I think this underrates how many emails are literally just replies of "sounds good". Small snippet replies seem to be the vast majority of automatically suggested responses in gmail
A reply of "sounds good" means the initial email has been read and its contents agreed upon. Ho would AI improve upon this?
- 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
It's a paper trail for me. Companies, as we saw recently, can do whatever they want on company chat platforms. Emails are nearly impossible to fully delete if they ever have to escalate to a lawsuit, and can (YMMV based on policy) let you BCC important trails to your personal email.
If it's that important you can screenshot it. If you're BCCing every email you sent to your personal email that is (or should be) an IT policy violation.
It’s no different than using IMAP or POP3 to download your messages. This is the beauty and curse of email. It’s sometimes too transparent. I prefer it.
Yeah. It's not every email (I can probably count the number of times I did this on one hand). But if I feel like they're trying to bury some lead or simply want to CYA, I will try to at least download the email to the local machine (perfectly legimate) and BCC myself (Grey area) as an immitation of 3 backup strategies. I've never had to utilize thar BCC, fortunately.
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.
Why is chat not a paper trail? Just yesterday I found a chat message that I had written in 2019 and I was surprised that I already back then knew things I did not know yesterday.
(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.
This seems risky, I'm not a lawyer but BCC company emails to personal account seems like a nice way to pave a highway for the company's legal team to request court ordered access to your personal affairs.
According to most work contracts / NDAs you wouldn't be allowed to keep private copies of work email.
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.
Because e-mail is naturally self-replicating and not bound to organizational boundaries, in ways chat isn't.
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.
Chat is a paper trail in finance at least. For regulatory purposes, bank personnel are not allowed to delete even their WhatsApp and other text messaging app info from their phones.
"serious business" and "serious stuff" still happens over email, and in the same way, even "more serious business stuff" happens over snail mail still.
Yeah, the reactions are just email messages with special headers, which as you say ends up spamming people who don't use Outlook. I think the hate was a mix of reaction to bad implementation and the concept in general.
I've adopted the inbox zero approach. If it's important it gets reclassified onto my task list with start and end dates, if it's useful info it gets filed, and everything else goes into trash.
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.
I thought just now, isn't inbox zero just a cosmetic difference?
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.
There's a UX difference: when you look at your inbox from fresh you have to remember which ones you purposefully ignored because they were left unread in the inbox (this might be trivial for you if you're used to it).
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.
Nate got his start in this world doing baseball forecasting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PECOTA), well before he delved into politics. Jay Boice definitely doing much of the heavy lifting these days, and deserves more personal recognition than he currently gets. But I wouldn't discount the amount of work Nate personally put in on the sports front.
I don't entirely disagree. We know from his public statements that he personally builds the political models. I think he is personally invested in the baseball modelling but we know it is a team effort and 538 is doing a lot. Nate is a media figure, he has to delegate.
I'm surprised that nothing here has been written about human in the loop. All time series models are flawed in some capacity, and are going to have difficulties in the current market given how it won't necessarily match historical seasonalities. Just having more human safeguards to flag wacky outputs seems to be a more reasonable explanation than not handling Prophet's shortcomings properly. Zillow would have likely faced similar issues with other time series packages as well
Reading some more, it does look like Zillow was in fact leveraging humans in the loop https://venturebeat.com/2019/12/11/why-explainable-ai-is-ind.... What seems like a likely explanation is that the proper balance between machine and human judgement was not calibrated to this current market.
"Part of the challenge of Zillow Offers’ human-in-the-loop system — any such system, really — is finding the balance between humans and machines. “In order to optimize this human-in-the-loop system, we’d like to figure out when the human is best, when an assistive situation is best, and […] when a machine is best,” said Fagnan."
I think in general just limiting your world view to singular topics is also just not a great way to learn about the world. We all have our blindspots, and it's exacerbated by that sort of curation
Everyone posting about $CURRENT_POLITICAL_ISSUE is not a great way to learn about the world, especially when they have no idea of what's actually happening and just post to feel good or be part of something. It's also way too biased for current US things. I don't need to see people talking about California fires for a month, and never ever hear about what's happening in my country. This is not "learning about the world", this is just a new flavor of the US cultural hegemony.
It could be argued that by focusing on the wide release, they inherently doomed the product. Hard to build a cohesive community of 300M when the stickiness factor doesn't exist yet. Arguably would have been better to focus on limited releases on niche communities to create that stickiness/increase retention.
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