ileonichwiesz

If I did have kids, I probably wouldn’t want them to run around a big heavy robot with very little spatial awareness.

Very interesting topic, but a strange choice of source. I'd recommend these instead:

Coller foundation press release: https://www.jeremycollerfoundation.org/news-and-insights/pre...

The actual publication in Science: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads8482

A point mutation is very unlikely to produce “the next Einstein”, it’ll just produce someone with one slightly different protein in their gut.

For example, in the old days, the internet was scarce, so people had the sense that their online self and their real-life self were the same.

I’d argue the opposite. On the old internet we all used nicknames, and everyone knew not to share their personal info. These days nearly everyone posts stuff on social media using their real name and a photo of their face.

I don’t think the analogy was the issue. What does it mean for a system to be so transparent that it’s obvious when it’s compromised?

I’m at a large Fortune 500 company. On a recent call, a mandate came from the CEO himself - “we have to use more agentic AI”.

And I found it really funny, because for what? Use it for what? It’s a tool. Imagine a guy coming down to a construction site where everything is progressing fine and saying “We need to use more screwdrivers”.

Lawyers run the US, I don’t think anything that reduces the country’s dependence on them has any chance of widespread adoption.

What I’m seeing in that link is that the organization pays 16 people a total of $3.6 million.

There’s almost always a better alternative for those who value having something better.

That alternative comes with a $60/year subscription these days, though.

Similarly, I sometimes daydream about those ancient law systems that were so simple that they could be engraved on a stone pillar and placed in a public area. Could you imagine a legal system that can be read and understood in minutes instead of the sprawling, byzantine thing that takes years of law school to comprehend?

Isn’t this just something that any IDE has built-in these days? Maybe I’m missing something, but how is this fundamentally different from the built-in git timeline view from something like VSCode or Jetbrains?

This might be an unkind reading, but to me this just sounds like an attempt to reinvent the very same kind of mysticism that it mentions in the first paragraph.

“No need to study the world around you and wonder about its rules, peasant - it’s far beyond your understanding! Only ~the gods~ computers can ever know the truth!”

I shudder to think about a future where people give up on working to understand complex systems because it’s hard and a machine can do it better, so why bother.

How would a touchscreen MacBook improve on something?

It won’t, but there’s now an entire generation of users who get confused and angry if any kind of display doesn’t react when you poke it with your finger.

That’s not OCD, it’s just paying attention to detail.

It’s not that much higher, actually. I just looked at some unskilled production line job offers, and looks like they start at 15-18€ per hour. Scale that to full time, and it’s less than 30k€/year - and of course without the free food and accommodation that you mentioned.

True, but muscle memory and a couple keyboard shortcuts (or heck, even using the mouse to select and drag the block) is always going to be faster then describing the changes you want and reviewing the output, at least for simple stuff.

Of course it’s important to remember that the ability of an LLM to answer an obscure riddle like that has nothing to do with its reasoning abilities, but rather depends on whether the answer was included in its training dataset.

Have you been using the same foldable phone for those 5 years? It’s the price, but it’s also a question of durability.

That really hits home. I spent a couple weeks in primary school sketching my own blueprints for great inventions. Nothing that could've ever worked (I didn't know what a transistor actually was, but my machine certainly had a lot of them!), but in hindsight a good start for a curious tech-minded child - switches that opened/closed circuits, wires to connect the various imaginary lasers and electromagnets, and so on. On the back of the paper I scrawled documentation to remember what the darn thing was actually supposed to do (the biggest one? Save people who fall out of airplanes, which to my 9 year old mind was a big issue that needed to be solved)

One day my teacher noticed me doodling in the back, so she promptly grabbed all the "blueprints" I was so proud of, tore them up, and tossed them in the trash. I guess I get discouraged easier than you though, since I didn't design a thing for many years afterwards.

I think you’re confusing mastery with marketability. “Other people want to hear it” is at best adjacent to someone’s skill at composing or playing music.

