Most people randomly accept invitations on LinkedIn: "We're both humans, so I felt we should connect!".
But if you actively prune / curate WHO you add to your LinkedIn, you end up with a feed that is genuinely useful.
What you do need to know is WHY you want to use LinkedIn. It could be to find your next job, finding potential customers, or just keeping up to date with <INDUSTRY>.
I used to accept only people I worked with/met in person, but the feed is crap anyway so why bother. I now accept pretty much everyone and prune the feed.
You don't need to accept at random. I'm selective - I only connect with people I worked with or know well from the industry - and it's still 99% AI slop.
Part of the problem is the tech industry. There's plenty of people trying to get rich quick in tech and LinkedIn is essentially made for them. I don't see it as much in other fields where most people don't imagine themselves building unicorn AI startups with VC money and becoming obscenely rich.
It is a way to keep up with opinions about industry news, but at least for tech, I think this is all downstream of what's happening on "short-form" social media. It breaks on Twitter and then you get LLM-powered thought leadership on LinkedIn for the next two weeks.
I haven't logged into LinkedIn in over a year. My contacts are only people I've worked with or good friends (or that cutie from logistics)... people I've physically met and respect. I'd like to keep up with what's going on in their professional lives. The problem is my feed is full of garbage that they have engaged with. I don't care about levels deeper than the first.
LinkedIn is unusable, and wasn't even helpful at all in finding a new job.
Unfortunately even with a heavily pruned list the feed is still a spam fest of recommendations that are just terrible. And every email notification is Facebook-level bait and switch clickbait.
Thanks! You caught a real bug: the form labels fed to the LLM were mangled. Now fixed: values land in the correct field.
On "what are we trying to solve":
Forms (PDFs, scanned paper) are still everywhere and aren't going away. SimplePDF Copilot exists to make the transition less painful. A few concrete use cases:
- Pre-filling repetitive forms from existing data sources (CRM, EHR, etc. via MCP/RAG). In most industries, employees fill forms by copy-pasting or retyping. With AI + tool calling, most of the form arrives pre-filled and the employee just corrects or adds the missing bits.
- Filling foreign-language forms. If you've moved to a new country, or know someone who has, you've had to fill out forms in a language you don't master.
- Understanding a contract before signing it. "Can I actually trust all the clauses here?" Reading proficiency changed the world by giving people a way to understand what they were signing. This extends it to legalese and odd clauses.
On Claude Cowork:
Different shape, and a different privacy model. Cowork drives a sandboxed virtual desktop: you can't see exactly what it's doing while it fills, and correcting a wrong value means another back-and-forth with the LLM.
Copilot works inside your editor: every change is visible as it happens, you can amend any field with one click, and the document never leaves your browser + it's LLM agnostic: bring your own (local or hosted).
- The same editor, embeddable into one’s app for companies, with the same privacy guarantees (everything happens in the browser) + the resulting PDF is stored in their own storage (« bring your own storage »).
The majority of our paid customers are in healthcare where privacy is non-negotiable. Co-pilot extends that to the AI world (« bring your own AI »)
I like that, but (and I might be ignorant) can't you just change it's all in browser to something else and the users would be oblivious? I'm cautious of this because these kind of solutions still susceptible to a lot of problems internally or some kind of governmental interception.
Is it possible to download as an app and disable internet (not sure if it's a feature of any browsers).
> like that, but (and I might be ignorant) can't you just change it's all in browser to something else and the users would be oblivious?
Excellent question! The answer is simple: we're known on the market, and trusted by our customer for this secure handling of PDFs. Should we decide to change that (unbeknownst to them), we would effectively kill our reputation and the company by extension.
> Is it possible to download as an app and disable internet (not sure if it's a feature of any browsers).
Back in the days, SimplePDF used to work offline. However maintaining that in conjunction with our paid customers features (where the online connectivity is mandatory) was too big of a maintenance burden. We decided a year ago to drop this support (silently), and no one has complained since then, confirming our hunch that it is not a high-demand feature.
Absolutely not insulting! In fact an excellent question!
Preview was an inspiration when I started SimplePDF, my goal was to make the "Preview" of the web, so that people without a Mac would benefit from a software matching Preview in ease of use and overall polish.
Adobe Acrobat: SimplePDF has "Simple" in the name as the philosophy is to keep it simple (both in ease of use, and features): I don't intend to support everything that Adobe Acrobat does. There's a lot of features that I could build that I intentionally do not, as they would bloat the UI and hard the overall usability. Most people have very simple needs and don't need advanced features (like scripting, etc).
That would have occured to me if it were free-form chat, but it's guided and telling me to input the value, not a chat response. Unable to try, third round hits the demo limit.
My customers are in healthcare, and they don't hang out on X for example (which is where I get most of my tech news alongside HN).