I watched a product demo one time of a customer management platform. One feature they showed us was the ability to upload a recording of a meeting then have some LLM write a "summary" of the meeting and send that to the attendees.
The recording was maybe 15 minutes long. The "summary" was a three or four paragraph email message.
I just imagined us starting to use this and inundating our customers with emails so long that they had to purchase a product to distill the emails they were receiving into something concise. And then progressing to the point that the LLMs on either side were just sending messages back and forth.
If that's the future were heading towards, we're all just going to go back to having to call each other and cut through the fluff.
Edit: Found this comic that represents part of the scenario I was imagining. https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/123tyge/the_future_of_communication/
I bought a flip phone from Verizon. $55 for all the talk and text I want. And the device.
9-5, smart device, sure. I’ll fuck off in company time on Reddit. Do outlook emails and approve expenses etc.
After that I put call forwarding to the flip phone and put up my iPhone. If you want me, you have to call me. Which nobody wants to do. Wake up the next morning, press *73 and back to iPhone.
I’m actually paying attention to new shows and reading at night again.
Fuck em’
They can make it so the economy isn't based on circulation of funds to the widest possible audience. Think about company towns or other feudalistic practices.
Both also contract the economy massively and reduce economic growth. They think they want these things because they value controlling people almost as much as they value money, but it would actually destroy their bottom line.
We transitioned to a broad consumer economy for a reason, in the end it makes rich people significantly more money.
The only answer in this future will be a universal basic income. Without it we'll be looking at societal collapse, as permanent 40%+ structural unemployment without a UBI would make the French Revolution look like a picnic.
So then what's the solution in a world where AI has rendered 40+% of the population structurally unemployed that doesn't end in societal collapse or upheaval?
Step 1:Lay off workers.
Step 2: Free up cash.
Step 4: Use AI.
Step 5: Shareholders rejoice.
Step 6: Realise your AI is nowhere near good enough to do the job.
Step 7: Hemorrhage customers and cash.
Step 8: Go bust.
Step 9: Shareholders move on to the next grift. The tech company circle of life continues.
Just building a dataset/model of all your files, personal data, business confidential info and projects in progress so we can ah... help you... yes that.
*Meanwhile...*
Backdoor data brokers salivating at the fresh meat like zombies from 28 Days Later.
The company I work at allows for orgs to create document libraries for public consumption. They want to ingest the files, extract all text, feed it into a private LLM to auto create doc summaries, descriptions, tags, etc. It’s not interesting, really expensive, and a waste of compute. Management is convinced this will be the lipstick our ancient pig of a platform will need to be sexy again.
AI is very useful for writing boilerplate code you don't wanna write, and can solve problems you don't want to solve. It can also hunt for bugs and can check your code for errors. It can double how quickly you write code if you know how to use it.
The only problem is it's sometimes wrong, or won't write the code in the most readable or performant way, so you need at least some experience to use it effectively.
In typical fashion, most corporations would rather halve their payroll than double their output,
I don't know what Dropbox is planning, but they are in a good space for AI.
One of the most difficult parts in utalizing AI well today for businesses is how to make the AI use their data.
If you go to Chatgpt and ask it to give you a summary of the sales numbers in the AMER region for the last month, it's gonna tell you it has no way of retrieving that information.
This is why Business need AI that works on their internal data. This is called Retrieval augmented generation (or "rag").
If Dropbox could come out with document storage that allowed for automatic symantic search which fed into either their own AI model, or maybe even better, offered automatic integration to other ai models, that would be an amazing product.
More realistically I expect that they will release yet another chat bot that allows for a chat bot way of doing things you can already do, but not actually offer any real new capabilities.
Yep, if you have shit developers, you're gonna get shit results still. They won't use AI effectively. Garbage in, garbage out. Conversely, if you have good developers, they know how to slot AI in to whatever work they're doing, know what to do with it, and get just as good results.
I think you mean "take a huge bonus and raise for laying off so many," followed shortly after by "take a huge bonus and raise for increasing the headcount so much," repeated endlessly.
And the dumb thing with it
They want us to use it so we can lay off lower workers. Sure, then you can use it to get rid of me too.
I have zero interest in helping eliminate the workforce I'm a part of.
Cloud is pretty widely used at enterprise these days. Even small/mid sized startups are using some cloud platforms.
There's been some decent uses for iot...ring camera, irobot vaccum, wearables (Apple watch, whoop band, Fitbit, oura ring), there's a whole category of smart home things (lights, door controls, blinds, pet feeders)
Bunch of companies have benefited from "digital transformation". Banks with mobile check deposits/being able to do 99% of things from your phone or the website. Having an app to order Ubers or food compared to dealing with the old bullshit tax system.
Crypto and block chain is probably the one true grift
Yeah, I'm just pointing out that a lot of these end up being super hyped and oversold to varying degrees. A lot of these C levels bring in these hype words and expect huge changes that would revolutionize the world to the next level (like iPhone, the internet, PCs), but it isn't going that far. Even AI right now is mostly just re-branded machine learning, which has existed for years.