There’s plenty of mediocre musicians who became world-famous, and plenty of great musicians who nobody’s heard about. Skill and success are pretty weakly correlated.

Would you ever be tempted to make such a claim (that everyone is close to the same in ability and effort is the main determiner of success) about athletes?

Well yes, absolutely. People don’t do quadruple axels on the ice because they were somehow born with the ability, they can do it because they practice figure skating every day for years. Innate ability (or in this case, let’s be honest, mostly genetics determining body shape) certainly makes the difference between becoming an Olympic gold medalist and just being very good at the sport, but you need to get very far in the field before it truly holds you back.

I don’t have a lot of experience with high-level professional sports, but I’m a classically trained violinist, and I’ve seen first-hand how a lot of the abilities that many people chalk up to “talent” (sense of rhythm, perfect pitch, composing music) are just skills that can be learned. Some students might need to practice more than others, sure, and some might reach a higher ceiling, but I firmly believe anyone can reach a high level with applied effort.

“I don’t have the talent to paint so I won’t learn to do it” is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That’s exactly what we do at the Fortune 500 company where I work, and it’s surreal.

In my first year I didn’t know any better, so I tried to set myself some actual objectives (learn to use XYZ, improve test coverage by X%, measurable stuff that would actually help).

Fortunately my manager showed me how to do it correctly, so now my goals are to “differentiate with expertise” and to “empower through better solutions”.

Every year I open up the self-review, grade myself a 5/5 on these absurd, unmeasurable goals, my manager approves it, and it disappears off somewhere into the layers and layers of ever-higher management where nobody cares to look at it.

I’m not denying this has been the case for some people. I myself have switched to pretty much exclusively wearing trousers from my favourite tiny brand that cuts and sews them <100km from where I live, and I’m privileged enough to always try to choose quality over price. But quality products have been getting much harder to find in the past years, and I was under the impression we're mostly outliers.

Looking at my family and friend group’s spending habits, it feels like everything is purchased either from Temu or from one of those super-low-price-super-low-quality stores that have been taking Europe by storm these past couple years (i.e. Action, Tedi, Pepco). It’s kinda maddening.

Just like the tide of fast fashion caused people to seek out local-sewn clothes made from high-quality materials, right? Right?

Quality isn’t a differentiator if the market is saturated with indistinguishable garbage. Everything is made in sweatshops out of the cheapest plastic available, and I don’t see why software isn’t next in line.

How well do LLMs handle handwriting recognition?

Pretty well for neat modern handwriting, but much worse for cursive or messier writing. They also really struggle if the text is at an angle. I have some recent experience with a project where we tried to use LLMs to digitise handwritten specimen labels from the 19th and early 20th century, and the success rate was far too low to proceed with that approach.

Hallucination was also a common problem, with the output often replaced by a similar (but more common) name or word.

I’d assume you could improve the results by using a model trained specifically on handwriting data sets, grounding the model, or using existing purpose-built OCR tools - but frankly that’s above my pay grade.

The thing is that taking an interest in baking a cake doesn’t actually feed anyone. If you’re not going to spend your time baking (i.e. actually get involved in politics, to drop the metaphor), then what’s the point?

My wife is a biologist, and as I understand biology on an academic level is just near-constant arguments about seemingly basic terms and concepts.

Life, species, gene, organism - we don’t actually have consistent definitions of what those are. Biology is the science of fluid spectrums, so any rigid classification you’d propose breaks down at the edges.

This is the problem with all of those „gadget but repairable” companies. It sounds great on paper, but the low adoption rate means that parts are hard to come by, the products get discontinued all the time, and your local electronics repair guy has never seen one of those before.

The army of faceless delivery gig workers can’t exactly pick and choose. They deliver the food or they get banned from the platform and replaced by the next guy.

I remember reading that early systems could be defeated entirely by putting a pebble in your shoe, but I’m sure they’ve improved a lot since.