I tried using Gemini for some light historical research. It could not stop using tech metaphors. Lords were the CEOs of their time, pope was the most important influencer, vassal uprisings were job interviews, etc. The metaphors were almost comically useless and imprecise, and Gemini kept using them even when I explicitly asked it to not do that.
Readit Newsmatusp commented on New imagery suggests U.S. responsible for Iran school strike cnn.com/2026/03/06/world/... · Posted by u/agluszak
In the US, but not in Iran and elsewhere.
Yeah, but that does not influence US politics.
Sure seems stupid on first glance but most science seems pointless. It’s only when several loosely interconnected ideas that prove something MIGHT be commercially viable do we find out that it was the first curious question that … again seems stupid… was the seed of inivation
Some would say that science can be valuable even when it does not produce commercially viable results. Making money is not the pinnacle of human experience.
matusp commented on OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation techcrunch.com/2026/02/27... · Posted by u/zlatkov
I dont see how network effects applies to Uber/Airbnb because nothing stops drivers/hosts from listing their property in multiple such apps
People continue using Airbnb because that's where the properties are listed. And owners keep listing properties because that's where the users are.
matusp commented on Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring theregister.com/2026/02/1... · Posted by u/benji8000
The "AI voice" is everywhere now.
I see it on recent blog posts, on news articles, obituaries, YT channels. Sometimes mixed with voice impersonation of famous physicists like Feynman or Susskind.
I find it genuinely soul-crushing and even depressing, but I may be over sensitive to it as most readers don't seem to notice.
> The "AI voice" is everywhere now.
Maybe I'm going crazy but I can smell it in the OP as well.
matusp commented on Young adults report lower life satisfaction in Sweden internationaljournalofwel... · Posted by u/late
> In Sweden and other parts of the Western world, for example, recent findings point to a widening intergenerational gap where older adults report increasing well being while younger individuals experience notable declines
So it is just a case of older people pulling the ladder up behind themselves.
> So it is just a case of older people pulling the ladder up behind themselves.
Is it though? I have a feeling that previous generations were simply happy with less. Now we are so connected and everybody wants what they consider the standard according to social media: huge house in the most prominent city in their country, N exotic vacations every year, meaningful job, etc. But this would be a pretty tall order even 20 or 40 years ago.
Framing GPT 5 as a loss because of its short run like that is a bit weird. They say "the R&D that went into GPT-5 likely informs future models like GPT-6". but that really understates what is happening here.
Barring solid evidence otherwise you would think that GPT 5.2 was built largely on GPT 5, enough that possibly the majority of the cost of 5.2 was in developing GPT 5.
It would be like if you shipped something v1.0 on day one and discovered a bug and shipped something v1.01 the next day. Then at the end of the year reported that v1.0 massively lost money but you wouldn't believe the profit we made on v1.01 it was the single largest return on a single day of development we've ever seen.
If this was the case, we would see R&D costs dropping for OpenAI. Not sure if that is the case.
matusp commented on How many chess games are possible? win-vector.com/2026/01/27... · Posted by u/jmount
Apparently ~75% of the positions in the lichess database (as of 6 years ago) have only been seen once ever. Average game length is 30-40 moves, so for the completely average player it would be like 10+ moves I suppose. The stronger the players the longer it will take: I found some comments suggesting 20+ for high level players.
I don't think the math is correct here. The 25% of positions that have been seen more than once represent more than 25% of the occurrences. Even if all of them would be seen only twice, you should already see them in 40% occurences.
> Overall, having spent a significant amount of time building this project, scaling it up to the size it’s at now, as well as analysing the data, the main conclusion is that it is not worth building your own solution, and investing this much time. When I first started building this project 3 years ago, I expected to learn way more surprising and interesting facts. There were some, and it’s super interesting to look through those graphs, however retrospectively, it did not justify the hundreds of hours I invested in this project.
The whole "quantified self" movement might be more about OCD and perfectionism than anything else.
/edit: quantified, not qualified