ninjalanternshk

You missed one particular class of typo.

- Three physicist were there

- Six dentist agree

- All the specialist are here

Specifically, plural words ending in -ist, if you say them quickly, it’s easy to drop the final -s.

Why in the world would you leave it off when typing? Because you’re typing what you hear as you “say” it in your head.

I find it fascinating and super annoying. It’s jarring every time I read it.

Kings has dozens or hundreds of people who did all those things for them, and more, at their command.

“Is evolving into” is code for “marketing made all this up.”

TIL Claris still exists.

I saw in a public library once, a grocery card swap box. You were supposed to register for a grocery discount card, and then every so often swap it for someone else’s, so your buying patterns couldn’t be accurately tracked.

We need to do that with cars. Every so often swap your car with someone else. Then your “driving pattern” will be all over the place so nothing comes up suspicious.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

I think the title undersells the accomplishment.

He made an animated button gif that scrolls the entire text of Moby Dick.

4.2 Mb, 19 hours long.

Top quality useless proof of concept. 10/10.

People have such trouble with dichotomies.

Musk is highly accomplished and has also over-hyped his plans many times.

He’s delivered things years late that were also years ahead of others.

The actual work of SpaceX and Tesla are done by his employees, but the company wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for him.

He’s expressed some laudable goals around green tech and space exploration and also done things designed to enrich himself immensely.

Tesla’s done some cool things and also had problems.

SpaceX is awesome and Musk is also a terrible human being.

Dichotomies are uncomfortable but they’re everywhere.

So would you want a genius figuring out how to do everything you ask it to from scratch, or do you want to train someone how you want something done, so they do it the same way every time and you don’t have to explain yourself over and over?

Nondeterminism is actually a bug in many cases, and training, process and procedure, is how we mitigate it in humans.

I’d argue programming is much less accessible now. For starters “programming” means a thousand different things and where do you even start?

My Apple //e came with one language, BASIC, it was built in, nothing to buy, and came with a book on how to get started writing it.

But yeah I didn’t start at 8.

We didn’t get that Apple until I was 10, so that’s then I started.

The harness that connects to a chatbot, API or voice interaction is the place to route requests to different systems. If you remember the early days of ChatGPT it explicitly said it was routing image generation to Dall-E after embellishing your request itself first.

Determining which tool to use should be a lightweight operation but I’m not expert enough to understand exactly how much lighter than a full LLM call just to recognize it needs a different tool or model.

Woah dude I took a nap and woke up in 1995.

Heh. Link is wrong but here’s the text:

Then the Lord said to Joshua, “Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. Take the whole army with you, and go up and attack Ai. For I have delivered into your hands the king of Ai, his people, his city and his land.

Not to be this way but can you not go to a local jeweler and buy a ring with a lab-grown diamond in it, no assembly required?

AI coughed up a bunch of references that put their stockpile estimate at around a year. Might have been more at one time but nothing close to 100.

Everything you said is why I don’t agree with the idea that “everyone will be writing their own apps.”

Can’t wait for a world full of apps as janky as most spreadsheets (or Access or FileMaker databases)

What a cool company. They’ve got the coolest nerdiest things.

I’m loving the non-transitive dice. My son’s birthday is in (checks calendar) ten months, but he’s getting these dice now anyway. So cool.

> Worth stating because four documents now assert

I got one too many chunks of this nonsense and told Claude to knock it off, forever. It acknowledged and wrote out some instructions to its memory about it.

And what a breath of fresh air. Its responses are maybe 20% longer but I read them at least twice as fast. Should have done it a long time ago.

What the American government funds with tax dollars should be chosen by the American people, via Congress. Choosing not to fund speech isn’t the same as prohibiting it.

That said, “chosen by the American people” needs to be broad enough that we’re not singling out individual universities and individual countries based on the power of their political lobbies.

> Their heuristics is opportunity of action

My favorite burglar fact is robberies go way down when it’s raining. Thieves just don’t want the hassle of getting wet.

I sorta recall a game (midtown madness?) that included a Rand McNally fold up street map in the box. The world was so accurate you could give your buddy driving directions by using the actual map to navigate.

I always respected that (for the time) extreme level of fidelity.

“It costs a lot to buy a new computer better than the one I have” is another way of saying “computers aren’t going obsolete as fast” which sounds like a great thing.

I’m curious when AI will be directly responsible for reducing the cost of anything.

Not “if you use it it can make you more money” but “real, normal people are seeing a benefit, not from using AI but from something it was able to accomplish that made normal people’s lives better.”

I hope there will always be an affordable paid option that comes with no ads.

The news industry’s failure to address this is what ruined journalism. Every publication, whether they admit it or not, judges its content by number of clicks, which destroys the incentive for producing quality journalism.

Both social media and mobile games have evolved to optimize for maximum ongoing engagement rather than delivering value to the user.

I pay $10/month for Apple Arcade in order to get mobile games with no ads and no addictive behavior model.

I can’t pay for ad-free Facebook or Instagram so I won’t use them.

If AI chatbots start optimizing for keeping me talking longer, rather than giving me the answers I want as quickly as possible, they will have failed miserably.

OT: there was a time when I could open my Usenet reader and go sequentially through each newsgroup I was subscribed to, scan the titles, read the interesting ones, mark the group as read, repeat, and in ~30-60 minutes be “caught up” on “everything.” Or at least that’s what it felt like, because basically anything I cared about had a newsgroup for it.

I had to let go of that feeling of being caught up in maybe 1993.

Because we’ve been sold the story that your house has to appreciate in value 2-3 times over the period you live in it, consequently, homeowners vote against anything that lowers housing costs.

I do love me a company with a good sense of self-deprecating humor.

There’s at least one distinction I didn’t see in the article.

If a throbber is advanced by signals of progress or at least action, then it’s not useless and is arguably better than a progress bar that moves with unpredictable and uneven speed.

If a throbber is an animated gif displayed until something makes it go away, then it’s useless.

The problem with politics is it’s not a meritocracy.

You find abdicating your speech to an AI to be disqualifying, but to people who’ve already abdicated everything they do to AI, it’s folksy and relatable.

Car enthusiasts generally dislike automatic transmissions, despite their ubiquity and clear advantages for the population as a whole.

We have machines that can read our thoughts and act on our slightest whims.

How come these brilliant machines can’t figure out how to make a hospital stay not cost $60,000? Or build a car for less than $30,000? Or keep a megalomaniac from fooling enough people to seize power in a country of 300 million people?