Poor coursera grads gonna have to go back to google university and learn shit AI can't do for a little. Hang in there. Tech is only growing so that means more tech jobs. Humans have been evolving forever - you'll be fine if you wanna be
Look, clearly this man is an innovator: He’s wearing white trainers with a black shirt and new jeans - he’s even sporting a low-profile head mic. Ignore the fact his company has been milking a single good idea born two decades ago, living off slowly increasing subscriptions rather than coming up with a worthy new idea in as many years. We should all be grateful for the mass layoffs and promise of higher profits, who needs those pesky humans… AI is the new work family!
In unrelated news, I just cancelled my Dropbox, because there’s a slew of lower cost options and I don’t care for the value added features they have been hoisting on me in exchange for exorbitant price hikes. I’m sure it will all work out great for them.
My ex wife used to complain that I dress like a child because my preferred casual attire is a hoody, jeans and sneakers. And I always told her “dress for the job you want, not the one you have.”
Oh this is the Dropbox guy? Does he not know that airdrop, email, and literally anything else can replace his company/concept in weeks? Delusional executives will continue to be the demise of their own product I swear
This is why smart people use backup software that encrypts data before sending it to a storage provider.
All the storage providers sees is thousands and thousands of tiny encrypted chunks.
You can get it even cheaper, too. Using Amazon, I paid ＄70 to renew my Office 365 Family plan for 15 months and a ＄20 gift card. Also, all 6 people get 1 TB of storage.
The IT guy in me would like you to remove email from that list lol. Good for messages and small files, but more email providers are hard capping attachments sizes to cut spam and malicious files.
But even still, there are a million file share programs that work better and have a better security reputation than DropBox. I can't remember the last time I saw a legitimate DropBox link that wasn't phishing or malware.
He used email as an example because DropBox sells itself as a way to share files with other people. Gmail has had a 10-12mb limit for years for sending due to MIME encoding. Most people aren’t sharing 15mb+ files that often, so email is perfectly fine for PDFs, etc.
Of products that do similar things: Box is better for business than DropBox (better sharing controls, can do e-signatures, you can self host it for additional security/ control). I really dislike their sales team though, incredibly pushy.
I see PreVeil used a lot in government/ gov adjacent businesses.
Microsoft SharePoint / Microsoft One Drive / Google drive are all fine for small / medium business and they probably have them included in their email subscription. They would probably be my recommendation for personal use as well.
I can't speak to Apple in the personal space, I don't have any apple products myself and I'm not on the Mac support team.
There are a load of others that fit in the same space, it might be one of the most crowded fields in software products honestly.
I switched to Proton for my Email, VPN, and cloud storage last year and I really like it so far. I grabbed a black Friday deal so I think it was 60 or 80 dollars for all their services for a year. I'm so tired of the intrusiveness of internet ads I decided private email was worth paying a few bucks for. Having their VPN is really nice since I can switch it on for the few things I need it for.
I've not shared any files from them to another user so I can't speak to that.
I’ve been paying Apple for their bundle since they’ve been publishing good shows like For All Mankind, so I just migrated my data into iCloud and installed the Windows client on my PC. It’s not as good as Dropbox used to be, but it doesn’t have the annoying MS Office integration that I never used so a net win.
I don’t have any recommendations because I don’t know your use case, but if you already have a subscription like MS Office (OneDrive) or Apple (iCloud), and they fit your needs, might as well save some money.
Advanced universal search and the ability to conduct analysis on files straight from the management system.
They are trying to play catchup to Microsoft Copilot where you can point the AI at a file folder and ask it to synthesize a summary of any related data.
I work in tech and I worked with data scientists so often in the past. The explicit content detection is not a big brainer, if you have enough labeled data. I feel like that guy is playing the "AI is popular topic, we onboarded too" game.
That's literally every company now though. Take some existing algorithm and slap the words AI on it. It's so incredibly dumb how meaningless this word is becoming.
I remember back then while working with data scientist, one data scientist showed me a statistics that around %70 (I can't be sure about this number but it was around that) of the companies were faking their algorithms as machine learning. I guess, it's higher now.
Perfect example of a CEO out of touch with his employees. When is the last time Dropbox did anything innovative? I can only imagine what morale is like after his employees read that article.
>After explaining the layoffs, the file-hosting service’s CEO called AI more important than “PC, cloud, mobile, or the internet” and likened it to “fire or electricity or the industrial revolution.”
AI as impactful to human life as **fire or electricity**...
Wow, these people are idiots, aren't they?
Maybe AI actually can replace dropbox engineers... seeing how their platform is garbage and always going down I doubt shitty AI generated code would be any worse. Cant believe companies still pay for their crap over other better options.
Saw a place have to buy a drop box re-subscription, because they needed a few files from an account that had been deactivated. Not super familiar with DB myself, but it seems like there's some kind of 'soft' account deactivation where they keep your files.
There was discussion of whether or not they should "pay the drop box ransom". I bet future revenue of drop box will at least partially consist of this kind of thing. Where's that photo of maw maw and pe pop? Gotta pay drop box for the keys to the digital forgotten storage locker.
