chris-orgmenta

Lovely piece.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find it kind of sad to think that you got buried in a grave with no headstone, no marker, no indication of who you were.

I appreciate this melancholy - even a compassionate wistfulness.

Conversely though - For me, it just feels part of an Ozymandian futility. If the suffering of dying + the suffering of others' grief are removed from the equation, it feels like there is an elegance to just dissolve back to the environment without a struggle, in a certain graceful way.

A headstone in that context is a 'struggle'.

To me, graves are for the living and never the dead.

To expand not refute,

If truth is defined as beliefs which lead one to make decisions that cause you/your society to thrive

This is 'metaphorical truth' to be precise.

But it's only a part of the virality of memes, not the whole.

Propagation can occur not just due to usefulness, but to other factors such as simplicity/replicability, human susceptibility / 'key in a lock' etc.

If survival was purely metaphorical truth, then all surviving lifeforms would be 'the most true' (including viruses being 'true' to us). Which can be argued, at a philosophical level - But then we've expanded the definition so much as to lose relevant meaning at the pragmatic level.

Porcupine throwing quills, and all that.

Agree.

I suppose I should clarify that I am aware that the incident was from '82 and that LDTs are no longer admissible in many jurisdictions, and new legislation came in for tamper-proofing medicine which affected not just the US.

But regardless, argument being "things haven't moved on enough - lie detectors are still used in some places, people still misinterpret what they are, and our supply chain still only discourages, rather than prevents, mischief"

While in custody, she took a lie detector test, which revealed deception in two key responses[...]

It did not. It revealed that the police failed to trick a confession out of her using pseudo-science.

James Lewis refused a polygraph.

Sensible move - Especially when journalists interpret LDTs as per above.

They tried enlarging the pharmacy surveillance photo, but the bigger it got, the grainier it got.

What did Fahner and Zagel actually tell Michael here? Surely not that, verbatim.

Interesting piece otherwise. Our global supply chain is just so fragile and insecure. We may need to rethink everything. For a start, is it not ridiculous that we have unsealed/re-sealable products? I do not want Ibuprofen etc. to be moved to behind-counter, but perhaps a better 'discard if tampered with' seal should be implemented. Will we get to a point where we have to sell fruit in tear-open cardboard mailers? Sounds ridiculous, but depends on what happens in the next decade re: terrorism in general.

Should we not allocate rights based on varying levels of consciousness and sentience as emergent phenomena?

Or they might oppose:

[Elephant Lawyer]: Dear Republican Party,

On behalf of our clients, the global elephant community, we formally request that you cease and desist from using their likeness as a party symbol. The unauthorized use of their image fails to represent their values, interests, and, most notably, their stance on environmental preservation.

Our clients object to being associated with policies that conflict with their dedication to ecological stewardship and community welfare. Therefore, we urge immediate cessation of any elephant imagery in relation to your party. Further unapproved usage may result in legal action.

Sincerely, Counsel for Proboscidea

Thank you, really insightful. Will listen to those episodes, thanks.

You really honed in on the crux of my questions actually - Your original comment immediately made me think of shamans and prophets from an evolutionary biology and anthropology sense (and the arguments that it is a beneficial trait for a subset of a human group to have) and what that all might mean to you.

I think the 'authority' was referring to the Lady not the Voice.

I interpret as "You were in an amenable state (consciously and subconsciously) for her to rewrite your software".

Edit: I have a couple of questions, if you don't mind (thank you for sharing your story):

A) You seem fairly neutral / Stoic about this entire experience, and it was clearly huge and transformative at a deep level. Do you perceive this as having a net positive or negative impact on your life?

B) Do you feel you are able to empathise with 'prophets' through the ages better than most? Not to single out particular prophets, but in general those with the Voice of God that wholly leant into to it rather than managing it (and then preached/spread their words)

Does gait recognition (and body tics / unique movement style) not make this moot?

