A relative sacked a team at his finance firm for using AI.
Short version :
1. Document ( transcripts of phone conversations, Bloomberg chats, WhatsApp messages etc ) need to be collected and collated accurately on a periodic basis for an industry regulator.
2. The very highly paid team used AI to inaccurately perform the task.
3. The resulting errors could have resulted in jail time for the decision makers.
They were sacked for vibe-working, which is how AI is supposed to be used if you listen to some business hype. Of course it is not how it's supposed to be used according to people who actually know the current situation.
1. The terrible quality of the locally manufactured items. I am in Sydney and will absolutely not buy anything marked Made In Australia. I have been burnt too many times.
2. The nearly 100% mortality rate among the companies.
What does that even mean. It is design produced by the user and maker of the app. If you hire a designer that's neither, doesn't that actually make them the outsider?
He's not making a traditional art form as someone who's untrained. He's designing Calibre, and he's the most qualified person in the world in doing that.
Outsider design? It means it’s designed by someone self-taught or not classically trained in the subject. It’s neither insult nor praise, it’s a classification, though often used as a way to express something as being unconventional and interesting.
> It is design produced by the user and maker of the app. If you hire a designer that's neither, doesn't that actually make them the outsider?
No, because it refers to “outside the world of design” not “outside the world of this product”. It’s two words but a single term.
> He's not making a traditional art form as someone who's untrained.
Your parent comment didn’t claim they were making art. But they are designing the app are are clearly untrained in design. Again, that’s not an insult. How many of us here are self-taught programmers?
> He's designing Calibre, and he's the most qualified person in the world in doing that.
That doesn’t necessarily follow. If that were the case there would be no designers, everyone would just do their thing. The point of learning design is to understand what works and why and how to apply it. It is perfectly valid for you to have a vision of what you want the thing to do but to need help in presenting it more effectively.
Outsider art, outsider music refer to art, and even in those practices a lot of celebrated artists are the ones that eschew the established norms.
But design is functional. Grows organically by needs of the user. If so many people swear by Calibre, it is well designed for calibre’s use case. It is not only about the aesthetic design trends. They don’t need to apply a coat of liquid glass and modern icon treatment to make it well designed. Software like Calibre are a toolbox full of screwdrivers and random things that are not in the same color hue and size and rounded corner treatment. You open the toolbox and immediately know what you need to reach for and where, get the job done and close it.
This appeal to authority is why we end up with everything looking like Juicero of software. Shiny, the same components and pricing plan as
everything else. But absolutely soulless and often user hostile.
> Outsider art, outsider music refer to art, and even in those practices a lot of celebrated artists are the ones that eschew the established norms.
I don't think many of those artists were celebrated during their lifetime, or at least not until the their form became more widely accepted in the mainstream.
> Outsider art, outsider music refer to art, and even in those practices a lot of celebrated artists are the ones that eschew the established norms.
Which is what I said, in different words. If you understood the term, why did you ask what it meant?
> If so many people swear by Calibre
There’s no true alternative. A lot of people use Calibre despite how it looks, because it does all the things. The world of messing with ebooks outside the vetted stores isn’t that big.
> It is not only about the aesthetic design trends.
I didn’t even so much as hint that. Please don’t straw man.
> They don’t need to apply a coat of liquid glass and modern icon treatment to make it well designed.
Again, didn’t even so much as suggested that. I personally dislike Liquid Glass.
> toolbox
Again, there’s nothing wrong with being a toolbox nor have I claimed there is.
> This appeal to authority
There was no appeal to authority. You paid no attention to words in the comment, you fabricated an argument in your head and are fighting that.
Fucking hell, HN is tiring. Stop being so angry all the time, we’re not on opposing teams. Not every comment is a criticism or disagreement for you to rally against.
Calibre is great and I’m happy it exists. I recommend it to people despite not using it myself (I make my own tools). When I used it I found it to be very ugly and at times confusing and found it could benefit from applying some basic well-understood and researched design principles. But that’s all my opinion. You’re welcome to have yours, I don’t care, use whatever you like. Just please don’t mischaracterise my words and don’t come all angry and citing misapplied fallacies at me. I didn’t do that to you and would appreciate the same courtesy. Don’t stoke hate.
