RTO full time just isn't possible for my family and I suspect I'm not alone. It has nothing to do with productivity. It's just the economics of childcare don't work. We live in SF both work tech jobs. We make above median income relative to rest of the country. Our 2 kids (< 10 years old) are in public schools. Kids need to be dropped off at 9.30 and picked up at 3.30 and 2.30 on weds.
The bare minimum for pickup/drop off help is ~ $2500 a month.
That’s less possible now in the era of longer commutes unless you have flexible hours. For example, I’m married to a teacher. I have to do the morning drop off because there is no flexibility in the schedules at either school. That means the earliest I can reliably be in the office is 9:15 (e-bike), 9:30 (transit) or 9:45 (car).
Since our son’s school day ends at 3:15, that also means that the only options are aftercare or me picking him up and resuming work after she gets home. When there are things like staff meetings that runs even later.
The reason this worked in the past was that women did not work full-time, or at all, and the entire system was set up around the idea that there is a “free” adult available to handle everything except instruction. Unfortunately, since wages for anyone below upper middle-class have been stagnant for roughly half a century most families now depend on both parents working to avoid falling further behind.
It is less possible when people choose to live further away and to live in constant fear of predators so their kids can't walk/bus themselves home.
If you are married to a teacher, how is that not flexible hours? Half the reason people become teachers is that they can pick up and drop off their kids around school times. It isn't like you have to drop off or pick up at start/finish time exactly. There is a good half hour window on either end. Those periods were some of the most fun you have at school as a kid IMO.
And yes if you make different choices they have different tradeoffs. Mum and Dad don't both have to work full time. You don't have to live an hour away from work. You don't have to pretend a 10 year old can't get themselves home fine on their own.
It is a myth that wages have been stagnant for decades. The basket of goods you compare to then vs now are completely different. You can buy a 1970s fridge that cost kW more to run for cheap. A new bigger more efficient fridge is a different product so you can't just compare prices then and now. Same with all products: today they're bigger, they last longer, they need less maintenance and they are much more efficient.
> It is less possible when people choose to live further away and to live in constant fear of predators so their kids can't walk/bus themselves home.
Most people live where they can afford housing. Unless you are in the upper 5%, you are “choosing” a longer commute in the same way that you chose to use a time machine to set housing and transit policy after WWII.
Painting this as a choice around stranger danger is similarly ignoring that children need to get to school before they are capable of traveling independently, or that busing and transit have been cut in many areas – I’m all about not driving everywhere, and we don’t use a car personally, but many of the families I know do not have that option because the built environment doesn’t have safe routes even to get to the closest bus stop (which is not close).
There are a lot of things we could do better but the average parent does not have control over their municipal zoning or budget, and certainly can’t turn their neighborhood into Amsterdam on a whim because their boss thinks Zoom calls are more productive in a cubicle.
> If you are married to a teacher, how is that not flexible hours? Half the reason people become teachers is that they can pick up and drop off their kids around school times.
Neither of these claims are true. Teachers, like many other jobs, have set schedules. If they need to be at their worksite before school starts and at or after the time it gets out, that does not leave time to travel somewhere else.
> It is a myth that wages have been stagnant for decades. The basket of goods you compare to then vs now are completely different.
This is well studied and I’d tend to go with the academic consensus over your opinion. For example, this is in constant dollars:
One key thing to think about is whether paying less for a cheaper TV every decade is saving you as much money as higher housing, healthcare, education, and retirement costs have cost – and especially how the increases in mandatory costs hit most workers harder. Saving $100/year on my electric bill is nice, but for many people that was cancelled out by rate increases and since it was never that big a part of their budget it’s nowhere near recouping how much rent has increased.
20% of US family households with children under 18 years of age have a household income over $200,000/year. (Source: HINC-04). A large percentage of this forum earn more than that individually. You also don't need nearly that much to live close to work. And that's across the whole US.
So it is definitely not only the top 5% that can afford to choose where they live. You know you don't need a McMansion! You don't need a single family home in an area designed around 1h commutes.
>Painting this as a choice around stranger danger is similarly ignoring that children need to get to school before they are capable of traveling independently
Right but one of you working part time for a few years until the kids are old enough to get themselves around vs one of you working part time until the kids are adults? Big difference. A lot of teenagers in the US are carted around by their parents everywhere partly because their parents choose to live in car-dependent suburbia.