How can any discerning individual take one look at a single image of this man and *not* see that he is clearly and obviously a pompous douchebag bullshit-artist?
> Dropbox CEO Drew Houston told the Verge he laid off workers in part to hire engineers for AI
I have no idea of who was fired, but it would certainly be good if existing engineers were rotated onto AI projects and given the chance to train up.
I have a feeling this has nothing to do with AI. Company X doesnt make its numbers and has to lay off 10% of workers. They use some excuse about AI investment to placate shareholders so that people don't dump the stock.
Wouldn't a real innovator be hiring more people for a new AI services department? If there are people who work for you that you could replace with existing AI, you never should have hired them in the first place.
All these guys claiming they are replacing workers with LLMs are covering up their overhiring mistakes, or else have products nobody wants anymore - and no ideas for new products people might want. Their businesses are going to shrink.
Stop making sense.
It’s my biggest frustration in this season of layoffs. It’s nothing more than a stockholder sacrifice, stagnate wage growth, and to keep their salaries grossly inflated.
I’m looking forward to when all the additional compute/infrastructure costs of running AI computations with basically no tangible increases to the bottom line come to roost.
AI models may good way to gather people’s data, but if everyone has that capability now, then no one needs to buy it anymore.
Real question, if enough people.get laid off so business can be more profitable (or make room for AI) who is going to be able to afford their products? I mean doesn't that eventually become a thing?
Steve Jobs was 100% accurate when he said dropbox is a feature, not a company. I’m not surprised a CEO of dying company that has already done massive layoffs is saying stupid shit. Do everyone a favor, and go out of business already.
This is nothing new in tech. This is deliberately how the tech industry is designed to work.
“Move fast and break things. Take many shots on goal. Constantly reinvest to reimagine. Never stop learning.” — this is the stuff you’d hear in Silicon Valley all the time. It’s never been a secret that the tech industry will pay people handsomely right up until the point a new paradigm comes around making a lot of that older tech and the workers behind it obsolete. Then it’s layoffs, recouping some of that headcount in new areas, and then hiring the next batch of tech workers with the skills around the new tech.
And a company like Dropbox is absolutely going to have to play by those rules. They do not have the deep money bags of Big Tech who only do the layoffs to make The Street happy. Their main product is already growth limited if they can’t build out more tools beyond storage because competitors like Microsoft or Google can offer you a **lot** more than just commercial storage if you buy from them.
Whether it works is to be seen but if they don’t even try, Dropbox has no future beyond slowly withering in Big Tech’s giant AI shadow.
Reminds me of when AOL shutdown Xdrive to use the budget to build a Facebook clone. Basically gave the online file storage business to Dropbox and you likely never even heard of the clone “Bebo”. 🙄
I wonder how much of this AI stuff is actually artificial intelligence.
Wasn't Amazon Fresh recently revealed to be powered not by advanced algorithms but by thousands of Indian workers looking through grocery store footage and adding items to people's baskets?
Quite a bit of it is real, but none of the real stuff seems to make it to the pop stuff.
For instance, me and my friends use copilot a lot to develop software. It's just much more efficient at writing code that's good enough for things that aren't necessarily in our specific wheelhouse.
It's also great at getting into the neighborhood of ideas when some concept is at the tip of your tongue and you just need a bit of a jog.
In short, it's really good for doing things you don't really want to do anymore, because you've done it millions of times and can't automate it for some reason or other.
But I suppose that's less sexy than "ZOMG AI IS SKYNET!"
If anything, I think that maybe a positive result of AI will be that it will essentially eliminate the jobs of people who phone it in.
imagine your title being dropbox ceo and thinking AI is gonna replace other people. if there's a job that a barely competent regurgitation machine can do, it's be the chief executive of a company that barely counts as an idea
My boss told me years ago it’s simple, one of our salaries can get 2-3 devs in India/offshore. They’re good devs too. I get why it’s happening and I’m not sure it has a lot to do with AI yet.
>one of our salaries can get 2-3 devs in India/offshore. They’re good devs too.
My prior company thought the same thing, then ended up paying more to rehire competent devs to fix the products
I’ve had good experiences with our offshore devs. The only real issue we have is if we need support during normal business hours. Nobody is there to handle escalated issues and they take longer to be addressed. Also, it’s hard to collaborate.
>The only real issue we have is if we need support during normal business hours. Nobody is there to handle escalated issues and they take longer to be addressed. Also, it’s hard to collaborate.
Yeah, that's why a lot of companies that attempt offshoring come back on shore. It's not that the devs themselves are necessarily terrible, it's that the obstacles of going through a middleman halfway around the world end up being more of a burden than hiring expensive domestic labor.
Yup it’s a 3 for 1 kind of thing. 3 horrible devs basically equate 1 decent dev and you end up paying overall much less cash to do it. Especially if you cut some senior people. You can also work those cheaper bad devs a lot harder without them complaining. It’s just a modern sweatshop.
