Going ahead without asking is a sure recipe for having the client tell you "Sorry, that's not at all what I want" and then having to start over again. Your creatives ask questions for a reason. What is it that made you pick this specific draft out of the slop pile as a good match for your brand? The color scheme? The composition? The atmosphere? The line art style? If you expect your creatives to just magically guess, and then get frustrated when the output is not what you had in mind, then it's hardly your creatives' fault.
Yup, people aren't mind-readers. And it can be very hard to predict what bits the client cares about and what they don't, so it's worth biasing towards asking (though I think it's worth emphasizing that 'I don't care, you choose' is a valid response). The worst clients are the ones who can't express what they want in the first place and then reject output without explaining what it is they did or didn't like about the result.
That said, it can be very hard to be a good client. Writing requirements (whether for art or engineering) is something that on average, people are very bad at. And often you will only find out you cared about something after you see it (oh god I am so bad at this, especially because it's often delayed, so I will go 'looks good, no notes', then like a day later go 'oh wait, actually...'), which is why having a healthy dialogue and rapid feedback loop is so valuable to any project.
I don't know about AWS or the rest of GCP, but in terms of engineering, my experience of GCE was at least an entire order of magnitude better than what the article alleges about Azure. Security and reliability were taken extremely seriously, and the quality of the engineering was world-class. I hope it has stayed like this since then. It was a worthwhile thing to experience.
Agreed, though only up to a point. Companies that need software to run their business, need that software to run.
When your operations are constantly hampered by Azure outages, and your competitors' are not, you're not going to last if your market is at all competitive. Thankfully for many companies, a lot of markets aren't, I suppose, at least for the actors who have established a successful rent and no longer need to care how their business operations are going.
Interesting. I hope this catches on -- it's tough to visualize poverty in concrete terms, but assessing how long it takes a population to make a given unit of purchasing power in average is a clever idea. It's sobering to realize that it would take a friend across the sea over 100 hours to assemble the funds for a $100 bill that I wouldn't look at twice...
Although I wish this sparked a conversation on how we can do better instead of national dick measuring contests. Those don't help.
Most recently: Opus 4.6 screwed up using a common and well documented API (Qt), then when asked to debug the observed issues, blamed "a Qt bug" and wrote a whole layer on top of the API to work around the issue caused by its incorrect use of the API.
It did the above twice in a row around different parts of the API.
The thought that there are almost certainly devs out there merging Claude PRs without the skills or volition to push back on its screwups is not comfortable.
It's background education in the basics so you can understand what drug addiction is and the neurological differences in the active populations for wanting versus liking. I guess I can spell it out.
Addictive drugs directly increase wanting via directly activating the downstream targets of dopaminergic populations which predict the valence of stimuli and control of wanting and motivation. By taking a chemically addictive drug you don't even have to enjoy the stimuli related to it. You will still be conditioned to want it and be motivated to re-experience the stimuli surrounding it.
This is vastly different in mechanism and result than simply seeing or hearing a screen. These things cannot directly increase incentive salience regardless of actual valance of the stimuli. You have to actually enjoy the thing and the experiences to form habits.
Do you see the difference now? One thing, the chemical drugs, are addictive. The other things are enjoyable. One will addict everyone because they're addictive. The other only leads to addiction-like behaviors in the context of say, random interval operant conditioning, if you actually enjoy the thing intrinsically first and are of the fairly small subset of that subset that is predisposed to behavioral addictive behaviors.
You're right in an important sense. There's not a complete difference in outcome between direct manipulation of wanting with drugs and using enjoyable stimuli in some form of unethical non-consensual conditioning program (aka advertising). It is one of many scales of magnitude and a lot of abstraction but that's still bad.
What I am trying to get across, and what I'd hoped all the conditionals and premises I laid out in my original comment made clear, is an additional consideration:
Screens are not drugs. They are not somehow uniquely and magically addictive (like drugs actually are). The multi-media is not the problem and not the device to be regulated. The corporate structure and motivations are the problem. This issue literally applies to any possible human perception even outside of screens. Sport fishing itself is random interval operant conditioning in the same way that corporations use. And frankly, with a boat, it's just as big of a money and time sink.
We should not be making laws regulating screens themselves because we think screens are more addictive than, say, an enjoyable day out on the lake. They're not. You could condition a blind person over the radio with just audio. The radio is not the problem and radios are not uniquely addictive like drugs.
I am saying it's important not to think of screens as the problem. The problem is the corporations' behavior and scale. That's a big difference in terms of the legislation used to mitigate the problem and the people to which it will apply. The Digital Markets Act in the EU is a good template to follow with it only applying to very large incorporated entities acting as gatekeepers.
I mean, yes, trivially? That only hinges on two factors: what share of a fast food business' overall expenses actually go to labor costs, and, y'know, how much extra demand is enabled by ensuring even the poorest workers make enough to afford fast food once in a while.
Takes like yours used to baffle me, until I realized that the US was founded on enslaved labor and to this day there remains a silent expectation in some circles that there must be a laborer class which should be as inexpensive and disposable as possible, and is fundamentally distinct from the consumer class. A lot becomes clearer all at once when you realize that to some, there's a whole segment of the population that is not expected to benefit from the economy, only serve it.
Historically, such worldviews have in the long term tended to bring sharp misfortune to those holding them. I'm hoping for a better outcome here, though.
Fast food workers are included in the consumer class.
As for slavery, the poorly educated believe that it was a uniquely American phenomenon. Slavery was a global institution practiced by every civilization, nation, and culture on earth. In fact, it’s still alive and well in multiple places. The US abolished it fully in 1865. Products produced by slaves accounted for around 15% of our GDP at its peak.
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