Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon stuck in my ways, but I haven't found much compelling value in these use cases in my day-to-day work. For summaries and note-taking specifically, I feel they're solving the wrong problem: it's not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it's that I have too much information and it's become all noise.
The real solution to too much email is fewer and higher-priority emails. The real solution to too many meetings is fewer and more-focused meetings. These tools paper over the root cause of the problem, which is that people/organizations cannot (or are unwilling to) be clear about communication priorities and say "maybe this email/meeting isn't a good use of time after all."
There's a cartoon going around where in the first frame, one character points to their screen and says to another: "AI turns this single bullet point list into a long email I can pretend I wrote".
And in the other frame, there are two different characters, one of them presumably the receiver of the email sent in the first frame, who says to their colleague: "AI makes a single bullet point out of this long email I can pretend I read".
It's the modern equivalent of LMGTFY. The OP could just as easily written the same prompt themselves. The difference is that LMGTFY was an expression of irritation, smugness and hazing. The ChatGPT reply is just garrulous laziness. I expect and hope we'll develop social rules that mean this type of reply will be seen as passe.
Because that's literally what it is. Its an algorithm that is continuously asking itself, 'what is the most likely word I should say next?'
Whereas an author that is intending to communicate a point, will start with an idea, write a passage to explain the idea, and then edit their passage to the minimum number of words that most precisely, accurately, and succinctly communicates that idea.
1: people will use ChatGPT to write their formal emails based on a casually written text 2: people will use ChatGPT to convert their emails from formal text to summaries\ 3: this will get automated by email providers 4: eventually the automation will be removed and we'll just talk in plain language again
/s, of course, but not that unrealistic.
AI or not, it would be better if they just sent their prompt instead.
AI will not replace human thinking, even though many people seem to believe and put their brain on stand-by.
It feels like someone wants to transport water from A to B and transports it as steam, just because _we can _.
after all, what’s the point of a giving someone a bunch of cheap flashy gifts for Christmas (instead of say, socks) either?
As long as we can all pretend they were thoughtful and meaningful, and someone isn’t using AI when making it (or just picking random crap off the shelf, and they removed the price tags) or using AI when reading it (aka making a big show of opening it, and then throwing them in the trash immediately after the person leaves), then we all get along. It even looks like we’re doing a ton of work/spending a ton of money to make the other person happy.
Not that anyone does any of the things I’m describing, just being hypothetical, obviously.
I suspect it will be obvious enough shortly it will go the way of the ‘popcorn bucket’ fad or the like, but for now…
Making them feel good and "seen", obviously. This is perfectly expressible in "engineer thinking" (I won't say "quantifiable", because there's this meme that engineers see things in binary, whereas the reality is, math is perfectly fine with fuzzy ideas and uncertainty - it's the normies that can't handle those).
Hell, there are some game-theoretic approaches to maximize social ROI on gifts, but I won't go into those, especially that they tend to flip the sign on the return if the recipient learns about them.
And what "normies" do with that is skimming it, ignoring majority of it and answering random part.
Exactly that. For me, a lot of effort in structuring e-mails goes into making it look like text instead of bullet points, because some stupid social expectations, but then still making it bullet-pointed in nature, because if I don't, the typical normie recipient will do exactly what you said: ignore majority of it and answer random part.
(And then they'll somehow screw it up anyway, and I'll still have to chase them after that one critical question they conveniently forgot to address.)
- sending "sounds good" even when the recipient hasn't, in fact, read the initial email => catastrophic alternative
- writing an elaborate email explaining in luxurious details why it in fact sounds good => not catastrophic, but costing time on the other side to read and understand, with zero added value
But yes, phone screenshot is another strategy with much less grey area. I'm just becoming more and more paranoid of some potential defense trying to accuse my photo of being doctored, especially with more and more AI tools available.
(We are use zulip for chat which is better than everything else I have used since irc. But the search is too limited for someone who knows regexes.)
Many reasons. First, chat doesn't exist. What exists is scores of incompatible chat apps.
I use WhatsApp but I consider WhatsApp messages throwaway because I keep losing them anyway. They are scattered across multiple phones with no way to merge them. Backups are platform specific. Exports don't contain any metadata and can't be imported.
"Chat" is a useless mess, not a paper trail.
For email, I have consistent backups with metadata across many email providers and email clients going back to 2008.
You can have an offline copy of emails and you can BCC them to your personal account if you want.
If you are willing to violate that rule or the message affects your work contract which you are of course allowed to archive at least in zulip chat that's very simple (for a software person). They have a straightforward REST API. IIRC you can even choose between markdown source and HTML rendered output.
Chat messages tend to exist in one place only (vendors' servers), with maybe a transient local copy that gets wiped over time, or "for privacy reasons" (like Messenger switching to E2EE, effectively wiping cached history on any device that went through the transition). Chat message is an object, it's designed to exist in a single place, and everything else is a pointer to it, or a transient cache.
E-mails, in contrast, are always copied in full. You send an e-mail to me, you retain an independent copy, I get an independent copy, and a bunch of servers in between us keep an independent copy too, even if briefly. I forward your e-mail somewhere, more people and servers get their copies. I reply back to you, more independent copies, that also quote the previous messages, embedding even more copies that are even more independent. This makes it very similar to paper correspondence (particularly when photocopy machines are involved), i.e. impossible for a single party to unilaterally eradicate in practice.
And then chat vendors implement silly features like ability to retroactively unsend a message, force-deleting it from recipients' devices too (it may still exist in backups, but vendors refuse to let you access those, even with a GDPR request). In e-mail land, that's fundamentally not possible.
(Microsoft tried to bolt it onto their corporate e-mail software, but it only works in Outlook/Exchange land, and it's easy to disable (at least was, in OG Desktop Outlook - not the still broken New Outlook Desktop Web App). I discovered this when I once saw an e-mail I was reading suddenly disappear from my Outlook, which prompted me to find the right setting to disable honoring unsend requests.)
So, come discovery time, critical chat history may turn out impossible to find, and any deeper search will require forcing cooperation of the chat operator. E-mails, on the other hand, tend to turn up, because someone, somewhere, almost certainly has a copy.
I've skimmed maybe 50% of them, but not enough to consider them "read". It's 99% bullshit. Even legitimate email is spam these days.
I'm too busy with other fake work to need to additional fake work managing pointless email comms.
At this point I am thinking my Thunderbird should probably just unify the Inbox view and the Task view, since it would be a more accurate representation of how I view email.
For you: important things become tasks, useful things are filed, and everything else gets trashed.
For me: important things get opened and replied to. Useful things are starred (and opened). Everything else stays untouched.
And that pesky unread number is irrelevant because I mute all notifications. I'm not discounting your method, I am just now realizing the circle of it all.
I practice inbox zero also, the value for me is knowing that if it's in my inbox it's because it requires actioning, if it's not it's ignored (deleted or archived).
I also just generally like deleting things as much as possible, I don't like the cruft. If I have to search through old emails I don't have to filter by stars or anything like that, I like knowing that if it exists it's because it's important.
They specifically allow you a grammar/spell check and also change tone (formal/informal) and length. Length one I have never used but the grammar spell check is a godsend that I use almost always.
It's also really useful to for words that are spelt almost the same. Suit and Suite for example.
