I knew someone who worked for Gannett. He told me that the churn rate for their subscription numbers were insane. I asked him why he thought this was the case and he just laughed. You see, they do this promotion where it starts at a reasonable figure and then much later jumps to one that is not reasonable. The reason he found this funny, he said, is that they spent incredible amounts of money doing data analysis, surveying, and remarketing to try to identify the cause for that rate and reduce it. All of this despite the obvious answer staring them right in the face.
This I believe. From print media days, I was told by an industry insider the "make your model with free parts every month" magazine churn was enormous, they were in profit from part 2, which is why they even hit "part 2 free with part 1" because they didn't want to admit parts 3 onward weren't coming. The sell was to ad-land, to all intents and purposes the customer didn't exist beyond the first sell. Could be rockets, cakestands, wedding dress or cookoo clocks. Same model same outcome.
There is a class of magazine aimed at fanatics for some things. Let's say its steam trains. Or dolls. You gin up a mock-up magazine, and sell advertising space in this proposed magazine, predicated on the target audience. When you've sold enough to be in profit, you go into print. Typically there is a free gift in part 1, or a model to be constructed from parts included in the magazine with an implication parts 3,4,5.. will be published in due course. A common sell was to include part 2 with part 1 free. It somehow built belief.
If a significant proportion of magazines sold resulted in a subscription you might go ahead but in practice you didn't bother printing volume 3 onward.
My contact from the biz said they'd repeated this model many many times.
I'm still confused because I think the word "part" and "model" are used multiple times with different meanings and I can't figure out which is which from context.
I've taken prenatal vitamins for as long as I can remember because they're FDA regulated to actually contain the nutrients they claim to include. I never would've thought that could be a source for microplastics.
Separately, I always knew there was a reason those RXBars taste like plastic. /s
It doesn't help that thanks to RLHF, every time a good example of this gains popularity, e.g. "How many Rs are in 'strawberry'?", it's often snuffed out quickly. If I worked at a company with an LLM product, I'd build tooling to look for these kinds of examples in social media or directly in usage data so they can be prioritized for fixes. I don't know how to feel about this.
On the one hand, it's sort of like red teaming. On the other hand, it clearly gives consumers a false sense of ability.
Indeed. Which is why I think the only way to really evaluate the progress of LLMs is to curate your own personal set of example failures that you don't share with anyone else and only use it via APIs that provide some sort of no-data-retention and no-training guarantees.
Wow, first of all, this is commendable work. I'm extraordinarily impressed by the commitment to minimize dependencies. Of the four dependencies, only one appears to not be owned by the author, and only one has any additional non-dev dependencies. Barring any other thoughts, that's pretty impressive.
To summarize my reservations, this lacks custom post types, meta fields or modules, and a full deployment story.
Although I can picture it, I think the author would get a lot more traction if they demonstrated how users might serve the generated content. It also feels odd to have to do so manually. Realistically this requires some kind of CI script, or, if attempting to expose to content editors, a dual reverse-proxy configuration.
I'm also not thrilled with the handlebars-esque DSL. Any templating solution without a general programming escape hatch is problematic in my eyes these days.
Users & Developers alike want a content management dashboard that bends to their sense of organization and needs. Many modern websites have more than one menu, for example. Custom post types are necessary for ease of use and quick content discovery. Modules exist to empower editors to insert beautiful, pre-designed content of their own making. Meta fields exist to signal to editors what kind of content is necessary to make a page viable (required fields). These types of features are becoming table stakes for modern content management systems, and they're very difficult to pull off in a meta-programming sense without the dynamism of a database.
All of that being said, I hope the author really does continue working on this. It's really great and exciting work!
It's roughly six thousand people's jobs (estimated base on headcount from last year), for anyone wondering. I don't know why they make you do the math, or provide such a fuzzy statistic.
I find percentages plenty useful, arguably more useful than raw numbers. If a company is laying off 3%, it's probably optimizing profits or shutting down failed projects. At 10%, they might be responding to some longer term issue. At 25%, they are in some kind of serious trouble.
The intended effect may have been the opposite. Maybe many people thing Microsoft is a much larger company and that 3% sounds more significant than 6000.
This is deeply ironic to me because this company is run by the same guy who has his underlings tearing through our government data, secretly building repositories with titles like NxGenBdoorExtract[0]. I don't trust this guy at all.
On a podcast I listened to yesterday (Marketplace, from American Public Media), they mentioned that many businesses seem to be approaching this with an "We're in this together" type of attitude. They played some audio clips of business owners on their social media channels saying things like, "Don't worry [company name] is going to do absolutely everything to fight this. We'll do everything we can to avoid raising prices on you!"
The reality, of course, which they reveal when interviewed, is that they know they're completely powerless. In the best case, all they can do is delay the inevitable and they know it. This approach exists purely to keep themselves from being made into the enemy. As you noted, some business owners admitted to considering if they should just shutter their business too.
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