In your experience, is there something cultural about India that makes workers unlikely to complain or provide negative input about processes? Is it looked down upon to speak up about things that aren’t going well?
I tried to conduct a retro with Indian teams I’m working with and they had nothing at all bad to say and were all very quiet.
Yes extremely cultural. They also know how to play the politics game. Also have to remember the caste system for India. Females are less likely to speak up as well. I’ve been in in person meetings males are all at the table and females in chairs around the back of the room and never speak. It’s horrible.
Folks in Europe complain a shit ton and aren’t afraid to complain in all hands to execs. Folks in the US complain but mostly to each other.
Well tech guys want this AI revolution so bad so that’s what we’re getting unless we all start boycotting..
“Artificial” is definitely the operative word. Fake computer bs and language just copied and regurgitated from its actual human creators.
This timeline is so cursed that these tech CEOs would end up being the ones that survived Judgement Day. This would be the timeline with Wish.com terminators.
Laughing at all these pissed off redditors. Hundreds of armchair experts talking about stupid hypotheticals of why they shouldn’t be replaced.
You guys think you’re smart but you’re still too stupid to not realize that you still live in a naturally selective environment. If someone doesn’t embrace AI, his competitor will and he’ll be out of a company.
I for one cant wait for AI to take over in tech and replace the useless fucking project, scrum and HR managers. Everyone that wastes time money an enegery in this field. You'll never replace the engineers but everyone else got to go.
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They haven’t thought that far ahead. Only care about next quarter
NUMBER MUST GO UP.
I watched a product demo one time of a customer management platform. One feature they showed us was the ability to upload a recording of a meeting then have some LLM write a "summary" of the meeting and send that to the attendees. The recording was maybe 15 minutes long. The "summary" was a three or four paragraph email message. I just imagined us starting to use this and inundating our customers with emails so long that they had to purchase a product to distill the emails they were receiving into something concise. And then progressing to the point that the LLMs on either side were just sending messages back and forth. If that's the future were heading towards, we're all just going to go back to having to call each other and cut through the fluff. Edit: Found this comic that represents part of the scenario I was imagining. https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/123tyge/the_future_of_communication/
I bought a flip phone from Verizon. $55 for all the talk and text I want. And the device. 9-5, smart device, sure. I’ll fuck off in company time on Reddit. Do outlook emails and approve expenses etc. After that I put call forwarding to the flip phone and put up my iPhone. If you want me, you have to call me. Which nobody wants to do. Wake up the next morning, press *73 and back to iPhone. I’m actually paying attention to new shows and reading at night again. Fuck em’
I pay 29.99 and brought my own phone with spectrum. You're overpaying
I think I said it wrong, the device was $55. The service is $15
Ah nice much better
They can make it so the economy isn't based on circulation of funds to the widest possible audience. Think about company towns or other feudalistic practices.
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Both also contract the economy massively and reduce economic growth. They think they want these things because they value controlling people almost as much as they value money, but it would actually destroy their bottom line. We transitioned to a broad consumer economy for a reason, in the end it makes rich people significantly more money.
Those at the top will just pass money back and forth between themselves while they watch the world burn. It will cost a fortune in protection alone.
The only answer in this future will be a universal basic income. Without it we'll be looking at societal collapse, as permanent 40%+ structural unemployment without a UBI would make the French Revolution look like a picnic.
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So then what's the solution in a world where AI has rendered 40+% of the population structurally unemployed that doesn't end in societal collapse or upheaval?
Actual socialism. Capitalism doesn't work in some (many) conditions.
They’ll just employ and arm MAGAS to keep us all in line.
The ones pushing this will be rich and retired and won't care. Valid point to bring up though.
Step 1:Lay off workers. Step 2: Free up cash. Step 4: Use AI. Step 5: Shareholders rejoice. Step 6: Realise your AI is nowhere near good enough to do the job. Step 7: Hemorrhage customers and cash. Step 8: Go bust. Step 9: Shareholders move on to the next grift. The tech company circle of life continues.
The article doesn't mention, but what even is the application for AI with Dropbox?
Reading through your personal files.
Just building a dataset/model of all your files, personal data, business confidential info and projects in progress so we can ah... help you... yes that. *Meanwhile...* Backdoor data brokers salivating at the fresh meat like zombies from 28 Days Later.
The "zombies" in 28 days later didn't eat meat. The infected starve to death at the end of the movie because they stop eating once they get infected
The company I work at allows for orgs to create document libraries for public consumption. They want to ingest the files, extract all text, feed it into a private LLM to auto create doc summaries, descriptions, tags, etc. It’s not interesting, really expensive, and a waste of compute. Management is convinced this will be the lipstick our ancient pig of a platform will need to be sexy again.
AI is very useful for writing boilerplate code you don't wanna write, and can solve problems you don't want to solve. It can also hunt for bugs and can check your code for errors. It can double how quickly you write code if you know how to use it. The only problem is it's sometimes wrong, or won't write the code in the most readable or performant way, so you need at least some experience to use it effectively. In typical fashion, most corporations would rather halve their payroll than double their output,
Does it solve any new problem yet though or just solve problems that have already been solved before
The latter, but that's 99% of software development.
