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It's an improvement but...I've asked it to do some really simple tasks and it'll occasionally do them in the most roundabout way you could imagine. Like, let's source a bash file that creates and reads a state file to do something for which the functionality was already built-in. Say I'm a little skeptical of this solution and plug it into a new o1-preview prompt to double check the solution, and it starts by critiquing the bash script and error handling instead of seeing that the functionality is baked in and it's plainly documented. Other errors have been more subtle.

When it works, it's pretty good, and sometimes great. But when failure modes look like the above I'm very wary of accepting its output.

Lots of progress, but I feel like we've been seeing diminishing returns. I can't help but feel like recent improvements are just refinements and not real advances. The interest in AI may drive investment and research in better models that are game-changers, but we aren't there yet.

Older clothes weren't just made better, people also took care of them better. Partly because of cost, but also culture -- fewer changes in fashion trends with slower and more local communication, cheap labor to launder your clothes by hand (which puts much less wear on the garment). Also a culture of repairing and mending (also easier to do this when you have fewer things to occupy your free time).

Quite a few people dumping their trash in the woods illegally have been caught in my area with them.

They just need to outlaw private citizens putting them on public property without a permit. Big fines could be a deterrant. Maybe USFS/BLM/NPS employees need some sniffing devices. The upshot is that if it's got a cellular modem, someone's paying a bill and they can usually be found pretty easily if you have the modem.

With fire seasons going the way they are west of the Rockies, I'd be a little concerned about a bunch of lion batteries scattered through the woods. Just takes one of them to blow up in late summer (say it gets crushed by a tree) and there's a good chance it'll be a multi-billion dollar problem that kills people.

That...doesn't sound unreasonable.

Not sure what the time/labor looks like, but I'd easily pay $60 bucks for that. You may be able to sell them at $100 and still move quite a few.

Honestly if you dressed it up a little you could probably charge quite a bit, it's just a matter of reaching that audience.

Game cams with cellular modems are getting to be pretty common, and you can equip them with solar panels. Basically just set em and forget em. It wouldn't surprise me if this is making them much more common...you can get them deep into the woods and don't have to go check on them hardly at all.

https://www.forestry-suppliers.com/c/trail-game-cameras/3-30...

Cool project! I'd buy one of these if they were pre-assembled.

I expect there will be some legal disputes over this kind of thing pretty soon. As another comment pointed out: run the AI-detection software on essays from before ChatGPT was a thing to see how accurate these are. There's also the problem of autists having their essays flagged disproportionately, so you're potentially looking at some sort of civil rights violation.

I expect not smart enough people are buying “AI” products and trusting them to do the things they want them to do, but don’t work.

People are willing to believe almost anything as long as it makes their lives a little more convenient.

I agree with this approach generally, but I needed to use some lua plugins to do something specific fairly quickly, and didn't feel like messing around with it for weeks on end to get it just right.

As someone who doesn't generally program, it was pretty good at getting me an init.lua set up for nvim with a bunch of plugins and some functions that would have taken me ages to do by hand. That said...it still took a day or two of working with it and troubleshooting everything, and while it's been reliable so far, I worry that it's not exactly idiomatic. I don't know enough to really say.

What it's really good at is taking my description of something and pointing me in the right direction to do my own research.

(two things that helped me with getting decent code were to describe the problem and desired solution, followed by a "Does that make sense?". This seems to get it to restate the problem itself and produce better solutions. The other thing was to copy the output into a fresh session, ask for a description of what the code does and what improvements could be made)

SPE was fraud, he told the guards to act like "tough guards" and then said publicly “the guards were given no specific instruction or training on how to be guards," which is what made it probably the most famous psychology study of all time.

https://gen.medium.com/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/6/14/17464516/st...

NBWM is absolutely fantastic. They have Clifford Ashley's (wrote Ashley Book of Knots) rope and knot collection, and some of his paintings too (he lived on the other side of the harbour). They also have the world's largest scrimshaw collection, and the Lagoda, the world's largest model wooden ship (1:2 scale IIRC), which you can walk around on and check out the ropework. Seamen's Bethel from Moby Dick is literally a block away. Easily the coolest museum I've been to.

Interesting bit of trivia, New Bedford used to be the richest city in the planet because of the whaling industry.