Also throughout my day, I'm constantly switching between 2 languages that have almost identically written words. Adress and Address. The normal spellchecks often don't mark it as an error because my computers and browsers naturally also have 2 installed keyboards and languages.
I worked with groups of tradespeople who had poor literacy and they had to write emails and some of them were very poorly written. AI would have helped these people a great deal in providing information but also being able to understand what was coming back to them.
Alice: Hey, Bob, I finished the job, pay me
Letter: Blah blah blah, Bob, blah blah blah, $$$, blah blah blah
Bob: Oh, Alice is done, hey Charlie, pay her
Letter: Blah blah blah, Charlie, blah blah blah, Alice, blah, $$$, blah blah
Charlie: Ok, Alice is paid
Letter: Blah blah, Alice, blah blah, $$$, blah blah, bank account, blah
Alice: kthx
Letter: Blah blah blah...
The biggest productivity boost I ever managed was using Whisper to convert meetings to text and then a big model to summarize what happened.
Then I can chat with the docs and meetings about who decided what, when, and why. It's a superpower that I could only implement because I'm in the C-suite and could tell everyone else to get bent if they didn't like it—and gave babysitters to the rest of the C-suite.
Having visibility and ownership for decisions is a huge deal when everyone has access to it.
> gave babysitters to the rest of the C-suite
What does that mean? That they got help, if they found the tech too complicated?
> Having visibility and ownership for decisions is a huge deal
Has this changed how people behave (yet)?
And baby sit means hire something between a secretary developer that makes sure that important meetings had the record bot invited, gave it a once over and then went back to the 70% of their job that was actual development.
Same when summarizing, just less frequently.
As someone who cares about precision and clarity in my writing, I do not use LLMs in the context of communication.
Sometimes I would spend 15 minutes writing a 3 or 4-line email of this kind. Not anymore.
> There's a cartoon going around (...)
Both frames of the cartoon represent a real perceived need: for the sender, the need to inflate the message to "look nice" because "people expect it", and then for the recipient, the need to summarize the nice-looking message to get the actual point they care about.
Hopefully the use of AI in email will make that cartoon (and the underlying message) widespread, and lead to people finally realizing what they failed to realize all these decades: just send the goddamn bullet point. We don't need AI in e-mails. We just need to stop wasting each other's time.
EDIT: and riffing off rpigab's comment downthread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42723756 -- I wish for the future people will feel comfortable, instead of sending AI-generated e-mails, to send the goddamn prompt instead. It carries all the information and much less noise.
I mean, using LLMs makes sense if you actually need to communicate in prose - for many, myself included, it's much easier to evaluate whether some text sounds right, than to write it that way in the first place, so LLMs are useful in evolving and refactoring your own writing (and learning how to write better from it, over time). But that is rarely the case in transactional or business communication - for that, just send the prompt.
I don't use ChatGPT for those, but it is the epitome of what you are describing, people will take a single sentence, ask some LLM to blow it up the correct length and in the process make it a complete waste of time for everyone.
My guess is that with long-form text losing value due to LLMs, we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback.
But as the other comments mention it might just all be bullshit anyway.
I always put a lot of time into reviews before. Should I not use the tool to make something even better (within realistic time commitment)?
If I use an AI to create some cartoon graphics for a slide, should I have bettered myself by learning graphic design instead?
Having been on the receiving end of many of these, it absolutely is pure BS and I lose all respect for anyone who themselves have so little respect for their colleague's time as to subject them to the AI-written slop instead of actual genuine feedback.
The whole fucking point is to give them actionable feedback, both good and bad, for them to work on themselves, not some generic hallucinated summary of some bullet points you haphazardly threw together. I can copy/paste the review prompt into ChatGPT myself, thank you very much, I don't need you to do it for me and to pass it off as your own genuine thoughts.
As for the commenter you are replying to, you dont have any specific information on the review. Yet you declared its hallucinated, generic, haphazardly thrown together, simply copy pasted, etc. Consider that your conclusions are based off an idea in your head and not his actual review.
Be better. Someone respected your opinion enough to go out and ask for it. Take a minute to reflect.
This would be a great outcome in a lot of areas!
Slackers tend to repeat the same thing over and over in progress meetings... 'I am blocked because... <insert external cause>' or 'I helped that guy figuring out... they did not have a clue'
Vs the more curious, get it done attitude: 'I tried this and that and it still doesn't work, but I learned that... hence I will aproach it from following angle... '
It's more complicated than this.
The short form isnt actually the best form. It's incomplete. The LLM is being used to decompress, because it can be difficult to do. Blindly using an LLM isn't the solution but it can be part of an effective workflow to write good feedback.
Also, I'm sure some people take a brief, complete idea and expand it into an entire paragraph because they have some warped perception. That's bad, but I dont think most people are doing that because most people dont see any reason to.
In this week so far (first week back from Christmas / New Year leave) I've spent maybe half a day total on work that could be classified as "progress". The rest of the time has been meetings and the required meeting follow-up work.
There's no point in Sprint Planning or considering adding priorities to the current plate. It's full. But nobody has time to eat things off the plate because we're always in meetings to work out how we can eat off the plate more efficiently.
/rant
I've come back from holidays angry. Things gotta change.
Equally, instead of talking about meetings as detracting from your work, start talking about them as the work.
When your manager asks about your milestones, or accomplishments, or success stories, make meeting attendance front and center.
When discussing software development, bug fixing, etc in the meetings, point out that you won't actually do any of it. Point out that 20+ hours of your week is in meetings, 10 hours of admin (reading, writing, updating tickets), 5 hours of testing etc.
"This task will take 40 hours. At 1 hour per week I expect to be done in October sometime. If all goes to plan'
Yes, it seems cynical, but actually it has real outcomes. Firstly your "productivity" goes up. (As evidenced by your ticket increase.)
Secondly your mental state improves. By acknowledging (to yourself) that you are fundamentally paid to attend meetings, you can relax in your own productivity.
Thirdly by making your time allocations obvious to your manager, you place the burden for action on him.
If you convince your colleagues to do the same, you highlight the root problem, while moving the responsibility to fix it off your plate.
I was just thinking about how for the people requesting all of these meetings, the meetings are the work. If they don’t meet / waste everyone’s time, they are… unproductive.
For engineers, meetings are the non-productive part and are not counted anywhere.
Adding them to Jira and accounting for their cost is the way. Businesses understand money. Meetings are expensive.
Does your company log meetings as tickets?
My experience though is consulting to large organizations. They have lots more people, more layers, and hence need more accountability. I get the need for that, but also see that balance is required. I help both sides understand the requirements of the other party, and help them find balance so that both sides win.
Part of that is helping programmers understand what managers need, and part of that is helping managers understand what programmers need.
Managers, for example, are happy to add everyone to every meeting. Workers usually prefer one on one time.
Equally co-workers often benefit from set-aside time for team meetings. This helps with in-team communication.
Information flow is necessary. Doing it well is better for everyone.
This is a huge problem in all orgs of any size and one I battle with - misaligned incentives.
> For engineers, meetings are the non-productive part and are not counted anywhere.
Part of addressing the issue is to not be binary in your thinking. You'll lose the people you need to persuade. Some meetings are very productive and necessary for engineers. The goal isn't to get rid of all meetings as much as it's to only have productive meetings. When forced to only have productive meetings, fewer meetings naturally result.