My sense is that facial recognition is a stop-gap and soon to be superseded, because the tech is there for more holistic 'reads' of a person - And that those subtle things that we humans can't see are actually plain as day and as clear as a fingerprint.

If we cover our face, then the data collected on gait etc. will be more than enough. If we adopt a different gait, then the data on other foibles and styles will then give us away. Etc. (we can't hope to disguise all of these at once)

I see those as the lazy ones that are the tip of the iceberg. A non-zero amount will even be intentionally lazy (analogous to the Nigerian Prince theory), or to get feedback from people flagging them.

I think the sensible assumption is that there is a 'rest of the iceberg' growing rapidly below the surface, and that the horse has truly bolted.

I currently suspect that ~1-5% of the 'people' I interact with online are LLMs. I suspect that a few Redditors and Facebookers are up to about ~10-25% without realising it, caught in 'AI social media eddies'. Older generations especially susceptible.

I hope that we can smack the personality down to zero.

ChatGPT already ignores instructions such as 'questions are NEVER rhetorical, answer every question I ask directly', 'NEVER apologise or say sorry' and 'NEVER pretend to be human, and NEVER imply you have emotion or personality'.

I worry that OpenAI will make it worse from leaning into this Her stuff.

I just don't want to talk to a pseudo-human. I want to talk to the machine.

From that video: I would have wanted to complete that conversation within ten seconds, any more and it is wasting my time with its personality.

Human: "French - Pronounce croissant"

Bot: "Crossiant. Notice emphasis on nasal `iant` syllable. Crossiant"

Human: "Pronuniation of baguette"

Bot: "Baguette. Notice emphasis on second syllable. Baguette."

Any less density than that, and I feel like OpenAI doesn't respect me or my time.

I believe it's for probing and testing.

They're using it to a. See what exactly are red flags to us such that we notice them as non-human, b. Testing to see when they successfully slip past us.

These are the obvious ones; I suspect there are many that we are now not noticing.

We're providing free data to them whenever we do or do not flag the comments, unfortunately.

Great. I feel like the music AIs are flying under the radar at the moment. I assume they will pop off shortly, once people realise how good they have become. Hopefully they add an upscaling option for songs v<1.5.

Related thoughts -

- I struggled with Udio to get great results. This might be my poor prompting though.

- Suno was better for me - so far, and my prompting is far more successful. This Udio update will hopefully bring it into line with Suno.

- I have had quite a few 'HolySh__t!' moments with Suno, and can now often induce frisson with it.

- More and more, I'm referring to my own creations rather than my Spotify weekly suggestions and Spotify playlists. Probably 1:1:1 ratio now.

- Listening is starting to merge with creating, i.e. I'm listening, extending the song, choosing the best extension, and so on.

- I have a 3 part, 15 minute song that I am actually in awe of. Possibly just my simple brain that loves beeps and boops in my ears, rather than it being a work of art.

- I suspect I'm a layman musically and that some people would find some of the transitions and patterns formulaic / refer to pre-existing art, but for me it is firmly in the 'wow' stage now, and it can fairly reliably garden-path my brain.

- Generative music like this is making me relate music to comedy - Music can almost be like a joke where a slight adjustment in the song tricks the brain slightly and can trigger really interesting emotion, ranging from "ah of course!", "genius!" to "oh that's nice, I wasn't expecting that" and "like a key in a lock".

- The above, for me and for now at least, is only for instrumental songs. Lyrics and vocals still seem banal, robotic, boring, cookie cutter. I haven't managed to get any good lyrics on songs other than a bit of techno with intentionally repetitive/robotic background vocals.

- Suno's extend option for tracks seemed broken a while back but is now fixed.

- I've been thinking about how this affects the live music industry, and I suspect that the DJ scene will be partially eaten from beneath __soon__, once on-the-fly generation is launched - i.e. 'why should we hire a dj for our bar / party when we can just ask SunoDJ to do it for us'.

