunk because of a popup up top that is going through a list of items they want to notify you about but the popups are shown one session at a time, sometimes they have a full screen popup that is going through that list of items, sometimes you are driving your car or trying to find a song for a baby or trying to do your run and you are being shown many different kinds of lists when a simple, scrolling up and down list with a search box would be preferred, but instead there is so much stuff they want to show you in these lists in so many different shapes that you didn't ask for.
Do you know what the provenance of this morass is, at Spotify? There are many, many Figmas, each a UX designer hoping to reinvent the list in their own way, various product managers competing for attention from the user to introduce a Feature and Increase Engagement for their Key Performance Indicators. The user is better served without any of this stuff.
Man, have you seen the Google Maps and Gmail apps? Google doesn't use Figma either, but the ethos isn't unique to Spotify, it is absolutely toxic. The amount of crap I can accidentally tap on while driving using Google Maps, telling me information I absolutely do not care about, trying to get me to Do Something for Some Product Manager's Product: it's negative ROI.
> why do you think collaborative design works so poorly?
To me, using Figma is a symptom of the incompetent people outnumbering the opinionated and competent. It's not so much that collaborative design works poorly, I'm sure it works very well in Apple's design org. But that's not what the Figma product is. It's a holistic social experience of giving 10x as many people the ability to inscribe their opinions and get credit for participating in a project, as corporate people do, which is very valuable to 10 subscribers as opposed to the 1 person actually doing the work. It's a great business!
It’s always been wild to me how incongruous / inconsistent the experience of using Spotify’s web/ios/android apps have been. It points to an organizational mess rather than a Figma mess, but maybe it also shows that Figma doesn’t address the entire picture yet of addressing org level communication and syncing with prod assets
At least to the specific, valuable role of a UX designer, the biggest problem with Figma is it has no opinions or affordances for improving HCI. The best UX designers have strong HCI opinions and Figma does nothing for them. It is fundamentally a tool to (mis)-style lists. So it is unfortunate it is adopted as much as it is, UX designers should be spending their intellectual energy on more scientific stuff.
> It points to an organizational mess rather than a Figma mess
The two are related. It's like Conway's law.
Figma has some pretty generic opinions about how apps or shit should be made. (https://www.figma.com/blog/working-well/). Like it has this collaborative editing multiplayer thing going on, but you could just ignore that, many bosses effectively use it to tell subordinates exactly what to do without any feedback. Nonetheless they have countless public materials espousing the things it can do and how using those features to the max, especially collaboration, is the Right Way.
However if your way of doing things aligns with its unique value proposition, such as by requiring many people to collaboratively turn simple lists into confusing lists, that is bad.
If you lean into what Figma writes is "Working Well," you will create an app that looks and feels like Spotify. That is what I am saying. It's on Figma.
This isn't a fringe opinion by any means. SAP users get the most success from conforming their business to the way their SAP vertical solution says to do things. Git is also opinionated.
Jira had an opinionated way of working, Agile is a manifesto for how people should do stuff. One task, exactly one assignee is really radical! You can go and read about Jira and Asana saying "no" when people ask to allow multiple assignees. Trello got rid of that, assign as many people to a card or task as you'd like, it's less opinionated, and in my opinion, it's an inherent flaw. And woe be onto people who use Trello, that is telling me right away that they are going to be slower than Jira and Asana users.
> Figma doesn’t address the entire picture yet
The core dynamic they provide software for - and this is just as true of Google Docs and Sharepoint - is that BigCo employees need to touch things and get credit. Every BigCo I've worked with, without fail. There are like 10 people on meetings, and 9 people don't do anything but they use the stuff they touch and the calendar entries as collateral in their performance reviews.
None of the things you've highlighted have ever, as a user, registered with me. What I want from a music app UI is a good search function, playlists, and then it's really down to content, content, content.
For an app like that I just need the UX to be "good enough".
I don't like spotify's UX much either, but I don't blame my hammer for the lopsided chairs I built. Plenty of crappy UIs were designed in Adobe Photoshop before Sketch came around and introduced tooling better suited for UX mockups. It's not the tool it's poor product and experience development you're complaining about.
Wow, I hadn't thought about it through that lens exactly, but you are 100% right. Virtually everyone in large organizations (engineers, PMs, designers) are incentivized to launch things that align with their end-of-year performance goals. Those goals are sometimes at odds with the best overall customer outcome.
I hadn't thought about figma specifically as being a symptom. I'm sure some organizations use it effectively, but I can see how it might spiral out of control to result in an "I'm helping too" sort of ethos, with a poor net outcome.
As a UX writer, the ability of providing feedback or editing UI text before a disastrous piece of Loren Ipsum goes to production is very, very valuable. What's the feedback you think is silly here?
I believe that's what Cory Doctorow calls 'enshittification'. I don't blame UX designers and Figma for it though, and I think this comes from the corporate stakeholders rather than the PMs. Full disclosure, I'm a PM similarly annoyed by the enshittification of once excellent apps. Maybe too many large companies are stuck releasing features on a regular cadence without many interesting user problems to solve.
While Faraday discovered induction, wasn't it Maxwell that unified electricity and magnetism? Given what answer.ai is attempting to do, Edison seems like a great example since he was both a brilliant inventor and an absolutely shrewd businessman.
I am excited for more research in this area, since there is currently a huge gap between foundational model research and practical applications of AI.
