I don't understand how the research methodology used in the article supports this conclusion. How did they rule out the possibility that the post-pandemic economic situation has had a greater impact on these jobs, leading to greater stress? How did they we rule out that remote work has led to greater range of outsourcing, resulting in more intense competition for these jobs, rather than that caused by
the lack of social contact? Or is it simply because the rapid development of AI in the research period has had a greater impact on these jobs, which is an obvious possibility?
>Undoubtedly, there are potential alternative explanations for the differential deterioration in mental health among those in remotable jobs, such as the introduction of generative artificial intelligence (AI), political shifts, or lingering effects of the pandemic. Workers in AI-exposed occupations—which also tend to be more remotable—might plausibly show rising distress owing to job security concerns rather than remote work. To test this, we leveraged an AI occupational exposure index (21, 22). We found that the mental health effects load on remotability rather than AI exposure (table S20). Additionally, the time series changes in mental health coincide with the pandemic and not the rapid diffusion of AI following ChatGPT’s release in late 2022. Furthermore, we might expect the mental health effects of AI to be particularly large among those who recently lost their jobs, but instead we found more muted effects for the unemployed (fig. S5). Together, these findings suggest that remote work is a more plausible explanation for deteriorating mental health than generative AI during our study period.
not sure if that answers your question, but your question also seems kind of bad faith perfect v good rather than merits and rigor.
> How did they rule out the possibility that the post-pandemic economic situation has had a greater impact on these jobs, leading to greater stress?
I only skimmed the paper, but I presume it is comparing remote workers to non-remote workers who also have gone through the same post-pandemic economic situation.
They use different industries to represent remote workers and non-remote workers. However the same economic situation can have very different effects on different industries.
A basic principle of ancient Chinese Feng Shui is that you should not sit with your back to a space. In other words, you need to have your back against a wall, not your face facing a wall. I believe there is a reason for this. When there is a space behind you, human instinct forces you to pay a subconscious attention on that space (we are very alert to danger from behind), making it harder to concentrate on what is in front of you.
I know that one of the main patterns in Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language was "Light From Two Sides."
Basically, corner rooms are best.
When we worked with a German company, I was impressed by their offices. They tended to have two engineers per office, with really large windows.
I was told there's actually a law that requires it.
I remember visiting the Facebook office, in New York, and was kind of aghast. It was this huge open-plan cavern, with the managers' offices around the edges (with the windows), and rows of desks, in a fairly dimly-lit pit, in the middle. Of course, the desks all faced each other, and the engineers' backs were to the aisles, with no real buffer between where people walked, and where they worked. It was also noisy.
The Japanese do something similar, but at the company I worked for, there was a lot of natural light in the open-plan offices. The managers don't get offices; just desks, nearer the windows, and the aisles were quite wide.
A VP, with a billion-dollar budget, would have a little desk in the corner that would embarrass a fifth-grade teacher.
And the offices were whisper-quiet, with hundreds of people working in the room.
That's funny, because there was a joke going around many years ago that you could tell how much money someone had by how far their couch was from the wall.
Out of curiosity, I was trying to find a source for that, but didn't find much other than old Reddit threads and a 'viral TikTok trend.'
> you could tell how much money someone had by how far their couch was from the wall.
Isn't this just a proxy for room size? A couch is bulky furniture and in smaller rooms need to be tucked away. Also in smaller rooms even a pillow in the corner can see a wall-mounted TV anywhere in the room.
It's also pretty widespread in the US business world. I rarely see a manager's office where they're not facing the door. I've made it my practice throughout my own career, even when it meant improvising the fixtures in dank little cubicles. Also, nobody but me sees my screen.
For a while, I had one of those kneeling chairs that I kept in front of my desk, so if you wanted to sit down and chat, it was like you had to kneel in front of me. I only did it as a joke, but it was amusing. It didn't last very long because someone took it away and replaced it with a regular chair.
This principle emphasizes that there should be no space behind you. It has nothing to do with the wall or window in front of you. Those are just examples I used to explain according to the original post.
If you're concerned about the window's position, ancient Feng Shui advised the window should be located to your side, specifically on the side of the hand you don't use for writing. I think their reasoning was: this way, your head and the hand you use for writing won't cast shadows on the area where you're writing.
Shouldn't the window be opposite your writing hand? If the light comes from the same side as your writing hand it casts a shadow toward your eyes rather than away from your eyes
Workplace safety rules for screen workers say that to avoid eye strain, windows should be to the side, not in the direction you're facing. On a bright day the light coming from the window can have an intensity multiple orders of magnitude higher than the screen. I find it very uncomfortable.