- Other than on the fly generation, what I _really_ want is for the tracks to be split into stems.

- Suno's paid tiers = you own the copyright. Suno's free tier = They own it. Not sure about Udio.

- Suno = a constant battle to keep it innovative. It does often go generic in terms of timbres, structure etc., but you can break out of that. I think. Again, it might be generic crap I'm creating, and it's my illiteracy that makes it seem unique.

- Dub/dancehall/reggae and MelodicTechno/AmbientTechno are the easier genres to wrangle IMO/IME.

In an attempt to make interesting/bold predictions:

- <10 yrs Google maps will use photogrammetry + Computer vision AI etc. to make 'street view' continuous, and you will be able to go anywhere and look with any perspective. New layers can start to be added, e.g. infrastructure layers that are captured from crowd sourcing from phones.

- Music will be continuously generated < 5yrs. Within 10, can adjust to auto and manual inputs that nudge it in the direction you want.

- <5 yrs - Business role-based email addresses automatically parsed and routed. E.g. most business bills captured and added to accounting platform.

- Proper HUD AR glasses that are on an open-enough OS that allows hacking + easy app dev, so not a DOA product. Auto labelling of objects, live translation etc. will actually be well implemented and used by many people.

- War is going to look even more terrifying, and the Terminator Salvation vision of hunter/patrol drones manning the skies is precisely what front lines will look like (except higher altitude).

- Defensive war: Multi-layer iron domes start to be erected on nation borders, and we start to hand over to AI such that humans are not immediately/directly in charge of decisions. I.e. defence ops handled by AI, but tactics and strategy still directly managed by humans.

- Offensive war: Opposing nations will start to talk re: agreements about a human needing to make final decisions - To what success I have no idea.

- Low altitude airspace mostly managed by AI, drone swarms + coordination start to be seen as commonplace. >10 yrs Propellor noise to somewhat improve after massive push from citizens, and we eat some efficiency in the interest of reducing noise pollution.

- 20 yrs Maybe... First AI enemy, i.e. a nation state 'battles' an AI that seems to be acting alone or cannot be pinned on a specific human group actor. Will be possible due to the 'scale' that AI affords, not the 'smarts'.

- A Japanese citizen will be more likely to receive 'care' from a robot than from a human... This ratio mostly due to heavy use in eldercare.

- We will hear of edge-cases (similar but smaller situation to tang ping + incel choices) where some people explicitly announce / decide never to interact with humans again, and opt to just interact with AIs only.

- EU legislation that demands open/reviewable algorithms before products be legally available to EU citizens

- 20 yrs: AI 'Oracles' that some people revere (just very insightful, accurate, consistent AIs that appear to exceed human wisdom)

- 10 yrs: MSPs/IT providers will handle ~5x as many endpoints per employee compared to 2024

- Some very very crude prototype of 'inter-animal language translation' that people will want to talk to their dogs with, but it won't really add value for a long time and will mostly just be used for zoology research.

By 'objectively' do you mean something like:

"A subjective but widely/generally agreed Average Utilitarianism with high distribution of utility (e.g. low Gini Coefficient)"?

Water Aid immediately springs to my mind, but it is no longer recommended by GiveWell. https://www.givewell.org/international/health/water. Which highlights some of the problems with this objectivity and effort.

Perhaps malaria charities are the current 'best bang for buck' / best targeting 'a better world' with the fewest competing interests.

NP at all, happy to see you tackling this.

In addition to the FAQs, here's what I would love to see on the landing page:

- Clear blurb on what data you're taking offsite (regardless of encryption), what you are storing, and confirmation that no third parties obtain any data (regardless of whether anonymized).

- Privacy policy & terms + conditions

- A screenshot showing an email inbox on the left, Xero bill templates on the right, and lines linking between the two (demonstrating the emails you have found, matched & synced to recurring xero bills).

- Assurance that 99.9% of bills would be captured and synced.

Those things together would be so compelling that I would get easy change signoff from most of my clients.