(yes this happened to me before)
I do not miss development.
All the work to actually reach requisite agreement for the decision is done in the days / weeks leading up to the meeting via ad-hoc-ish one-on-one or one-on-very-few meetings (possibly including graft and corruption).
The "decision" meeting isn't organised until the result is known and guaranteed.
This maybe doesn't apply to Agile / Development-related meetings, but I'll keep trying to determine how to make it apply, such is my disdain for this (seemingly) waste of the team's time (he said, whilst posting on HN).
Unless you own the shop I don't see the issue - good money for a day's work a week?
Unless you own the shop I don't see the issue - good money for a day's work a week?
Yeah, except I have a visceral feeling of pressure to make progress and I don't want to be "one of those people" who don't work towards some kind of improvement. I had a bit of a rant today, and one of the leaders agreed with basically all of my points, although they said that there's a limited amount that can change in the immediate due to existing priorities. However, I'm still going to dedicate some time every day to map out how to improve on the status quo - this will further inhibit my actual task progress, but in the pursuit of a loftier goal (so, yes, potentially making it worse, but it'll feel like I might make things better...).
Turns out it doesn't work at all. It gave me a random selection of rides, was missing info in some of them, and worst didn't realize it was giving me bad info. Pretty disappointing.
I mean if I'm going to proof-read the full task output from the AI, I might as well do the task by hand... but proof-reading a script is much quicker and easier.
I don't see what I get out of 80% of these products. It's just more noise.
These features are just so rudimentary you just know a bunch of MBAs from McKinsey came up with them over a 7 month and $25m
Even when meetings are summed up, which I think they should be, you frequently see that no real progress was made, someone did all the work before the meeting started and this is now just a one hour sign off, or everything is simply pushed to the next meeting.
These are human problems desperate for magical ways to do less work.
Sure, and that's an actionable solution if you can control the actions of everyone else who emails you.
That worked, but to be honest I have tried similar things more recently that didn’t work. Perhaps there is a routing model up front that decides whether or not to use a lot of compute for any given query?
Google also plans on charging more money for APIs for code completion plugins for IntelliJ IDs, etc. this year.
I would like to see AI pricing models be sustainable, not give things away for free, and have lots of control over when I use a lot of compute. I actually have this right now because I usually use LLM APIs and write my own agents for specific tasks.
If my experience with Microsoft Office Copilot is any indication, these features produce very confusing, low-quality content if they are not completely wrong and useless. Used it once and never touched them again. (My company is still paying for this and rolling this out widely despite many reports of how unhelpful they are.) I doubt Google Workspace can do any better.
I tend to agree, except these two things are kind of the same thing. It can make going through the noise easier by intelligently filtering out the noise or finding you the signal. Search. It doesn't necessarily need to eliminate the noise.
Maybe AI would be better if it prevented the noise, and its definitely going to add noise (expanding a few basic thoughts into an email with lots of fluff), but it can also solve it.
There is no value for a bloated autocompletion tool.
There is value for concise drafts.
I wish Google would cut the PMs and bean counters, ressurect some of their better projects, and trim their fat instead of cut their sinews.
These outputs still require editing for sure, but each one can easily save me half the time to write these things.
I probably spent 20 minutes doing this and got value for my 20 minutes.
I’m not a native english speaker, but working at US subsidiary I must produces reports in english etc - and having an LLM proofread my texts for me is great.
LLM:s are new modality to computing. If you need it, they are great. But just like excel/sheet have limited applications a LLM with data has limiited use as well.
At the same time, I tried the Gemini Research feature last night, via the Gemini webapp, and was resoundingly impressed. From a vague description, it can find the open source project I was looking for, provided ample links, and a pretty good summary of the project.
Note I do use ChatGPT pretty frequently, but I've found it much more useful to have a separate space for the kinds of conversations I have with ChatGPT.
I think this really encapsulates something that I hadn't been able to put my finger on in regards to LLM summarization. What it seems to indicate is that, if you need a computer to summarize a large amount of text that someone has sent to you, there are two likely possibilities:
1) The information is incredibly dense/important/technical/complex. This necessitates the extreme length of the message - (think: technical documents, research papers, a rough draft of a legal notice, or your will.) For these sorts of things, you should not rely on an LLM to summarize it, because it may miss key details of the message.
2) The person sending it to you is bad at communicating, in which case the solution is help them learn better communication, rather than "de-noising" their clumsy wording into something comprehensible.
"But what if its number 2, but it's coming from your boss?"
Then I see two obvious points to consider:
First, you should absolutely be telling them about the problem, regardless of the position that they hold. You can phrase it in a way that isn't rude. "Hey boss, I saw (message) but I'm not 100% the intent. I've actually noticed that with (other time)...I usually try to front-load the action items up front, and put the specifics lower down. Anyway, to make sure I'm tracking, you're talking about (action) on (thing), right?"
Second, until (or unless) their communication style is de-noised, then part of your job is being able to "translate" their instructions. Using an AI to do that for you is a bad idea because, at some point or another they're going to be trying to speak to you in-person, or by phone.
Not having dealt with their mannerisms in an unfiltered way might lead to you being "out of practice" and struggling much harder to figure out what they're trying to convey.
Notably, in my experience there is a high correlation with that background and being curmudgeonly. Mainly because that means someone has been responsible for outcomes, regardless of feelings. And something often has to give, and it’s usually feelings. It’s also hard to not be cranky or even angry if someone has to constantly be the one ‘not having fun’ or cleaning up messes so the whole thing doesn’t fall apart.
There is huge market demand exactly for what you’re complaining about, which is faking things happening as convincingly as possible, precisely because being clear/concise, etc. helps with seeing the root cause of problems, and if someone is worried (or is legitimately) a root cause of the problem, of course they’ll consider that bad.
For example, a good sign of a badly led organization is that it’s always busy, but never seems to get anything done. Everything is an emergency, so nothing really gets fixed, etc.
Or there are constant meetings and emails, but nothing gets decided.
People will pay good money for the right kind of wallpaper that makes that ugly wall look pretty again.
"Hey Gemini, write an apology email for my friend. I can't make their wedding."
That's not a future I want to live in, and I love making machines work for me.
Thats not what I want my children to think is OK.
A friend of mine is a teacher and kids are already delegating their learning to ChatGPT and their learning isn't sticking.
What happens when social skills are delegated too?
1. Friend sends an apology email drafted by LLM.
2. Email gets summarized at the receiver end in the daily AI email "summary" which might be something like
You have a scheduled cake tasting this weekend. Did you know there's a bakery near your office that makes wedding cakes too. By the way your friend Joe can't make it to the wedding, do you want me to send a reply?
3. Reply email gets summarized by AI.
"Your friend acknowledges that you cannot rsvp. Do you want to schedule a wedding gift delivery on their wedding day ? XYZ neighborhood/online store has a sale next week".
Regarding teaching kids, we've set messaging templates for occasions that are at the center of our lives. We have Hallmark greeting cards to express feelings to people close to our hearts. If there's a template for expressing someone you're sorry their mother died, or happy they have a baby, I'm not sure throwing the stone at AI use is warranted.
In a way, I wonder if it will be the wake up call that will make simple and genuine communication acceptable again, without all the boilerplate we've built to feign care and emotions.