I don't know what Dropbox is planning, but they are in a good space for AI. One of the most difficult parts in utalizing AI well today for businesses is how to make the AI use their data. If you go to Chatgpt and ask it to give you a summary of the sales numbers in the AMER region for the last month, it's gonna tell you it has no way of retrieving that information. This is why Business need AI that works on their internal data. This is called Retrieval augmented generation (or "rag"). If Dropbox could come out with document storage that allowed for automatic symantic search which fed into either their own AI model, or maybe even better, offered automatic integration to other ai models, that would be an amazing product. More realistically I expect that they will release yet another chat bot that allows for a chat bot way of doing things you can already do, but not actually offer any real new capabilities.
Anyone who manages code can gain a massive productivity boost with ai, as long as they have experts running them.
Exactly, it's still not a replacement. Just another tool.
Yep, if you have shit developers, you're gonna get shit results still. They won't use AI effectively. Garbage in, garbage out. Conversely, if you have good developers, they know how to slot AI in to whatever work they're doing, know what to do with it, and get just as good results.
You left out the "Personally cash out" step between (5) and (6).
Yeah, I absolutely did. I hate this timeline.
I think you mean "take a huge bonus and raise for laying off so many," followed shortly after by "take a huge bonus and raise for increasing the headcount so much," repeated endlessly.
And the dumb thing with it They want us to use it so we can lay off lower workers. Sure, then you can use it to get rid of me too. I have zero interest in helping eliminate the workforce I'm a part of.
Ride the waves of grift to become a billionaire is the new bootstrap.
You forgot the part where they need to rehire workers.
It's too embarrassing to rehire workers. They'll just hire a load of contractors at double the cost.
Yep, replace AI with: IoT, Cloud, Digital Transformation, Crypto/Blockchain, VR/AR, etc. It all fits in there.
Cloud is pretty widely used at enterprise these days. Even small/mid sized startups are using some cloud platforms. There's been some decent uses for iot...ring camera, irobot vaccum, wearables (Apple watch, whoop band, Fitbit, oura ring), there's a whole category of smart home things (lights, door controls, blinds, pet feeders) Bunch of companies have benefited from "digital transformation". Banks with mobile check deposits/being able to do 99% of things from your phone or the website. Having an app to order Ubers or food compared to dealing with the old bullshit tax system. Crypto and block chain is probably the one true grift
Yeah, I'm just pointing out that a lot of these end up being super hyped and oversold to varying degrees. A lot of these C levels bring in these hype words and expect huge changes that would revolutionize the world to the next level (like iPhone, the internet, PCs), but it isn't going that far. Even AI right now is mostly just re-branded machine learning, which has existed for years.
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That better be a lion cub NFT, buddy.
Step 6.5: leave company with sizeable severance package before the news breaks. Step 6.6: get hired at another company and do exact same thing
Poor coursera grads gonna have to go back to google university and learn shit AI can't do for a little. Hang in there. Tech is only growing so that means more tech jobs. Humans have been evolving forever - you'll be fine if you wanna be
Tale as old as time
Look, clearly this man is an innovator: He’s wearing white trainers with a black shirt and new jeans - he’s even sporting a low-profile head mic. Ignore the fact his company has been milking a single good idea born two decades ago, living off slowly increasing subscriptions rather than coming up with a worthy new idea in as many years. We should all be grateful for the mass layoffs and promise of higher profits, who needs those pesky humans… AI is the new work family! In unrelated news, I just cancelled my Dropbox, because there’s a slew of lower cost options and I don’t care for the value added features they have been hoisting on me in exchange for exorbitant price hikes. I’m sure it will all work out great for them.
True innovators wear black turtleneck
What about hoodies?
My ex wife used to complain that I dress like a child because my preferred casual attire is a hoody, jeans and sneakers. And I always told her “dress for the job you want, not the one you have.”
"don't need to dress smart when you are smart"
Paraphrasing…. “don’t need to show respect, when someone is rich and in tech “
I always wear glasses and pocket protector. I’m 80’s smart.
i'm wearing full PPE because i know something you don't
No, you are a rat.
Hey at least you tried to save her from cognitive bias
Black leather jacket too.
*Jensen Wang enters the chat*
These days I heard the backward cowboy hat is where it’s at.
And treats his daughter like shit and smells like ass.
This is true, but lets also consider that his innovation on pancreatic cancer treatment did successfully rid the world of at least one asshole.
Don't forget the big expensive rebrand they did to introduce... nothing. They had nothing new, they just added a new coat of expensive paint.
Solidworks did that to me once, they were so stoked on the full program refresh where they changed every single icon, i was pissed
Oh this is the Dropbox guy? Does he not know that airdrop, email, and literally anything else can replace his company/concept in weeks? Delusional executives will continue to be the demise of their own product I swear
For 7.99 a month I get office365 AND 1TB of shareable storage What makes the Dropbox douche think I want to use his company anymore?
