sequoia

I have a lot of issues with dictation as well which I feel has gotten much worse as it gets "smarter." It used to take literal dictation & I could say "comma" "period" etc. to insert punctuation. Now it tries to guess when commas or full stops should be added and it's horrible. If I pause to take a breath it puts a comma or period, sometimes entirely changing the meaning of the sentence.

Recently I said "I ran into this too earlier on the project" and it wrote "I run into this tube earlier on the project." So now I'm running into a tube... because this makes more sense than "too"? And it can never write the names of immediately family members I text about every single day, and it has 5th grade vocabulary so if I said I demurred or that something was germane or any other word beyond the 500 most common words it butchers it.

What I want: 1. let me handle the punctuation manually 2. assume a broader vocabulary 3. let me specify how people's names are pronounced!! How are we this many years in and it still misinterprets my wife's name on a daily basis?

wow it reminds me of Microsoft Access, a great piece of software in terms of rapidly building an application!

Does grist have forms?

I also have stopped donating. I replied to a WM Foundation email explaining why and they said they don't have editorial control over wikipedia, i.e. their hands are tied. Well OK, but I'm not giving money to fund the promulgation of Jew hatred and blood libel. Sad state of affairs! I've given for years.

this is so crazy. How does this accord with wikipedia's NOR & NPV stances?

This is a case of "if you abandon your convictions when it's inconvenient, you never really had convictions in the first place."

Some of this has to do with concerted and long-running campaigns of coordinated editing (against wikipedia rules) to push a one-sided political narrative. Most notably this happened and continues to be done by Israel-eliminationists[0]. Wikipedia eventually acknowledged the problem and banned a couple of the worst offenders[1] but that's a drop in the bucket as far as I'm concerned. I read it less and less these days and don't consult it at all for anything controversial ("controversial" meaning "topics that leftists have strong opinions about").

Sadly, a system like Wikipedia is hard to defend against persistent coordinated attacks by people who have lots of time.

0: https://aish.com/weaponizing-wikipedia-against-israel/ 1: https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/article-833180

> We want to help people, but only if and when it’s profitable for us

If s/he is running a company and not a charity, this is responsible, understandable, and predictable.

No one requested "highlight the ingredient names in the recipe steps"? That's a top request from me.

I looked into it a bit (another commenter called it "not that complicated" which is not a phrase I usually hear in relation to Israeli/Palestinian politics!) and it's pretty interesting: https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-curious-tale-of-israels-sh... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93North_Korea_rel...

Apparently at times some in Israel worked to establish relations with NK, in hopes of improving economic ties & bringing them in the fold I guess, but their efforts were thwarted by others in Israel (intelligence services) and pressure from the USA. And eventually (according to the article) it became clear that "stop selling our enemies weapons to use on us & in return we'll invest and establish ties" was a non-starter, so they gave up.

Also in an interesting reversal of tropes common in US politics, it sounds like the Isaeli government felt they were being unfairly controlled by the US, by being prevented from trying to establish friendly relations with a country the US considered off limits.

It's interesting to think of the counterfactual where Israel invested in NK, NK stopped participating in or arming attacks on Israel, and who knows what else would have happened. Oh well!

What's the source of the particular singling out of Israel here? Is it because they're a US ally, or is there some other history between the countries?

It looks like a singular designation in their atlas that Israel is referred to not as an enemy, but as "nonexistent." Anti-Israeli sentiment certainly creates strange bedfellows.

I thought it wasn't just a matter of valid but of identicalness. Multiple clients with identical JA4 which comprises if I'm not mistaken useragent but also other aspects of the host machine indicate that they are in fact a single user agent.

I don't know if there's a simple solution to deploy this but JA3 fingerprinting is sometimes used to identify similar clients even if they're spread across IPs: https://engineering.salesforce.com/tls-fingerprinting-with-j...

In canada it's "one cluster of dots = $5, two clusters = $10, three = $20" and so on. You just feel the number of dot clusters & count, no braille involved.

Gas prices are frequently in fractions of a penny. This never matters because they round. Yep, rounding, in the real world, and the nation has not imploded. As pointed out by others Canada does this already and it's no issue.

You eat them because they are abundant and nutritious. I can't gather wild arugula where I live, but there is plenty of Nettles.

"just taste like plant" the same can be said of Matcha which tastes like eating grass.

Wow interesting!

> The purpose of this workflow is to encourage the agent to identify and test small, incremental improvements. Claude would otherwise attempt to fix everything at once, only to be confounded by the drop in match rate, which had too many possible causes to diagnose effectively. Similarly, each attempt is made in a new file so that we can easily recover good matches. We want to avoid situations where an agent achieves a good match but subsequently edits the file and degrades its quality. The trail of attempts is also a useful reference for the agent.