This is actually a semi-plausible angle. Given Sam's personality, I could see a scenario where there was disagreement about whether something in particular would be announced at demo day. He may have told some people he would keep in under wraps, but ended up going forward with it anyway.
I don't understand how that escalates to the point that he gets fired over it, though, unless there was something deeper implied by what was announced at demo day.
Edit: Theres a rumor floating around that "it" was the GPT store and revenue sharing. If that's the case, that's not even remotely a safety issue. It's just a disagreement about monetization, like how Larry and Sergey didn't want to put ads on Google.
ChatGPT blew the doors open on the AI arms race. Without Sam leading the charge, we wouldn't have an AI boom. We wouldn't have Google scrambling to launch catch up features. We wouldn't have startups raising 100s of millions, people talking about a new industrial revolution, llama (2), all the models on hugging face or any of the other crazy stuff that has come about in the past year.
Was the original launch of ChatGPT "safe?" Of course not, but it moved the industry forward immensely.
Swisher's follow up is even more eyebrow raising:
"The developer day and how the store was introduced was in inflection moment of Altman pushing too far, too fast. My bet: He’ll have a new company up by Monday."
What exactly from the demo day was "pushing too far?" We got a dall-e api, a larger context window and some cool stuff to fine tune GPT. I don't really see anything there that is too crazy... I also don't get the sense that Sam was cavalier about AI safety. That's why I am so surprised that the apparent reason for his ousting appears to be a boring, old, political turf war.
My sense is that there is either more to the story, or Sam is absolutely about to have his Steve Jobs moment. He's also likely got a large percentage of the OpenAI researcher's on his side.
ChatGPT was definitely not some visionary project led by Sam. They had a great LLM in GPT-3 that was hard to use because it wasn't instruction tuned, so the research team did InstructGPT and then took it even further and added RLHF to turn it into a proper conversational bot. The UI was a hacky interface on top of it that definitely got way more popular than they expected.
I don't know if it was led by Sam, and don't dispute that it may have been "hacky," but there is no denying it was a visionary project.
Yes, other companies had similar models. I know Google, in particular, already had similar LLMs, but explicitly chose not to incorporate them into its products. Sam / OpenAI had the gumption to take the state of the art and package it in a way that it could be interacted with by the masses.
In fact, thinking about it more, the parallels with Steve Jobs are uncanny. Google is Xerox. ChatGPT is the graphical OS. Sam is...
If it was really just about seeing eye to eye, why would the press release say anything about Sam being "consistently candid in his communications?" That seems pretty unnecessary if it were fundamentally a philosophical disagreement. Why not instead say something about differences in forward looking vision?
Which they can do in a super polite "wish him all the best" way or an "it was necessary to remove Sam's vision to save the world from unfriendly AI" way as they see fit. Unlike an accusation of lying, this isn't something that you can be sued for, and provided you're clear about what your boardroom battle-winning vision is it probably spooks stakeholders less than an insinuation that Sam might have been covering up something really bad with no further context.
I've been out of the web-dev game for a while, and have been pretty blown away by how much has changed. Suddenly, it seems like everything is a 1-page application, SSR, and doing a lot more on the client than I was used to back when jQuery was the standard. Next.js seems like a pretty beginner-friendly way to get a lot of the "new stuff" without having to learn the multiple technologies in a MERN stack.
On the other hand, it seems like a lot of folks (particularly in this thread), think of Next.js as a well-intentioned, but unstable shiny toy that more or less breaks when you try to do more complicated stuff. Is that accurate? If so, what is the standard stack that most companies are using these days to build high quality web apps?
heh yeah it seems like there's a lot of hate here for a release with only 4 bullet points. I'm using NextJS to learn react for my own interest (i don't do front-end work like this at work) it seems reasonable enough to me. My biggest complaint so far is getting use to everything being named page.tsx, layout.tsx etc and directory naming conventions having so much control over functionality. Otherwise, it seems like a typical Nodejs stack with Express abstracted away and React included.
Ironically, I was just using ChatGPT to answer another seemingly simple question:
What is an example of an item that would show up in EBIT but not operating income?
> In standard financial reporting and accounting terminology, "Operating Income" and "EBIT" (Earnings Before Interest and Taxes) are typically considered to be the same thing. They both represent a measure of a company's profitability from its core operating activities, and they exclude non-operating income and expenses...
It's an answer, stated as fact, that is also totally wrong. When I went to Google, I found the correct answer:
"The key difference between EBIT and operating income is that operating income does not include non-operating income, non-operating expenses, or other income."
After some pressing of ChatGPT, I ultimately got it to spit out the correct answer:
"I apologize for any confusion in my previous responses, and you are correct. In standard financial reporting, EBIT does include non-operating income, whereas operating income does not."
ChatGPT is great in some cases, and in other cases sends you down random tangents, references things that either don't exist or are misleading, or just flat out lies. That is a REAL time waster, because you might end up proceeding based on the incorrect explanation provided by ChatGPT, only to find out that you have to re-learn a concept correctly later on.
Are you using GPT-4 or ChatGPT? I only trust GPT-4, and I have a fairly good idea of its 'limits' so to speak (don't ask it to walk step by step through a decision tree question for instance, but if we generally want to know about xgboost or lgbm it's good). I agree that if you don't know what is trustable by ChatGPT and what is not, then it frustrates the whole process again