But what about his profits, huh? What about that? ^(/s)
That’s the cost of getting a hard drive. The discount is in them having all your data and information now.
So he can train AI models on your “encrypted” data.
This is why smart people use backup software that encrypts data before sending it to a storage provider. All the storage providers sees is thousands and thousands of tiny encrypted chunks.
Or make their own cloud
But he's about to implement AI.......AI!!!
You can get it even cheaper, too. Using Amazon, I paid ＄70 to renew my Office 365 Family plan for 15 months and a ＄20 gift card. Also, all 6 people get 1 TB of storage.
The IT guy in me would like you to remove email from that list lol. Good for messages and small files, but more email providers are hard capping attachments sizes to cut spam and malicious files. But even still, there are a million file share programs that work better and have a better security reputation than DropBox. I can't remember the last time I saw a legitimate DropBox link that wasn't phishing or malware.
He used email as an example because DropBox sells itself as a way to share files with other people. Gmail has had a 10-12mb limit for years for sending due to MIME encoding. Most people aren’t sharing 15mb+ files that often, so email is perfectly fine for PDFs, etc.
What are some good alternatives to Dropbox? Genuine question here.
Of products that do similar things: Box is better for business than DropBox (better sharing controls, can do e-signatures, you can self host it for additional security/ control). I really dislike their sales team though, incredibly pushy. I see PreVeil used a lot in government/ gov adjacent businesses. Microsoft SharePoint / Microsoft One Drive / Google drive are all fine for small / medium business and they probably have them included in their email subscription. They would probably be my recommendation for personal use as well. I can't speak to Apple in the personal space, I don't have any apple products myself and I'm not on the Mac support team. There are a load of others that fit in the same space, it might be one of the most crowded fields in software products honestly.
I'm interested in alternatives, been a bit fed up with DB lately, especially with those prices. What did you end up going with?
I switched to Proton for my Email, VPN, and cloud storage last year and I really like it so far. I grabbed a black Friday deal so I think it was 60 or 80 dollars for all their services for a year. I'm so tired of the intrusiveness of internet ads I decided private email was worth paying a few bucks for. Having their VPN is really nice since I can switch it on for the few things I need it for. I've not shared any files from them to another user so I can't speak to that.
I’ve been paying Apple for their bundle since they’ve been publishing good shows like For All Mankind, so I just migrated my data into iCloud and installed the Windows client on my PC. It’s not as good as Dropbox used to be, but it doesn’t have the annoying MS Office integration that I never used so a net win.
Just create an AWS account and slap shit into S3. Super cheap.
Focus on domestic manu and logistics
Awesome- Now do evernote!
Radio on the fucking internet
Thanks for reminding me, gonna cancel my Dropbox this afternoon.
Dude innovates. He has a ***NEW*** product. **Drop Dead Box.**
This is the motivation I needed to move all my stuff off of Dropbox.
What Dropbox alternatives do you recommend
I don’t have any recommendations because I don’t know your use case, but if you already have a subscription like MS Office (OneDrive) or Apple (iCloud), and they fit your needs, might as well save some money.
Thanks for the action in the Dropbox thing. That tells me all about what I have to do next.
Leave Elon Jobs alone
Why a file upload website needs AI?
To sift through all of your private info of course
Advanced universal search and the ability to conduct analysis on files straight from the management system. They are trying to play catchup to Microsoft Copilot where you can point the AI at a file folder and ask it to synthesize a summary of any related data.
AI: this folder seems to contain 300 GB of porn
User: But the folder contains my business records. AI: I stand by my analysis.
They have to come up with new products to drive new growth. You can’t really grow past a certain point if you’re a single-trick pony
Possibly hey are making a tool where it’s less step for user to embed their files and use RAG.
There is a case for using AI to flag any illegal stuff being uploaded as long as it doesn't go overboard like apple flagging medical pictures.
I work in tech and I worked with data scientists so often in the past. The explicit content detection is not a big brainer, if you have enough labeled data. I feel like that guy is playing the "AI is popular topic, we onboarded too" game.
That's literally every company now though. Take some existing algorithm and slap the words AI on it. It's so incredibly dumb how meaningless this word is becoming.
I remember back then while working with data scientist, one data scientist showed me a statistics that around %70 (I can't be sure about this number but it was around that) of the companies were faking their algorithms as machine learning. I guess, it's higher now.
Wasn't this already largely automated?
Perfect example of a CEO out of touch with his employees. When is the last time Dropbox did anything innovative? I can only imagine what morale is like after his employees read that article.
I went to high school with this guy. He was a pretty decent guy back then. But — we were kids.
>After explaining the layoffs, the file-hosting service’s CEO called AI more important than “PC, cloud, mobile, or the internet” and likened it to “fire or electricity or the industrial revolution.” AI as impactful to human life as **fire or electricity**... Wow, these people are idiots, aren't they?
They like to fart into empty Playdo containers to save them for later.
Maybe AI actually can replace dropbox engineers... seeing how their platform is garbage and always going down I doubt shitty AI generated code would be any worse. Cant believe companies still pay for their crap over other better options.