I think doctor assisted suicide is something we should have, but I've read some really messed up stuff about Canada's program.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/06/canada-...

https://apnews.com/article/covid-science-health-toronto-7c63...

One case (can't find it now, I think it may have been Alan Nichols') had someone claiming the doctor basically pressured them into it, implying they were taking up resources from other patients in Canada's health care system who could use it more.

Hope Deere gets what's coming to them and this sets a precedent for other companies. Next on the list should be devices remotely disabled when they're discontinued, which would have otherwise continued to work perfectly fine (like the Spotify car device).

Dr. Robert Cannon, a transplant surgeon at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, described a similar incident during the congressional hearing where Martin’s letter was disclosed. It happened at a hospital outside of Alabama.

“We actually were in the operating room. We had actually opened the patient and were in the process of sort of preparing their organs, at which point the ventilator triggered and so the anesthesiologist at the head of the table spoke up and said, ‘Hey, I think this patient might have just breathed,’” Cannon later told NPR in an interview. “If the patient breathes, that means they’re not brain dead.”

Nevertheless, a representative from the OPO wanted to proceed anyway, Cannon says. He refused.

“We were kind of shocked that an OPO person would have so little knowledge about what brain death means that they would say, ‘Oh, you should just go ahead.’ And we thought, ‘No. We’re not going to take any risk that we murder a patient.’ Because that’s what it would be if that patient was alive.”

OPO should be charged with attempted homicide.

That's what I was getting at

Well it was obviously an ad for "x-ray glasses," not x-ray glasses.

Ignorance wouldn't prevent you from concentrating on a 14-line poem, or from understanding the immediate plot details of a book and how they fit into the plot more broadly.

Things like this are foundational for learning. If you can't do them, you can't learn very well. Even if you do learn to do these things in college, you're literally learning as an adult what previous generations learned in elementary-, middle- and highschool. This is delayed development. People like that will never be able to achieve at the same level.

Here's the article if you're interested:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...

https://archive.is/TJ18n

Big John (mentioned in article) uses Levi's old selvedge denim looms and their jeans are fantastic. Also, I believe William Gibson referred to them in Pattern Recognition.

I guess my point is that we as a society have allowed things to get to a point where some of our brightest students have graduated highschool without ever reading a book, or having to focus their attention undivided for the duration of a short poem.

What kind of society produces kids like that? Our values have changed focus from effort, hard work and self improvement to ease, comfort and a one-dimensional notion of happiness. It's a downward spiral.

I read an Atlantic article the other day where a lit professor from Columbia University said that he has students nowadays who admit to having never read a book cover to cover. Ones that have tend to say their favorite book is something like Percy Jackson. They also can't focus on a small poem. This confirms what a teacher I know has been saying for a long time: highschool kids since around the class of 2010 are getting very noticably stupider.

I'm beginning to wonder if social media really has caused kids to miss key developmental stages. Parents being on their phones has led to kids hearing a substantially reduced vocabulary, these kids also receive less interaction from their parents and interact less with their environments and other kids. This stuff is really important for brain development, and we've replaced it with an iPhone.

I don't think social media started this, just accelerated the trend. I do think commercialized media for decades now has really been a driver of insipid banality.

Fend for themselves, and if they don't cooperate with the wishes of the TLAs they get legal trouble nobody could possibly afford. And if you end up in the secret FISA courts, you basically can't get legal representation because it's secret, or ever really talk about it. Also there's no real oversight for this stuff because it's that secret.

And even if you could find a significant number of kids without phones, they're likely still interacting pretty closely with kids who have them. There's a theory that kids with phones and social media are missing key developmental stages that contribute to things like empathy, which would explain the increasing rates of narcissism we've been seeing. Kids without phones are subjected to to all the toxic second order effects. No way to escape it really.

Void is pretty cool.

Current AI systems are by far the worst that they will ever be. 5-10 years from now, I will trust AI tutor/teachers and will make sure my kids is on the right side of the achievement curve.

Pretty sure I read that line about self driving cars 8 or 9 years ago.

Realistically, kids will always take the easiest path, why learn when AI will do all the thinking for them? And if AI does all the thinking and people begin to depend on them, what autonomy do these people have left? They've been completely neutered.

You can also use this to get a rough idea of who the most insecure people in the room are and work from there.