That’s usually bad due to the brightness contrast with the screen. The lighting of what you see next to the screen needs to be controlled, so that it can match the brightness of the screen.
There is a new trend of bringing dogs to the office, and for someone that isn't used to having a pet, it's so disruptive to my focus. So many times I'm focusing on something and then having a dog climb on to you/lick you from the aisle behind you is so jarring and disruptive.
Try having a dog repeatedly hump your leg till completion. “Theres nothing we can do about it” I hate my office and the stupid pet rules more than you could believe.
I have a similar issue with the couple of cats we have in our office (known also as my home). Either they want to go outside, get fed (again), or simply just decide they need attention more than I need to work. But still, sometimes it is a nice distraction, and sometimes that distraction is what I needed to help me actually re-focus on the task at hand :)
It is better for privacy and receiving clients, but a disadvantage is less physical space in the center/walking area. You can play with lego on the ground, too. I would also get rid of the bookshelf. Get an ereader. There is no way you need all those books physically in your vicinity (I am not arguing you should give up 100% on physical books).
Worse, if my desk wouldn't be at the wall (in corner) my cats wouldn't be able to hide in that corner under the desk, and they could play easier with cables which would also be way more in sight. Against the wall? Not so much. I do regret not getting a sit/stand desk, but the extra cost back then was too large. Oh, and I like Ikea. You can sell those refurbished for good price, too.
One of my thoughts is that it's not easy for people to discover what they're truly good at.
The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are. Just as no one thinks they're good at their heartbeat and breathing. Because you have the talent to be good at them from the beginning, so you don't put in much effort to learn them, and therefore you don't realize how difficult they are.
I think a real way to discover your strengths is not to reflect on what you do well, but on what makes you most frustrated when you see others doing it. It feels like an experienced driver watching a student drive and getting frustrated: Why can't you do such a simple action correctly? If you find yourself constantly wondering on something: why can't everyone just do this and it's so simple? You can remind yourself that that one might not be simple at all, but rather that you possess a genuine talent for it.
>>The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are.
I've often wondered about this (beyond basic abilities). I'm sure there are exceptional people for whom this is true but in my experience most people start out not being very good at what they later end up being really good at.
Would love to know if there's some sort of data / research on this.
Most things take learning to master. But most people have more of an aptitude for some things than others and find it comparatively easy to become baseline competent at those things.
Like, one of my nephews could dribble a soccer ball almost as soon as he could walk — it was astonishing how good he was at it at 20 months old. At three his ball control skills were as good as his father’s were at 9 or so (a father who was good enough to play in travel leagues in middle school, so no slouch).
No, at age 5, of course he can’t compete with adults who play in rec leagues. He doesn’t have the speed, strength, situational awareness, reflexes, or sense of of his options in a given situation.
But on the other hand, in isolation, he can almost always get the ball to go where he wants it. He’ll never in his life feel like that’s a skill he had to _learn_.
Whereas I’ve never been able to pick up dribbling at all regardless of how many hours of practice they subjected us to in phys ed.
I think we have so many hangups about this subject that we ended up leaving it unexplored and misunderstood.
Talent, drive, inherent traits interacting with learnable traits, learning curves, etc. What you are good at. What you are good at getting better at.
"Blank slate" is a better ethic. It's sort of the basis for modern public/political moral perspectives. But also for personal ethos... the "growth mindset* is a much better ethos and mentality.
But Otoh... we are who we are. We have the body we have. The genes we have. The childhood development we have. The education and experience we have. The personality we have. Etc.
We don't really have the have the culture of weighing these, and "knowing ourselves" via a mattwr-of-fact, calculating examination.
Sorry to sort of hijack your comment, but as I was reading it I was instantly reminded of a "blog post" that I have in my list of "blog posts for the blog I don't have, and which I will likely never actually share with the world", and thought "Why not share this one today?"
As a prelude, I resonate somewhat with your approach to finding what we're good at. I don't look at how good we are at something, but more at a sort of quality of "effortlessness". Though, now that I am re-reading the pseudo-blog-post (it's from more than a year ago), I am not convinced this is the best word, as it sort of...makes it seem like people didn't put in work!
Anyway, my opinion:
--
I recently caught myself thinking about how different people do and feel about certain kinds of work in different ways.
