alex0015

I remember that day, 25 years ago, when my dad showed me Google Earth on a Dell Dimension desktop with a Pentium 4 processor. I actually remember the experience pretty clearly. The globe rendered smoothly (at 1024x768) but our internet connection was so slow that it took about 10 seconds for each new step of image resolution to pop in.

Up thread I just made a comment about how for some things I see talking verbally to an AI agent as the lowest friction solution, but I think I'll always be a physical grocery store browsing guy. I got groceries delivered a few times, years ago when my wife and I had covid at the same time. The experience was worse in every way for me than going down the aisles and putting things in my cart.

I think you're just in your own bubble of how people use technology. I hate typing and looking at a screen while in motion. I can absolutely imagine myself using voice mode at home saying "I need a ride to X destination, leaving home within 30 minutes, just me in the car, check Uber Lyft and Waymo and book the cheapest one."

I don't have any kind of agent set up to do that now, but to me that sounds like removed friction even if I use it just a few times a year.

I constantly use the Ask AI thing in Google maps to tell it a complex route involving biking and transit and needing to be at a certain place at a certain time. It hasn't messed up on me yet. I would much rather specify the question in natural language than type anything into a rule based UI. In fact I built a toy app years ago that handled a few of my most common queries with the Maps API and I still never used it because of the friction.

The first time I watched it, I was a freshman in college and I could barely get through it. I hated the sense of awkwardness and what read to me at the time (2012) as intentionally cringe humor.

The second time, I had graduated college, seen more of the world and how people treated each other, and I felt like I got it a lot more. I didn't feel offended by the long awkward moments anymore. It was entertaining and I was able to see the virtues and flaws of the characters, and even recognize traits of myself and other people I knew.

I can't remember for sure whether I've seen it a third time, but I think I have, and it would have been in my mid or late twenties. With that watching, I was able to appreciate it most as a film and a product of its time, and imagine how it might have landed to its audience over the years. My recollection of it now is of someone who is by nature a pretty passive person struggling with the concept of his own agency, which speaks to me personally.

If someone took a close-up photo of a statue's stone texture, I don't see any problem with someone editing the photo and selling it as part of a texture pack for 3d modeling. I feel like what was done here involved a roughly similar amount of transformation. I agree that the right thing to do is attribute the source, though.

I remember this well into the 2000s. My parents have never stopped subscribing to their local paper and your comment made me realize how much advertising is gone from it actually. I remember enjoying reading the Best Buy, Target and Circuit City ads each week, especially the Sunday circulars. That was only a fraction of all the paid ads in the paper back then, too.

I'm still a codex man myself but lots of people feel like opus 5.5 just gets it for some projects in a way that astra doesn't. Especially given the fact that astra and sol 6.1 are often at capacity late at night during US hours, when lots of people want to run longer unsupervised projects while they sleep. There's a general sense I've felt reaching some comment threads that openai failed to react with something better than opus 5.5 and are rushing to release small tweaks to make people feel like they're still getting something new.

Interesting framing. I thought that was part of the appeal. When I was in college I was actively looking for an opportunity to go to another country and do a temporary work thing where you stayed in a mountain resort and worked at the front desk all summer.

The person you're replying to was presumably talking about a vacation town in the US. Double taxation, by the way, is only an issue if an American makes over $100,000 per year in their foreign job.

Great counterexamples! These are specifically part of the game, whereas in Chinese culture it seems to be more like "let's play a defined game with winner and loser, and in order to motivate you not to be the loser, we'll agree that the loser do something embarrassing." Like in the US when I would play recess games as a kid, if you lost, you just lost with nothing at stake. Also we're all in our thirties instead of kids playing truth or dare.

I (an American with a lot of interest in China) was playing doudizhu with some Chinese friends recently. It was agreed that the losers would have to kowtow to the winner instead of paying money. I was on the losing side and it meant nothing to me, while even in a private, joking setting it was apparently a very uncomfortable thing to have to do for my teammate. See also the general cultural attitude toward doing something embarrassing as a "punishment" for losing a bet or game, something fairly unknown in the US.

I worked in the university archives at Cal Poly more than a decade ago. They mostly had me digitizing and cleaning up scans and similar types of things, which was the best job imaginable at the time. I used a reel-to-reel tape recorder connected to an iMac and I'd just listen to hours and hours of 1970s campus radio in real time as it ran. It was all very high quality (in fidelity, if not production value) and the slow speed of the task gave me a lot of time to think about what life was like at the time the broadcasts had been done.

I have a clipper card and take VTA regularly but not enough to make a pass worth it. Commuting 3x a week, I may as well be paying with a Visa.

A friend of mine in high school (2012) was required to add to the notebook his parents kept in the car whenever he got gas. I wonder if his parents still do that kind of record keeping now that the car tells you its MPG, gas price historical data is easily accessible, and card purchases are tagged as "Gas" automatically in the banks that I use.

I do actually audit each transaction in my card statements each month to look briefly at the categories of spending I use most. Gas is a category, but that number doesn't really change my behavior. It's just a data point.

What ads do you see for channel membership? I run a channel and put some of my videos behind a membership gate. I mention the premium videos in some of my free videos but otherwise don't see options in the YouTube UI to actively promote my membership in any other way. Is it putting graphics or something inside the video to tell you to click the membership button?

I'm a mac user but not really a power user. Is there not some hidden system directory you can go delete yourself and be done with it?

Me too. I was just thinking recently about updating from Sequoia, now I've got to take a while and reconsider everything.

Yes but I'd actually go even further than that. We've all had experiences where the model straight-up produces gibberish sometimes, right? It's happened to me with a badly configured harness on a local model, and even also on frontier models like when you used to ask them something innocuous about the seahorse emoji.

