Agreed. I wish they would consider charging a small fee (~$1) to create an account. That alone would cut down on all the AI spam and give subreddit moderators a fighting chance.

This is great and has lots of practical stuff.

Some of the takeaways feel over-reliant on implementation details that don’t capture intent. E.g. something like “the LLM is just trying to predict the next word” sort of has the explanatory power of “your computer works because it’s just using binary”—like yeah, sure, practically speaking yes—but that’s just the most efficient way to lay out their respective architectures and could conceivably be changed from under you.

I wonder if something like neural style transfer would work as a prelude. It helps me. Don’t know how you’d introduce it, but with NST you have two objectives—content loss and style loss—and can see pretty quickly visually how the model balances between the two and where it fails.

The bigger picture here is that people came up with a bunch of desirable properties they wanted to see and a way to automatically fulfill some of them some of the time by looking at lots of examples, and it’s why you get a text box that can write like Shakespeare but can’t tell you whether your grandma will be okay after she went to the hospital an hour ago.

Spotlight search is infinitely more useful than the Windows 10+ start menu. 99% of the time I'm just using it to open an app or a recent document/download.

In Windows, if I hit [Win], type "fusion" (to open Fusion 360, an app in the "Start Menu" folder, for what that's worth nowadays), there's a 70% chance it will do a Bing search for "fusion".

My British friend that lived in Kyoto had his favorite snac bar. He was accepted as a local and even had a whiskey bottle saved for him (privilege for the regulars!)

Another snac bar that he brought me to had an interesting story. The snac bar was in an apartment complex (due to Japan's funny zoning laws) at the nightlife district, could maybe fit 5-6 max. The place was filled with blues and jazz LPs! When we went there, there was only one man sitting, eating omelets and a talking to the owner.

Turns out the owner used to be a salary man in Tokyo, but got sick of the corporate banking life, took his savings, moved back to Kyoto to open his small bar. He loved music, particularly blues and jazz, so just bought an apartment and rebuilt it on his own as this jazz n blues bar. He barely made any money, lower than minimum wage. but he said to him it was a life style, and he enjoyed it and wouldn't have it any other way.

The guy eating the omelet, turned out to be a pretty famous professor at Kyoto University. He had this deal with the owner that he would make him lunch boxes and dinner for the professor (omelet wasn't on the bars menu), and he hanged around there every night. They've had that setting going for 8 years and the owner laughed that he was essentially the professors wife, and a bad influence for his workaholics habit!

There's a charm to those places, but they're best observed from the distance. The group of exchange student I was part of made a local bar close to the uni our hang out, because they had cheap beer and amazing food. But one day the owner politely told us they didn't want us to come back. That 10+ tall loud white people was ruining the third place this bar represented to the locals.

Funny thing many of the students protested "I don't understand. We're customers. We're paying and bringing many customers!" they tried to convince the students "to you it's consumption but to us it's a community place". Few of the students would accept that answer, but obliged. Oddly only the French did understand the sentiment. (and the Swiss were the most entitled)

My kid has recently just quit playing Roblox because of the sketchy facial age check process. She said that her and all her friends know not to ever upload a picture of themselves to the Internet (good job, fellow Other Parents!!) so they're either moving on to other games or just downloading stock photos of people from the internet and uploading those (which apparently works).

What a total joke. These companies need to stop normalizing the sharing of personal private photos. It's literally the opposite direction from good Internet hygiene, especially for kids!

I was in management i probably also wouldn’t like my designers to use AI. I pay them good money to draw original pieces and everyone can tell and it looks generic when AI is used. I’d want my moneys worth

I think it's not that they lose their mental faculties... it's that they lived most of their lives in a world without computers (at least home computers - which only became a common occurrence in the 90's, when today's older people were already in their 50's. So they just never learned to use computers and smart phones and are completely unused to their modern UIs. Even I find it hard to use many apps on my phone! Like, how am I supposed to know that wiping carefully up and to the left is the only way to do something!!!??? So, older people may try a few things, and if it's too frustrating they just find something else to do and give up. At least that's my experience with my mom and auntie. Both of them managed only to learn how to open WhatsApp and call family, but it's always an agony when they accidentally touch something and the video disappears, or pauses, or flips so they can see only themselves or some other nonsense. And that's all they use their "smart" phones for! They just wanted an old fashion phone with a big dial buttons, plus a screen to see the person on the other side.