thinkling

What makes it seem crazy is cars entering have right of way.

The thing that’s bananas is that this is a City of Paris rule. In the rest of France, traffic entering a roundabout must yield. Not inside Paris. Better make sure you know this!

And even more crazy, the Periphérique, the controlled-access ring road around Paris which tends to move at 40-50mph, is a city street and so traffic entering that highway-like “street” also has right-of-way.

Time scale matters a lot in how we as humans perceive things like agency. Plants grow too slow for us to see any intent, but when you speed up a time lapse, suddenly it looks like plants reach for sunlight and vines for supports. Now, that may be projection on our part, but it may not be.

A lot depends on where you draw the boundary for consciousness. Michael Pollan (in his new book, _A World Appears_) distinguishes simpler sentience from more advanced consciousness, and the requirements for sentience (be aware of sense data, have preferences, be able to respond to senses appropriately) are met by plants and single celled life (e.g. moving up a nutrient gradient). Recent findings in plant science are particularly mind blowing. Some are in Pollan's book, more are in _The Light Eaters_.

Mmm, no, I don’t think it’s equivalent. I think they know that if you make the work hard, some employees will have trouble keeping up and will do things like peeing in bottles. And they’re OK with that, because they think there are enough people who can keep up that they can push the weaker people out. I think they believe that the peeing in bottle is relatively rare. I’m unsure whether that’s right or not. It’s been reported that it happens, but I have no sense whether it’s common.

Is there auto-updating of plug-ins?

Installing a plug-in and reviewing its code at that point is one thing. But if the plug-in can be updated withut you knowing, then there’s little guarantee of security.

Thanks for the inside insight.

I'm surprised how few comments are written with the prior that Amazon managers aren't stupid or uninformed about how incentives work.

My guess would be that someone created the leaderboard without a lot of consultation with managers, and that some employees feel a competitive urge to try to "win" the leaderboard by burning tokens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkerboarding_(land)

TL;DR: Railroad developers were granted alternating square mile sections as a reward for their investment.

Interesting. I know that some smaller jurisdictions in the US (cities and counties) run non-partisan primaries and elections. Have party-less elections been done at the national level anywhere? Did they not result in de-facto party competitions? Curious to know where and read up.

What tech will be used for this?

I hope it’s better than other sensor tech in cars that think they need to warn you that you’re about to hit something at the front when the car is in reverse, that can't distinguish a bike rack statically attached to the car from the environment, and so on.

What do you dislike about the common proportional representation models?

Do they reconstruct the scene graph for each frame?! Maybe I'm overinterpreting the phrasing. Someone take a peek at the source?

A similar explanatory mirage happens in elections: when a candidate loses by (say) 1% of the vote, people go looking for factors that produced a 1% swing and declare, “it’s because of inflation! it’s because they took position X! it’s because the other team focused harder on turnout!”. You can find several such explanations and no single one is the causal one.

+1 on most of this. A small note: I think “suffering” is an unfortunate translation as it connotes dire circumstances or real pain, whereas I understand dukkha to include simple discontent, dissatisfaction, and stress. I take the Buddha to have said roughly, “I teach the origin of unhappiness and how to liberate yourself from it.”

One thing scientists are trying is to see what interventions in the brain seem to make consciousness go away. Continued work in that vein may well set bounds on how consciousness can and cannot be caused and give us some idea.

Do you think bacteria have will? Or plants?

When their actions are sped up to match the speed at which we move, movies of their behavior will start to look like there's intent and will. Plants move towards the light, tendrils "reach" for supports, etc.

Clearly this is humans projecting our mental model onto plants, but... are you sure we're not also projecting it onto ourselves?

Not very long ago, we thought that "life" was due to a non-material life-force thought to inhabit biological entities and thus raise what would be a biological machine to the status of living being.

The Occam's Razor-logic of looking for the simplest explanation possible leads me to the hypothesis that consciousness will similarly turn out to be an emergent property of the mechanical universe [1]. It may be hard to delineate, just as life is (debates on whether a virus is alive, etc.) but the border cases will be the exceptions.

Current research on whether plants are sentient supports this, IMO. (See e.g. "The Light Eaters" and Michael Pollan's new book on consciousness, "A World Appears".)

Meditation adds to this sense. We do not control our thoughts; in fact the "we" (i.e. the self) can be seen to be an illusion. Buddhist meditation instead points to general awareness, closer to sentience, as the core of our consciousness. When you see it that way, it seems much more likely that something equivalent could be implemented in software. (EDIT to add: both because it makes consciousness seem like a simpler, less mysterious thing, but also once you see the self as an illusion, that thing that dominates your consciousness so much of the time, it seems much less of a stretch for consciousness itself to be a brain-produced illusion.)

[1] To be clear, the fact that life turned out to not be a mystical force is not direct proof, it is an argument by analogy, I recognize that.

Delta uses Viasat and has been rolling out free wi-fi on more and more of their planes. Is it not usable?

Seems to be offline, FYI.

Interesting! Seems like this could very easily be generalized. Tool sharing/swapping, ditto for books, rides to things other than the airport, etc. E.g. on the latter: some medical procedures like colonoscopies (basically anything that involves general anaesthesia) require you to have someone pick you up at the end, you're not allowed to take a Lyft home. That seems highly viable for trading favors, though hard to build trust on unless it's part of a larger sharing network.

Um, why would anyone be "holding the bag" and who needs protecting by society? He's not taking out a loan, he's getting capital investment in a startup. People are gambling that he will do well and make money for them. If they gamble wrong, that's on them. Society won't be doing anything either way because investors in startups that fail don't get anything.

I think they are reading it correctly. Year 1, they touched one drive and left 9 untouched. Year 2, they read one additional drive and left 8 untouched. Etc.

Agreed, would really like to understand what this (setting the LLM up to assume a role to improve performance) is doing under the cover and why it works.

Why aren't the labs training models to pick a mantra appropriate to the task and do this themselves? "Huh, a database question. I am going to pretend I'm a database expert with lots of experience. OK, here we go!"

My read was roughly that agents require constraining scaffolding (CLAUDE.md) and careful phrasing (prompt engineering) which together is vaguely like working in a DSL?

Many apps are missing many keyboard shortcuts that you may be used to if you’ve used the equivalent on the desktop. You’ll need to keep the iPad screen accessible to tap on UX elements. There’s also the issue that shortcuts that do exist may be hard to discover because there’s no menu bar to look in.

I don't think hybrids use skateboard designs the way EVs do? The battery for a hybrid is so much smaller, they usually steal space under the rear seat and/or in the trunk afaik.

I fondly remember running PageMaker on my MacPlus. It was as mindblowing as HyperCard was.

For comparisonI think the current leader in pelican drawing is Gemini 3 Deep Think:

https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3meolxx5s722...

You can see up-thread that the same model will produce different answers for different people or even from run to run.

That seems problematic for a very basic question.

Yes, models can be harnessed with structures that run queries 100x and take the "best" answer, and we can claim that if the best answer gets it right, models therefore "can solve" the problem. But for practical end-user AI use, high error rates are a problem and greatly undermine confidence.

Most importantly, Slack limits the amount of message history you get to keep if you’re not paying. And the payment plans are per-user fees which quickly becomes non-viable for non-commercial use.

Ideally, ethical buyers would cause the market to line up behind ethical products. For that to be possible, we have to have choices available to us. Seems to me Anthropic is making such a choice available to see if buyers will line up behind it.