Baeocystin

For now, the answer is just buy more batteries and use a DJI drone. There is nothing else that comes anywhere close in terms of bang for your buck.

I had to retake a multi-hour proctored test (and only got to do so after a ridiculous amount of back and forth with the school) because my cat jumped up on my computer table while I was taking it, and I looked over at her and gave her a few pets before looking back at the screen. Not joking in the least. It was maddening.

I had no idea it was so common! Fascinating article, thanks for posting it.

Stephen Baxter wrote a short story about such. It sticks with you.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080725045740/http://www.solari...

This essay is (painfully) apt, and it reminds me of where I was when I finally switched, to my great relief, from being a Maximizer to a Satisficer*. It was all just Too Much, and I was feeling overwhelmed with responsibilities.

And my drive to Solve All The Problems was not making me happy. At all. It was just a way to exert control over a difficult life, and by being terminally distracted by the easily-solvables, I was avoiding the big problems I genuinely needed to confront.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

I still have vivid memories of getting the 'reduced cost' meal ticket for school lunch. They made all of us with the reduced tickets stand in line and wait for the other kids to get their food first, where all the other kids had to walk past and stare at us, and once everyone else was served, they'd put the food away that was given to the other kids, then hand out shitty plastic-wrapped sandwiches that were half the size of the barely-adequate meals the 'full' sized lunches got.

It was all on purpose, too, to make us ashamed for not paying the full amount.

The adults that chose this path were fucking evil ghouls, the lot of them. Of all the things I want my tax money to go to, ensuring that no one (and especially growing children) need to feel hunger pangs while trying to learn is close to top of the list.

That vacuum tubes(!) were part of that package, and were able to be that robust, still floors me every time I think about it.

Back when I was taking CogSci classes in the 90's, The Bicameral Mind was introduced as a 'this is almost certainly completely wrong, but it makes a great starting point for a lot of great discussion', and it certainly bore out that way; our discussion groups using selections from the book as a starting point were some of the better ones. I agree with you; even now I think it's an interesting read.

If I said "gosh, I can't believe you can actually think at a human speed, having to use words for everything! It's like having to speak out loud when you're reading, so slow! Have you been diagnosed by a professional on how to deal with this obvious handicap?" it would be pretty insulting, yes? Even if I said I wasn't trying to put someone down, because the implicit assumptions baked in to the very statements themselves.

All I can say is, as someone who also does not have an internal monologue, and can easily and happily go days without thinking in words (which is very, very different than not thinking at all), please just accept as a given that people like me exist, we're fine, do not feel like we have any deficits, and it's exceedingly frustrating to come across comments like yours whenever the subject comes up, because of the raw arrogance of it all. I can completely and honestly believe that you have a rich, engaging internal life, even if the quantity of words involved would drive me mad, because we're different people with different thinking styles. All I ask is for the same respect in return. If we can start there, then we can have a real conversation, which could be fun. I know that when I first learned that 'internal monologue' wasn't just a literary, poetically-descriptive term, but that people actually heard voices/words in their heads while thinking, it utterly floored me. That I'd made it to college without knowing this really threw me for a loop, and made me think about what other seemingly-core differences in cognition are out there. It really is a fascinating subject to think about.

Not the person you're asking, but as someone who also doesn't have an inner monologue, no, I literally never think either of those two things you gave as an example. I feel the feelings they describe, but they never bubble up to my thoughts in word form.

I majored in CogSci at UCSD in the 90's. I've been interested and active in the machine learning world for decades. The LLM boom took me completely and utterly by surprise, continues to do so, and frankly I am most mystified by the folks who downplay it. These giant matrixes are already so far beyond what we thought was (relatively) easily achievable that even if progress stopped tomorrow, we'd have years of work to put in to understand how we got here. Doesn't mean we've hit AGI, but what we already have is truly remarkable.

I assume they're getting these massive windows via RAG trickery, vectorization, and other tricks behind the curtain, became I've noticed the same as you- things start dipping in quality pretty quickly.