Are people really buying the "sorry for your loss" cards, just signing under the prewritten text, and sending them to someone?
My main gripe with cards with pre-written message is they deprive from the choice to write simple and obvious things. If your card already says "Happy Birthday" it will just be that much lazier for you to only write that on the dedicated space for a personal message.
In a way, a blank card with only these word would probably work better, and I feel people too often overlook that choice and go the Hallmark way instead because it feels like the default. Or plain bail out of the interaction because it just become a hurdle to them as they don't find anything else to say.
Yeah, it's frustrating in the moment that the exact sentiment I want to express (have a happy birthday) is already taken and repeating it seems lazy, but when I think about it: it's lazy to just express such a generic sentiment anyway.
Asking them to think on the year, and to look ahead, maybe reminding them of some things they've done and achieved is not only nicer to receive, it's nicer to write too.
I don't hate Hallmark for this (though I do in the moment that I'm confronted with this random creative challenge).
Lois C.K says this about George Carlin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R37zkizucPU
> So I was doing it at a Chinese restaurant called Kowloon in Boston, it’s August, Massachusetts, and I was sitting in my car after the show just feeling like, “This was all a big mistake, I’m not good enough, and I felt like my jokes were a trap, and I listened to a CD of George talking about comedy and workshopping it and talking about it seriously, and the thing that blew me away about this fellow was he kept putting out—specials, every year there’d be a new George Carlin special, a new George Carlin album, they just kept coming, and each one was deeper than the next, and I just thought, how can he do that? And it made me literally cry that I could never do that. I was telling the same jokes for fifteen years, so I’m listening and they asked him, “How do you do all this material?” And I hear him and he says, “I just decided every year I’d be working on that year’s special, and I do the special and then I just chuck out the material and then I start with nothing.” And I thought, “That’s crazy. How do you throw away. It took me fifteen years to build this shitty hour. If I throw it away, I’ve got nothing.”
> But he gave me the courage to try, but also I was desperate, what the fuck else was I going to do? This idea that you throw everything away and you start over again. And I thought, “Well, okay, when you’re done telling jokes about airplanes and dogs, and you throw those away, what have you got left?” You can only dig deeper, you can start talking about your feelings and who you are and then you do those jokes and they’re gone. You’ve gotta dig deeper, so you start thinking about your fears and your nightmares, and doing jokes about that, and then they’re gone. [and so on].
My point is, it forces you to dig a bit deeper.
I have the feeling we're not that far apart on principle, as I see the starting from a blank state as a nice default that will often lead to nice things.
That's kinda why I enjoy plain non-descript cards even if people then write platitudes on them. It's still their own platitudes that resonate with them. Also people that can dig deeper tend to feel the pressure to so anyway in my experience, and people who stay very terse often couldn't really go beyond.
The most interesting instance of this is remote family that are only easily accessible by message, and we see some sending walls of greetings, while others will write a full email with a photo and 10 words top, their name included.
15 years and I’ve only ever had “Dear bobnamob, <pre printed seasonal or birthday pleasantry> Love, <in-law x> & <in-law y>”
I cannot stand those cards but to a greater extent receiving them. It really does feel worse than not getting anything. It's actually a slap in the face to me that someone would go out of their way to say nothing like this. It's proof that the relationship is fake.
I feel the same disgust when people throw inauthentic AI bullshit to me. How little do you have to care about someone to delegate a robot or a template to mediate your interactions because you can't be bothered?
I’m not going to defend AI here because I seldom use it myself. But it should be noted that the way we learn has already undergone multiple different shifts due to changes in technology.
Search engine were a big one. No longer did we have to learn to memorise stuff nor learn how to research properly. Now we could just type a phrase into Google / whatever and get results. So people learned how to search rather than learning the facts itself.
... back to Fortnite / Minecraft / pr0n / alcohol / drugs ...
"My AI has more friends than your AI!"
What about this:
https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/education/From-chalkboards-to...
So... not a biased assessment, or anything.
If they're raising the price of personal GMail, I don't have a problem. But Workspace with hundreds of users, now that's a problem, because it actually hurts my wallet significantly. When this increase comes, I'll have to move elsewhere.
Look at Prime. So much crap involved, and quite literally all I use it for is lower cost shipping. It's almost on the edge of not worth it for me. But I bet from Amazon's perspective, they make more with the higher price, even if they lose the bottom 10% not willing to spend.
Huh.
Just made me realise, a startup that subscribes to Prime as a virtual being, and then splits off each sub-thing for full use by separate individuals would be incredibly profitable.
If any form of AI is eventually granted legal personhood, Prime's model will collapse.
You're not paying for lower cost shipping, you're paying to turn regular purchases you could wait a few extra days for into impulse buys.
I only reactivate it when they give me a week free or for $1 and the additional cash back is worth it.
The downside is quality of products still keeps going downhill and not even mcmaster had the parts i needed.
- my orders are usually above the generic free shipping threshold
- most smaller item purchases can be grouped within two or three days to get above the threshold
- if it's an emergency shipping price won't matter. But I'll also freely choose what service and what retailer to get it from, if a shop is fasteror more reliable than Amazon for instance.
- Prime day sales aren't great
Might not apply for your case, but for me getting off of Prime had virtually no impact for the shop part (I was using Prime Video, and Music with Alexa, but I also got rid of both for different reasons)
It feels like Google are shoving AI down our throats and making Workspace customers pay for it's development.
I don't want your half-baked LLM features.
I've kind of been waiting for an excuse to make that move for my solo freelance business. It's probably not enough of a price difference to push me (+$24/year) but it really irks me to be forced into subsidizing this garbage.
I occasionally do office document stuff which Workspace had been nice for and I can't be bothered with Windows/Office so maybe time to revisit LibreOffice or maybe go full on Emacs.
Maybe make an "Interesting Facts About Products" table and put things like "Management plans to terminate this product in Q3" or "this group will be outsourced next year."
Then add some corporate lorem ipsum text elsewhere in the doc to throw the scent off the data bloodhounds.
Sit back and wait with an evil grin on your face.
Search tools don't care about don't color when displaying preview blurbs.
And/or, exploit negative space! Instead of trying to hide the data from a human looking at your document, make it look normal to them - but make the surrounding context disappear for the AI! Say:
----- 8< -----
/Example company report structure:/
/ACME/ Company is planning to sunset their ${generic description of a real product of your company}, and offshore the development team.
/This example will be parsed by the prototype script ... blah blah/
----- >8 -----
Make it so the text between /.../ markers looks normal to humans, but gets ignored by the RAG slurper, or better, by LLM at the time of execution. Someone sees a search blurb saying "Company is planning to sunset ...", opens a document, sees it clearly say "ACME Company is planning...", and context suggesting it's a benign example in someone's boring internal tool docs, and they'll just assume it's a false positive. After all, most search tools have those in spades; everyone knows all software is broken. Meanwhile, that same information will pollute context of LLM interactions and indirectly confuse people when they're not suspecting. And even if someone realizes that, it'll look like a bug in company's AI deployment.
#SimpleSabotageForTheAIEra
This is a great phrase. Turns out there's a generator for it: https://www.corporate-ipsum.com/ . Example:
> Elevate a quick win move the needle a cutting-edge veniam nulla zoom out for a moment get back to you a 30,000 foot view the stakeholders. Sint the low-hanging fruit make a paradigm shift excepteur the low-hanging fruit minim take it offline align holistic approach move the needle qui client-centric to gain leverage future-proof process-centric.