This is a great tip. Using llms in the ide, I stage changes frequently to be able to rewind to a good state due to this “doing well then going off the rails” behaviour.

In Canada's largest city the mayor is firmly and strongly associated with the NDP. "Chow served as the New Democratic Party member of Parliament for Trinity—Spadina from 2006 to 2014."

How do you figure? I've had one swimsuit for 5 years & I store it in my dresser. He presumably buys one or more per year.

How does he fit all his camping stuff in his one bag? This was not explained. He "tosses it in his bag" for outdoor trips but tossed from where? I thought everything he owned was already in his bag.

How does he "not buy stuff frequently" if he discards & buys new swim suits (and presumably other stuff) as needed?

Sounds like this guy has a pretty cool & minimal lifestyle but I suspect there's some exaggeration and elision going on in this post.

Is this an advertisement? There's a CTA for a $190 service above the fold.

Here's a free product enhancement for OpenAI if they're not already doing this:

A todo app that reminds you of stuff. say "here's the stuff I need to do, dishes, clean cat litter fold laundry and put it away, move stuff to dryer then fold that when it's done etc." then it asks about how long these things take or gives you estimates. Then (here's the feature) it checks in with you at intervals: "hey it's been 30 minutes, how's it going with the dishes?"

This is basically "executive function coach." Or you could call it NagBot. Either way this would be extremely useful, and it's mostly just timers & push notifications.

> have to wonder how many separatist and protest movements are unknowingly getting external support to produce geopolitical disorder.

Many movements "wittingly" receive external support. From wikipedia[0]:

> In 2022, a report by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) identified Qatar as the most significant foreign donor to American universities. The research revealed that from 2001 to 2021, US higher education institutions received US$13 billion in funding from foreign sources, with Qatar contributing donations totaling $4.7 billion to universities in the United States.

In addition to investing in US Universities, Qatar is also host to the the Hamas political apparatus, which operates out of Doha.

Foreign propagandists don't exclusively target right wing radical movements, they are very happy to exploit leftists as well!

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatari_involvement_in_US_highe...

I've tried to suggest what people are suggesting here to google (start 10 min late). I'll post it here in case google cal eng are present.

Speedy Meetings, meet Tardy Meetings. I want 50 minute meetings & time to transition, but our culture of "let's wait a few minutes for people to arrive" is way too deeply engrained at my company to shift it. Solution: Speedy Meetings, but instead of end 5/10m early, start 5/10m late. We could turn this on company wide without a revolt.

Alright google cal eng: Go get that promo!

Yeah fair enough. I agree Trump was elected democratically and he's acting on behalf of "the people" when he threatens to pull funding. Perhaps attack was the wrong word.

apologies, I meant to suggest that Trump & MAGA are very hostile towards universities and Trump is threatening to pull so much federal funding some colleges may have to close, and a lot of Americans seem OK with that. I'm not making a value statement on that, Trump was elected to run the government, hence him reallocating funds (in this case) is part of our democratic process. People chose to put him in charge because they wanted him in charge.

To tip my hand: I personally think universities don't have more people rallying to their defence because they have abdicated their responsibilities to provide space for open inquiry, and have instead allowed themselves to be institutionally & ideologically captured by a group of people with activist leanings and fringe beliefs not held by 90+% of Americans.

My answer to my question above is "in the past two decades, the universities could have done more to protect speech across the board and not pick favourites to protect and others to abandon, as they have clearly done. In the last two years they could have refused to tolerate lawlessness on their campuses (not just 'speech' but actual law-breaking, including assaults, going unprosecuted) instead of turning a blind eye when the criminality was from a favoured cause du jour." I think if Universities had not abandoned their leadership duties, they wouldn't have Trump bringing the hammer down on them with so much public support.

I'm referring to threats to pull hundreds of thousands of dollars of funding if certain demands aren't met. But yes, there are also plenty of rhetorical attacks.

A lot of Americans support these attacks on universities. Why do people harbour this much animosity towards these institutions? Is there anything they could have done differently in the past decade or two to have broader sympathy now, or is people's ambivalence towards elite universities 100% irrational?

You can create a community in a neighbourhood like this. Five years is a pretty long time. People will come and go but if you spend even an hour per month with neighbours and other people reciprocate, it will build a community that transcends individuals coming & going. Think of a university campus: community forms there in far fewer than 5 years through regular casual interactions.

It's funny to me that both this woman and Kondo describe their methods as "The Japanese art of tidying." It's funny because if these methods were so characteristically or inherently Japanese, why would so many Japanese people themselves need so much help & training in the methods as to spawn a whole industry?