I think we often tend to think in two axes. We think about liking to do something and not liking — which is one axis (our enjoyment). And there’s also the axis of being bad or good at it, which is the axis of quality.
It seems to me that we think about work according to these two axes. However, I don't think this is the full picture. By which I mean that I think it's possible for you to like something, and for you to be able to be good at something (i.e. to produce good, even incredible quality work), while still having a third axis tied to this equation.
The Effort Axis.
The third axis, to me is, is the effort axis. We can be good at something and enjoy it, but it can still take us a lot of effort. People kind of think about passion, or being "born to do something" (some say it's a "calling"). I think that when you have a calling, you are deep into the third axis, and it is very likely you are also deep into the other axes.
The third axis essentially means that things should feel effortless.
You can be very good at something, but it can still take a while for you to produce good results. And especially if it doesn't feel effortless, it often means that you'll procrastinate more, and that you'll delay it. That it’ll weigh heavier on your mind. But if it feels effortless, you just want more and more and more of it.
This thought came to me when I thought about working on breaking down a project into user stories and, most of all, adding them and meticulously creating them in the appropriate task management software. This is something that I enjoy a lot. It's something that I actually believe I can produce quality results in. And if I really put my mind into it, I can actually do it fast.
But it doesn't feel effortless.
When I finalize it, I feel very drained. Again, I can feel that I've made good progress, that I've produced something very good, and I can genuinely think, "Yeah, I really liked doing this", but I feel very tired. Whereas I think I can code very effortlessly. I think I can effortlessly devise very complex solutions, or very simple solutions for complex problems. And I think it's clearly my "calling".
Today a colleague had the responsibility of handling this process of creating tasks and everything else. And I was marveled at how effortlessly he was doing it all. It's not that he has a lot of experience, or that his results were outrageously good (they were good, but not remarkable). It's just that it clearly felt effortless to him. And I thought: Now, this is something that we should focus this person on.
It's actually the first time they've done it. We gave him the challenge, like we have given other people, and it was amazing. It felt great to work with someone who was able to do things effortlessly.
People often say that you should surround yourself with the best quality workers, the ones who produce incredible results, the ones that have passion. Let's be clear: I have passion about working on those user stories, but it's not effortless.
So I think that you should actually surround yourself with people for whom the work feels effortless.
And at times, it may actually not be the best quality work, but it’ll drive them. They will have more energy. And you will marvel at the way in which it was not a problem for them. They looked at it, they started attacking the problem, and they imbued this wave of positivity — this unshakable belief that they were going to do it.
Even if the results weren't the best, you can feel that they will iterate over it, and they will do it quickly enough and with enough quality because it is effortless for them.
Do not underestimate the power of doing something effortlessly.
Hey this really resonates. I’ve been looking for a way to describe the observation that talent is multi-dimensional without using that word, or just saying something generic like “people are good at different things.”
I don't have any reason to believe this is not a scam. If Amazon had any good intention in doing this, why didn’t they simply note on the webpage that this book is printed on demand? Those introduction on pages look exactly the same as those for the original edition. It’s only once you’ve received the book that you realise Amazon has printed it themselves. I don’t like this game, and now I never buy books from Amazon unless I absolutely have to.
1. This chatbot is incredibly fast. It's the fastest chatbot I've ever seen. Before this, I was used to waiting several or tens of seconds after speaking before the response appeared word by word. But this one immediately displayed a complete answer, which was a completely new experience for me. Is it because of using local model?
2. I'm almost never influenced by any ads, but the ads it recommended really appealed to me. I even hoped they were real. I asked how to buy them and Googled similar products. This shocked me and led to a long self-reflection.
3. Another thing that shocked me is that someone can now create such a beautifully executed, product-level, non-profit thing, simply to showcase an ironic concept. (Even the experience is somehow better real products, see 1). This spectacular unrestrained use of productivity is epic. And this is precisely what AI brings. A double irony.
I'm afraid you might not understand what you're talking about. Animation is a geometry problem, while robotics is a dynamics problem. The latter is subject to constraints many times greater than the former. There is no such "easy" model as you imagined that can transform the former into the latter.
Currency conversion is not only incredibly fraught with traps, but believe me, even for very intelligent and research-savvy individuals, if you're not a professional in this area, you'll struggle to see all the pitfalls and still fall for them. I don't consider myself stupid, but I spent several days seriously researching it, and ultimately, after being exploited by several new tricks, I gave up. I consider those losses as a part of travel expenses and avoid letting it amplify my losses, that ruining my travel. PayPal is even more blatant fraud. You never know how much money is left after a transfer or withdrawal until you're surprised, and then they'll say they mentioned it in some tens of thousands of words of agreement that they would deduct this amount.
