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The word "most" is doing a lot here. Europe guarantees consumer rights by law, while the US relies on companies adopting the practices voluntarily. Most do, but larger companies more universally than smaller, and it's by no means universal.
It may be only a matter of time before all devs remember to append ", and make no mistakes" to the end of their LLM prompts, but I don't think we as an industry will ever reach a point at which every release of every package/library/application is scanned with the most capable model available.
I mean, we've had tooling like fuzzers available for a very long time, and most devs haven't run one against their software ever, let alone before each release.
It's the human factor I think will keep this a problem essentially-forever.
Sorry for the late response; it's been a busy week.
As a user, I don't care how complicated is the means of displaying images in a terminal session. I would only want to do so when I'm deep in a text-oriented context and there is a suddenly a need for an image. Not a chart or a graph, but an actual image. As a user, whatever contortions are necessary at that point are fine, because it's an unusual circumstance.
I hope that makes sense.
This will alarm you, then.
I set Siri to a masculine voice, because I disliked the gendered assumptions I felt with the default.
I gave my Claw Discord bot a feminine identity (Ada, with a pfp of Ada Lovelace) for the same reason. But then I set up a separate Discord bot for an LLM outside of Claw, and gave it a masculine identity so I could easily distinguish between the two mentally and expressively.
All still clankers, but "it" is too general for my dual-bot config.
Sure, of course sometimes an image conveys things better than a thousand words. But a very large percentage of what most people do with computers is primarily text, with more images in ads than useful content. By and large GUIs don't use images to convey information better, they just make text worse.
Modern terminal software supports displaying images, for what it's worth.
I use actualbudget.org to track all spending, but only update investment accounts ("off-budget" in Actual Budget terms) once a month. Completely deterministic, as all things related to numbers should be.
I have pointed my LLM at the SQLite DB and asked it to tell me what it could see from my last five years of transactions, and I was impressed with the things it picked up, and what it reminded me of, but I'm not sure I saw any value in the sense of anything I would change.
I'm going to have it review things monthly to see if that helps me, but I'm not sure it will. I'm generally already aware of how my finances are going because of my budget updates.
I kept asking this question last year, especially after that initial METR report showing people believed themselves to be faster when they were slower. Then I decided to dive in feet-first for a few weeks so that nobody could say I hadn't tried all I could.
At work, what I see happening is that tickets that would have lingered in a backlog "forever" are getting done. Ideas that would have come up in conversation but never been turned into scoped work is getting done, too. Some things are no faster at all, and some things are slower, mostly because the clankers can't be trusted and human understanding can't be sped up, or because input is needed from product team, etc. But the sorts of things that don't make it into release notes, and are never announced to customers, those are happening faster, and more of them are happening.
We review server logs, create tickets for every error message we see, and chase them down, either fixing the cause or mitigating and downgrading the error message, or however is appropriate to the issue. This was already a practice, but it used to feel like we were falling farther behind every week, as the backlog of such tickets grew longer. Most low-priority stuff, since obviously we prioritized errors based on user impact, but now remediation is so fast that we've eliminated almost the entire backlog. It's the sort of things that if we were a mobile app, would be described as "improvement and bug fixes" generically. It's a lot of quality-of-life issues for use as backend devs.
At home, I'm creating projects I don't intend for anyone outside my family to see. So far things I could theoretically have done myself, even related to things I've done myself before, but at a scale I wouldn't bother. Like a price-checker that tracks a watchlist of grocery items at nine local stores and notifies me in discord of sales on items and in categories I care about. It's a little agent posting to a discord channel that I can check before heading out for groceries.
Or several projects related to my hobbies, automating the parts I don't enjoy so much to give me more time for the parts I do. My collection of a half-dozen python scripts and three cron jobs related to those hobbies has grown to just over 20 such scripts and 14 cron jobs. Plus some that are used by an agent as part of a skill, although still scripts I can call manually, because I'll go back to cron jobs for everything if the price of tokens rises a bit more.
