Suit of the Week: Me + Em

42 Comments

1. What do people wear over fancy dresses to keep warm? I’m going to a wedding this weekend and am wearing a 1-shouldered dress. Should I just bring a scarf in case of artic ac? I tried it on and it looks like of dated to my eye, but I’m at a loss for alternatives.

   1. I am not fashion forward. But I would use a shawl.

   2. This seems like a good reason to have a date so you can borrow his jacket; I think a shawl in August is going to look silly. Also, SEUS here, and I cannot imagine attending a crowded social event this weekend where I might be cold. Surely nobody’s a/c is up for that.

   3. A shawl, or a decidedly unfancy topper like a denim jacket with my ballgown.

   4. i googled “what to wear warmth over wedding guest dress” (I think the semi-insane syntax helps) and was served a surprising range of options in the shopping links at the top of the page (including a Me + Em jacket and an Eileen Fisher silk wrap top thing). You might try the same and see if anything strikes your fancy (either to buy new or to repurpose something from your closet)

   5. +1 to a thin pashmina or shawl, especially one with silk. the nordstrom tissue ones are good. you can find fancier ones on amazon.

      1. This is the way.

         In the winter, a short faux fur jacket.

2. out of curiosity has anyone here done a mastermind or something similar?

   1. I have been doing a 1x month mastermind meeting with 3 others for 10+ years and
      it is by far one of the most powerful ways to self direct my goals.
      There is also a business version (we do not do that one) that a fried has found to be a game changer).
      we use the Napolean Hill methodology.

   2. we did it at a previous job in a development workshop. I really appreciated the format.

3. I am almost 50 and I need something – not sure what exactly – to deal with the difficulty of looking at documents on my computer screen all day. I am thinking about getting blue light glasses that also magnify by +1.00. Has anyone done this recently? Would it be better to adjust to blue light first, and then magnify/readers later? Or vice versa? Any recommendations are welcome.

   1. Office glasses! Mine have minimal magnification on top so I can still focus on people across the room, arms-length computer magnification in the middle, and reading correction on the bottom. They’re also treated for anti-glare and anti-blue light.

      1. Is there a style or brand you’d recommend?

         1. I got them through my optometrist’s office – I think the lenses are made by Essilor, but Zeiss also makes something similar.

   2. I got a blue-light filter film that I applied directly to my computer screen – it doesn’t make a visible difference, but makes a huge difference in terms of eye strain and headaches. Easily-removable ones are available if you are worried about not liking it.

      Have you tried increasing the font size or the magnification on screen, instead of getting reading glasses?

      1. +1 to both of these suggestions.

         Also, it really helps mitigate eye fatigue to intentionally look away every 20 minutes. Just focus at a further distance, refocus elsewhere, blink, close your eyes for a moment, repeat a few times before going back to your screen.

         1. +++ this is so huge.

   3. Go to the optometrist. Even if you just need reading or computer glasses with magnification, they will be so much more helpful and comfortable if they are the right strength and the pupillary distance is correct.

   4. Girl. You need readers!!

4. How do people feel about the ‘will AI replace most white collar jobs’ discourse? I’m a controller and we just implemented an AI platform, and I’m pretty blown away so far by how much of my job it could theoretically automate, which isn’t something I’ve felt when using Claude / ChatGPT. With Claude, I feel like it can be a helpful resource for certain functions, but I don’t feel like anyone would need to be too concerned with it replacing them.

   1. Generative AI like Claude/ChatGPT is a parlor trick compared to real automation. They’re calling everything AI these days, but hopefully what you implemented is something legitimate and reliable. It’s okay to have fewer people doing things that can be automated (though we should remember why the Luddites protested).

      1. this is what I’m finding. the gen AI will throw you a different problem every time if you try and “automate” with it.

   2. If companies try to replace humans with AI the world will grind to a halt very quickly.

   3. How I feel about it and what I think about it are probably different things. But feelings-wise, pretty terrible.

      1. Do you think it’s legitimate or hype?

      2. I *think* there’s something like a 20% chance we really screw up the economy (ie. significant increase in inequality, driven by the elimination of many mid to well paid jobs, many of which will be white collar ones). If you had asked me in 2022, I would have said ~2% chance of that.

         So, rationally, I still *think* generally good economic growth is the most likely outcome (although there will be individual losers, similar to globalization: median well-being increased, even though it really got rough in Detroit). But a 10x increase in my estimation of the chance of a *bad* outcome *feels* really, really bad.

