upvote
> Same as how textile industry has enabled people to have an style and expression in clothing.

I'd tend to agree with what you said, except this part. Mass produced clothing is fantastic for many reasons, but not for style and expression. Look at the traditional clothing from almost any part of the world and it was gorgeous and colorful. Now it's all just a t-shirts.

reply
> Look at the traditional clothing from almost any part of the world and it was gorgeous and colorful.

Was it?

There's a lot of survivorship bias in old things; we don't see the things which weren't recorded. Old things had their style, that much is unavoidable, but before mass production normal people inherited their clothes because it was just that hard to create.

Also, a lot of the pigments we take for granted today didn't exist at any price in the pre-industrial era, and some which did involved trekking to a mine in Afghanistan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarine

This also means (in general, not specifically clothing) a lot of "traditional" things are post-industrial recreations or re-imaginings of the past.

reply
spoke to a clothing historian in Europe years ago. Pigments, shoes, and washing have improved… But all clothes being tailored and more craftsman made the experience better.

She said she’d only choose the modern era because of the washing machine.

reply
Before the stitching machine arrived in my village, all you can see was large rectangular pieces of cloths, delivered directly from the weaver craftsmen of the village, for men and women alike (only color difference - white for men and mostly dark green for women). The washermen still delivered clothes correctly across dozen's of families everyday, after washing. The famous Indian Saree is an example of unstitched clothing. Dhoti, lungi, turban and towel are other forms rectangular clothing.

People had cultivated an art in how the rectangular cloths are wrapped around them and they clothes are secured at their waist, or around their head. Talk to a Sikh or Afghan about turban.

reply
It was gorgeous and colourful, but highly impersonal. Traditional clothing, almost by definition, isn't really an enabler of personal style and expression. And you can't really compare traditional clothing to day-to-day clothing, these are entirely different purposes and codes.

Day-to-day clothing is definitely not "all just tshirts" nowadays, even in the mainstream. Women fashion is very varied, and while men's fashion is a lot poorer there's still a huge spectrum of expressive clothing that's available. I don't think personal style and expression has ever been as available and encouraged as it is today.

reply
> It was gorgeous and colourful, but highly impersonal.

So is mass-produced clothing. Go into any store, and you will see the same shit with very few variations. For actual personality you have to search for niche/hand-made/small-productions etc.

reply
deleted
reply
deleted
reply
It's not really good that email (and written content overall) quality has gone up. The problem is that there's tons of high quality content but no way to know which content is useful or good. Before we could know someone's personality from their style, now everyone's just wearing Balenciaga.
reply
> textile industry has enabled people to have an style and expression in clothing

That’s a very good analogy!

reply
I love this positive take :)
reply
deleted
reply
deleted
reply
And, hilariously, as an AI booster, I personally dislike it, because now everyone sounds like they have a PR company ( and the same PR company come to think of it ). It was bad before in corporate land, but the level of standardization for optimized response is aggravating to me, when I am simply trying to have a short conversation.

Case in point, I reached about syllabus to my kid's teacher. Long story short, email ended with their boss, who sent me long winding non-answer that I had to resist to not knock down.

I dunno, generic executive summaries can be canned, but I would like to hope I pay them enough for an person to person exchange.

reply
I have resorted to asking some people "just send me the prompt", like as messy as it might be, I will get the gist much faster than reading through Claudish or Gptinglsh which my eyes gloss over half the text
reply
If they are copying and pasting the answers and replies how will it "pull up people's thinking"?
reply
I have Ai read those emails and condense into one sentence summaries.

I’m not reading all that. I want one word answers.

Also noticed huge uptick in “call me” emails.

reply
> everyone is sounding like a master of drafting emails

> this is pulling up people's thinking to have a structure, minimalism and sequencing of expression

I see the same for the former but the opposite on the latter. Everyone sounds like expert drafters because the AI is doing all of that.

True to the "use it or lose it" principle, the people's thinking skills about the emails have weakened. They rely on giving the AI some bits of info, a document they never read, some vague instructions, and the AI molds the message with structure and sequence. Then I get to experience live the joy of discussing with these people face to face and they still just spit out disparate bits of information with no fluid structure and sequence for the ideas because the only time they thought about the topic was when the AI wrote an email about it.

reply
[flagged]
reply