I was super-skeptical, and now I'm not. I think companies laying off employees are delusional or using LLMs as an excuse, but there is zero question in my mind that these things can be a huge boon to productivity for some categories of coding.
You could double or quadruple the number of pixels, and it wouldn't make any difference in how much information humans comprehend easily. You would be using more computing power and more memory to deliver the same amount of useful information less efficiently.
A "proper GUI" is rarely better than a well-designed TUI for communicating textual information, IMO. And the TUI constraints keep the failure-states for badly-designed UI tightly bound, unlike GUI constraints.
Every year or so, I look into alternative to my Paperwhite, which has been in "airplane mode" since I bought it. So far, nothing else seems to be quite up to the level of my existing device for my use case, let alone better.
It's possible I needed to log into Amazon in 2016 and 2020 when I bought my two Paperwhites, but I haven't needed to do so again since, so I'm not sure this will affect me at all. If it does, I'll have to check my notes for what was closest last year when I last checked.
Something seems wrong. A half-million tokens is almost five times larger than I allow even long-running conversations to get too. I've manually disabled the 1M context, so my limit is 200K, and I don't like it to get above 50%.
Is it... not aware of its current directory? Is its current directory not the root of your repo? Have you maybe disabled all tool use? I don't even know how I could get it to do what you're describing.
Maybe spend more time in /plan mode, so it uses tools and the Explore sub-agent to see what the current state of things is?
I appreciate these kinds of posts, and I've been semi-Degoogled for years now. What hasn't been easy for me to move away from so far is Docs/Sheets.
Apple's Numbers and Pages seem very far from ideal. Zoho didn't quite work for me. Maybe I should try Clickup.
It's easy on the creators primarily, they get to skip a lot of steps and don't have to explain away things like cell phones.
For consumers, they get quantity.
Although it shouldn't be impossible, it seems really hard to get any kind of real quality out of isekai stories. Usually the stakes are low and the setting is surprisingly similar (even though having a different setting is ostensibly the entire reason for the genre). All you end up with is variety in characters, and even then there are common tropes.
Of course! I don't disagree. And yet here we are at 69.43% desktop market share[0] for Windows for March 2023, decades after I started hearing about how this year, for sure, was going to be the Year Of Linux On The Desktop™.
Most people don't seem to be using the best possible desktop experience. Their desktop is decided by an employer, or whatever is pre-installed, or who knows what. But an ad in the start menu doesn't seem like it's likely to budge that number much.
0. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
Most people will sign up for a Microsoft account, or already have, and so won't even see these ads.
But let's say you use Microsoft Windows, but don't want a Microsoft account. You're going to leave Windows over this? And go where?
Wait, is 2023 the fabled Year of Linux on the Desktop, at long last?
I haven't used Windows in many years, and I'm not trying to defend Microsoft here. Still, the framing of this piece seems silly. Very rarely is any single thing reason enough for the average person to completely switch operating systems. The cost of switching is too high.
And yet Duke Nukem Forever has shipped, and Cybertruck has not. So right now, today, at this moment, DNF is not vaporware, and Cybertruck is. This is true regardless of how one feels about it.
Regulating data privacy isn't Apple's job, if you want that fixed then you should take it up with the government or someone who can actually hold them accountable.
I live in the United States of America, where the government is bought and paid for by companies who dislike privacy for their users.
In the meantime, it may not be Apple's "job," but it's part of their value proposition, and the grumbling from software vendors indicates it's reasonably effective.
Because Facebook announced publicly that Apple's privacy policy changes would cost them $10 billion[0], putting them on the record as having strong motive to avoid the App Store.
0. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/facebook-says-apple-ios-priv...
Think about it this way: any app that refuses to go through Apple's store is telling you that you're not a customer they want. If Facebook makes that choice, it's a great time to give up Facebook!
