Like, it's obvious to me why a true Jack of all trades would use different resumes for applying to a plumber role vs a carpenter role, but less clear why a career plumber would tailor resumes for applying to two plumber roles at slightly different companies.

My devs keep throwing Claude-generated writeups at me that look okay at first glance but fall apart when you actually try to follow the instructions they lay out (which makes them useless for anyone who's not already familiar with the product or feature they're describing), and/or have major structural and logical gaps, and/or gloss over messy details in a way that makes the product or feature sound better but doesn't reflect the reality of what we actually built.

Which turns into an ironic ouroboros where I then have to punch my own queries into an LLM and ask it to read our codebase, compare those details against the original writeup, try to decipher what the hell it was trying to say, etc. And even that turns into an extended back-and-forth where my LLM is like "The original writeup is inaccurate; it should say X" and I'm like "Are you sure? That contradicts what I know about related concept Y", and then the LLM is like "Good point, I dug into it more and the real answer is Z." (And even then, god only knows if Z is correct. I still have to get real developer eyeballs on anything before it goes live.)

I think the odds of any particular article making it onto a CEO's radar are low, and the odds of them actually taking good advice to heart (let alone implementing it) are even lower. That said... I also get the impression that the shittest kinds of C-levels and VPs are disproportionately swayed by whatever opinion they last read in their daily email newsletter or heard on a five-minute podcast snippet. So at least in theory, if you were able to inject a seed of a good idea into the zeitgeist, that idea might reach the level of saturation where it turns into a form of white-collar peer pressure.

Unfortunately I also think the ideas that reach the peer pressure saturation point tend to be less "be nice to your employees" and more "put shock collars on them and make them beg for their jobs," but I guess it can't hurt to try?

Oof.

But I also like your candy analogy because I think it's spot-on for how LLM text superficially looks informational/nutritious, even though it's actually just junk.

(I do think this is extraordinarily rare compared to how often AI hallucinations happen, but it's such a bizarre story that I have to mention it.)

Not Phoenix, but I learned an interesting fact about some of the huge data centers in Las Vegas, which pre-date AI: since it's 72 degrees or cooler for more than 70% of the year, during those months they can just pipe in outside air without needing to cool it first.

On top of that, I think both Phoenix and Vegas have fewer natural disasters than other major metro areas.

Not for nothing that YouTube alone is responsible for a double-digit amount of all internet traffic.

This also depends on whether ads are being sold as "pay-per-click" or "pay-per-view" (although in the biz they say "impression" rather than "view"). For the latter, websites like Meta who sell ad space only get paid when people actually click on them.

Which is the wrong angle on my part, but leads to the same point about it being dubious to throw Taco Bell under the bus here.

But the actual numbers don't surprise me: the majority of bad lettuce went to Wal-Mart, and a significant chunk went to restaurant suppliers like Sysco. People obviously shop at Wal-Mart (and I think many small restaurants shop at Sam's Club, same as Costco), and Sysco alone supplies ingredients to a massive number of restaurants, big and small. So that's a lot of opportunities to eat bad lettuce.