inanutshellus

I'm for sure reinventing the wheel here but I've had an LLM generate an app that walks me through my existing tax routine I've been running with for years. Thus no real numbers go to any LLM I just give it my situation and it fills out the form.

The plan now is to retrieve the current year's tax forms then have an LLM compare them to stored versions from last year, and look for variances (e.g. new field, new form requirements, etc) all of which an LLM would excel at (whilst basic math it historically did not).

Man I'm sad you weren't happy with your books. I'll say it doesn't match my experience.

Of course, your child is supposed to get books for FIVE YEARS and their point-of-development is also relevant... meaning yeah some are kinda rudimentary... obviously.

Some of my favorite books to read aloud to my child were from there.

Classics are in there...

  - *Goodnight Moon*, where on your 10th reading you're still noticing little artistic differences from page to page
  - *Little Engine That Could*, everyone knows this classic and I think it's always the last book they send.

But some surprise wins:

  - My wife loved reading *Love, Mouserella* as theatrically as possible
  - I loved the art of *Where's my T-R-U-C-K?!* and sought out both the artist and the author because of it
  - I loved reading *Cool Time Song* in a gravelly African accent (I imagined Ofeibea Quist-Arcton - a gal that used to speak on NPR sometimes - reading it... go listen to her voice. Such a great voice.)
  - The Mine-O-Saur, Roly Poly Pangolin, 
  - The "Llama-Llama" books.

... So many more. I'm just riffing off of old happy memories here. I guess my point is that there are diamonds in there. Keep digging.

The info about the RAND corporation was engaging, but... since the post promised to connect it to "strikingly similar to the rhetoric coming out of places like Anthropic" ... I was surprised that it entirely lacked quotes from Anthropic, save one link to another blog post that was itself, IIUC, a joke.

Isn't "free market capitalism" is doing its job here, rewarding the best player of the game into brand-godhood?

More to the point - is it not government oversight that appears incapable of leveling the playing field for others?

That said - the only "others" we seem capable of getting is other governments' Amazons. So. Devil you know?

It even updated to let you choose the search engine. Surprisingly they haven't updated it to include OpenAI/Claude/Copilot/... guess he should've named the domain "lmFtfy" (s/Google/find/g)

The "taking credit" thing rings true for sure.

I have trouble saying "I" when an LLM has done the leg work.

"I found a report with this info..." turns into "There's a report with this info". heh.

> also assuming it was a scam, and then found out it very much wasn't.

Right, it's "just" an "honest" list of ingredients, how could a list of ingredients be a scam?

... but if splitting an unhealthy ingredient into 3 different obfuscated line items made you an extra pile of cash every year... would you do it?

Had the same thought.

> Scam American companies

... why would I do that?

> Scam American companies are using

... so fake companies?

> Scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient lists

... What?

(reads post)

Oh. "Food companies are splitting up ingredients to manipulate you"

(as a tangent: There's zero percent chance this is only "American" companies. Useless addon word.)

You're defending the example (why idk), but what about, say, a dog food company listing "buffalo meat" as its #1 ingredient by simply splitting every filler ingredient into constituent parts?

How does one reward the "good guys" when one can't tell the difference between a gamed metric and an honest one?

OP says the article is to help CS majors soldier on.

... and I'm reminded of all the folks that have Accounting degrees. Their degrees ended up being proof that they could track a lot of rules.

That proof meant they got hired and their job was not to ... "account", but to "fit into our business".

Perhaps that's the majority of CS folks going forward?

"Your CS degree proves you can help me not get stuck in technical problems so I can go solve [business/engineering/scientific/...] problems"...?

As long as it has value... I'll allow it.

~guywithnopowertodisallowit

The first example (of HN) is the one that feels like it has the most potential to me.

"Teach me to do this" kinda stuff. "Guiding agent" rather than "doing agent".

Honestly, @franze, if you're reading this, maybe update your screenshots to show an agent in tutorial mode on some complicated app?

You are on the other side of the line, that's all.

No matter which way the government goes, someone's "mental health and safety" WILL be affected... just... somewhere else.

Implying only one side has those effects (like this topic's headline) is underhanded.

Confoundingly, not having permanent daylight savings time could harm sleep and mental health, @inanutshellus says.