Yes, nobody is saying that Apple Card is the only card for everyone, just that it's a great card for tap-to-pay.
4.15% is lower than 4.81%, but how did you decided that UFB defines "current market rates?"
UFB, I note, does not offer a debit card.
4.15% is not the highest yield currently available, but it would put them fourth on this list[0] of ten, making them better than average even on that rarified list. This without fees or minimums, which would put them behind only Betterment, which is not a bank, but a brokerage account.
As always with an Apple offering, there are ways that some people under some circumstances can find better terms so long as they don't care about some of the benefits Apple is offering, but that's a very long way from "below current market rates," and comes from a company a lot of people are already trusting with their funds.
It's fine if you already have an account with UFB, carry on! And next month when it's a different company leading the pack, transfer. And the month after that, while Apple is still consistently in the top five.
0. https://www.investopedia.com/best-high-yield-savings-account...
That they're blocking tracking is still privacy-focused. There are unsubstantiated claims that they exempt themselves from the same tracking, but reports of their advertising revenue doesn't contribute anything to those claims.
At Apple's scale, it's relatively easy for them to deliver $20B in ad revenue without any privacy-invading means.
People seem to have forgotten, but ads used to be based on context, so people looking at apps related to fitness might see ads related to fitness, but that wouldn't follow them around when they looked at other things. Apple still seems to be doing that; I haven't seen fitness ads on games, or game ads on fitness apps.
I'm not sure the initial comment lends itself to that reading, but it isn't clear it lends itself to my initial response either, so I'll switch over to your more charitable reading. Thanks!
Your contention is that any and all poor performance is due to the pandemic, not in any way related to Brexit?
I'm not sure 2022 looks quite as good as you're suggesting, but it's clear the pandemic had a profound impact, certainly.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/nov/19/britain-eco...
Not only Tesla, though. My 2023 Chevy Bolt EUV is 1670 kg.
I just looked it up. My new EV weighs 3680 lbs[0], or 1670 kg, which seems to be below average[1].
I still pay nothing in gas taxes, the primary funding for road maintenance. That doesn't seem quite right. I'd be happy to pay an annual fee based on miles driven and weight class.
Apple has two values in conflict with each other, I think. On the one hand, they want to deliver best-in-class solutions. On the other hand, they have a commitment to user privacy[0] as perhaps only a gay man growing up in the south might value.
Siri should be better! It lost features post-acquisition by Apple, and it seems like user privacy is why.
Home automation is arguable. If you consider a single point of failure on a server somewhere to be bad, Apple's solution is pretty great. Their commitment to zigging where others zagged put them behind, since hardware vendors didn't want to put in powerful (expensive) enough chips to handle the cryptography, but while other companies go out of business, or transmit images and video to external parties, Apple's works reliably and securely.
Still, as with most of my complaints about Apple, it's a trade-off between privacy and functionality, and Apple will seemingly always choose privacy over functionality, even as Google consistently chooses functionality over privacy.
[0] Yes, there are examples of edge cases that suggest a less-than-perfect record. Contrast that with their competitors, for which invading privacy is foundational to the business model.
You believe human brains are special meat with super powers and silicon can't possibly think because it doesn't have a soul or some other new age BS.
I believe literally none of those things, and have explicitly stated the opposite of at least one of them on this page.
At this point I think an LLM would do a better job of responding to my comments, based on context and syntax alone.
Anyone with any political opinions at all is ideologically aligned in that sense, making them ideologically affiliated with anyone sharing that alignment.
NPR, as it happens, has run many stories that seemed aligned with the right or the left, depending on the subject. They're generally pro-military and pro-wealth, while being against racism and censorship, so it's not as if they're either all left-wing or all right-wing.
You realize the label is applied by twitter, not the state department, right?
In which case there's no reason to be unkind, either!
If you can communicate the truth with kindness and be heard, great. If not, move on.
In my experience, unkindness isn't any more effective than kindness in effecting change; it usually prompts defensiveness.