monitron

Oh, heavens.

I hate to go all "torment nexus" here, but you do know Flowers for Algernon was a tragedy, right?

That's a good point. As my wealth level has risen a bit over my life, I have tried not to let go of ever actually learning and doing things. Both because those are among my foremost pleasures in life, and because I don't want to become totally helpless in an unexpected situation where delegation isn't possible. Of course fixing a faucet because I feel like it isn't the same as fixing it because I'm forced to DIY, but it's something.

Still what you're saying is very real. I'm reminded of the tweet that said that "in terms of cognitive impairment, [being a billionaire is] probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day"

My first thought is that, before LLMs, getting out of your comfort zone to work with folks in Kyoto in their language would have been an important step in getting yourself ready to live there successfully. It would have been difficult and awkward, but that's part of the process. Or it was. I wish you luck once you get there.

One time I was messing around with the settings for a 3D printer in whatever software I was using to control it, and found a dropdown for "Machine type" or similar that defined my printer as a "3-axis robot." That gave me pause. Is it a robot? Maybe. That printer didn't even have any sensors, apart from the thermistors that fed into the temperature control PID loops. But by someone's definition, it's a robot.

That was and remains fun to think about. I guess that like the author, I will "be pedantic all day long."

I'm not sure if this is a serious question, but: buses, subways, (e-)bikes, working from home, carpooling. I know these aren't an option for everyone in every situation, but congestion pricing areas tend to be set up in places where public transit is good and normal.

This was fascinating, thank you. I expected to read about legal threats against the folks collecting this data and am glad that those didn't materialize.

Also I only realized after finishing the article what a breath of fresh air it was to read something that came straight from another human's brain without LLM intermediation. Thank you to the author for that too.

Waitasec...wouldn't you have to hold it at a very specific distance from your eye for the "viewfinder" to be accurate?

At work I am sitting on a small pile of incomplete/wrong/missing-the-point bug reports right now, all generated by Opus 5 on High effort. Even under good conditions, LLMs are still wrong quite a lot, and confidently so. I can see why you think instant dismissal of LLM generated work is shallow, but I think it's at least as shortsighted to assume that when it creates poor quality work it must be an old/cheap model, bad settings, bad prompting, etc.

Precisely! I don't think this is the whole problem but it's a part of it I keep coming back to. We took the one thing that computers were good at (getting the same answer every time, quickly and efficiently) and tossed it out the window.

Good AI system design can help somewhat, but even if you give the LLM a calculator tool, it's not guaranteed to use it every time, or to write the tool use correctly, or to copy out the answer correctly.

My friends and I used to do this all the time in that same time period. It was all fun and games until one day I caught one of them spoofing a message from me to president@whitehouse.gov making vague threats. He seemed to think I overreacted when I dove under the desk and unplugged the machine.

I really appreciate the reply, and all your work. The difficulty of what you're doing is not lost on me; I was honestly blown away that you all launched a browser project at all. I think it's vitally important that the web not become a monolith in terms of user agents (even if, alas, one single rendering engine takes all the market share) so kudos to you.

I'm a devoted Kagi user and really want to use Orion but keep running into perf issues and jank that frustrate me enough to switch back to something else. My most recent attempt was this past week.

You all seem to maintain a very fast pace of development (the changelogs are always chock full of cool stuff) but the problems I am hitting have remained broken for ages. Some examples include:

* The app hangs for 1~2 sec partway through typing a URL/search, when using the back button, or during other navigation

* The 1Password extension fails to fill usernames and passwords most of the time, regardless of which version I install. It works fine in Safari, Chrome, Firefox.

* Your built-in ad blocking triggers anti-ad-blocking measures on many news/blog sites now, resulting in the entire page being blocked.

I don't know your business, but maybe pausing new features and pushing for stability/perf/quality of life for a while (a la macOS Snow Leopard) would make sense.

This was unexpected and wonderful. Thank you so much!

The style is really fun, and your writing is interesting.

I find it slightly ironic, though, that many of your articles that make a case against AI-generated writing are illustrated by AI-generated images. I forget who made the insightful comment that most people seem to think that AI should take over in every field except their own :)

Just a regular brag, I'd say! He mentions it at the top of every blog post, including irrelevant details like the case. "Weird flex, but OK"

The visuals are neat looking but I was hoping to see more details like correlating capture recency with countries, population, economic status, etc. to see what causes areas to get the most and least love from Google.

Did you catch that it's allowed to edit its own SOUL.md?

So the bad behavior can be emergent, and compound on itself.

If you want to appreciate his work today, consider reading these lovely articles about the systems he helped design:

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/master-system/

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/mega-drive-genesis...

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/sega-saturn/

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/dreamcast/

> The image of Saturn was generated with ChatGPT.

Wait...wh...why?!? Of all the things, actual pictures of the planet Saturn are readily available in the public domain. Why poison the internet with fake images of it?

In what sense will it be "Free" if it...isn't?

Same reaction here. I think the author certainly crossed a line by using a diffusion model to publish an image of a dead famous person doing something he never did.

> the OG tool `git`

This phrase immediately turned the rest of my hair gray. I'm old enough to still think of Git as the "new" version control system, having survived CVS and Subversion before it.

I'm sorry if it has that effect on you. Personally I've been on tirzepatide for about a year now and have not experienced anything like that.

It seems to reduce my impulsivity, but I still enjoy things very much. I am just able to stop when I "should," or wait for delayed gratification, when previously I had trouble doing so.

I'd say my mood has been higher overall. Feeling like I am in control is an everyday boost.

You made me curious. It looks like dithering is still an accepted name for this kind of technique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordered_dithering

This is fantastic, thank you. Recently when trying to sleep away from home, I went looking for a noise app and was grossed out by the state of the available apps, just like you said.

BTW One unfortunate feature that many noise apps/websites have (including Apple Music's official noise buttons) is that after a few minutes, they fade out and back in or have some other jarring transition when repeating. This is far from ideal for sleep, meditation, etc. So this is an enhancement request, if your app doesn't already solve this ;)

I'm also curious: do you think that the cost of maintaining the app (keeping it up to date with newer iOS versions, for instance) will eventually dissuade you from keeping it available in its pristine state? I've wondered why there seem to be ZERO free apps by hobbyists on the App Store in categories like this...

> YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.

lol if this is the perfect example, "AI" in general is in a sad place. I've tried to use it a handful of times and each time it confidently produced wrong results in a way that derailed my quest for an answer. In my experience it's an anti-feature in that it seems to make things worse.

Some people experience major side effects. Neither my wife (semaglutide) nor I (tirzepatide) have had any negative effects apart from minor upper GI disturbances when moving up to a higher dose. These dissipate within a week or so.

That said, these are definitely serious drugs and I wouldn't be taking one if my quality and length of life weren't threatened by metabolic syndrome, and if I hadn't been trying for decades to solve the problem without medication.

Please reconsider citing Gwyneth Paltrow's scammy goop.com.

I'm so sorry for your loss. I don't have anything super-personal to contribute except what has been said many times already: QModem was my first window on the digital world and a delightfully crafted tool. Developers of today (like me) could learn a lot from your dad.

It's quite a bit more "realistic" if you imagine it as a simulation of the "Defragment Free Space" option that at least some defraggers had.