Can you give a few examples of those brand-centric cultures? Which product categories do they follow? I've never seen anything like this, so if I were to go to one of the places that has this culture, I should probably know about it in advance.

Many store chains in Canada have also started putting maple leaf icons on price tags for Canadian-made products over the last year or two, after the US did whatever they've done. But it's harder to avoid US-made products here, because so much is imported and it's the only country we share a real land border with.

Senior devs, people with many years of experience, people who have had the chance to funnel themselves into something specialized are doing okay. It's still not as good as it once was, many still find themselves out of a job and unable to find another one without having to settle for worse conditions or a lower wage, but the squeeze isn't nearly as bad on them.

For juniors and new grads, it's a bloodbath. The best people I know are sending hundreds of tailored job applications to try and get just about anything, and it's still almost impossible. Rates of applications to interviews are probably <1% for most people. Internships still help, but it's not as much of a difference as it once was. Everyone is desperate, and people are lowering their standards as far as they'll go, but employers are still not budging.

Basically, it seems like the sides of the job market are diverging. People who are already in are usually still in. You're either doing great or living through the most hopeless and soul-crushing time of your professional life, with a small portion of outliers in either group.

Have we seen any of that yet? If anything, the most popular modern projects out there are all AI tooling, basically recursive software to help with using AI. Have you seen any truly novel software that solves new problems? Even before AI, I've been worried that most of the problems that were possible and viable to solve have run dry, leading to tech chasing hype and the next big thing over practical issues that have already been scooped up by someone else. What new problems have been added?

There's more types of writing between the extremes of research papers and novels. Data is useful and all, but asking it to be the sole driving component of ALL types of non-fictional writing is too much. Besides, this tool would criticize your novel just the same, because the intended use is to have it filter everything you write.

> Overused Intensifier - Delete it. If the sentence still makes sense, the word was never needed. If it doesn't, rewrite the sentence to show why it matters.

You heard it here first. Adjectives? More like AIdjectives, a covert plan by AI companies to make our writing more sloppy. According to this recommendation, writing should never have any emphasis, it should only contain the most basic "X is Y" relations, like in some programming language. Sentences should contain the bare minimum amount of information required to parse them, everything else must be cut. In practice, this recommendation only filters a few of the most pervasive 'corporate PowerPoint'-style language, but even then, the suggestion that these words are never useful is wrong.

> Triple Construction - Break the pattern. Use two items or four. Or convert one item into its own sentence to give it more weight.

Humans may really like when things are structured into threes, but you must resist this AI temptation! Use two or four points, because you're not like them. The only reason cited for why this is wrong is that LLMs use this pattern often, so naturally the rest of us must cede good writing practices to them.

> "Almost" Hedge - Commit. "Almost always" → "usually." Or just say "always" and defend the claim. Readers notice when you won't take a stance.

As we all know, the world is discrete and easy to describe. That's why there simply isn't anything between things that happen "usually" (70%) and "always" (100%). Saying "almost always" (95%) is bad, because you should round your estimates and defend what is now an obviously wrong statement, for it makes you seem more brutal and confident.

> "Broader Implications" - State the implication explicitly, or cut the phrase. "This has broader implications" says nothing. What are the implications? Say them.

God forbid you organize an essay that's in any way non-linear, temporarily withholding some information for the sake of organization. Asking to can the phrase entirely says that even complex writing should be strung together in a rigid and sequential order.

That's the problem with the project, the way I see it. It was too heavily inspired by Grammarly and the likes, and in chasing it, the criticisms were adapted to fit the Grammarly model. The issue with that LLM 'style' is the punchy, continuous overuse of these patterns to the point where these phrases start seeming like meaningless sound combinations. There's nothing wrong with most of these patterns individually, what I hate is when text is filled with them to the brim, not when they show at all. If your writing is like the example paragraph, with most of the text highlighted, then it's a sign that your essay is more rhetoric than substance. But if you write an argument with three items in it and it's highlighted because "that's like AI" to make you delete it, then that's performative self-censorship, not improving your writing.

This paper is all the way from 2012. Since its publication, many countries have pushed the limits to far greater lengths than what it talks about. Canada remains a signatory to all the old 60s-80s treaties about drugs, but can you guess what the consequences were when we legalized cannabis in spite of all of them? No one cares about these.

In the worst-case world, there is still more than enough wealth and work done to provide the bare minimum quality of life to everyone. The automation of most occupations would lower the bar of creating the simplest food supplies and homes even more. But, in that horrific world, the elite class would say "lol no" and use that wealth to live in paradise, away from everyone else, while the rest are left with almost nothing. The parent is saying that your immediate reaction is depressing, because instead of anger or even disapproval, your instinct is to put your head down and reason that you and all the future generations should just live like a monkey, forever.

Sufficiently detailed telemetry is indistinguishable from surveillance because even if the goal isn't to target you right now, they will still have the secondary option of going back and inspecting all that data you sent them if they ever are interested in you. Another secondary use of telemetry is selling it to someone else to squeeze out a bit more money. There's no downside to doing this, so any business that collects a lot of varied telemetry and likes making money might as well do it. And once the data is in the hands of adtech businesses, it becomes a whole lot more like tracking you personally than just collecting some data for development. In Google's case, you don't even need to hand it over to anyone else, everything stays in-house.