liamwire

For the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

Queensland allows residents to see the details of offenders in our local area, but you need to provide extensive ID to do so, and leaking that information is itself a crime. Daniel's Law was introduced in 2025 so this is pretty recent.

What's depressing and shitty about Brisbane's weather?

It takes an incredible stretch of the imagination to conflate colonialism with freedom, when the two couldn't be more at odds, definitionally.

It'd be extraordinary compelling to genuinely have a unified mechanism to explain depression treatments, but I am not qualified to make heads or tails of the research. Wondering what the take of those with relevant experience is on this?

You can use my phone number, +61 400 000 000 :)

Sincerely, I’ll be thinking of you tomorrow. Best wishes with your treatment, give it hell.

That seems incredibly prescient for accounts created before even GPT-1. Obviously broad data scraping existed before then, but even amongst this crowd I find it hard to believe that’s the real motivator.

What an absurd take. If we use FLOPS as a crude measure, the Air would be comparable to the leading supercomputers of ~1999/2000. There's many reasons why that's a very poor comparison but ignoring the absolute insanity of the raw compute available in a pocketable, thin, battery-powered handheld that you can buy literally this week, is ridiculous. Modern smartphones are nothing short of sci-fi when compared to even recent living memory. We're simply used to them due to their sheer ubiquity.

Air, as a product line, quite famously started with Jobs emphasising the thinness of the MacBook Air by pulling it from a paper folder. Taking what are ultimately marketing terms as literal face-value descriptors isn't particularly useful.

If you take Apple's presentation at face value, most of the iPhone Air hardware is within the plateau, with the rest of the body being almost entirely battery. So it's not immediately obvious that even if they did do away with the bump, that there'd be a useable phone left over once considering the necessary reduction in battery size.

Huh? GeForce NOW is a resounding success by many metrics. Anecdotally, I use it weekly to play multiplayer games and it’s an excellent experience. Google giving up on Stadia as a product says almost nothing about cloud gaming’s viability.

I have to ask out of curiosity, why is your first comment made with one account, and the reply with a similarly-named alt?

I thought the world had broadly moved onto the moment magnitude scale?

Queensland, Australia introduced state-wide $0.50 public transit fares a year ago, and it’s been a raging success. Conveniently, this also eliminates the entire problem class of needing to calculate fares. Mind you, for those unfamiliar, QLD is a state 2.5x larger than Texas, 5x larger than all of Japan, 7x larger than Great Britain, and is bigger than all but 16 countries.

Really? It’s always felt to me like it was app availability — for all the efforts, the app marketplace was a fraction of a fraction of the competitions’, and much like the network effects in social media, if you can’t catch up quickly, it can be almost impossible to ever do so. Haemorrhaging billions per quarter takes a strong stomach and a long vision, one that’s likely to put any executive’s tenure at risk. Nevertheless, it interesting to think what things might’ve looked like had Microsoft persisted another decade.

Natural? Sure. Deserved? Not really, not unless we’re also forthcoming in our lack of foresight and the times we plainly got it wrong.

I’ve found this problem to be compounded by the use of stimulant medications — no matter how aware of the phenomenon one is going into a task, it can feel nigh impossible sometimes to avoid locking into whatever path I’m on as the drugs kick in. This seems true not only of the task itself but also of the individual decisions that can constitute it. I don’t think this is surprising or novel, to be sure, but frustratingly predictable.

Brilliant visual demonstration, really helps build an intuition for the concepts at play.

What a harrowing account. Incredibly moving, and evocative of many thoughts I’d long since forgotten, having grown up alongside multiple children with cerebral palsy, early enough to not think anything out of the ordinary of it at the time. Wow.

Seconding the sentiment, this was a brilliant read that gave me a newfound appreciation for the art of cartography, but also for giving oneself over to a pursuit fully. Truly excellent.

So, to recap, your gripe, with my gripe, is that I hold the author to aesthetic standards that differ from your own—and that that’s… wrong? Do I have that right?

I ask genuinely. I want to understand your position better here.

Is that what I did, though? I disagree.

Rather, what I hoped to articulate was a sense that being able to viscerally feel that an author holds a very obvious position from the outset of an article, and then not seeing them make even the faintest attempt to proactively argue their point against the most obvious—the easiest—criticisms, comes across lazy.

I expect arguing in good faith, and this wasn’t that.

Your comment was the one that really made all of this sink in, thanks. Wow.

I read the entire essay. It comes across wholly uninspired. Some thoughts:

> But do the apologists even believe it themselves? Latham, the professor of strategy, gives away the game at the end of his reverie. “None of this can happen, though,” he writes, “if professors and administrators continue to have their heads in the sand.” So it’s not inevitable after all? Whoops.

This self-assured ‘gotcha’ attitude is pungent throughout the whole piece, but this may be as good an example as any. It’s ridden with cherry-picked choices and quotes from singular actors as if they’re representative of every educator, every decision maker, and it’s such a bad look from someone that clearly knows better. I don’t expect the author to take the most charitable position, but one of intellectual honesty would be nice. To pretend there isn’t, or perhaps ignore, those out there applying technological advancement, including current AI, in education in thoughtful, meaningful, and beneficial even if challenging to quantify ways, is obtuse. To decide there isn’t the possibility of those things being true, given their exclusion, is to do the same head-burying he ridicules others for.

…

> After I got her feedback, I finally asked ChatGPT if generative AI could be considered a gimmick in Ngai’s sense. I did not read its answer carefully. Whenever I see the words cascade down my computer screen, I get a sinking feeling. Do I really have to read this? I know I am unlikely to find anything truly interesting or surprising, and the ease with which the words appear really does cheapen them.

It may have well been the author’s point, but the disdain for the technology that drips from sentences like these, which are rife throughout, taints any appreciation for the argument they’re trying to make — and I’m really trying to take it in good faith. Knowing they come in with such strongly held preconceived notions makes me reflexively question their own introspection before putting pen to paper.

Ultimately, are you writing to convince me, or yourself, of your point?

It’s incredible how quickly Apple changed course on this after being told to have the person responsible front court next week to explain in person why they feel they can defy Gonzalez Rogers’ orders. It should be said, there’s a lot of nuance here, as reinstating Fortnite on the App Store after being banned for their ToS violation is not the same case as the one at hand. However, it seems the internal calculus at Apple has shifted dramatically, and there’s genuine fear of the company and the executives being held accountable in a meaningful way, never mind the court of public opinion. They’ve really pissed off the court through their actions, and it’s not going well for them so far, at all.

It feels like this is the required level of speed-up needed re. time-to-first-token to make continuous vision useful for on-device applications like an assistant that can see and take action on your screen, ala the original Apple Intelligence demos. It’s very impressive seeing the app in the repo and I’m excited to build it tonight and play around.

Seems really interesting, and the in-browser demo and model was a really great hook to get interest in the rest of the research. I’m only partially through it but the idea itself is compelling.

I know this is repeated ad nauseam by now, but as an ardent user of em dashes for many years pre-LLM, I think this a bad heuristic.

I’ve had similar experiences in recent weeks, enabling search in ChatGPT with o4-mini-high to fix previously insurmountable hurdles I’d run into wrt breaking changes in libraries that have occurred outside the model cutoff dates, and for which the errors and fixes are non-obvious. It’s worked far better than I’d expected for what feels like such a simple UI toggle.