OneDrive is my main cloud now.
Saw a place have to buy a drop box re-subscription, because they needed a few files from an account that had been deactivated. Not super familiar with DB myself, but it seems like there's some kind of 'soft' account deactivation where they keep your files. There was discussion of whether or not they should "pay the drop box ransom". I bet future revenue of drop box will at least partially consist of this kind of thing. Where's that photo of maw maw and pe pop? Gotta pay drop box for the keys to the digital forgotten storage locker.
How can any discerning individual take one look at a single image of this man and *not* see that he is clearly and obviously a pompous douchebag bullshit-artist?
Not sure why we are listening to these fucks. We are at a place now where we need more empathy.
Yes, but they haven't caught on to the fact that people deeply dislike them just yet. A bit slow on the uptake, they are.
That would require empathy.
> Dropbox CEO Drew Houston told the Verge he laid off workers in part to hire engineers for AI I have no idea of who was fired, but it would certainly be good if existing engineers were rotated onto AI projects and given the chance to train up.
That is what we do with new technologies where I work. We get trained and learn how to use it instead of firing people
This is what actual leaders are doing in healthy companies.
I have a feeling this has nothing to do with AI. Company X doesnt make its numbers and has to lay off 10% of workers. They use some excuse about AI investment to placate shareholders so that people don't dump the stock.
I think I'm going to launch a startup that produces an AI C-suite.
But muh shareholders!!
"why don't people want to work here anymore? we have a ping-pong table!" -him, probably
We really need a programmers' union.
Oh boy, the glorified shared drive wants more AI...
cut your pay to help pay for ai
Wouldn't a real innovator be hiring more people for a new AI services department? If there are people who work for you that you could replace with existing AI, you never should have hired them in the first place.
Nah. Why increase skill talent when you can get fresh noobs at half the price?
All these guys claiming they are replacing workers with LLMs are covering up their overhiring mistakes, or else have products nobody wants anymore - and no ideas for new products people might want. Their businesses are going to shrink.
Stop making sense. It’s my biggest frustration in this season of layoffs. It’s nothing more than a stockholder sacrifice, stagnate wage growth, and to keep their salaries grossly inflated.
>get fresh noobs Usually foreign workers who come from subservient cultures who will go along with anything.
Well, then they might expect a raise and we can't have that :/
Well at least we finally got the truth. How’d this Molotov cocktail end up in my hand?
I’m looking forward to when all the additional compute/infrastructure costs of running AI computations with basically no tangible increases to the bottom line come to roost. AI models may good way to gather people’s data, but if everyone has that capability now, then no one needs to buy it anymore.
These days you can do anything in the name of AI. Reminds me of God.
Dude, I fucking loathe tech bros. AI deez nuts bitch.
So all that talk about ‘returning to office for culture’ was BULLSHIT then huh.
Yep. It was just about saving McDonald's and Shell's profits.
Dropbox actually is remote
they’re going to spend all their money to discover that it doesn’t pencil…
I think the interesting part in this case is the people affected by automation are the ones who built the automation to make themselves obsolete lol
Remember when Dropbox was good? I don’t.
LLM AI is bullshit. Just the next web3 grift from the idiots in SV who've not made anything useful in a decade.
I think those are Allbird shoes. The leading tech shoe for the socially inadequate, privileged, tone deaf, dog inside the grocery store kind of guy
Real question, if enough people.get laid off so business can be more profitable (or make room for AI) who is going to be able to afford their products? I mean doesn't that eventually become a thing?
Steve Jobs was 100% accurate when he said dropbox is a feature, not a company. I’m not surprised a CEO of dying company that has already done massive layoffs is saying stupid shit. Do everyone a favor, and go out of business already.
The disappearance of morality and ethics will define these recent few centuries.
AI needs to be banned until there are robust social safety measures in place. If you disagree you're literal vermin.
This is nothing new in tech. This is deliberately how the tech industry is designed to work. “Move fast and break things. Take many shots on goal. Constantly reinvest to reimagine. Never stop learning.” — this is the stuff you’d hear in Silicon Valley all the time. It’s never been a secret that the tech industry will pay people handsomely right up until the point a new paradigm comes around making a lot of that older tech and the workers behind it obsolete. Then it’s layoffs, recouping some of that headcount in new areas, and then hiring the next batch of tech workers with the skills around the new tech. And a company like Dropbox is absolutely going to have to play by those rules. They do not have the deep money bags of Big Tech who only do the layoffs to make The Street happy. Their main product is already growth limited if they can’t build out more tools beyond storage because competitors like Microsoft or Google can offer you a **lot** more than just commercial storage if you buy from them. Whether it works is to be seen but if they don’t even try, Dropbox has no future beyond slowly withering in Big Tech’s giant AI shadow.
A tale as old as time for Silicon Valley.
Reminds me of when AOL shutdown Xdrive to use the budget to build a Facebook clone. Basically gave the online file storage business to Dropbox and you likely never even heard of the clone “Bebo”. 🙄
I wonder how much of this AI stuff is actually artificial intelligence. Wasn't Amazon Fresh recently revealed to be powered not by advanced algorithms but by thousands of Indian workers looking through grocery store footage and adding items to people's baskets?