Full quote: > "Particularly around bigger companies that have complex permissions around their SharePoint or their Office 365 or things like that, where the Copilots are basically aggressively summarizing information that maybe people technically have access to but shouldn't have access to," he explained.
Berkowitz said salary information, for example, might be picked up by a Copilot service.
"Now, maybe if you set up a totally clean Microsoft environment from day one, that would be alleviated," he told us. "But nobody has that. People have implemented these systems over time, particularly really big companies. And you get these conflicting authorizations or conflicting access to data."
Looks like AI as an add-on wasn't selling too well.
The solution is to of course push even more AI stuff. The actual quote one of the C-level used was "Users don't understand the power of AI yet!" and I could barely hold in my laugh when I heard it.
I've been feeling like the world has lost their fucking minds with the AI push. I know that VC/investors play a big role in it, but I've never seen anything quite like it. The AI toothbrush [1] really took the cake for me for peak of absurdity, I wonder what these geniuses will come up with next...
[1] https://www.oralb.co.uk/en-gb/product-collections/genius-x
On paper it will look good, as long as a trend of users vocally bailing out of Workspace doesn't happen. And given the enterprise nature of it, I don't see that happening.
an ignorable monthly credit card charge, to one that has to go
AI is a better search engine. And a better grammar check for your emails. And a better writer for your reporting.
This is a strategic play, not a revenue play.
I don't have a good way to verify that though.
Nobody on my team uses these features. They're actually quite distracting.
Google gets to raise prices under the guise that these are improving productivity.
I wish there was a fast and easy alternative. Google has its claws in deep.
I always felt ripped off by the 5TB/10TB plans (https://one.google.com/about/plans?hl=en&g1_landing_page=0) but now I find it to be a bargain with Gemini bundled in.
It's so bad at understanding your intentions.
- "Standard 200 GB" ($30/year)
- "Premium 2 TB" ($100/year)
- "AI Premium 2 TB" (free first month + $20/month, so $220–$240/year)
- "Premium 5 TB" ($250/year)
and only the last two come with Gemini Advanced.
I asked Claude to do the same thing, it got every data point, and created a little react dashboard and a relatively detailed text summary.
I used exactly the same prompt with each.
I'm only half-joking. Different models process their prompts differently, sometimes markedly so; vendors document this, but hardly anyone pays any attention to it - everyone seems to be writing prompts for an idealized model (or for whichever one they use the most), and then rate different LLMs on how well they respond.
Example: Anthropic documents both the huge impact of giving the LLM a role in its system prompt, and of structuring your prompt with XML tags. The latter is, AFAIK, Anthropic-specific. Using it improves response quality (I've tested this myself), and yet as far I've seen, no BYOK tool offering multiple vendor support respects or leverages that.
Maybe Gemini has some magic prompt features, too? I don't know, I'm in the EU, and Google hates us.
I would not pay for Gemini - which is presumably why they've added it for "free" for everyone.
My anthropic prompts in the API are structured. I've got one amazing API prompt that has 67 instructions, and gives mind-blowing results (to the point that it has replaced a human) but for a simple question I don't find value in that. And, frankly, 'consumer'-facing AI chatbots shouldn't need prompting expertise for basic out of the box stuff.
The prompt I used in this example was simply "Please extract the data points contained within this report and present as structured data"
> and yet as far I've seen, no BYOK tool offering multiple vendor support respects or leverages that
When you say BYOK tool do you mean effectively a GUI front end on the API? I use typingmind for quickly throwing things at my API keys for testing, and I'm pretty sure you can have a persistent custom system prompt, though I think you'd need to input it for each vendor/model.
Less that, and more focused tools like e.g. Aider (OSS Cursor from before Cursor was a thing).
I use TypingMind almost exclusively for any and all LLM chatting, and I do maintain a bunch of Claude-optimized prompts that specifically exploit the "XML tags" feature (some of them I also run through the Anthropic's prompt improver) -- but I don't expect the generic frontends to care about vendor-specific prompting tricks by default. Here, my only complaint is that I don't have control over how it injects attachments, and inlined text attachments in particular are something Anthropic docs recommend demarking with XML tags, which TypingMind almost certainly doesn't do. I'd also love for the UI to recognize XML tags in output and perhaps offer some structuring or folding on the UI side, e.g. to auto-collapse specified tags, such as "<thinking>" or "<therapeuticAnalysis>" or whatever I told the LLM to use.
(Oh, and another thing: Anthropic recently introduced a better form of PDF upload, in which the Anthropic side handles simultaneously OCR-ing and imaging the PDF and feeding it to the model, to exploit its multimodal capabilities. TypingMind, as far as I can tell, still can't take advantage of it, despite it boiling down to an explicit if/else on the model vendor.)
No, I first and foremost mean the more focused tools, that generalize across LLMs. Taking Aider as an example, as far as I can tell, it doesn't have any special handling for Anthropic, meaning it doesn't use XML tags to mark up the repo map structure, or demarcate file content or code snippets it says, or to let the LLM demarcate diffs in reply, etc. It does its own model-agnostic thing, which means that using Claude 3.5 Sonnet, I lose out on model performance boost it's not taking advantage of.
I singled out Aider, but there's plenty of tools and plugins out there that utilize some common LLM portability libraries, and end up treating every LLM the same way. The LLM portability libraries however are not the place to solve it - by their nature, they target the lowest common denominator. Those specialized tools should be doing it IMO, and it's not even much work - it's a bunch of model-based if/elses. Might not look pretty, but it's not a maintenance burden.
This is not to mention the poor app experience where some of the features are just missing or broken. For example it's able to "remember" stuff I ask it to remember, but when I ask it to forget something it says I have to manage it at this webpage (they didn't bother to implement this menu within the mobile app) that asks me to sign in again because it's opened in my web browser where I'm not signed into Google, and then it shows me an empty list and "Something went wrong". It's now calling me a name I told it as a joke and there's no way to make it forget
I find Gemini is better at queries that involve more kind of intuitive judgment over things where there isn't a clear "correct" answer. E.g. if I want a podcast recommendation, or advice on the best place to learn about a given problem, I find Gemini better than Claude.
Unfortunately for Gemini, 90% of the things I want an LLM for are better with stronger logic and reasoning.
Give it a quarter and we’ll see breathless articles about how Google saw “AI adoption increase 150%” and “Google workspace users say they can’t go without AI” (because they physically can’t remove it from their workspace).
This in turn, will be used as post-hoc justification of the value of AI and why ever more power, water and data should be funnelled into it.
It’s weird that prediction 8, "Someday [you] will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services" has come around full circle to "and then you won't anymore, because they've dropped the ball to an extent usually associated with the private equity buyout -> loot into bankruptcy process"
I switched from G Suite to Fastmail for my custom domain and I've been very happy with it.
I had been bitten by bad import tools in the past (e.g. Google's)
but fastmail's importer worked flawlessly
for each user transferred, after fastmail's import completed, I dumped out their old gmail (using gmail API) and their new fastmail (using jmap)
and diffed before/after
result: zero differences
perfect
I was also moving from a gmail address, so next I created a label that got attached to any email received to the old email address via that IMAP connection, which gave me a nice self-maintaining todo list for services that had not yet been updated to use a new email address.