It's like calling Golang "The California programming language" or calling Newton's laws "The English art of explaining inertia." Is there really anything particularly Japanese about these women's methods or is it just Orientalist branding?

(You do see this sometimes around Brooklyn, or you used to, when Brooklyn's cultural cache was especially high.)

This is such a narrow view of homeschooling as to be idiotic.

> That voice likes to say: You should just homeschool them. Opt out of interacting with average people, because average people will only damage your kids.

The author makes a statement about why they think people prefer homeschooling, and yet they do not mention having spoken to a single currently homeschooling parent to ask why they homeschool. This is like me writing an article about some group I'm not a part of (say, farmers) and saying "why don't they all get organic certified? As far as I can tell it's because most farmers don't like nature."

tl;dr: this is a completely uninformed tirade from someone who unfortunately had a bad experience with their religious upbringing, which involved homeschooling, and is generalizing the negative emotions towards all homeschoolers whatever their reason for opting out of school. Ironically this article that's ostensibly criticizing homeschooling parents as snobs is dripping with disdain and condescension.

The reductive & random assumption that people opt out of school they object to the students is baffling to me. Does it not occur to the author that people take issue with institutionalization of their kids in school? It's not the other children, it's the one-size-fits-all meat grinder of school most secular homeschool parents object to.

Bonus: The footnotes are hilarious. The footnote to their argument that people homeschool because they're snobs is:

> I don’t think I’m straw-manning, because I’m pretty sure someone is going to highlight the “opt out of interacting with average people” quote on Twitter/X and say “this, but unironically.”

"I don't think I'm inventing a weak interlocutor to argue against because I've invented another imaginary person on twitter who agrees with the first imaginary person I created" I'm honestly laughing reading this.

I went to public school as did my wife. That's why we homeschool. It was a terrible experience overall; all these kids in a totally unnatural environment wasting time. I say unnatural, because generally if someone is tormenting you daily you can get away from that person. Even at a job, you could quit and find another job. In school, you are trapped with your tormentor(s) and constantly forced to take part in social hierarchies you have no interest in being part of. I was a loser through middle school which was not fun, then in high school I was not engaged so I became bored and lazy. When I had an engaging class (like mens choir, german, spanish or woodshop; even though another kid did intentionally burn me with a hot bit off the drill press among other antics) or I was able to be creative, I put a lot of effort in and it felt rewarding. But mostly I look back and say "what a massing f*cking waste of time that was." Not only did I not spend my time doing something better, it destroyed much of my natural curiosity and creativity.

We homeschooled our two older kids, the eldest is now in their second year of an extremely competitive engineering university program. She wanted to go to Uni so she took some online classes to prep then enrolled in school in grade 9. That was completely different from my experience in large part because she chose to go to school, so she had no one to blame for "why do I have to be here?" like I did. She owned her own choices & succeeded.

As for "what about socialization" that is the most laughable part to me. Sure I learned "socialization" in school: kill or be killed. I learned to be a mean, cynical, jaded child who could survive in that institutional environment. My children were free to spend full days socializing with other kids when we got together, and met frequently at libraries & parks with other homeschool kids, as well as engaging in extracurriculars. And if they're having a spat with another kid? That's fine, they can take a break for a bit then reconnect with them later; no need to force them together daily.

The funniest thing to me about "what about socialization" is that when I was in school & chatted with a friend in class, guess what I was always told? "Do that on your own time, you don't come to school to socialize." Ha. But seriously, avoiding the maladaptive "socialization" of what I think can fairly be called "industrial schooling" is one of the biggest perks of homeschooling.

The extracurriculars were easier too because they were not already tired from an early wakeup and full day of school! My younger kids who are now in regular school now are absolutely fried after a day at school + extracurriculars.

The amount of energy I spend now supporting school for my younger kids is crazy. Stressful mornings harrying sleepy kids out of bed and out the door, kids upset over bullying and inequity in the classroom, begging for designer clothes (where did that come from?), getting them to do their homework, oh and then there's "teaching my kids shit they were supposed to learn in school but the teacher didn't teach them" i.e. I'm having to "homeschool" them in addition to school. Sooo many conflicts spring from school. Having my kids in school often feels like more work that homeschooling rather than less.

Academics are easy. Tons of free online resources + Outschool where you can pay a teacher for one-off classes. My older kids took the 8 week essay writing class then breezed through high school english. When younger, if they wanted to play iPad I'd say "do 30m khan academy then you can do 30m iPad." Regular trips to the library & read to them... it's really not hard to cover academics through middle school, then if they want to go to high school, go ahead. Or apprentice, or focus on something else.

If you have any questions about homeschooling from a veteran parent who's also had kids in public school, let me know.