My father grew up in a somewhat rural Irish village and there was one farmer who would take his horse and cart to the pub (fairly anachronistic even in his day) in the knowledge that no matter how passed-out drunk he got the other patrons would load him into the cart and the horse would take him home. Take that, self-driving cars!
I read that as him trying to move his money to another bank that would allow him to make the transfer. His current bank suspected this and wouldn't let him even close his account. So they confiscated his money to prevent someone else supposedly stealing his money - pretty Kafkaesque I think
It's a bit of a fringe theory but there's a suggestion that the human 'alliance' with wolves gave us the edge over Neanderthals and other predators and ensured that it was us who ultimately survived as a species. It's a nice thought for a dog lover.
Why wouldn't neanderthals form an alliance with wolves too? Especially considering Neanderthals had a multi-hundred-thousand year head start in wolf range compared to homo sapiens.
It’s an interesting question. I don’t know if there’s any evidence of wolf domestication by Neanderthals. If they didn’t domesticate them, it would be interesting to try to work out why – maybe there’s a subtle difference in psychology between H. Sapiens and H. Neanderthalensis that enabled us to bridge that gap but not them?
There isn't a whole lot of evidence for how Neanderthals lived. We have only discovered remnants of 400 Neanderthals (about 30 mostly-complete skeletons).
Again we are in the realms of speculation upon speculation, but Neanderthals didn't have sclera (whites of the eyes) which according to the co-operative eye hypothesis as regards to domesticated hunting dogs allows them to follow our gaze. It does seem odd that Neanderthals didn't try to domesticate them too - surely the first reaction on seeing humans and dogs bring down a mammoth or corral large deer would be 'got to get us some of that', but as sibling comments say we don't know much about them really.
Character-level operations are difficult for LLMs. Because of tokenization they don't really "perceive" strings as a list of characters. There are LLMs that ingest bytes, but they are intended to process binary data.
I had an idea like this for helping introverts with icebreaking small talk. Flash style cards for each person, with info on what you spoke about last time, and a pre-prepared opener for the next time you bump into them. With the card info being updated each time you meet them.
Exactly! I've found I'm a lot more talkative and I appear to be more of a fast thinker with this approach. I have about 15 subjects (outside of coding - sports, wine, pop culture, national parks, current music, popular fiction, tv shows, movies) that I try to be knowledgable on and the flashcards help
Very cool. I've no idea if this is possible without rooting the Kindle, but I wonder would it be possible to highlight sections of text in a book and send it to something like this with a request to summarise/explain?
It's a good idea! Amazon doesn't offer an API for fetching highlights but services like Readwise seem to get around this by using a Chrome extension to do it. Not sure how that could be done on a Kindle though...
This is very cool. I wonder if we are going to have to get used to a new paradigm in software, where you have tools that are incredibly powerful and that you just accept that sometimes it 'gets it wrong'. There's no debugging, no root cause analysis, just a shrug of the shoulders and 'sometimes it gets it wrong mate, what're you gonna do?'. This is probably the mental model most laypeople have of software already I suspect but for software engineers it's somewhat of a shift. Bit of a deal with the devil, perhaps.
tools that are incredibly powerful and that you just accept that sometimes it 'gets it wrong'. There's no debugging, no root cause analysis, just a shrug of the shoulders and 'sometimes it gets it wrong mate, what're you gonna do?'.
So, pretty much what we have now with the vast majority of mega-tech companies with zero customer service. Plus all the growth-hack startups playing "monkey see, monkey do."
The difference is that you can throw a senior engineer at a bug and know that the issue can be root caused and fixed because the behavior is "fundamentally deterministic", whereas with AI for the foreseeable future all you can do is maybe tweak the model and pray.
> There's no debugging, no root cause analysis, just a shrug of the shoulders and 'sometimes it gets it wrong mate, what're you gonna do?'
This been the case for as long as I can remember, seems to have more to do with individual developers typical methodology rather than the tools available.
I remember a bunch of issues with early npm versions were resolved by deleting the node_modules directory and running `npm install` again. Sometimes it borked the directory, sometimes it didn't, deleting everything and beginning from the beginning resolved many of those issues.
You are absolutely right of course, most day to day bugs we don't have either the inclination, time or knowledge to root cause much less fix, but I feel it's a comfort to know that you (or someone) could.
Well, as in many cases, I think it depends. There are some situations where you can accept errors, but in some others definitely not: imagine you're trying to delete a set of files from a directory that contains other files you're interested in. If the AI commits a mistake and deletes some of the other files you will be disappointed. Now, you should have a backup. But what if you had the AI assistant come up with the backup command for you and by mistake it didn't include that directory?
I wonder how we might design for such a system. I'd say as a starting point any action should be undo-able. Then you give it a go to see if it works, and if it didn't you can always get back.
I've read this is good practice in any system, as a user can get inured to 'are you sure' dialogs and just click through them reflexively.
DT article to illustrate, not necessarily to inform. The idea I believe being that heat pumps are part of a supposedly unnecessary and costly push to Net Zero driven by industry and shadowy interest groups but which are just another means of a) enforcing control and b) screwing money out of 'the little guy' and siphoning tax dollars off compliant governments. And thus one is able to wave away an article absolutely bursting with scientific detail and research as 'well, it's all a bit convenient, isn't it?'
Oh wow. I lived in the US for a year, so this doesn't come as a complete surprise. But Heatpumps? I thought everybody loved Aircon, regardless of polical party, or socioeconomical background.
This is just Aircon.
I'll despair with you. Unfortunately, trends that emerge in the US tend to find their way to the rest of the western world too..
Counter point, the war on heat pumps is mostly a British problem. Everytime I have heard it come up its in context of the UK. Don't think the US has anything to do with it.