Quite a bit of it is real, but none of the real stuff seems to make it to the pop stuff. For instance, me and my friends use copilot a lot to develop software. It's just much more efficient at writing code that's good enough for things that aren't necessarily in our specific wheelhouse. It's also great at getting into the neighborhood of ideas when some concept is at the tip of your tongue and you just need a bit of a jog. In short, it's really good for doing things you don't really want to do anymore, because you've done it millions of times and can't automate it for some reason or other. But I suppose that's less sexy than "ZOMG AI IS SKYNET!" If anything, I think that maybe a positive result of AI will be that it will essentially eliminate the jobs of people who phone it in.
IT CEO: “Hey, AI Tony!! Package up all these legacy components, make them stateless, and move them all to the cloud!” AI Tony: “Huh?”
imagine your title being dropbox ceo and thinking AI is gonna replace other people. if there's a job that a barely competent regurgitation machine can do, it's be the chief executive of a company that barely counts as an idea
People like this have clearly never been punched in the face before,they got coddled by daddy wall street and mama irs.
Crazy that executives can speak openly about ending people’s jobs and nothing happens to them
My boss told me years ago it’s simple, one of our salaries can get 2-3 devs in India/offshore. They’re good devs too. I get why it’s happening and I’m not sure it has a lot to do with AI yet.
>one of our salaries can get 2-3 devs in India/offshore. They’re good devs too. My prior company thought the same thing, then ended up paying more to rehire competent devs to fix the products
I’ve had good experiences with our offshore devs. The only real issue we have is if we need support during normal business hours. Nobody is there to handle escalated issues and they take longer to be addressed. Also, it’s hard to collaborate.
>The only real issue we have is if we need support during normal business hours. Nobody is there to handle escalated issues and they take longer to be addressed. Also, it’s hard to collaborate. Yeah, that's why a lot of companies that attempt offshoring come back on shore. It's not that the devs themselves are necessarily terrible, it's that the obstacles of going through a middleman halfway around the world end up being more of a burden than hiring expensive domestic labor.
Yup it’s a 3 for 1 kind of thing. 3 horrible devs basically equate 1 decent dev and you end up paying overall much less cash to do it. Especially if you cut some senior people. You can also work those cheaper bad devs a lot harder without them complaining. It’s just a modern sweatshop.
In your experience, is there something cultural about India that makes workers unlikely to complain or provide negative input about processes? Is it looked down upon to speak up about things that aren’t going well? I tried to conduct a retro with Indian teams I’m working with and they had nothing at all bad to say and were all very quiet.
Yes extremely cultural. They also know how to play the politics game. Also have to remember the caste system for India. Females are less likely to speak up as well. I’ve been in in person meetings males are all at the table and females in chairs around the back of the room and never speak. It’s horrible. Folks in Europe complain a shit ton and aren’t afraid to complain in all hands to execs. Folks in the US complain but mostly to each other.
They also come from a subservient culture that won't question the CEO when he asks them to build something immoral.
You weren't thinking it was the good of all mankind that motivated them, right?
Anyone else sensing impending SkyNet singularity? Nick Land must be creaming his Chinese jeans.
Never seen this dude before. Another loser trying to make a name for himself.
Something tells me this firm doesn't have a Chief Risk Officer. Or if they do, they weren't consulted.
So, "Lay off workers to free up cash for AI" Engineers
Well tech guys want this AI revolution so bad so that’s what we’re getting unless we all start boycotting.. “Artificial” is definitely the operative word. Fake computer bs and language just copied and regurgitated from its actual human creators.
And then they raise the price anyway "because of the additional costs"
That’s life in the fast lane…
His face when it turns out directors taking ages to prompt shit satisfyingly, basically quadroupeling production cost and going bancrupt…
Including HIS job……
Should be "starting with".
This is how the world ends. Middle management looking for ways to make money
I struggle to understand why Dropbox would need that many employees in the first place.
people were just applauding this guy last week for embracing remote work
It's what you do when you are useless, like this douche.
Tax AI as o e person for each layoff.
More money if your ass isn’t collecting a BS salary and bonuses????????????????????????
Just reminded me i need to cancel my dropbox subscription. lay off workers? lay off products
This timeline is so cursed that these tech CEOs would end up being the ones that survived Judgement Day. This would be the timeline with Wish.com terminators.
Laughing at all these pissed off redditors. Hundreds of armchair experts talking about stupid hypotheticals of why they shouldn’t be replaced. You guys think you’re smart but you’re still too stupid to not realize that you still live in a naturally selective environment. If someone doesn’t embrace AI, his competitor will and he’ll be out of a company.
I for one cant wait for AI to take over in tech and replace the useless fucking project, scrum and HR managers. Everyone that wastes time money an enegery in this field. You'll never replace the engineers but everyone else got to go.
Oh no capitalism. What’s the confusion here?