I've seen many comments describing the "horse riding man" example as extremely bizarre (which it actually is), so I'd like to provide some background context here. The "horse riding man" is a Chinese internet meme originating from an entertainment awards ceremony, when the renowned host Tsai Kang-yong wore an elaborate outfit featuring a horse riding on his back[1]. At the time, he was embroiled in a rumor about his unpublicized homosexual partner, whose name sounded "Ma Qi Ren" which coincidentally translates to "horse riding man" in Mandarin. This incident spread widely across Chinese internet and turned into a meme. So they used "horse riding man" as an example isn't entirely nonsensical, though the image per se is undeniably bizarre and carries an unsettling vibe.
While I don't doubt this was one influence, there was also an infamous problem with Dall-E 2, which was perfectly able to generate an astronaut riding a horse but completely unable to generate a horse riding an astronaut.
This problem is infamous because it persisted (unlike other early problems, like creating the wrong number of fingers) for much more capable models, and the Qwen Image people are certainly very aware of this difficult test. Even Imagen 4 Ultra, which might be the most advanced pure diffusion model without editing loop, fails at it.
And obviously an astronaut is similar to a man, which connects this benchmark to the Chinese meme.
Interesting background! Prompts like this also test the latent space of the image generator - it’s usually the other way round, so if you see a man on top of a horse, you’ve got a less sophisticated embedding feeding the model. In this case, though, that’s quite an image to put out to the interwebs. I looked to see what gender the horse was.
EDIT: After reading the prompt translation, this was more just like a “year of the horse is going to nail white engineers in glorious rendered detail” sort of prompt. I don’t know how SD1.5 would have rendered it, and I think I’ll skip finding out
Gary Marcus successfully wrote an article about getting image generation models to show a horse riding an astronaut, which is all I needed him to do. (Actually he wrote two, but this one felt more concise.) Take it as an existence proof, not an endorsement.
Just like a basilisk, if you never refer to him again, he fades away and doesn't bug people anymore. Let him fight through whatever he needs to if he ever bothers coming up with anything the rest of the world needs to hear; until then, we can enjoy the peace and quiet.
From the article it seems the name is 马启仁, not 马骑人 so the guy's name sounds the same as 'horse riding man', but that's not a literal translation of his name.
Fun fact, the Serbian parliament building has two statues of horses riding men in front of it.
Which is really apt because in Serbian "konj", or horse, is a colloquial word for moron. So, horses riding people is a perfect representation of the reality of the Serbian government.
Another fun fact, the parliament building in HL2's City 17 was modelled from that building.
I was curious enough to fact check this. The statue does look like two horses wrestling or even mounting two men, but here’s what the city’s tourism website says about it:
[the famous sculptor Toma Rosandić] named this composition of bronze horses and their tamers “Black horses at play, and with them great heroes”, saying that the horses represent strength, and men tame and control that strength.
It’s a valid interpretation. Fact checking may be the wrong word choice and if it wasn’t clear your story passed the fact check: there are indeed two statues, just like you described (with some margin for interpretation). I was just curious to see this postmodern sounding piece of art and it turned out to be a pair of fairly traditional bronze statues.
Since China has a population of 1.4 billion people with vastly differing levels of cognition, I find it difficult to claim I can summarize "modern Chinese culture". But within my range of observation, no. Chinese not only have no hostility toward AI but actively pursues and reveres it with fervor. They widely perceive AI as an advanced force, a new opportunity for everyone, a new avenue for making money, and a new chance to surpass others. At most, some of the consumers might associate businesses using AI generated content with a budget-conscious brand image, but not hostile.
>Since China has a population of 1.4 billion people with vastly differing levels of cognition, I find it difficult to claim I can summarize "modern Chinese culture"
Well, they would modify it slightly to claim "real American culture is..." In general, the range of 'real' America is about 300 miles, in my experience.
A lot of the hostility in the west likely comes from most of the CEO talk about how they want to use this tool to make you obsolete and homeless. The Chinese models have largely just been released for free for anyone to use.
> "Why did such a strange metaphor like 'the sound of an electrocardiogram machine moving paper' appear in this story that had nothing to do with medicine?"
this is sending me, I don't know what's funnier, this translation being accurate or inaccurate
I assumed it was something like that. With all the (impressive) Chinese text in these examples, this definitively wasn't catering to foreign audiences. Nothing wrong with that of course, but it's interesting, it's not something we see a lot.
