obruchez

It's a shame though that this is gonna kill so many sites and projects. Sure we have ChatGPT, but also with things like Google AI summary getting so much better traffic to sites is going to plummet. Without people visiting I think the incentive, heck even motivation, for a ton of the sites is gone. We've seen it with sites like Stack Overflow, but it's probably going to happen to just about everything..

As I see it, this is just an extra step in a long series of tools to just serve information more quickly. Search snippets for search results have always (?) been displayed for each link/page returned. If the information you were looking for was included in those snippets, then you wouldn't need to visit the actual site.

Then at some point there were knowledge cards/panels. Again, if the information you were looking for was in those cards/panels, then you didn't need to click on the links.

Now with LLMs/Gemini, the information is sometimes summarized at the top of the page. You need even less to visit the search results.

Google has always been a kind of cache for the Internet. It's just way more efficient at extracting and displaying information from that cache now.

So, yes, traffic keeps going down. But new knowledge will still need to be produced, right?

I've finished IMDb's top 250 a few years ago. I'm now using this list ("a list of greatest films of all time") as a reference:

https://www.phi-phenomenon.org/

It's merging dozens of "greatest films" lists into a single "master" list.

Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves? I don't buy that.

I understand that it's not the main point in your comment (you're trying to determine if the parent comment was written using an LLM), but yes, we do exist: I've spent years planning personal projects that remain unimplemented. Don't underestimate the power of procrastination and perfectionism. Oliver Burkeman ("Four Thousand Weeks", etc.) could probably explain that dynamic better than me.

Do you know this from personal experience or after watching a "Hamilton's Pharmacopeia" episode or a similar documentary?

It's difficult to know what people really believe, especially after only a few minutes of discussion, but I would say most people I talk to don't believe AGI is even possible. And they probably think their life won't be changed much by LLMs, AI, etc.

Isn't that an argument in favor of taking care of wild animals instead of continuing factory farming, though?

I read Ecclesiastes back in 2019. It's probably one of the more interesting books in the Bible. I wasn't particularly impressed with it, but it's a short read, so I still think it's a good suggestion, especially if you're atheist or agnostic.

I have the opposite anecdote. I left a lot of leaves on our lawn last winter (by pure laziness) and it definitely damaged the lawn. Edit: it was a rather young lawn, I guess (less than 2 years).

The only time I had to hire somebody, the university I was working for in Switzerland made it mandatory for the candidates to send their application via mail, not email. That was back in 2014. I found this odd at the time, but I'm pretty sure it made my job way easier (less applications to review, motivated/serious candidates, etc.).

I know people who still love to receive ads in the (physical) mail.

My latest LTS upgrade ended up completely breaking my RAID partitions. I had to completely reinstall everything. It took me days. This was not a smooth experience.

I guess it worked in the sense that most people listen to music using legal services, instead of still using eMule, BitTorrent, etc.

Isn't it perfectly normal/healthy to keep some of your private feelings totally private? Your best friends/spouses shouldn't necessarily be your psychotherapists.

Having kept a diary/journal since 1993 and reading old entries daily, I'm struck by how we often see the past through rose-tinted glasses. The opposite is also true: I tend to forget happy moments from long ago.

Kurzweil's book "The Singularity is Near" was published in 2005 and at the time he placed the technological singularity in 2045, so 40 years in the future. He said it was "near", because most people thought at the time that either it would never happen or it would happen in thousands or millions of years.

What's ASI?

TIL: in French, "nightmare" is "cauchemar" and has the same etymology (the second part, at least).

I've been suffering of anxiety for decades. Nothing really serious. I stopped caffeine for one month in 2022, cold turkey. No coffee. No tea. No chocolate. I stopped alcohol as well (I don't drink much, so it wasn't really hard). I track a lot of things daily and during this abstinence period, my anxiety didn't decrease. On the contrary, it (very slightly) increased. This, of course, was not a controlled/blinded experiment, the duration was rather short (1 month), N=1, and I actually did two experiments at the same time (caffeine + alcohol), which is not optimal.

In summary, my conclusion is that I prefer drinking coffee (max 2-3 small cups daily, in the morning) than not.

Still, I'd like to try the experiment again in the future and stop caffeine for a longer period this time (3 months?).

Edit: I'm a slow metabolizer (rs762551 = AC).

You mean Shopify?

In Europe at least, where most (?) transmissions are still manual, you will still get way more noise from an ICE vehicle than an electric vehicle at low speed. This is my experience everywhere here in cities, on small roads, etc. This is largely caused by the fact that people tend to not drive in an optimal manner (i.e. using a low gear instead of a higher one).

Motorcycles are absolutely the worst. Even when they drive as slow as possible, to make less noise, they're still noisier than some cars. This is insane. And what's frustrating is that this is considered a feature, not a bug. I don't know how we can get out of that particular culture. I'm not sure electric motorcycles would help at all.

That's how I ordered my first CDs online: via a Telnet interface. It sounds crazy 30 years later.

He's working on the Blue Brain Project, apparently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project

Speaking French, I've asked it to create some songs in French. The first two examples I got use the voices of Edith Piaf and Julien Clerc (who is still alive and professionally active). I hope they're doing this with the required permissions.

"Beyond the Sea" (the Black Mirror episode) had a similar problem: 2 astronauts are working in a spaceship and they can regularly go back to their families using some very advanced technology (VR, humanoid robots, etc.). Why are they not using that technology to "work from home"?

"a lot of downsides"

Can you give a few examples? I only see upsides.

"We have temporarily disabled raw data download as an additional precaution to protect your privacy. We don't currently have a timeline for when this feature will become available but will keep customers informed of any changes."

I'd gladly switch from Chrome to Firefox, but tab groups are what's preventing me to do so. :( I can't work without them.

I live in Switzerland and had never heard of the EHIC before. Switzerland not being part of the European Union means that some of those international cooperations don't always work as well as they should.

"Most Swiss hospitals are privately owned, however, some are public or run by a non-profit." https://www.expatica.com/ch/healthcare/healthcare-services/h...