Honestly, this is even more boring than that. This is some rich dude who has made obsessing over his health and his diet his entire life. He’s not actually DOING anything other than pretending orthorexia is 1. something he invented and 2. a substitute for a personality.

1. Something you’re at least vaguely interested in and don’t mind doing.
2. Something you’re at least vaguely interested in and don’t mind doing.
3. Blockchain, because it’s a scam that is rapidly disintegrating.

No one else can tell you what you should pursue. I didn’t know what I did or didn’t like until I tried a few things and figured out what aspects of them I like and what aspects were not for me. For instance, I don’t like frontend programming and I absolutely hate dealing with external clients. I do something more like data engineering, which a lot of people find deadly boring but I find perfectly satisfactory.

The other thing that’s been really important to me is decoupling my career from my self-worth. My job is not the most important thing about me. My job is something I do so I can get paid enough to do the things I actually want to do. I don’t need to LOVE my job. I need to like it enough to mostly not dislike having to do it 40 hours a week. For me this means I don’t find the work boring, I work with nice people, I mostly don’t have to do things I HATE (e.g. client presentations), and I’m not doing anything that conflicts with my values (e.g. I wouldn’t work on blockchain, or law enforcement projects).

This makes me sound like a total wanker but I reread my favorite Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. I find them both very comforting because generally nice people end up happy in the end.

A few of the chatbots I worked on, back when I did that, were actually good. Those companies had actually looked at their support traffic and figured out that like 95% of it was people asking the same 20 or so questions that had specific answers. Or at least that you could get to a specific answer with 1-2 followup questions. Like, a huge number of people just want to know how to pay their bill, and the answer is “go to this webpage or call this number”.

It’s kind of a waste of human time and effort to have a human answering all those questions, so the chatbot dealt with those (and tbh it was 50-50 whether those people even knew they were talking to a robot) and the actual hard shit got a warm transfer to a human agent who got the chat transcript.

Honestly the companies it worked best for, either their online documentation was a total shitshow so the chatbot was your best hope of actually finding anything, or a huge proportion of their customer base were total luddites who just didn’t want to use a website and wanted to talk to someone. (We had to make our chatbots support Internet Explorer 11. In 2021. Because for some of our clients IE11 was like 30% of their traffic. I don’t even fucking know.)

I used to design and maintain chatbots for a living, for a company that among other things sold bespoke chatbots to corporate clients, and I can tell you that the companies KNOW that customers don’t want chatbots for customer service. They don’t care. THEY want chatbots for customer service because chatbots are orders of magnitude cheaper than hiring customer service representatives.

A chatbot is gonna cost what it costs them to employ 1-2 customer service reps, but it can handle basically infinite traffic for that price. The GOOD ones handle the simple questions (your "how do I pay my bill"s and your "what are your hours"s) and then forward the difficult ones (“why is my bill fucked up?”) to a human agent. But I absolutely worked with some clients (who I will not name because I do not want to get sued) that explicitly wanted to avoid letting customers get access to a human agent by whatever means possible.

Also a side note but basically no one lets people cancel accounts via chatbot. They inevitably want THOSE requests to go to a human rep so they can try to talk them out of it.

Normally I’d agree but the prospect of two dudes I find morally repugnant trying to punch each other in the face has a certain appeal, since no matter how it goes at least one person I think deserves to get punched in the face is gonna get punched in the face.

Is Musk gonna pay the lawyers tho because he’s sure as shit not paying anyone else.

TIL Beeper exists. Now I am on the wait list, and kind of sad I can’t prepay for a year to skip the line.

Dropshipped AliExpress crap and hundreds of people with a cricut and the same free clipart making tote bags/tshirts/dog tags.