>Neither of these claims are true. Teachers, like many other jobs, have set schedules. If they need to be at their worksite before school starts and at or after the time it gets out, that does not leave time to travel somewhere else.
Teachers have among the most flexible and kid-friendly schedules of all professional or semiprofessional workers. They don't have weird night shift schedules half the week like nurses or 60 hour weeks like lawyers. They have pretty flexible hours when they aren't actually teaching. Because they are largely unionised and mostly women, they have negotiated flexible hours and openness to part time that you just don't find in many jobs.
You also ignore that even if they have to be there from say 8:30 to 4pm, that still means they have drop off flexibility with the kids at one end, and, obviously, in many cases the kids go where teacher-parent works!
>This is well studied and I’d tend to go with the academic consensus over your opinion. For example, this is in constant dollars:
As always this propaganda relates only to "production and non-supervisory workers". You can't just exclude large parts of the economy and call it proper analysis.
>One key thing to think about is whether paying less for a cheaper TV every decade is saving you as much money as higher housing, healthcare, education, and retirement costs have cost
It isn't just TVs but everything else. Appliances are better and cheaper across the board. Cars are cheaper. Houses are far bigger and families are smaller, so food and shelter are cheaper per earner. Clothing is virtually free, and decent clothing is still much cheaper than it was.
Education is free - no, tertiary education doesn't count because the expensive options are luxuries and move the average up a lot. Communication is cheap: remember long distance calls costing dollars a minute? Remember texts costing 79c each? And that was only 10 or 15 years ago.
Housing is more expensive largely (no, not entirely, but largely) because people's tastes are more expensive. You could build uninsulated damp houses with single glazed windows for a pittance if you want to spend what people spent in the 50s.
Retirement costs are up because people live longer. Cry me a river.
What people did before was simple in my childhood case: your grandma/grandpa, who live downstairs in a multifamily home, drops you off or picks you up.
How that's supposed to work with just 2 parents that work 8h/day - idk.
Exactly how I just said? One picks up, one drops off. Not that hard, my parents managed it my whole childhood. And kids can make their own way to/from school after a few years.
Who gets to choose their own hours? This would get most people fired. You can’t just leave in the middle of the afternoon to spend an hour+ driving your kids around
I read this annually, typically in a day, usually when I'm feeling lost. For me it distills the human experience into a simply story that helps me find meaning for where I am in my own journey.
I like the AI notetakers. I'm not worried about being taken out of context because if I am, there is a recording of the whole thing I can point to. As far as etiquette, yah it was awkward at first, but so was doing video calls
Most of my meetings are customer/market discovery interviews, and having a database of transcriptions I can query and discuss with an LLM has increased my ability to extract value from these interviews 10x while reducing the time I have to take and organize notes by 90%.
I didn't read the article, I am just reacting to the headline.
sales ops here. I was just tasked with figuring out how to use AI to use previous quotes to generate new quotes so sales people don't spend so much time creating quotes. Seems like the perfect thing for an agent. Anyone done this?
That sounds alright, but I'm having difficulty imagining a situation where a business wants to produce a quote with novel element types / parameterizations not yet seen before without a human hand in the loop.
I’m way out in assumption-land, but I’m guessing all quotes would be reviewed by humans, and the goal is to take the drudgery out of first drafts.
For that it would be fine if the AI took a stab at something novel like a faster than usual delivery timeline or higher than usual part tolerances. It might get the economics wrong, but just by including them it would be easier for a human to adjust.
In my pre-sales career, we just did copy and paste for spreadsheets and docs. Most quotes only require finding the nearest recent one and a replace-all for key bits of information followed by careful proof-reading.
Sounds like a poorly thought out requirement. If you are tasked with speeding up the generation of quotes and find that AI can do the job well, that is perfectly reasonable. But if you are told what tool to use to make it happen, whomever tasked you with it doesn't understand that AI is a tool, not a goal. (I say that often enough, I may need to put it on t-shirts.)
For him and his boss and the boss of his boss it may well be a goal to use more AI in business processes. It may be decided in the strategy to spend X% on AI in the next 3 years. So you will do exactly that and not question if it makes sense at all.