Does anyone know if I am correct in my assumption?

Fuck. That is a bleak assessment.

I ask people to unplug their Ethernet cable and tell me the colors they see on the wires all the time.

I don't care, of course. But they'll happily do that, where if I ask them to verify if the cable is properly plugged in, 99% of them will just say yes without so much as glancing in the cables' direction.

Let him be bored, and provide the tools so that he learns how to make his own fun.

My suburban neighborhood here in the bay area is mostly cul-de-sacs, and on the 4th of July about half of them close off the entrance to non-residents/family, and have a collective BBQ in the middle of the circle. Several of our neighbors are musicians, so we get live music from people we know, and we all know how to cook up good stuff for the party. It's genuinely a lot of fun, and I look forward to it every year.

FWIW, this has been my experience as well. When I lived in poor neighborhoods, yeah, we had more property crime. We also had a tremendous sense of community; I knew everyone, they knew me, food & favors were traded happily. The block parties we had during the summer were tremendous amounts of fun.

Meanwhile, the more wealthy neighborhoods are full of busybodies sniffing around for the slightest HOA infraction, and high-anxiety individuals reflecting and amplifying each other's tensions. Each home is a fortress unto itself. I feel pretty lucky to be in the middle, where we don't have as much crime as the poorer areas, but we still know one another, and still trade food on the holidays.

Yep! I'm glad to hear that someone else had the same misaligned initial expectations. Keeping it vague to avoid spoilers, but the fact that I'm still unsure if the protagonist's action at the very end of the story was an example of agency or not has been a lot of fun to think about.

Ha! Good point. No argument there.

Seconded. Blindsight remains one of my favorite meditations on the Mind's I (not a typo) that I've read.

Echopraxia, the 'sequel' (the events occur at the same time as the events in Blindsight, with a completely different group of characters) has grown on me over time, too. At the very least, it gave me a great appreciation for Portia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(spider)

The only repeating use I've found for these so far is object detection in Frigate (NVR software).

No, I'd do that in a heartbeat. There are so many things I want to do, try, read, or learn, and yet I will never have the time, because I have to work. A high end salary for a minute of pain is so much better than what I currently have to do that it's ridiculous.

Still fantastic writing, though. Just personally can't relate.

Current LLMs decohere rapidly, and as far as I am aware, this problem seems like a fundamental to the architecture one.

Ok, that's hilarious. Thanks for posting it.

Uncooked greens have always had the highest rate of food poisoning/parasites/whathaveyou. It's not a new thing.

Due to a gnarly accident, my right arm was in a cast for six months. They had to change the cast several times due to shrinking soft tissue, and by the time the cast came off, from wrist to elbow was all the same width. It was awful. But, like you said, it came back to the 80% level very quickly. At first I was genuinely worried that I'd never recover, but at three months I was already two-thirds of the way to normal, and was at 95% by a year.

Funnily enough, there have been a few times over the past couple of years I've been asked by younger co-workers to read something for them that was written in cursive. I hadn't really realized it had become such a (comparatively) rare skill. This fact is making me feel older than my actual 50th birthday did!

I was a reasonably competitive BW player until the Korean teams arrived on the scene. I'll always appreciate how they elevated the level of gameplay. Really nice guys, too, I learned a lot from playing with them, and it was fun talking strategy via chat to the best of our mutual linguistic abilities. Good memories. I would have absolutely loved something like this project back in the day.

The older I get, the more I realize that so much of the divide in the tech field is simply between the two camps of "the tools are the interesting part" vs "getting things done with the tools is the interesting part".

I have a very common name, and monkey's paw wish managed to get the unnumbered version for my gmail address.

It has been a significant amount of work just dealing with all the derppelgängers out there who use an address they don't own for important things. Medical records. Divorce papers. Mortgages. The short of it is that it doesn't even require maliciousness on someone else's part to be affected by impersonation, accidental or otherwise. So yeah, keep what you've got, because there's no guarantee the next person to get it will not somehow affect you.