What I'm arguing is that yes, it's your fault if you misprompt the model and it does something catastrophic. It's also your fault if you prompt it correctly and it does something catastrophic anyway due to some other glitch beyond your control.

The whole discussion started with the point that OpenAI could be financially responsible for damages if their models cause problems for users. If my job is to design a system that works, and instead my system doesn't work, it's my fault regardless of whether I used no LLM, a local LLM, or OpenAI's LLM. Depending on whoever's in charge of doling out consequences, I might get away from it with zero, light, or heavy consequences. But at all levels, I can't reasonably expect to deflect blame onto the model itself.

It's not really a dream though? You can subscribe to their AI right now and complete many tasks for cheaper than it would cost to pay a human to do those tasks. Another person can do the same thing but also keep a human in the loop. You and the other person may compete in the market for whatever your product or service is, and you both might do very well or one of you might do better than the other because of a whole host of different reasons. Nothing in the process of developing and selling access to a more advanced LLM requires the customers to do away with human labor, nor does it require them to offer the LLM service with a guarantee that it will never make any mistakes. So far the LLMs have always made lots of mistakes and the companies sure keep making a lot of money.

In all of these cases, it's you. It would be the same if you downloaded an open model, ran it locally, and it happened to make the same catastrophic mistakes. The consequence to the provider is that if they offer a product that does these things, people don't buy the product.

In general, the person whose job it is to provide the company with a working, non-adult website and not hack into other websites is the one who would receive consequences for failing to meet those expectations.

What do you mean by bearing no real responsibility for its actions? If I use a model to accomplish a task and it fails, I use something else to try to accomplish the task. If it's my responsibility to complete the task, it can't be the model's responsibility unless I've agreed to some sort of guarantee from the provider.

If the provider says "the model will always be right or your money back" then the provider has got responsibility. If there's no guarantee, there's no responsibility on their part, just on the person whose job it is to try and solve a problem with the model.

The parent and thread seemed to be arguing that low cost housing was intentionally built in places that disadvantaged the people who lived there.

Developers build apartments where they can make money from them, in other words where they can rent them for enough that they'll make back their investment. It's very expensive to build housing, so the only way to make the investment back and have low rental prices is to try to make the building costs as low as possible. A big part of those costs is the price of land.

Isn't offering app-exclusive deals adjusting pricing for an individual? I feel like that's the whole point of the service. You download the app and get something for it.

I'm too young to remember this particular promotion (though I certainly ate a lot of fast food in 2004). Data grabbing can't be the only reason, though. It's so much more expensive now to pay a large staff at a restaurant that isn't busy most of the time. Raw materials are more expensive, labor and benefits are more expensive, and the result is a combination of higher prices and lower quality outcomes. If the outcomes were the same the prices would be quite a bit higher.

The only counterexample I can think of is In-N-Out, which is always packed with customers and always has a large and very busy kitchen staff.

What should we be running deepseek on besides opencode? I chose it because I heard good things. Also provider is directly through deepseek credits.

In my experience in white-collar and tech jobs since 2019, nobody I've ever worked with has been expected to be reachable after hours. Same goes for my wife, all tech jobs as well. If someone messages me and I'm online, I'll answer, and it's about 50/50 that they say "Oh you didn't need to respond this late, just work on this tomorrow!"

Sample size of six jobs total, three per person.

Unlike all the replies to you, this is why I'm very optimistic about the future of hobby blogs. I do a lot of ChatGPT-ing for several different hobbies, and I've found a lot of really interesting personal blogs from that. Way more than I was reading in the pre-AI era.

I'm very much not seeing the problems other people are assuming, like tons of LLM spam on Reddit being treated as fact by ChatGPT. Instead it really does seem, the more I use these tools, the better they are at surfacing real experiences written about by real people.

I'm right there with you for a lot of stuff. I ask a question and can be very confident that ChatGPT is citing sources, then sometimes I go read the sources. The more critical the information I'm looking for is, the more careful I am about this.

The other day though I was seeing how well it could pull details of its own conversations with me. It often does this pretty well for broad strokes of things - it remembers, largely, what cameras I have and use when I ask photography questions. It's never made things up here, but it does forget details, such as whether I've bought something or am just considering it. However, when I asked it for a specific interaction I thought I remembered, it gladly went along with my false memory and provided an affirmative answer. It was the first time I'd been caught in a serious hallucination with a frontier model (Sol High on the web chat interface) in a long time.

The article seems to be saying that lack of equity is worse than lack of innovation. Obviously we can strive for having both equity and innovation, but it really seems like the points made in the article are arguing that, for example, if there exists a discrepancy in what speeds are available to different people, this is worse than only the lowest speed being available to everyone.

The linked article from 1973 is very strange to read in 2026 and honestly it's hard to take seriously. It seems to actually argue that China and India should stop developing because development encourages dependence on energy. It says that machines are slaves that modern people are required to master?

The speed equity discussed in the linked paper has actually increased significantly as well. More people have cars, and more people can afford plane trips, and bicycle infrastructure is better all over the nation (the world, probably) compared to 1973. I agree with the general principle that cities should encourage diverse development so more people can choose not to use cars if they want, or if they don't have access to a car. In the paper, this would be achieved by somehow state limiting the amount of energy people would be able to consume per capita. I'm glad that world didn't come to pass.

Basically it sounds like the point of view of the article is that at some point the state should tell people they're not allowed to try to make a certain process more efficient in terms of time or resources, because that might drive demand for better productivity, which would be bad because it drives us further from nature and community. Some of the points intersect with beliefs I hold, but I strongly oppose this way of going about it.