I disagree here. It sounds to me like the requirements are clear: Use some AI "agent" to perform this task. That means it should be trained on a particular dataset, and it should perform a particular function. This would be in place of trying to write software to directly do this, just let the AI perform task processing, proposal drafting, document formatting.
We sell maker and STEM education electronics, but the profit margins on products like Raspberry Pis, Micro:bits, and Arduinos are, well, pretty slim. This has pushed us to become extremely efficient; so much so that we ended up creating our own AI-agent-based ERP platform called Koi [1]
In essence, our work is built on the shoulders of giants like OpenAI’s Assistant API, Anthropic and Rails.
One of our standout demos is that certain objects (Orders, Quotes, Supplier Orders, Customers etc) in our database are assigned their own email addresses (using Rails' Action Mailbox[2]). Emails can be forwarded directly to these objects-whether it’s an order, a customer, or a supplier order.
From there, our agent, “Koi,” automatically extracts relevant information from emails and takes appropriate actions. For example, Koi can create a quote, attach a purchase order PDF to an order, or extract tracking information from supplier shipping confirmation emails to provide live tracking updates.
It also works the other way around; you can ask Koi to send a customer their tax invoice or inform them that a product they were interested in is out of stock, seamlessly handling typical customer service tasks.
Previously, we integrated speech-to-text functionality using the Whisper API, which made for an impressive demo.
Now, we’re taking it a step further by rebuilding our speech system to leverage OpenAI’s new WebRTC-based Real-time API. The key advantage here is that it comes with function calling support[3]. We already support a variety of automation features using barcodes[4], allowing users to scan a barcode and have Koi perform specific actions. This has proven to be an ideal area in the application to integrate tool use with the real-time API, creating even more powerful and efficient workflows.
Our ultimate goal is to integrate this system with Bishop, our product-picking robot[5].
Your spiel here is much better than the website you've linked.
What you've linked sounds like you're selling a glorified shipping label printer.
I'm curious how this differs from standard TA/TMS systems that have been around for decades. I work in the space and there are plenty of TA/TMS systems that print shipping labels and fulfil orders, that update stock levels and send out tracking emails + SMS messages, integrate with carriers for shipment updates, that integrate with Shopify, eBay, Etsy, big commerce, etc.
They didn't need AI to do any of that. What's the advantage you're finding?
Here's an example that seems to operate in Australia:
Shipping is a fraction of what the system does. To completely automate shipping you need an understanding of inventory etc. To do automated customer service, you need knowledge of shipping, inventory etc.
Apple photos is my privacy first social network. I have "shared albums" with my families, different friend/hobby groups. There is an activity feed so whenever someone shares a photo I get a notification, can like like, comment. It just has the basic features and works really well. Here's the thing, I pay $40 a month for the icloud bundle. So technically they've monetized it already. I've always wondered if others use it similarly...
For me it's just plain old texting group chats, which compared to texting in the old days, is not so bad with RCS messaging. It's free (with cellphone plan), no ads, chronological timeline, private, can send dumb videos and memes all day long while connected to WiFi.
I think this is the reason why "social media" seems so dead now. People stopped posting publicly (for obvious reasons) and almost all of the "social" web is in private group chats. People don't want their life broadcast permanently and prolifically anymore, and they want to share it with just a subset of their friends. The only people left posting to the "public web" are attention seekers, scammers, influencers, people that don't know any better.
1) it doesn't work outside of iOS/macOS really.
2) it's an app on both platforms with it's own communication protocol
You can use Google Photos similarly and it's cross platform. Not sure about commments tho
Line and Facebook also have "private" social media feeds. By private I mean only people you approve can view. No idea how mined they are for data for ads
I do this as well! There is a link that android users can use to view, not sure about upload. My feature wish is that you could associate a shared album with a group message and then it's all I'd ever need. Also not sure you've run into this, but we recently hit the 5K pic shared album limit and had to create a new album.
I always thought YC growth was to fuel it's portco's initial traction. My understanding is that they solved each other's problems and then raised on traction largely within their own ecosystem. Having a wide breadth of companies would better enable this
The bare minimum for pickup/drop off help is ~ $2500 a month.
Frankly I don't know how people are managing.