adamesque

Nothing makes me feel like more a chump than getting halfway through a blog post and realizing it was likely cowritten by an LLM. And I love LLMs! I use them all the time. But I just can't darmok at tanagra my way through tortured LLM-speak like "the dependency was the use case" or "all of the architecture was still there waiting to be paid for" and still comprehend what the article is trying to say.

We humans owe each other better.

The Drifter is a great example of a slightly more modernized take on the classic adventure genre. Had a slow start and some grating voice acting, but gosh it ended up being a great experience.

I went through a “100%” phase recently and couldn’t for the life of me understand why I was suddenly saying it ALL THE TIME. Brains are so weird.

It's hard to take this piece seriously if he's citing _Ed Zitron's_ math, and equally hard to make the blanket statement that flat-rate plans = "the current AI pricing". But yes, those pricing models were pretty silly and unsustainable.

At least on the HomePod side, intercom is at best a half-baked feature and at worst an infuriation machine. It uses a cumbersome voice trigger ("siri, tell <room>…") to begin recording audio, with no clear indication of when recording began and no way to know for sure that the audio was directed where you wanted it to go.

To respond is similarly cumbersome and soon you give up completely. I can only assume it was designed by someone whose parents were killed in an intercom-related disaster and has sworn revenge.

I bought a mini for my office with this purpose in mind, but it has been a total waste.

Okay, so then — who gets squeezed more by AI: the clueless or the losers?

Nope. Still does not. I have 2 macs on my desk and no simple way to connect them to a single Apple display! It's a glaring hole that to me suggests they have no idea who their market is for these.

I think many deployments of modern technology do turn us into reverse centaurs, and we should rail righteously against those.

But I don’t at all believe that AI-assisted coding is doomed to do this to us and believe thinking so is a misread of the metaphor.

(As is lumping all of “GenAI” together.)

Unlike many of those approaches which concern themselves with delivery of human-designed static UI, this seems to be a tool designed to support generative UIs. I personally think that's a non-starter and much prefer the more incremental "let the agent call a tool that renders a specific pre-made UI" approach of MCP UI/Apps, OpenAI Apps SDK, etc for now.

that's not quite what parent was talking about, which is — don't just use one giant long conversation. resetting "memories" is a totally different thing (which still might be valuable to do occasionally, if they still let you)

i'm geniunely curious about how you made the jump from "here's a single regulation" all the way down the slippery slope to "can't regulate away ALL parenting". does this one regulation cross that threshold? how'd you get there?

in an ideal world, parents would also prevent their kids from smoking, but the fact that in many places minors aren't allowed to purchase tobacco sends a social signal and actually does seem to put a speed bump in place deterring casual use.

is it not _also_ ideal to have some of these regulations in place? does it not help parents make the case to their kids?

Very surprised they didn’t do preorders for this

Much better version of the paper here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/magentic-ui-an...

I think for enterprise it’s going to become part of the subscription you’re already paying for, not a new line item. And then prices will simply rise.

Optionality will kill adoption, and these things are absolutely things you HAVE to be able to play with to discover the value (because it’s a new and very weird kind of tool that doesn’t work like existing tools)

> The bulk of the responsibility is, and should be, on the leader to avoid misunderstandings in the first place.

This can be both true and unhelpful at the same time. “Extracting the kernel” is about putting agency back into your own hands when someone else is less-than-perfect. How do you read beyond the utterance to understand the intent? Will that lead to better outcomes?

Since you sadly cannot force leaders to improve, and sadly cannot usually also pick for yourself perfect leadership, what power do you have to make things better?

Not to look a gift horse too much in the mouth, but I find the multiple English translations overwhelming! But at the same time, the range of interpretation and the different colors a translator can inject are truly wild. There is no true translation, all are copies, all imperfect.

Looking forward to giving it another try!

I was very delighted by Aqua v1, which felt like magic at first.

But I’ve noticed/learned that I can’t dictate written content. My brain just does not work that way at all — as I write I am constantly pausing to think, to revise, etc and it feels like a completely different part of my brain is engaged. Everything I dictated with Aqua I had to throw away and rewrite.

Has anyone had similar problems, and if so, had any success retraining themselves toward dictation? There are fleeting moments where it truly feels like it would be much faster.

Fantastic game, and really enjoyed the thought you put into "submit-gate" and entertaining ideas from the peanut gallery.

Manifold Space specifically (unless it’s also present in his other Manifold books)

I love this nongrammatical/idiomatic use of parentheses actually. Language is a tool, and its rules can be just as powerful when violated as when upheld.

In this case they convey a subtext you can’t get as gracefully by being a slave to syntax— that the author hoped the post would be about how they did achieve success, but that didn’t happen, forcing the parenthetical qualifier. I don’t think another treatment would express that quite as well; you can almost feel the wince.

Interestingly, this is the exact opposite of the point the article makes — which is that over time, more general models and more compute are more capable, and by building a domain-specific model you just build a ceiling past which you can’t reach.

This is not the same as having unique access to domain-specific data, which becomes more valuable as you run it through more powerful domain-agnostic models. It sounds like this latter point is the one you say has value for startups to tackle

Is it less evil if an unsupervised process does it?

Magnet is great, with very good sane default keybindings so you can just install and go.

It really is. People have a hard time balancing focusing on their deliverables vs truly paying attention (either broadly or deeply). I tend to err toward the attention side which makes me a terrible task deliverer, but I think on balance paying attention has been more valuable.

The entire device is “no computer required”, just like an iPad for your face

I’ve recently seen some work claiming this link is exaggerated: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611/

Regulation isn’t perfect but it can do a lot to prevent the worst outcomes.

He used to be but I think he left to do this EpicWeb thing.

Yeah, Nick Lutsko is super super funny and a very talented musician. That’s hard to replicate.