Yes, thank you so much. I totally wanted and have time for a scavenger hunt + jigsaw puzzle. Clearly you understand enough of the issue to know that I need to handle it but can’t be bothered to spend 45 seconds to summarize the relevant bits.
A few times, people have just forwarded an email thread to me, without ever typing any words into it, not even, “see thread”. Straight into the bin go those threads. So f*ing lazy!
honestly I feel the same about people just putting links or media into a post. I get it. Its me. I come here for communication. I want to know at the very least why you felt something was important enough to post. Why did they like it. Why I should like it. Does it have meaning to them. Is it just a laugh. etc. I kinda wish I could block all posts that did not have about as much body as you have up there.
This drives me crazy. At least give me a description for your YouTube link so I can decide if it interests me. “Check this out” isn’t good enough, give me a bloody reason.
im a bit of a hypocrite though as I will respond to comments with links to songs or something relevant to convo with no statement. But that is a commment so I feel the bar is lower and usually kinda a joke. like one of the most often ones I do is stan ridgeways I want to be a boss which works with both general work things and things about rich trump holes.
Valid. I hate link only posts. Especially when the link is to a video with clear clickbait titles. I tend to just keep scrolling. I would love a setting to block posts that are only a link and no details.
Reply back: several questions, see my reply in red and ask one question
Bonus “Mildly infuriating”:
Ask 4 bullet-point questions in an email, they only answer one of them and ignore the rest.
nowadays I just let whatever the issue is sit in the queue until it comes back around
“yep, that’s waiting on so-and-so. see here, I asked for this necessary information two weeks ago, still haven’t got a response. you might want to check with their manager about why they’re holding up this project”
And it’s always your third bulletpoint so you know they know there were multiple questions and they just ignored the rest!
Either the 3rd one or the least important one. Whichever causes me the most inconvenience.
That’s when you reply and fixate on completely the wrong part of the thread. Teach them for not setting the right context.
See below
Just don’t read it. Delete and move on.
Reply: “yep, that’s a chain.”
I can’t tell if people who do that kind of thing are lazy and malicious, actually stupid, or stressed beyond their capacity to be decent.
I do think a lot of people are actually only semi literate, and asking them to write is legitimately difficult and embarrassing for them.
Wrong community. I think that there’s an actually infuriating one somewhere.
I know don’t like it, but this is a perfect use case for AI.
how is AI going to know the relevant part of the chain?
The same way it knows anything, by looking at all of the tokens.
No, no it is not.
It is a case for smarter client software, if anything. Deterministic smarter client software that just shows you the context instead of making it up.
Deterministic software can’t summarize a long email thread, or that would already exist as a feature.
We can’t even get deterministic software to ask people what they’re calling their cellphone provider about well enough to route them on anything more than broad keyword matching.
This anti-ai shit is nauseating. Businesses that rely on it too much are going to fail, but businesses that refuse to use it at all will get out competed over the next decade.
It’s a tool like any other, use it where it’s strong. Like summarizing a fucking email thread. Modern models and integrations are not just randomly hallucinating topics of conversation in a single email thread at this point, we’re well past that level of incompetence.
My whole point was that it shouldn’t be a summary, it should be the actual context, in the actual words of the actual people who actually wrote it. Not what the statistical wordsharter pretended to compress it down to.
– Frost
Why? We already write summaries as humans for long concepts and ideas. Executive summaries, abstracts, conclusions, we’ve been doing this kind of language compression as humans forever.
Emails chains can often contain out of sequence information, repetitions, contradictions, disagreements, and just the stupidity of human communication in general.
Because a person writing a summary actually understands what they read and wrote the summary based on that.
LLMs don’t. It’s literally fancy autocomplete. That’s all it is. It’s really fancy autocomplete, but it doesn’t actually understand anything.
– Frost
And yet it produces better summary output than many humans I’ve had the (dis)pleasure of reading the work of.
You’re assuming because it doesn’t function the same way as a human that the output can’t be equal or better. That’s simply not the case at this point in this type of task.
Autopilot in airplanes doesnt fly like a human, and yet its installed and running on almost every passenger flight in the world.
Autopilot in planes also isn’t an automatic pilot. All it does is the bare minimum of “keep the plane level at this altitude/climb rate and/or heading this direction” while you focus on other things (unless you get distracted in the wrong place and fly into a mountain). Some get a little fancier than that, but still.
It doesn’t replace the pilot and it’s not even trying to replace the pilot.
Oh and you know what happened when pilots got too used to following the line on their display instead of actually using their brains and reacting to the situation? Planes started crashing. They had to actually dial back on the automation somewhat. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magenta-automation-paradox-pt-1/
– Frost
I have a filter that checks for “Fwd:” and immediately trashes it. If you cant be bothered to format even the subject line, you’re a lost cause. Cut down significantly on useless shit from my parents especially.
I have like 150 other filters that sort messages into folders, trash others, and immediately permanently delete others. My inbox now has 1-5 messages in the morning, and usually 1 or 2 throughout the day, vs the like 25-50 daily. Having unique email addresses for each recipient is great too, since if you unsubscibe from some garbage and it doesn’t actually unsubscibe (fuck you, AT&T Business), you can just blackhole it and it’s gone.
I prefer email to texting or calling, since there’s less expectation of a rapid response, but I got tired of getting so much garbage all the time - and I was already actively trying to keep my inbox clean 15+ years ago.
Sounds like a senior engineer at a company I had to communicate with on the daily. I was supposed to report tech issues and problems directly to him, since they refused to assign my area any actual techs and instead gave the regional. I swear if you used any term that seemed to imply the request would be difficult or time consuming the email would be marked as read, then marked as deleted with no reply. Then when a followup was requested “I never got anything”. There was a few times higher ups would get pissy at me for an issue not being resolved, I would just show them my outlook that clearly showed the “email deleted” tag on the email indicating that it was read, and then trashed again and they would go complain to their managers about it.
