fredley

Very nice, but the map seems to be in the wrong position vs. the trains/3d elements.

"Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller."

As an OS, I wish the user would launch fewer programs. What a chore.

3) Buy all the RAM, increasing the barrier to entry to push back the tide a bit, in time for a juicy IPO.

To William’s complete lack of surprise, the little cellar under the shed was much better built than the shed itself. But then, practically everywhere in Ankh-Morpork had cellars that were once the first or even second or third floors of ancient buildings, built at the time of one of the city’s empires when men thought that the future was going to last for ever. And then the river had flooded and brought mud with it, and walls had gone higher and, now, what Ankh-Morpork was built on was mostly Ankh-Morpork. People said that anyone with a good sense of direction and a pickaxe could cross the city underground by simply knocking holes in walls.

The people behind these funds are playing Monopoly IRL, and this in particular makes me very angry.

The UK high street has been a notable victim. Gradually, over the past couple of decades, company after company has been snapped up by PE. Not just shops, but restaurants too. Suddenly you realise that the 5 or 6 high street chains that were competing are now owned by the same fund. Quality collapses, prices rise, not just at one chain but everywhere. People stop going, the chain collapses, another empty unit, the fund moves on. It's easy to point at Amazon and internet shopping as having degraded the British high street, but there are several other factors, and PE is a big one.

I think if local models catch up with current SOTA then that might not happen. Either way, I'm don't think the long-term for OAI, Anthropic etc. really holds up.

Increasingly I see marketing as akin to LLM training. We are all being trained (by activating and reinforcing neural pathways in our meaty heads) to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way (e.g.: at the store, select _this_ brand of soap).

I don't want to learn how GIMP works. I want to edit photos.

Some people do. I know my way around Photoshop very well, but do not use any advanced features. I tried using GIMP once and bounced off immediately, trying to do what I knew how to do in Photoshop was very hard, the learning curve felt very steep.

These days I use Photopea which meets my needs perfectly (but is not free software).

Almost exactly the playbook I followed (unwittingly) when designing a logotype for my Playdate game recently:

https://play.date/games/hyper-vector/

He did his _last_ mile in 4.17. Insane.

I need a version of this which swears loudly when an assumption it made turns out to be wrong, with the volume/passion/verbosity correlated with how many tokens it's burned on the incorrect approach.

https://archive.is/92Xsy

Playdate games! Super constrained/lo-fi/retro and really a joy to program without AI.

Hyper Vector is dropping on Catalog next week!

I had the UK Age verification popup today. It verified immediately based on the age of my Apple account, I didn't have to take any further action. I am much younger than the OP, and probably than their Apple account. I am surprised that this didn't happen for them.

It's like the mastered Factorio and applied it to real life.

Brit here: It is very uncommon.

This is an interesting development. I would predict some of the biggest losers in the AI boom will be Indian (and similar) outsourcing companies. Companies like Wipro and Infosys have thrived off richer countries' businesses wanting grunt work done cheap, not caring necessarily about quality, as long as it meets some baseline functionality. LLMs are very good at this.

In addition, support volume must be taking a hit from AI agents too. When pricing stabilises, will Indian outsourcing still be competitive? Maybe. Maybe less so. If I were working for Infosys right now I'd be a more than a little worried.

Perhaps Anthropic anticipates a glut of engineers in the near future.

I genuinely can't tell if this is satire or not.

Americans always think a British accent is exactly one accent.

True, existing addictions are a good bet, but a brand new one with no competition, regulation or recognition? That's you you get Zuckerberg wealthy.

Me too. I first assumced it was an OCR error, then remembered they were emails and wouldn't need to go through OCR. Then I thought that the US Government is exactly the kind of place to print out millions of emails only to scan them back in again.

I'm glad to know the real reason!

If you want to become a billionaire, the best way to do it is invent some new addiction.

Calling it now: this is ignobel prize-worthy research. If it doesn’t get a nod I’ll eat my hat.

I love this fact. If you're a fish with no neck, the route it takes is the most direct and obvious. But as evolution gradually lengthened necks the route remained the same!

As someone in the UK, this was especially chilling.

Once you start noticing how often you see content that references e.g. anything that's happening in the US right now (I'm in the UK), you realise how 'news' is everywhere.

If you go on reddit, unless you've curated your subreddits and never touch /all or /popular, it's very heavy with 'news'. The Google app, a left-swipe by default on your Android phone is all 'news'. Twxtter/Bluesky/etc. are full of news. Avoiding news entirely is almost impossible on today's internet.

I have had success with this approach too, but key to all this is being careful about where you go online to minimise exposure. These days I don't use any 'social media' platforms, but I do visit HN and BBC news (both of which are of higher quality than most places, and crucially only have a few stories on a typical day - the rate of new content is low). This way I stay informed without falling down rabbit holes about every twist and turn of every (mostly awful/depressing) thing happening in the World.

Yes, laws only matter if they are collectively believed in. International law just the same. This has always been the case, but largely speaking in the West, for the last century or so, the rule of law has been broadly believed in, including international law.

The story here is that the US seems to not currently believe international law is an effective tool for projecting its power. Whether correctly or otherwise, it has believed that up until now.

https://mamota.net my ultra minimalist site