This is a compelling use case for AI, and a solution that was sorely needed.

- If you refer to it as '(payables) bills' not '(receivables) invoices' it will tie in more neatly with your customers' payables departments, and employees will be less likely to confuse it with receivables. It also future proofs your dictionary for when you scale. It also opens you up to B2C (Individuals refer to their bills as bills, not invoices).

- This is too small in scope for the long term (presumably preaching to the choir). Businesses can't have one integration per entity class. I.e.: If a business installs this, then they will also need another LLM agent scanning for customer tickets, another for sales, etc. Having 100s of integrations is a security problem, on top of cost and complexity considerations.

- Thus, presumably your plan is to introduce more integrations for more entity classes over time, a single agent scanning and each routing different entities into their respective bucket. The low hanging fruit is probably: Other supplier comms/tickets, Customer leads/sales/rfqs, Customer tickets/support, Customer complaints, Outgoing invoices (detect when a recurring invoice has not been issued, for example), RMM augmentation (e.g. warranty/domain expiry warning emails), Marketing notifications to correct campaigns.

- The pricing is interesting, as the lower tier is in a range that will be very price elastic for 'small businesses that are not particularly profitable'. I.e., tiny water-treading companies tend to quibble over $20/month (despite it preventing >$100 in equivalent labour) as they will assume that it is one of many necessary other integrations. Adjusting price down would bring in many more customers, but they would arguably not be 'ideal' customers (less of a problem since this is a subscription pay-in-advance system, though).

- I like the clear simple copy (a neat springboard for target audience to think 'this will save me so much effort'). I suppose some people would argue that you should go harder on the 'This will save you lots of employee time and prevent catastrophes' message.

- Far more transparency please - Website sparse on details (inc. privacy, data storage). You can't really onboard EU customers until then.

- Upcoming integrations with Xero, MYOB et al?

Great entry point into what can evolve into an 'IFTTT-v2' business routing system. If you're getting <0.1% false negatives then well done, you're onto something.

Ah that's cleaner than my idea. Which was:

Install OBS, add a 'Scene', add a 'Window Capture' to the scene, then right click it (in sources) and transform / scale / crop the scene dimensions. Then optionally in the 'controls' panel you can start a virtual webcam, then go to Chrome/Brave settings, go to Site & Shield settings, set the default Camera to your virtual one.

Not sure if OBS would solve your Mac issue.

Popup for me @ https://gemini.google.com/app:

"Bard is now Gemini

The best way to get direct access to Google AI All the capabilities that you know and love are still here, and will keep getting better in the Gemini era"

So I suppose this is the official launch.

(https://gemini.google.com/app 404'd until I connected my workspace account in bard extensions).

Edit: Side note - Hallucinations pretty much what you would expect, the same as ChatGPT4. Immediately tried to tell me to import non existent components from an npm library. That test was without prefixing with 'turn creativity to zero [blah blah]', so will test further with proper prompts. Gemini doesn't seem to allow for custom instructions, so I suppose I will have to add them into an Autohotkey script.

Oh absolutely.

I'm surprised that no-one located (somehow) and reported him before then.

I'm sure the digger would say that it's just rubble (nothing structural) he was touching, but there are of course plenty of issues & it's besides the point / could be incorrect anyway.

Here's a really interesting one.

(sort by oldest, third video onwards) - https://www.youtube.com/@Paleas/videos

Tradie somewhere in QLD, I am guessing. Perhaps underneath a condo or small hotel.

At some point, they become a bit 'psytrance music video', from what I remember.

The UI isn't really mentioned directly in the article, and is another major problem.

It's optimised to keep you reading. But you don't want to keep reading, you just want your original question answered.

Unfortunately, they style all the page components the same, and you are forced to read to see if it's an answer to your question, a 'related question', or something irrelevant (like the ChatGPT example given).

On top of that, it cuts off most of the answer(s) anyway 'below the fold' of the fragment it's contained in.

