Hi,

Welcome to the Procrastilearning Newsletter, where your time is well spent even though you should probably be doing something else.

3 things worth procrastilearning over

1. Gen Z hates Millennial burger places

Do you remember those trendy burger places that started opening up 15 to 20 years ago? They served fancy burgers in a small stripped-down venue that you had to queue to get into, and had names like Honest Burger and Meat Liquor.

Well, the kids today absolutely hate those places. Social media is awash this year with Gen Z talking about how awful they are. They’re part of what makes the generation above them, the Millennials, so 'cringe'. Personally, I liked those burgers... but then I am a Millennial 👴

So will these sorts of places start to die out? In Poland where I’m based, there’s a chain called Bobby Burger which makes use of every single one of these cliches, but it seems to be doing okay. And in London, the Five Guys chain is on every high street. But let’s see how things go over the next couple of years as the backlash grows…

2. Remote IT workers are taking on multiple full-time jobs and then coasting

Seeing as savvy IT people are figuring out how to get AI to do much of their work, there’s an increasing trend for the cheekiest among them to take on multiple jobs and half-arse them all. The phenomenon has just gotten a lot of attention after a scandal featuring one man called Soham Parekh who was caught working at 5 big firms, quickly making everybody else doing it look bad.

If you’d like to know more about how to take on 3 jobs at once, check out the subreddit Overemployed where its thousands of members refer to the enterprise as ‘OE’.

3. The construction sector is going hard into sustainability

Around 11% of global emissions are caused by the construction sector, so companies are trying to find ways to reduce them and feel less guilty. Some examples are Sublime Systems which makes cement without using heat, Rondo Energy which makes massive heat batteries powered by renewable energy, JUUNOO which makes modular offices in factories (i.e. reducing the high energy expended on construction sites), and Paebbl which captures CO2 in the atmosphere and turns it into building materials.

This is all great news, whatever the incentives might be. Now all we have to do is stop using airplanes and letting cows burp and fart, and we’ll halt climate change completely (maybe? 🤷‍♂️).

2 quotes to keep in mind

1 simple tip to stop AI lying to you

Ask it to assess its own answers.

When you ask AI a question, it usually responds with complete confidence - but it’s sometimes quite wrong. This problem, known as 'hallucination', was supposed to get better as the years go by, but it hasn't really. If you know anything about the topic you’re asking the AI about, you will often come across errors that make no sense.

The solution is to copy-paste an addendum to your questions when you use AI. Get it to tell you how confident it is about its answers. You'll be pleased to know it will usually remind you that it's not actually confident at all about what it's telling you - it really is just programmed to sound like it knows what it's doing.

If you can’t open the full article above, the prompt they recommend adding to your questions is:

Add a section at the end of your responses labeled "Uncertainty Map," where you describe what you're least confident about, what you may be oversimplifying, and what questions or followups would change your opinion.

That's all for today. Many thanks for reading.

Adam

Adam Zulawski
Procrastilearning on Beehiiv / More stuff

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