Very interesting! What's weird though is that the chinese do not even pretend: every single picture has asian-looking people generated.
But on the one picture that honestly looks like a man getting ass-raped by a horse, it's a white man.
I mean even in the west where you can hardly see an ad with a white couple anymore, they don't go that far (at least not yet).
White people are a minority on earth and anti-white racism sure seems to be alive and well (btw my family is of all the colors and we speak three languages at home, so don't even try me).
> I mean even in the west where you can hardly see an ad with a white couple anymore, they don't go that far (at least not yet).
What are you talking about? 1. This is such a strange thing to fixate on and 2. whatever commercials I am seeing that aren't blocked still have white people in them
Super tone-deaf and inappropriate. Not realizing how it would read to the uninformed is a bad look. Myopic at best, openly hostile toward the west along racial lines at worst.
Why not ask for simply a man or even an Han man given the race of Tsai Kang-yong. Why a white man and why a man wearing medieval clothing. Gives your head a wobble.
Yes, in those movies, the hot white guys (and sometimes girls) usually ride on top of the muscular horses. So when you want to show a horse riding a man as a visual gag, why not make the man a hot white guy with a gruff beard?
You act as though they first decided to make an image representing Westerners and then chose that particular scene as an intentional insult, but you need to consider that they likely made thousands of test images, most of which were just playing around with the model's capabilities and not specifically crafted for the announcement post.
So why did this one get picked? I think it boils down to the visual gag being funny and the movie-like quality.
If it was a an elf, knight or some sort of fantasy warrior sure with a comedic prompt sure, That is not the case. If you translate the prompt as people have here, you can see what was typed in,'Subdued white man' under 'muscular horse'. Who is the mare in the picture or even the gelding. If I was to do the visual gag it would be a knight or a a warrior not a peasant, there a no peasants in lord of the rings and very few medieval fantasy has peasant of any kind.
Racial/cultural tension is part of the context in which this image is appearing. Not only because of historical tensions, but because this image appears as part of this generation's Manhattan Project style arms race toward AGI and global dominance. Your denial of that is a reflection of your own ignorance.
Very interesting! It seems to be a great way to combine chords with scales within chords, something no traditional instrument can do. I see the key positions on the left is similar to a computer keyboard, perhaps it could be directly mapped onto a keyboard? That way it could be played even when without that hardware.
Could you talk more about the "recent Chinese coins"? China hasn't had any fiat money containing gold or silver for at least 100 years. So I'm curious what exactly these Chinese coins are.
I don't know the details because I don't really care about gold as an investment, but everything I find says variations of "the 3g Gold Pandas have a face value of 50 Yuan and are legal tender in China.". It would be subject to VAT in Belgium anyway if it was not considered to have legal tender.
And that's the smallest one, I seriously doubt many people buy a 4000 € (30g) coin as a tourist gift.
It is definitely not legal tender. As a Chinese, I've only ever seen such things in tourist souvenir shops for foreigners. If your argument is that a €4000 souvenir is questionable, please allow me to remind you that a €4000 currency coin makes no more sense. If your source is this webpage: https://www.kjc-gold-silver-bullion.com.au/PD/30-g-2023-chin..., I can be almost certain it's a scam because its description is ridiculous.
Bullion coins are typically marked as 'legal tender' (of a nominal value relative to the precious metal content) as doing so exempts them from sales tax in most jurisdictions..... because they are technically "legal tender" (coins) and not bullion.
e.g. British sovereigns are still produced and have a "legal tender" value of £1. Though the gold content of one is currently about £800 last I looked.
> As a Chinese, I've only ever seen such things in tourist souvenir shops for foreigners
Huh, none of these coins are in general use in any country because it would make no sense (their facial value is always largely below their metal value, which is basically constantly appreciating). As a French person I have never seen 20 francs coins in circulation either, and I wouldn't by my baguette with one, but they are still obviously not a "scam", even if their actual value doesn't match their face value. I mean, I should know since I actually buy them, manipulate them, and use them for their gold content.
I think you don't understand how these gold coins work, honestly I don't claim I really understand why central banks produce them either, but they do exist and they seem like a convenient way to invest in real gold (and here comes my initial remark: but why choose the ones that sell for a premium as compared to the ones that sell just for their weight in gold, that I don't understand).
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