Example where I googled 'quora van dimensions': https://www.quora.com/Is-there-much-of-a-height-difference-b...

1. AI component

2. Relevant answer, but arguably a lazy one that assumes that it's a post 2020 model (instead of 2013-9). Also does not address the person's question for 'in the UK' (people answering should advise if model differs between the UK & US). Also assumes that the asker has not already looked at that spec sheet.

3. Fairly related / useful context, I suppose.

4. A 'related' question's answer, for "What is the height of a standard 53ft. semi trailer?". (Seriously?!)

5. A 'related' question's answer, for "How tall can your load be above the cab on a flatbed 2016 Ford F550?" (Seriously?!)

6. 'Related questions'

7. Answers to completely different questions.

The UI is hostile to the readers' needs.

So that, along with the poor quality responses mentioned (usually some business consultant giving vague pointless lists or pointing to some SaaS offering) means that "Site:old.reddit.com" or niche related websites is usually a more direct path to an answer to me.

May I add: 6) Any anti-AIcorp legislation (that the current incumbents may encourage, which does not affect themselves) - legislative barriers to entry?

I am not convinced they have truly managed this yet - It is a concern of mine though.

I agree that we should pretend that my question said "from standby" instead of "boot"

It's not a complaint (from me or my acquaintances), it's something that I thought (possibly incorrectly, but as mentioned I am ignorant hence me asking) was a hindrance to the success of the market. I.e. when I speak to most people re: VR/AR, they say something like "It sounds like a lot of faff", or "I have one gathering dust, I can't be bothered to use it".

I have no skin in the game and no intention of buying anything for another couple of years at least, FWIW.

Anyway: Sibling post says ~5 seconds from standby - Which seems very reasonable to me, so I suppose it's just lack of compelling features (subjectively to the people in question, not regular users) that result in the 'gathering dust'... Which means the people I have spoken to haven't wanted to bother keeping it on standby (thus increasing the barriers further).

Sorry for the slight tangent, but: What's the current state of VR&AR Headset friction / boot time? This is what I expected Apple to solve first.

With VR/AR headsets, the friction to 'boot in' seems to be one of the biggest problems in adoption, and one that I feel Meta et al don't openly talk about. (Note, I am ignorant of this field in general).

How close are we to seamless, quick boot, such that one puts on a headset and are 'immediately' immersed? (Compare to my phone, which unlocks before my eyes even have time to focus on the screen).

(My admittedly poor) web searching of this question just tends to offer webpages on common boot issues (e.g. 'Quest boot time'/'Vive startup time' just leads to complaints and support forums.)

I suspect this also to be a primary issue with the true 'metaverse' taking hold. GTA6 will, in my opinion, be the luxury 'hang-out' metaverse, but will likely take many minutes to access. I feel that Microsoft could have made Minecraft the de facto metaverse (by implementing certain features), but will never quite get there. Perhaps a WebGL game that can take you to a bookmarked 'spacial' lobby within 3000ms can get real traction.

Also see u/BuildTheRobots' helpful note to my similar comment the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39089364#39092697

I think this is a huge win for Airbus.

Extra market barriers to entry, a hobbled competitor, a now (relatively) outstanding brand, eyes diverted from them, 10 years head start / catch-up, lessons to be learnt from Boeing, solid backing from shareholders, etc.

OK great, thanks

And appreciate that any expectations for <1week delivery would ignore your JIT/ondemand style assembly

Hi there,

Do you think that you will move from batches to continuous production the next few years (I understand this is difficult logistics)? If Frameworks were available with 3 day shipping, then I would be able to recommend them to people more successfully.

Also out of interest, do you mind sharing your stance (and estimates for current and future demand) for touchscreens? Presumably you're estimating low demand for this at moment since it's not a priority. Would be great to see stats on this (since at the moment it's mostly just informal discussion / passing comments in the community/forums)

Thanks in advance. Appreciate everything you've all done.