   4. My job is certainly at risk but I think replacing me with a bot would be a huge mistake – see the morning’s thread about how you should never use AI to write. People are already dead behind the eyes in my workplace and their Claude use has only just gotten started.

      1. See also the NYT article about an AI bot that is failing at managing a store.

   5. I’m on the bleeding edge of the tech industry, so I hear this all the time. There have been massive layoffs across the tech industry, and they are attributed to AI. But then a few months later, the companies start hiring people back, and they just don’t mention that.

      AI is the latest scapegoat for poor management, over-hiring, and/or growth-at-all-costs that leads to weak financials and short-term decisions to make shareholders happy.

      For the companies who actually did think AI was the silver bull3t, they’re finding out that they still need humans. For the companies who just used AI as the scapegoat to make Wall Street happy, their stock prices are still tanking and they’re getting called out by customers, press, etc.

   6. I am going to be super honest here: My company has gone all in on AI. We recently acquired a product and fed it a bunch of exemplars, then tested its ability to generate that type of work product based on new facts/documents. Even with the need to proofread what it generates, it can produce something that would take us two to three hours to prepare for 15 minutes of hands-on work. Is the work brilliant and wonderful? No – it is not. But this is not a job function that calls for brilliant and wonderful. What we were generating was not brilliant and wonderful. What AI generates is good enough and the stakes if it gets it wrong are pretty low. And it does a genuinely uncanny job of mimicking our company style such that its output and ours is essentially indistinguishable.

      We had someone retire (age 69 so not unexpected) in the midst of testing and will not be replacing him. So, while I do not think it will replace all of us, it has already replaced one person.

      1. It is so hard to imagine what work product is this unimportant!

         1. You have no imagination?

            1. It sounds like some written product that shouldn’t need to exist in the first place.

            2. This is silly. I can think of an example off the top of my head. I’m in-house counsel and manage our litigation docket. We have lots of insured claims (worker’s comp, auto, general liability…). For each claim, there’s written materials that the claims adjusters produce, both internally and reporting to us. No clue if they are using AI for it but it strikes me as something that AI could work for. But more to the pint, it’s work that needs to get done, but absolutely does not need to be an A+. The real task is to get through a large volume of claims efficiently and consistently. That’s more important in terms of overall value than creating excellent written work product.

            3. It depends a lot on what you mean by “better”, but an example I can think of is customer service scripts – how many times have you been stuck on a call with someone who has no idea what they’re talking about but is contractually obliged to repeat “I understand your problem, and I am going to help you” 8 times. Imagine being the experienced CS phone answerer 30 years ago thinking “they could never replace me with ill trained script readers, I take the time to listen to the customer, I truly understand our product, and can exercise my own good judgement, and do a way better job”. And they’d be right. But they got replaced anyway, because sh*tty but cheap was “better” (more profitable) for the company.

   7. If, as someone else has written, you mean tools that automate work functions more broadly, then the cost of the tools on the market are already more expensive than the employees at our company they want to replace. There are businesses willing to take that leap and give each researcher a half million dollar software budget per year, but we aren’t that company and our leadership won’t pursue the option at that price tag.

   8. Automation? Like actual automation and not generative AI garbage? I’ll take all I can get. But anything that involves judgement calls (like 90% of my job)? Generative AI is horrible at it.

5. any tips on tinnitis? i usually don’t have problems but for the past few days i’ve had it for about a minute each day

   1. I had the swooshing/thumping kind of tinnitus for a couple of years. First, you can get it checked out by your primary care doctor. Mine said my ears looked fine. Then, I decided to clean our my ear wax by adding a solution of half hydrogen peroxide and half water and waiting for a few minutes. The crackling sounds on the tinnitus side were intense. I rinsed it out and have not had any issues ever since. So, even if someone says your ear looks all clear, I recommend trying an ear wax removal method and seeing if that helps.

   2. See an ear doctor and an audiologist (if this is long term, it is good to have a baseline to check hearing loss against) for a diagnosis. Some causes of tinnitus are easy to address. Others, like mine, are not. I have tinnitus 24 hours a day from Meniere’s disease. Would not recommend.

   3. Can be a symptom of perimenopause. Mine improved significantly with HRT.

6. I said screw it recently and bought a bunch of clothes from Me & Em. I never spend this much but I have zero regrets. These clothes are beautifully made.

Comments are closed.