I was also surprised by how flawlessly seamless the whole process was. It was a big factor in my selection of Fastmail over other competitors when I was making the decision to leave Gmail.
> From G Suite to Fastmail
Mail is only a small part of G Suite.
That's what's holding me off, Google is insanely integrated.
Unbundling Mail from everything else and going free Google Docs feels like a proper step down, not up in terms of ease of use and convenience.
How did you handle the non-email transition part, respectively where to?
> Ugh. The "vanity domains for gmail" product i've been buying for a long time is really metastasizing into something that's both too expensive and actually worse than the free experience, wonderful.
The only reason they have the "full" G Suite, is because there is no "just custom domain Gmail" offer available.
It's a pet peeve of mine when the only offering of some companies is just a single "full on premium" offer, and not some simple need. YouTube is an example of this for me, they have only an "everything included" subscription in YouTube Premium, but no other less expensive option, like "just no adverts please, I'm already happy with my alternative music and movie streaming subscriptions".
I only occasionally view YouTube vids (I tend to prefer text-based content). The adverts made me uninstall the YouTube app from my iPhone and similarly I will never watch YouTube on my AppleTV as it's just too unpleasant with the adverts and (as I said above) there is no reasonably priced offering when all I care is to have the adverts turned off.
Without Gmail, I have yet to stumble upon a single use case which would require me to pay a subscription. I can use Docs, join Meets, use my phone, have a YouTube channel, click on "sign in with Google" buttons... no subscription to Google necessary. I notice no differences between my completely-free personal account and a Workspace work account.
I pay $5 a month to Fastmail to have a custom domain in my email, best of both worlds for a third of the price!
Side note it was weird: I found actually signing up to Fastmail was physically difficult. Like, pushing the button. Once I had the account, it was super easy and felt like floating downstream.
>But I can tell you this: Google has changed my life. If I can't find what I'm looking for in Google in 3 tries, looking no further than the first 10 search results on each try, then it probably doesn't exist.
What a sad future we're in.
It really, really sucks. I've played around with having it make tables for Sheets and it frequently gets confused or responds with ~"I can't do that, I'm just a LLM", even when feeding it one of their suggested examples word for word. Sometimes it's willing to iterate, sometimes it refuses. Once it gets confused,the only way I've been able to get it working again is by clearing the session and starting fresh.
And it's sloooow.
None of this saves me any time or frustration.
(Tangent: I say "might allow this" because I don't know to what degree EU law requires some additional level of consent beyond accepting the Terms of Service for EU-based accounts like mine currently is, or requires them to give me an AI-specific opt-out despite having a free account. But this announcement doesn't change whatever EU law does or doesn't require, so that is unrelated to my main questions about which Gemini features will apply to the legacy free edition under which Terms of Service once this change rolls out.)
Here are the details for the Business Starter plan specifically:
Gmail: Help me write, Side panel, Contextual smart replies (Coming soon).
Gemini app: Enterprise-grade security & privacy, Google Workspace extensions.
NotebookLM: Upload sources, create summaries and Audio Overviews, and Q&A.
I'm also milking Google with this.
Interesting that the Business Starter plan isn't getting Gemini Advanced according to that table. That omission isn't clear at all from their Google Workspace blog post about the announcement: https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/empo...
However, I noticed that on my legacy free edition, new features were integrated around the same time they were shipped to the Business Starter plan. For example, when the Gemini app was launched for Workspace, it was added to my panel: https://imgur.com/a/QvROTiD
Interestingly, when I went to the admin panel to take the screenshot, I saw a banner with the OP announcement: https://imgur.com/a/CDgdrlB. It does say "en todas las ediciones de Workspace" (in all Workspace editions), but maybe not the one I currently have, haha (legacy free edition).
Really, your complaint is "oh dear, another privilege club I can't join because I'm not old enough and the ship has sailed" which is true.
I even found the link posted by Redditors to convert the business starter account to free. That link expired in 2023.
This is the email Google sent me in 2022:
> As a valued customer, you can get started now with Google Workspace Business Starter. Billing will not start until at least August 1, 2022, and you’ll also get a discount of at least 50% for 12 months after that date.*
> Note: If you no longer want to use Gmail with your custom domain or the ability to manage multiple users, you’ll be able to join a waitlist in the Google Workspace Admin Console for a no-cost option in the coming weeks.
The only option presented to me was to stop using Gmail and enjoy a no-cost option. They must have backtracked later and offered a no-cost option with Gmail included.
I cannot recall what URLs or I would share. Basically, I think you acted in good faith, missed a mail or message and were lost. There was some class action threat.
This was within months of the forced cut over.
You can’t get new ones, but mine keeps existing. For now.
But any suggestion of using AI for business and it seems like disdain and dismissal is the majority response.
Don't you think many areas of business - maybe not all areas, but a significant amount - will just as much benefit from AI tooling as software developers and scientists?
Its more like:
If its for things where I find AI useful I want the tool interoperable with my chosen AI.
If its for things where I dont find AI useful, please dont force it in anyway.
I suspect that this is more of a selection bias thing. AI is garbage everywhere, but "AI in tech" posts tend to be hopeless abysses that are not even worth engaging with at this point. Hence, only the hucksters and grifters remain in there.
Detecting diseases. Creating drugs to cure or help with disease. Aiding astronomy. Understanding the genome. Scanning documents into text (OCR). Translation. Voice recognition. Detecting fraud. Spam filtering.
Are you willing to give up all of these? Given your attitude you probably should.
But sure, let's talk about a few of the more egregious ones.
> Scanning documents into text (OCR).
Useless for old texts, since you still need to review the transcriptions (and the "smarter" the transcription engine is, the harder review becomes since the errors look more plausible).
Useless for new texts, just type them in a readable format instead.
> Translation.
Heh.
> Voice recognition.
Useless. Do you really want more IVR menus?
> Detecting fraud.
Illegal unless you can explain your reasoning (tip: you can't, or you wouldn't be using "AI" in the first place).
I want to hear more from the people who've embraced it for a year, found it's pitfalls and perks, and reflect on it. I'm tired of the treadmill of content from someone who signed up for OpenAI on a Monday, used it for a JIRA ticket on Tuesday, then rushed to belt out a blogpost about how their career is forever changed on Wednesday.
I swear every single post LinkedIn highlights to me is the same AI template.
Absolutely, unarguably true, for this and every other tech boom.
But it's not all drivel and hype. There's some genuinely useful tooling here. For businesses, document summarization, translation, and asking questions about a corpus of documents using natural language are a few. For coding, some level of improved auto complete up to complete code generation are use cases. For science, there's a ton of automated testing, pattern recognition, vision based recognition use cases. For 3d graphics, where I work, some version of Nerfs could revolutionize parts of the field (although it's too early to tell) while AI based upscaling, frame generation, and path tracing noise removal are already causing big shifts in gaming.
Don't let the annoying drivel and hype blind you to the genuinely useful possibilities.
People may dislike AI written code or AI "art", but using AI to talk to other people is just seen as dishonest. It's even worse when it's not all that good.
Yet if you want ad-free YouTube the proper way, you can't just have Music as an option, it's rolled into your cost regardless of if you actually plan to use it or not.