If it benefits you to have DST timing, you'll want permanent DST. If it benefits you to ditch it, you'll want to ditch it.

The effects of being on the "wrong side" affect mental health and safety.

Thus... whichever way you want to be true, is true.

In rereading it, I agree. :)

A percentage of people going to say "Yes" and not mean the same thing as I mean when I say that.

That's all I'm saying.

Doesn't that seems like a more accurate measurement? what's the percentage of adults who check "yes" for "friends i'm hoping to hook up with" versus those that say "oooh, you mean actual friends"?

> enculturate

I think he meant inculcate as, presumably, an "eggcorn"...

...and the occasional director of the CIA to his girlfriends... la tee dah...

I looked (briefly) online for evidence of the factory claim and found none.

GP didn't give enough context ("MY shoes are weird so I extrapolated" vs "I know this is true; here's proof."), but the casual one-off scenario is absolutely a showroom level of "random happens".

Babysitting all those individual shoes and styles and sizes seems ... expensive, logistically.

In fact, if this were a thing, I'd imagine they'd start offloading them as though it were a cool feature. "Want to mix-n-match shoes? buy just a left!"

I'm curious of source on this being more than anecdotal?

The most natural way for shoe mismatches is from the showroom. Customer grabs 5 pairs, tries some on, they get mixed up when returning to stock. Same shoe and size (hopefully, lol), but different production number and different factory/origin.

We'll call ourselves "Eloi"[1], I guess?

On the one hand, one really can't remove all of humanity from the economy. Humans are what makes the economy matter, and if you cut them all out, they'll just replace the economy with something else, call it "the economy", and move on. ("Butlerian Jihad" pivot, I suppose.)

On the other hand... I'm reminded of dock workers and the advent of container ships. The only way to handle that was to basically pay those workers a living wage for the rest of their lives to ... not work.

So... we have options, I guess!

  [1] In Orson Welles's Time Machine, the eloi were the lazy "child-like" humans not challenged to grow intellectually.

I'd expect this to be temporary while the educational system figures out how to manage LLM-bolstered students.

The intern I worked with last year said her graduating class all felt like they were the last "real" graduates. Meaning: the class after her had less credibility in her eyes, having been presumed to have used AI to get past the "pons asinorum"/"bridge of asses".

... this also made me swear off DELL and discourage everyone I knew from buying from them, too.

DELL was an innovator in this "incomparable pricing" model for normal consumers.

You'd price out a machine and then go look at comparable machines (difficult) from other vendors, then the next day your machine wouldn't be "the" configuration anymore. Instead there'd be half the ram and double the harddrive space for an extra $50, and if you swapped back to what it had been yesterday it'd cost you an extra $200.

IIRC they won business awards for this.

Where's Cartman when you need a vigorous "SHENANNIGANS!!!!"?

I'll bite.

    - Nothing like it in style and execution.

    - Superb and unique universe. It's brilliant. Fight me. ;)

    - Charming, engaging storytelling full of wit and humor. Charm and humor are particularly hard to pull off, it seems, given how few games I can think of that have them. (Bard's Tale and... uh...)

    - If you like the adventure games of the era, then this one is right up your alley. The puzzles are much more frustration-friendly than modern games, so they're not for the coddled gamers of today who, frankly, would just use an answer sheet when they got stuck. OTOH forcing yourself to stick with it and get that "Ohhhhhh the *diamond* makes the boat sink around us! *that's* how we climb out!" -- which is a real example from a *different* LucasArts game -- is very satisfying.

Yeah but you really could just guess and be right most of the time, since the question was likely "A/S/L?" ;)

Curious how/why all this negative attention is focused directly on the Flock brand (current example notwithstanding)?

Seems like if I were a competitor of Flock I'd be pretty happy right now and all this negative press is making them artificially cheap to buyout right now.

Motorola/Vigilant, Rekor, Leonardo/ELSAG, and Axon are huge companies making mint off the same thing and no once in 20 years have I seen this level of attention... not on the overarching issue of surveillance-state-ing, but of one particular company.

"As brevity is the soul of wit, I shall be brief. [then bloviates on and on.]" ~Polonius

My guess is your sessions are interactive conversations rather than planning a course of action then, separately, executing each piece.