Our city just spent >$15MM on "case management software" that took 5 years to build by some fly-by-night outfit in California who won the contract, haphazardly bolted together MSFT Azure components, then vanished with zero support.

These teams can't in good faith freely adopt AI tooling into their workflow because they don't have the bandwidth to do it well, so they don't do it at all.

Most of the ML candidates I see now are all "working with LLMs". Most of the ML engineers I know in the industry who are actually shipping valuable models, are not.

Cool, you made a chatbot that annoys your users.

Let me know when you've shipped a fraud model that requires four 9's, 100ms latency, with 50,000 calls an hour, 80% recall and 50% precision.

Music is the thing I love more than anything. I love writing it, releasing records, playing shows, and connecting with people on an emotional level. Never once have I considered it possible to have a fruitful career as a musician, despite seeing more success as a musician than most can ever dream of. Additionally, the industry (like many others) has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. In many ways, it has put much more power back into the hands of artists: you don't need a huge studio/record label/promotion to release a record. You can just release records, and promote them yourself. The flip side of that is there are SO many more people releasing music these days, which makes it really difficult to cut through the noise if your music is halfway decent.

Finally, recommendation algorithms have truly transformed the landscape of content creation, likely irreversibly. I get messages _daily_ from people who have "hacked" the TikTok algorithm, and can get my bands plays. There is an entire cottage industry of algorithm "hackers", some of them actually have results too.

One odd anecdote: I love Alex G. I've been listening to him for over a decade, and have flown out to see him play in places like New york/Austin TX. A few years ago he played in Seattle, and the entire demographic of the audience seem to've changed overnight. Way younger, more "mainstream" looking kids, filled the Showbox in Seattle. The strangest part was that no one seemed to know the words to his songs anymore. I did some digging, and he'd gone viral on TikTok. A few of his songs went absolutely bananas on there, and it completely transformed his fanbase. They knew the words to those songs, but not his entire set. Is this bad? I have no idea, but the trimming down of content into bite sized morsels _feels_ bad to me, and I believe it will dramatically alter this next generation's baseline attention span. Again, not a moral judgement, just a factual claim.

Also...yes it is a sentiment (a view of or attitude toward a situation or event; an opinion). Our opinions about what constitutes "taking advantage" are different. Saying otherwise doesn't make your argument more compelling.

To remain stable, economic growth must be slow and steady. The alternative is you simply don't go to Kenya, rather, you go somewhere else, and Kenyans get $0/hour.

I had one of these once. The chief product officer came into the room, stared at me for awhile, then asked "tell me something you've thought really hard about...". It was a classic case of a narcissist exec. Glad I didn't get the job, as they are struggggggggggglin' right now.