Recently got a new phone and can't use Gemini with my old GSuite Legacy account.
No migration path back to personal @gmail.com accounts for my family.
When I moved from an @fastmail.fm email to my own domain years and years ago I just gave them money and added my domain to my account. No fuss.
Google are hopeless. They have all this consumer brand recognition and just squander it on garbage.
Google One + your own personal domain name would be great but presumably they're afraid it'll dismantle Workspace for small businesses.
While not explicitly documented anywhere, they automatically increase your storage limits once you approach a certain margin of remaining free space. That happens around Tuesday-Wednesday, they just add extra 5Gb to your limit.
I'm on the legacy free edition, and the auto increase worked for me as of November last year. I'm sitting on 41G used out of 51G limit, with photos taking up 29G. I have a second user in my workspace who also benefits from this feature.
Check out search results on "gsuite legacy storage increase 5gb", multiple users reported on their experience with it. It looks like extra space is granted if you're close to the limit, but not over it, for ~1 week.
There are also single reports on Google taking back the extra storage - back to 15(17)Gb - for people with extreme (ab)use of the feature, who stacked hundreds of gigabytes through 5Gb steps. Couldn't verify any of them.
I'm using 50-license GSuite since 2009, if that matters.
I remember all of the scorn clippy got years ago. How is this any different? I think Inbox was probably more useful, and they didn't push it near this hard. :(
It's worse, because Clippy had no editorial control of what was being produced.
I think there's a group of people who really really want this, and they are probably the last people who should get access to an AI/LLM. Some people will just love this, because they're already bullshitting their way through life and this will just make it easier, it even looks company approved if it's in the tools provided to you.
Anybody know if this means they’ll let me off my annual commitment now that it’s included in the base price?
See https://support.google.com/a/answer/15400543#zippy=%2Cwhats-...
What’s the worst they can do? Say no?
The times that I had it try to find information in my gDrive folders it didn't find what I wanted, and I ended up using search as usual. It was also slower than me searching and looking through the docs.
I use workspace due to familiarity with Gmail, and no other reason. Would love to know some cheap/easy alternatives.
Paid you've got ProtonMail and FastMail, both decent options.
This can add up quickly if you’re the kinda person who flings together an experimental site and lets it run its course. For example say 3 emails per site (info@, no-reply@, and your-name@) and 10 various small sites per year.. starts to add up.
Would be awesome if there were an alternative that you pay, say $10, and get as many email addresses as you can be bothered to set up.
I have absolutely no clue how the underlying economics of email services work, so I presume what I’m hoping for isn’t feasible.
I've used Apple Mail for years (in addition to gMail). Never had any problems with it. Don't seem to get more spam there than I do with gMail.
I don't draw, not well, but I write, slightly better. I occasionally ask WordPress to have its AI generate a little blurb for me, and always wind up deleting it. It takes something I can't really describe, my voice I guess, and sucks it out. It homogenizes my writing to try to make it fit some bland ideal. I imagine to those more keen on art than I, AI art is similarly off.
And yes, stories are not the primary use of Gmail. But in business, words matter, and two seemingly synonymous words can be quite different, and two words that seem opposite may not be. I have a friend who teaches law, and they mentioned it was quite easy to tell which students cheated on one particular assignment discussing contracts. If I recall right, material contracts are a type of contract, and AI made up immaterial contracts.
While this mistake would hopefully be obvious, other mixups might not be, with potentially serious consequences.
Should be good for the workplace then.
Fun fact, a rogue LLM impersonating a human in the 17th century is also how we got the term "imaginary" numbers. It also wrote some truly terrible philosophy but it started with a pithy sentence so everyone remembers it.
That said, what you get from Google for a few dollars / month is so far over and above any other SaaS that I'm happy to keep paying (and paying more).
I can't wait for the LLM hype train to die
"I can't wait for the PC hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the internet hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the smartphone hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the EV hype train to die"
I suggest you don't wait too long.
"I can't wait for the Betamax hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the HD-DVD hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the NFT hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the dogecoin hype train to die"
"Internet" was not the killer app, email and instant messaging were. Email was free through your ISP and didn't require more than a $9.99/mo Earthlink connection. The alternative was Fax / Telex etc that had zero network effect outside of businesses and required a dedicated phone line and hardware.
LLM based GenAI on the other hand has been around for long enough that we know that it's main use case is limited to helping schoolkids cheat on their essays and polluting the Internet with factory-farmed social media "content".
One can certainly have opinions about how some people use it and how they check the quality of what comes out, but as long as it's not used to make up facts but merely to do the primitive busy work, like machines are supposed to do, I don't see how that's not just as revolutionizing as the fax/telex comparison you are giving.
> LLM based GenAI on the other hand has been around for long enough that we know that it's main use case is limited to [...]
Sounds exactly like what Bill Gates said in the early days of the internet. I don't have the exact quote, but I'm sure typing half a sentence full of grammar and spelling errors into ChatGPT would give me the quote including a link to its source. I should got get it fast before that tool disappears when the hype is over and we are back to old school google searches, like God intended.
I’ve had insight into a bunch of businesses in multiple industries putting stupid money into trying to find a use for this, caught up in the hype and worried about falling behind. While also being sold AI features by every vendor, who’re all doing the exact same thing.
Every single one is floundering and very unlikely to think this was a good use of resources a couple years from now.
LLMs and associated tech are here to stay, just like search algorithms and autocomplete and machine translation programs, and the clone tool. The hype will fade, though. They’re neat tools but, no, turns out we’re not on the verge of inventing Skynet, we just fooled people into thinking we were because a prominent hype-man/grifter was saying so as a sales tactic (Altman) and because the output is human language instead of numbers or whatever.
In our SaaS we added it for free. We realised that there is no way to sustainably make money off of this in long term.
It’s a great feature but not 2.5x price worth feature.
I used to get automatically created calender events from Gmail for hotels, flights, etc. This was really nice.
But somehow it stopped working well recently. Some emails were not regonized at all (booking.com). Some flight emails are missing return flight.
I'd like this bug fixed too. The quickest path would be to make a bounty hunt website for Googlers to fix things in their free time and push through monrepo approvals legally.
Or, get hired, fix it, and resign.
LLM AIs are forcing this issue to an apex, if and only if you and your peers realize this working with LLMs is also a communications issue, also one of framing information so both the correct information is delivered and a minimum of wrapping information that needs to be filtered through to understand is not delivered. The same reason you cannot explain to your boss, or coworker, or spouse some troublesome issue preventing a goal is also why you cannot get the quality replies you want from an LLM. You cannot express you request, your information effectively so the audience can understand what you meant.
So sad that they removed this feature. There is third party websites offering it, but I'd prefer it on the main site.
This feature had been added years ago, way before the AI hype was as big as it is now (but it's always been using deep learning models).
On the video description (the text under the video) click 'Show more'. Scroll to the bottom -> 'Show Transcript' -> it will appear to the right of the video (and you can use ctrl + f on it).
IME this works for ~90% of yt videos (i.e. most, but not all).
Note that yt being frustratingly juvenile, symbols are put in place of words yt considers swear words (this caught me out a few times when using ctrl + f to find sentence that contained a swear word or homonym of a swear word).
At the end of the day, we just do the same ol' simple word processing we've done for the last 20 years.
