Maybe neither should. The problem is the power existing in the first place, waiting around for someone like Trump.

Come on, as Beth says, those two should just fuck and get it over with.. We are all adults here. Say it with me: "Those two should just fuck and be be friends, again"

That's one every five weeks. Middlemarch is roughly 900 pages. Assuming one reads five evenings a week, that's 36 pages per sitting. Each page is roughly 300 words. An average reading speed is about 250 words per minute; let's knock that down to 200 for denser works like those discussed. That's 54 minutes of reading per day.

Hardly a huge time commitment, especially as a way to decompress from the day.

I worked on a team where a new hire from a prestigious school told his manager "That work is boring and mundane and I'm not going to do it."

He didn't last long.

Yeah, so you fire them and replace them with another human, thats still vastly cheaper than a person plus a per-token ai fee.

And it wouldn't surprise me if he is now the boss of people like his prior boss.

Helicopters typically contain people, drones do not.

I used to do technical sales and I couldn't agree more. Everyone wants to be part of a compelling story.

"Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is." -- Leslie Lamport

Writing is an essential skill.

Writing well requires both having organized thinking and writing skills to carry the reader's thinking and feelings along where you want them to go. You can put your organized thinking into an LLM, perhaps as bullet points or dense explanations and it can do the writing skills part. You just need to be able to read well enough to evaluate the output, which is a lot easier.

ACME aside, I love the description of how the OP iterated to a solution via a combination of implementing simple functions and cussing. That is a beautiful demonstration of what it means to be an old school hacker.

If AI regularly uses the Oxford Comma, it can't be all bad.

It thinks in Comic Sans, however.

> I’d argue that a well-written email is one that doesn’t require a summary.

I strongly agree. This echoes the cartoon about using LLMs to write and then summarize emails (https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html).

If someone doesn't care enough about my time to compose a well-written email, with a tl;dr at the top if necessary, then I see no reason to care about what they've generated.

Really, the format of your email is dictated by the business norms of communication that you operate in. If your norms dictate that your emails must, say, be written in an extremely overwrought and formal manner that massages egos, then LLMs to generate and summarize might be the technology that brings efficiency while upholding these norms.

Speaking to the performative importance of cultural norms, many workplaces would not look kindly on certain white-collar roles if they wore a T-shirt to the office; even if it is more efficient, or comfortable to wear the T-shirt.