So imagine you’re an industrial designer of milk cartons in Japan.
You design a carton with a weird shape which is 100% full on packaging. The carton intentionally deforms when the user breaks the vacuum seal.
Some users report this as a production quality issue. So what do you do? Roll back to the previous standard carton design?
No, you write a brief and simplified explanation on how air is the enemy of milk taste and the carton deforms because the vacuum that you were extremely intentional about putting in has been broken.
And you put it on every box.
“The bulging [of the package] is the proof that the aroma and essence [of the milk] was [adequately] sealed.” (My freehand translation.)
I also love the brand strategy meeting for this product.
“What’s competitive positioning?”
“We’re competing on taste.”
“But milk is a commodity. Do you mean on perceptions of taste?”
“No we are going to science the }^{*} out of this. I do not accept milk has stopped improving.”
(It’s おいしい牛乳 brand, literally “Tasty Milk”, and while I have done no rigorous double blind study it is definitely the milk of choice in my household.)
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Term life is a commodity product. Premium never changes after you lock in the term. Many people reading this will pay tens or low hundreds of dollars per million in coverage.
A common model I have is that, like many people, I have some finite amount of consequential decisions I can make a day. This is sometimes a frustration for my wife, who wants me to spend a decision on e.g. “What color should we make…”
There are some classes of non-domestic decisions which still seem to take a slot, and where there are theoretically wrong answers, but where any plausible answer is fine.
I love having LLMs available for this.
Example from earlier: “Should we use X medication for symptom management of a minor recurring condition, or should we escalate to a medial professional for a recommendation?”
I probably could have Googled to kick off a research process, but that’s -1 for the day.
Also helps in the intermediate stages when you're dealing with accountant questions which might be, how do I say this nicely, "I thought I was hiring you to give me answers in this domain." Much higher bandwidth than multiple messages in an email thread at tax time.
"Why is he asking this?"
"Presumably he is attempting to qualify whether you have specified foreign financial assets."
"What does he really need to know?"
"Is the Tokyo condo held directly or in an LLC/etc"
"Held directly."
"OK so no you don't have those assets."
"Find authority"
Often people in our social class are worried about sounding elitist, and I understand that, but there's some perversity in being an elite and not being able to confess to that fact. The PMC is an elite class in the US political system.
Class membership is defined by being able to pass brutal intelligence and diligence filters. It is not simply "tests well", but you basically have to eat the PSAT for breakfast.
We all had classmates who did not eat the PSAT for breakfast.
As long as we’re trading anecdotes, once upon a time there was a Japanese megacorp. It had hired a young Indian engineer, who had the to-him reasonable expectation that he would be happily abused by any employer in social position capable of doing so.
Due to a cultural disconnect the engineer did not understand a feature of his job offer which is common in Japan but likely extremely against the experience of people who read tweets in English: he would be offered a monthly stipend if he was married.
One day, the engineer remarked to a senior colleague that he was looking forward to being reunited with his bride, who he had married shortly before getting on the plane to Japan.
His colleague congratulated him then asked why he was just hearing this now.
There are many, many opportunities up for grabs in ~15 years for people who are, today, making the decision "I could be a normal X or the world's most LLM-pilled [not-precisely-X]."
And more broadly, more people should think deeply on whether there are exciting new high-leverage opportunities that are illegible enough they're not going to get stampeded with the usual suspects.
("But everyone knows about AI." Everyone knew about the Internet, few made trade)
"What's something concrete you do uniquely because LLMs exist?"
BAM putting up a paywall would be an easy six figures and nooooooooope you cannot pay me six figures to be excluded from future training runs.