John Wayne is said to have chain-smoked 5-7 packs a day? If you can smoke a cigarette every ~30 mins, that's 2/hour (actually about 1.5 packs/day), but if a cigarette takes 10 minutes to smoke and you chain-smoke, that's 6/hour (4.5 packs/day). So it's doable but John Wayne was significantly out of breath the last 10+ years of his life, perhaps from having an entire lung removed.
A lifelong chain smoker will smoke a cigarette in 1-2 minutes and light up another. 3-5 minutes is a relaxed casual smoke. Cigarettes were modified a decade or so ago to ensure that they go out quickly if not actively smoked. It's not even possible anymore to keep a cigarette burning for long enough for it to take 10 minutes.
This is all pedantic. The point is that you can chain smoke quite a lot if you're dedicated. I've never met anyone who smoked more than two packs a day regularly or maybe three on a crazy night out of drinking and smoking. 4-5 is crazy.
Lucille Ball's voice changed dramatically over the course of the 6yr show from heavy smoking. Their show was sponsored by cigarette companies and she used to hand out cigarettes on a platter to guest when they came over to her house.
I went to a Black Keys concert in 2007 or so that was sponsored by Camel cigarettes and they were giving out free packs of their newest variety at the door.
Nobody is going to read anything regardless of whether you used a LLM to write it or not (but if you use a LLM they'll use that as their excuse for the virtue signalling aura farm), so honestly why bother writing.
If it's written down in a form that can't be repudiated, a succinct message to any stakeholders covering any decision of substance is good practice. They might not read it, but they cannot pretend I did not make a good faith attempt to inform them.
(And I try to be judicious about what counts as "of substance" so they can't accuse me of flooding them with messages)
You have to assume that in many situations a human is asking an LLM about the content you've provided, even if they or another human reads some or all of it themselves too. So it's valuable to proactively ask your own LLM in the same way, so you can see what the other person will get out of it. And tune the verbiage until the LLM tells them what you want it to :)
Sorry if this comes off as critical, but are you seriously doing that? I can't imagine optimizing my writing for people choosing to mangle it through a LLM rather than for the people reading it as-is.
Also the word "verbiage" ticks me off as a LLM-ism on the level of "delve" or "smoking gun". Are its users aware that in addition to its usage as somewhat of a synonym of "idiolect", it more commonly means "a profusion of words usually of little or obscure content", i.e. slop?
This is the real crime of llms on writing. They’ve taken perfectly reasonable verbal ticks (the one I miss being able to use is scaffolding) and caused the audience to rebel against them en masse. Verbiage is a great word. I refuse to give it up. It’s load bearing even.
I wrote a contract proposal a few months ago and I absolutely did a few rounds with an LLM to get the result I wanted. Anyone applying for a job should be doing this with their cover letters. You know that HR has a pipeline set up with a prompt like "here's the job description, here's the candidate's info, rate the candidate on a scale from 1-10" so you can do the same and learn how to boost your own signal. I have zero qualms about doing this.
As for "verbiage", I guess that's too bad, I'm going to continue using it anyway. Interesting factoid about the word though. I will say that "utilize" is one of my pet peeves (99% of the time the word you actually want is "use") and I've excised it from my spoken vocabulary, but I like(d) how verbiage rhymes with foliage so I'm more reticent to give that one up.
Fair enough, cover letters and contract proposals are more marketing than actual information, so that's fair game I suppose. Good trick. I wouldn't use it in something meant to transmit actual information though, like a manual or something.
> Anyone applying for a job should be doing this with their cover letters
Sadly people lost the skill to write a standard form concise 3-paragraphs-of-3-sentences cover letter even before keyword-based ATS initiated the beginning of the end. It wasn’t supposed to be a summary of a CV and an essay about your lifelong passion for automated ad-bidding quality checks or some other shit employers delude themselves into believing someone might organically be really into.
So let's think one more step out. You're supposed to train your juniors so that you have seniors when everyone else is scrambling. But when everyone is scrambling, the biggest and most-funded/most-profitable companies will be offering a lot more money than you can afford to pay your now-senior devs. Now I suppose you think those former juniors would be so grateful that you trained them, that they would be loyal to your company and continue working for what you're paying them, right? ...right?
"Awhile" IME is 3-6 months. And they won't stay for 10% more when Meta offers them 50% more. It's brutal but I'm not sure the economics of 'training' add up for any individual company.
A 100-year-old's children are 70-80 years old themselves, if they are still alive. They very well might be not be capable of taking care of a 100-year-old person. And not everyone has children. Rather than throw up our hands and say "too bad", perhaps we collectively have some responsibility to take care of those who aren't able to take care of themselves?
and those 70-80 year olds may have children old enough to be going through menopause and any number of health issues themselves, along with their own adult children who may not have viable prospects for leaving home yet (if the dynamic is at all similar to other G7 countries). In Canada, I would be plenty old enough by now to have my own kids, and my grandparents, lucky though I am to still have them around, are old enough to be needing some help in their 80s. Thankfully they all have their own homes and can take care of themselves financially, but even if I was interested in having kids, there isn't really a viable financial strategy for creating a support structure viable for even myself long-term. Adding one other person to the mix isn't feasible and won't be in foreseeable future unless I made some dramatic changes solely for that purpose. Thankfully the Gen Xers in my family got in early to the whole "social contract" thing and seem to be handling what they can, and I contribute when I'm visiting by putting in the physical labor where it's useful. I can barely reliably pay for a basement apartment, and the way things are looking, that's about as far as it's ever going to get.
> perhaps we collectively have some responsibility to take care of those who aren't able to take care of themselves
This is the cornerstone that all society rests upon. If a person argues that there is no such obligation, they do not understand the social dynamics of a civilization and you can be sure you're dealing with a sociopath.
Perhaps Google would be bigger? They don't even have desktop app offerings and the consumer versions are subsidized with your advertising data. They certainly weren't the first to introduce the pattern. I feel like Adobe was one of the first big providers to move from lifetime licenses to subscriptions.
I've had several jobs that were great for the first 12-18 months before the manager that hired me left. Then they sucked for another couple years but the pay didn't change.
I am seriously considering going into more lead/management role because of this, it is so demoralizing to feel I am doing work in a way I don't agree with.
Never thought I would say the day, when I joined this career all I wanted was to work on interesting problems and not work more than 40 hours per week. These days the interesting problems are always solved in the worse ways possible and I am often swamped with work that I don't even have the time to do any improvements out of my personally-assigned backlog.
What I'm saying is I am not a jerk and actually do care about my coworkers, however I also don't want a bunch of noise in a chat app I have to use to do my job.
I thought it sounded like a nice gesture of trying to be helpful and making a small connection with their coworkers. One message a day is hardly "a bunch of noise". Even though you say you wouldn't have said anything at the company, you said something here, and that has a similar chilling effect on other people who might have been inspired by the OP to share their tips and tricks with their coworkers.
Sorry for the "personal attack" but my point stands, you may not think of yourself as a jerk, but I saw your comment and thought "this guy imagining himself being annoyed at a coworker for a daily message with a helpful tip might be more of a jerk than he realizes". As a jerk myself I judged myself qualified to make that assessment and commented accordingly.
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