Not in my experience. My library's DVDs and Blu-rays work great. I check one out every week or two.
I'd encourage anyone reading to go to your local library if you haven't been in a while. Check out a book. See if they have a makerspace. Do some remote work there. They're wonderful places. They become more and more important with every passing year.
Not many of those left in my local libraries. They downsized to popular fiction and a rack of magazines to introduce more sofas and space for charity cake stalls. And "mindful colouring-in" if you're around for the 4.5 days of the week that they're open.
Libraries threw away the one thing that made them unique, curated knowledge, in order to compete with Starbucks as a "third space".
It depends what you mean by "not allowed". Breaking ToS isn't a crime, but you might be sued for damages, but how can they show there were any damages?
"Cold calls annoy me" is one angle, and from that perspective, sure.
But "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is another angle. Because giant corporations may not need to make cold calls. It's the small bootstrapped startup that does.
Hopefully lawmakers will include provisions for small businesses making well-researched calls. Because otherwise, this is just one more way of pulling up the ladder.
Yeah this is something which got on my radar as a potential way to get web development clients, like just call companies with kind of bad websites and see if they need new ones?
This gotta be an outdated way to get business, but regardless of whether this would work on a small scale (havent tried yet) would this be considered spam aswell?
I certainly do. As usual the revolution is weeks away, but I continue to produce work better, faster and more reliably than my colleagues who have outsourced their brains to Claude.
You can tell me I'm not gonna make it and the last 5% is going to topple on the next model release, but the work I enjoy doesn't have precedents and it seems the plagiarism machine is quite bad at that specific flavour of knowledge work.
> I continue to produce work better, faster and more reliably than my colleagues who have outsourced their brains to Claude.
It matters little if your employer does not recognize/value that? Given the quality of most software nowadays, the output of Claude driven by a monkey appears to be perfectly acceptable for a lot of companies.
(yes, there's likely a big reckoning coming where all the slop and tech debt suddenly catches up with them, but that could be a decade off and you still need to pay rent in the meantime)
My employer pushes everybody heavily towards AI, but unsurprisingly that stops the moment the work is late or bad in a way that catches their management chain's attention.
I'm not doing work in the way they tell me to but the results are good enough that my performance reviews / job security is fine. For now!
That has nothing to do with your work being pointless or not (it is), but more you showcasing your insecurity of having to be smarter than your peers because they use LLMs.
Oh, I hadn't even considered the interpretation here where you're saying knowledge work is pointless and always has been. I'm not even going to engage with that one because I see the value and real world impact of my work every single week.
I don't think I'm smarter than my colleagues who use LLMs, for what it's worth. I just have the advantage of continuing to think, try, improve etc.
“Positive” is not required to avoid “pointlessness”. If you think work is pointless, you’re as helpless to argue with as a depressed suicidal. If you want you can easily argue nihilism and everything being pointless. But really?
Absolutely. Across the board I reject that. Knowledge work is still work, knowledge is power. Those who can use knowledge are powerful. For over a decade I've helped transform healthcare businesses into stable, profitable companies that can grow and help more providers help more patients. My knowledge has helped 6 different companies grow and help people. In 6 months my coworkers and I took a company that was losing $15m a year and brought it to break even, and then on to profitable sales of the three different business units into larger companies those units have blossomed with. I cut $2m in spending but improved performance and reliability because I came in with 20 years of knowledge and experience.
I make games, so I was never under the illusion that I was saving the world. But at the same time, art moves you, inspires you, reflects your culture, and overall has its own invisible tug on society.
You can definitely argue my work isn't essential. I'd never say my work is pointless.
I'd encourage anyone reading to go to your local library if you haven't been in a while. Check out a book. See if they have a makerspace. Do some remote work there. They're wonderful places. They become more and more important with every passing year.
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