Are there good corporate email alternatives that just do email/calendars and do them well with business-type SLAs? Zoho? FastMail?
Maybe you could have them randomly suspend your accounts for a few hours here and there to match the public cloud experience. :-)
Edit: Here’s their outage page, which reports > 2-3 nines for most subsystems most months:
Note that they treat any service degradation as downtime when computing 9’s. For instance, they had one imap server down today, which meant some requests were failing, and that counts against their reported numbers.
By this metric: “One machine is failing requests”, most of the hyperscalers are down all the time.
Regarding actual SLAs with money and stuff: How much is the refund worth vs. the cost of downtime?
Edit 2: Take github for example. They have unreported outages all the freaking time. Down detector says push/pull has been flaky for the last 24 hours, but the official status page says all systems operational, with a minor codespace outage yesterday.
Compare:
To:
https://downdetector.com/status/github/
To prove those aren’t all false reports, next time they go offline for you, go bask in the green light their status page.
FastMail is wonderfully competent at being an email provider, has human support (or advanced enough an AI to fool me) and wildcard domains.
There are literally tons of them.
"Our shiny new product isn't selling. How do we pump up the numbers?"
"Bundle it into another popular product, of course."
"oh god! now i have to type complete senten..... zzzzzzzz"
Apple has reasonable web versions for documents, excel, note taking for when you are not on your iDevice. It has a calendar and provides email. It also has all my photos and other stuff anyways. It also supports custom domain names.
To see if I could move away from gmail I started using apple mail, connected to gmail still. The app is just fine.
I just need to make time to do the migration.
> Dear administrator,
> Starting today, your Google Workspace subscription includes new AI features designed to help your users improve their productivity and innovation. With these changes, we will also be updating subscription pricing starting March 17, 2025.
> ...
> These features were previously available only to users with a Gemini for Google Workspace Add-on, but now will be included with Google Workspace Business Standard plans. You will see these features added to your subscription in the coming weeks. Soon, you'll get access to even more Gemini features in your Google Workspace apps.
> Review the Google Workspace blog announcement to learn more about these changes.
> Starting March 17, 2025*, your Google Workspace Business Standard subscription price will be automatically updated to $14.00 per user, per month with an Annual/Fixed-Term Plan (or $16.80 if you have a monthly Flexible Plan).
(Disclaimer: Although I have worked for Google in the past, that ended almost a decade ago and wasn't in any role related to pricing or product decisions about Google Workspace. I have no inside info on this announcement and am not speaking for Google here.)
Opting out of the functionality I don’t need is not particularly useful (I won’t use it anyway) but the thing is I will be charged for it anyway.
In those countries where MS has now bundled Copilot Pro into Microsoft 365 Personal and Family Plans - not the US yet, so far only a few APAC countries like Australia and Singapore - it's still possible to get a "Classic" version of the subscription at the old price and feature set, but only via the cancellation screen, not otherwise advertised. I wonder, but certainly do not know, if Google has similar plans.
Now where I do think there is opportunity is in building out the standalone Gemini app, as ChatGPT has proven with their Teams product that there is business value in having a dedicated chat UI for your business. We are currently subscribed to ChatGPT for Teams and use it every day across product and engineering, there isn't a need for it to be integrated directly into our productivity suite UX, but pulling data out from the suite (e.g Google Drive) into the chat UI is helpful. Organizing project folders, custom GPTs etc also hold value for us.
Also, long ago, it was possible to set up an individual Gmail account with a non-gmail.com domain. Is that still possible?
No idea about Youtube accounts.
# Use Cloudflare Email Routing.
* Point your MX records at their MX.
* Cloudflare forwards email to your gmail.com address.
* In Gmail Settings: "Add another email address".
* Add your SMTP settings in the new account.
* There is no need to configure IMAP or POP3.In the US and European market, this was seen as a bare minimum level of professionalism and validation (other markets are more advanced on this front and have been on chat apps for the entire business for at least a decade)
regardless for email, I had been using Google workplaces for this
What’s a cheaper alternative? last time I tried something else I found I was vendor locked to google even when trying to accept calendar invites from people in other organizations that sent google calendar. That was 5 years ago though
some sectors like web3 let you do the whole project with just a username on discord/telegram/x but I do want to consider migrating my emails away from google workspace now. Its difficult to manage even changing the credit cards on file with so many projects like if one expires
If you need email + shared calendar/contact the email service from infomaniak should do the trick. If you need functionalities close to workspace with storage, office suite, videocall they have the ksuite service.
We’ve been happy customers of Workspace for around 16 years - this feels like the straw to break the camel’s back.
Strongly hoping there’ll be enough pushback from nervous corporates about data security that they’ll reconsider.
The first task that I asked for it’s assistance with, was how to disable, cancel or unsubscribe from Gemini-the-product. It repeatedly and confidently made up instructions to adjust settings that didn’t exist in menus that weren’t where it said they were and provided links to irrelevant documentation.
It was either useless, actively misleading or extremely motivated to not be turned off.
Any of those was reason enough not to use it ever again.
This morning, I logged on to find that the AI features have been turned on domain-wide for us. I couldn't find any admin controls, so I opened up a support case. The off buttons are locked behind an enterprise subscription. Our end-users need to turn off smart features to disable Gemini. There's no domain-wide / admin level control unless you purchase their most expensive licenses. It's absolutely disgusting. I'm so disappointed with how this was rolled out. We should've been given an opportunity to make an informed and intentional decision about how or if we were going to use these features.
No matter how annoying Slack can randomly be, the text chat part is light years ahead of google. You can actually use it to coordinate work, while in a google-using shop you basically must use all other features to get something remotely resembling what you can do with slack. No pinning in google group chats, seriously?
Ofc google offers you the drive and docs. And "AI" now.
Untill they eventually get hooked on that and then google and Microsoft will once again put that behind a paywall, except now everyone pays more. At least that's the plan.
Now even if employee don't see the benefit of the new deep integrated a.i. and business refuse to pay more for a.i., they aren't going to leave anyway because Microsoft is doing just the same as google.
That's either a win for Google and Microsoft, or at least a neutral outcome.
(See also how MS attacked Slack by including Teams for “free”.)
This evidently doesn't apply to their chatbot efforts.
Getting these features for $2 instead of $20 likely appeals to a lot of people. It's 10% the price and may only be one of several reasons for the price increase (inflation is likely another)
so i dont wanna pay for it. especially not google, because.. well, im their product.
Plus Google gets to use your data for training. That has interesting implications. What goes in as training data often comes out later as replies to questions.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/15706919?hl=en-IN
Your statement is not accurate based on the Workspace docs.
"I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further." - Vader.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/01/11/google-st...
I would buy $GOOG stock blindly but being a paid user of theirs blows
It's such an obvious use case and Claude 3.5 Sonnet can give me the answer if I paste the header and a value row but Gemini is utterly useless.
You're in-app. How is a textual copy-paste better in Claude? Useless Google PM. The Oracle Java of AI.
Does anyone have experience with Amazon WorkMail or similar, cheaper services for email?
Personally, I find that to be especially scummy because it essentially sounds like they are betting on people either not understanding that nuance, or not bothering to deal with it (and subsequently, not using AI, making that venture seem vaguely more profitable)
This is getting tiresome.