Sorry I made you feel like this. There are no shortage of “Calibre but well designed” tools, as long as Calibre has existed. I am just tired of hearing Calibre and other open source apps are badly designed as if that is an objective fact. So I ranted against a general sentiment rather than your arguments in particular and I did not mean to put words in your mouth or offend.
However, when can we accept a design stands the test of time and maybe it is in fact well designed? So many objects that are considered well designed today look that way because they got refined over the time and designed through their goals and constraints. Only in retrospect we call those well designed because they were original and not designed by committee. Can you give benefit of the doubt that maybe Gimp’s, Emacs’ and Calibre’s of the world might be in that category?
Your point would make even more sense if you realized that not everyone cares about capitalist goals when developing software. Some people want software to work for everyone, not just those with money or means.
I also want software to work for anyone. I never said anything about capitalist goals. I pointed out that the person building calibre can still be considered an "outsider" in the art sense, since they are not part of the mainstream who hires designers. Work on your reading comprehension bud.
No, you only want software to work in a specific way that requires more resources than necessary. Just because you don't understand the outcomes of your beliefs doesn't mean others do not.
Lots of people. It’s great that you don’t, really, but Calibre is very ugly¹ and I have no doubt that limits its adoption. Subconsciously, people associate ugly apps with unpolished or unfinished apps.
I don’t use Calibre (I rely instead on command-line and bespoke tools) but I do recommend it to less technical people and I always make it a point of saying “it’s very ugly but it does everything and does it correctly, it’s the gold standard for what you want to do” because I’m pretty sure if I didn’t add that disclaimer the people I recommend it to would think they downloaded the wrong thing or abandon it as soon they opened it.
¹ That’s just personal opinion, we don’t need to have a debate about that. If you find Calibre beautiful, more power to you.
> “I manage my Kindle reading list with home-made command line tools” is a very niche situation.
I don’t use a Kindle (it’s a Kobo, those are very hackable) and don’t use my tools to manage the reading list, I prefer to do that on device. But sure, I’m not claiming it’s for everyone, there’s a reason I recommend Calibre to other people. My needs are fairly minor, I don’t even use any of the popular alternative interfaces like KOReader.
> I’m impressed but also… that’s a lot of effort.
Not that much effort, and the tools have evolved as my habits did. I’ll give you one simple example of such a tool: I can select an EPUB and press a keyboard shortcut which actions it in Alfred to first convert it to to a Kobo EPUB with kepubify and then upload to Dropbox with rclone. I can then download it from the Kobo manually.
I had another which would take the URL of the frontmost browser tab, download and convert it to EPUB with pandoc, then it’d reuse the same kepubify and rclone steps. That one doesn’t work that well nowadays, with all the websites getting harder to access programatically due to all the LLM scraping.
Neither of those needs a lot of code, and I’m still relying on other tools for the heavy lifting. It’s just that for my specific personal needs, this is faster and more convenient than using Calibre.
Instead of mindlessly watching Fox News, you could learn to read, it is a very useful skill.
"Zuckerberg didn’t donate to Biden’s 2020 campaign, federal campaign finance records show.
He and his wife donated at least $400 million to two nonprofit organizations which distributed grants to state and local governments to help them conduct the 2020 election during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The donations came at a time when election offices were trying to transition to mail voting.
The money helped pay for material and services such as equipment to process mail ballots, protective equipment to curb the spread of the coronavirus, and drive-thru voting locations, The Associated Press reported.
The Center for Tech and Civic Life, a Chicago-based nonprofit, received and distributed the bulk of the money.
The Center for Election Innovation and Research, which is based in Washington, also issued grants."
My pessimistic view is that it is unlikely to end up any other way in the society where the only value of a person is their net worth, giving back to the community is a fringe belief for losers ("make money not friends" said someone's t-shirt I saw the other day) and foreign meddling is all but encouraged ("Russia, if you're listening"). Foreign dictators have deep pockets and they will always find receptive politicians. The Iron Curtain saved the West more than it saved the USSR.
Short version : 1. Document ( transcripts of phone conversations, Bloomberg chats, WhatsApp messages etc ) need to be collected and collated accurately on a periodic basis for an industry regulator.
2. The very highly paid team used AI to inaccurately perform the task.
3. The resulting errors could have resulted in jail time for the decision makers.
4. The team was removed.
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