The "iced coffee to an interview" thing is such a good case study in Gen Z not being able to pick their battles
Everything has to be some dramatic example of oppression or ableism or "corporate overlords" instead of...just the way things are
You don't wear white to someone else's wedding, you leave a tip when it's customary to do so, these are just social conventions that make you not look rude
An iced coffee doesn't matter that much to you as the interviewee. You will survive going 1 hour without an Iced Brown Sugar Oat Milk Shaken Espresso
But it COULD matter to the person interviewing you. Why risk it? Why die on that hill?
You may think it's a poor proxy for professionalism, you may think a good employer wouldn't care
But if someone tells you "Hey, this is not universally acceptable, it could risk your success," and you insist on doing it to make a point, that's your own dang fault
This Saturday we upload our biggest YouTube video ever. It’s been in the works for years, I’m personally over a thousand hours deep into it, spent around $10,000,000 on it, and I literally have dreams about the video lol
A common dynamic I observe with AI: it feels most impressive when you don’t know much about the subject, don’t care or don’t have a clear idea of what the you want.
This applies across design, code, legal, and more. If I don’t know code very well, every piece of code it writes feels very impressive.
Once you know what something should feel or look like, it becomes almost impossible to guide AI there. And you definitely can’t one-shot it.
Noticing an interesting version of gell-man amnesia where people use AI for their job and see all the various things they have to do in the “last mile”, but then look at someone else’s job and think that AI will eliminate it immediately.
We all have a much deeper appreciation for the nuances and complexities of the work that we do every day. We run into issues about accessing data, we know how much context is needed to get AI models to work the way we need, we have to review the output of the AI to make sure it’s accurate, and then we have to incorporate that work into some broader business process. We see all those steps deeply for the work that we do.
Then, a moment later, we see AI do something in a foreign space and think that it can go automate that entire function. We tend to dramatically underestimate the work that goes into making the AI work just as effectively in those jobs.
This is reason to be skeptical about many of the theories of job loss. It’s coming from the lens of being able to automate individual tasks with AI, without understanding all the work that goes into doing the job fully.
Google Maps: This is the standard set of directions to get there in a reasonable amount of time
Waze: I can get you there 2 minutes earlier, but you're going to drive through someone's front yard
One thing that sets Perplexity apart from other Al apps is its ability to understand context. It doesn't just provide a generic response to a question, it actually takes into account the context of the conversation to provide a more accurate and personalized answer.