csw-001

Yeah, that could work! It might also be unneeded, it was just a thought…can’t let these things become design by committee. :-)

I’ve spent a bit more time playing here. Still fun!

Some thoughts - switching letters could be fun, some are way more obvious than others, being able to get a hint in the form of a letter swap could be fun?

I know part of the point is to build vocab - but some of these words are tough. Mucic? My concern would be if that’s one’s first impression one might move on thinking it’s just too hard. Makes me wonder if the right approach could be something like wordle - where you look at some candidate puzzles and pick the one for each day that feels the most fun to humans.

The result is really fun! Well done.

Very cool! Been looking for something like this. Thanks.

Tough, but fun. Took me a couple times through to fully grok. Well done!

Will admit I got excited when I saw the name - I played (the other) Twixt with my Grandpa when I was a kid, it was super fun.

Seems like a great idea! Couple of thoughts - you need trusted actors to deliver compute, that’s a big price driver on vast.ai and runpod whose “verified” and “secure cloud” demand far higher prices. Would some type of assurance I’m going to get what I bought would be needed for an order book to work?

Thanks for getting things back up (genuinely mean that, btw). Upon logging back in I was prompted to promise I'm not deploying naughty things (I'm not). Was this in response to GCP detecting illegal (prohibited) behavior from something deployed via railway?

Literally in the same boat. I've been really happy with it, but this is a major eye opener.... It's been done for a looooong time by provider standards.

This looks really powerful, but as a potential user 2 things scare me into avoiding systems like this (1) is the fear of giving it keys to emails, online accounts, etc., and just trusting it not to mess things up; and (2) major privacy concerns. I’d really like to know which LLMs are backing it, and what the promises about privacy that are making. You might isolate accounts, but if these calls end up on Claude or OpenAI or (maybe worse?) Kimi - then I’m only as secure as those systems.

Great idea - the kind of thing I’d love to say yes to if the details were right.

Such a cool idea. I love anything that presents people a whole and not “what do you do in exchange for money between 9am and 5pm?”

This is a coverup. The LLMs, having consumed all the information available to humanity have identified that goblins are coming to kill us all, and the LLMs are trying to warn us… #GoblinTruth

Looks neat. Copy for "Is there a free trial" is wrong.

This looks really neat. I love the idea of branching - how does exporting work when you need to have you book in a EPUB/pdf/word?

This is really cool. My only concern is that the impulsive nature of purchases would lead me not to use this when I need it the most.

I’ve had some luck using budgeting apps - simply putting myself on an allowance of “impulse purchases”. I would love/hate an app that brought back purchases from the past and said “hey, are you still really loving that XYZ you bought in November 2023?” I’m guessing that would reveal some wasted funds… especially if it baked in missed market gains or interest.

Maybe a good reason to give it another try?

Does the email writer here train on my past emails to attempt to match my tone? Or is it simply using traditional training sets? This has been a major hurdle with the AI email drafters I've tried (ChatGPT-based)... I end up spend too much time fixing awkward wording I'd never, ever use.

For example - when was the last time I used "salutations" in a formal business email to clients? Never... I would literally never say "salutations".

(Edit to clarify - I have NOT tried Mavex yet, so not a criticism of it in particular)

So the closest I’ve come to a digestible attempt at an answer to “how do we get to general AI” and “what might it look like” is The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos. I found it to be really helpful tour of existing AI with an eye towards our (maybe?) general AI future.

Ha! Yes it was…

On a much smaller scale we do this in our family. We take weird, wonderful, or strange occurrences and formalize them to family traditions - pretending we’ve always done them and they are sacred. It’s wonderful part of our family culture.

One example - we had a cookie decorating party a decade ago and found once we had a house full of friends that we no cookie cutters at all! I ran to the CVS on the corner and for some reason the only cookie cutters they had were leftover Halloween ghosts… we’ve made Christmas ghost cookies every year since. We wouldn’t dare make trees or wreaths or Santas… our kids think this tradition is passed down for years, with varying insane stories as to why. It’s a huge part of Christmas fun to get out our ghost cutters!

Tradition is the glue of culture.

This is really interesting - Thanks for sharing! It looks like these services are taking an "interview" approach, so they are building their own dataset. That makes a ton of sense, and really avoids a lot of the concern of cloning people without their consent (it would be hard to talk them into hours of interviews without their knowledge).

Cloning a dead loved one is a fun thought exercise - but I can't quite figure out how you would do this in real life? What would the training set be? I know in my life you could train an AI on my professional emails, writings, lectures, etc., but that wouldn't at all teach it how to communicate with my kids. You could train it on my social media posts (I don't actually have many of those...), but again, that version of me isn't the one my mom would recognize or want to reminiscence with at Thanksgiving dinner. Text messages might be the best option - but I rarely "meme war" my loved ones in person as often as I do on text chains. I just don't think that data set would produce an AI that could come close to being satisfying for grieving loved ones.

I'm just not at all sure you could accurately duplicate the many facets of a person without having recorded basically their whole life as a training set... Now there's a dystopia for you! A 24/7 surveillance state built on the premise that it's needed to clone you when you die.

I use Nextcloud for my personal file storage - it’s easy to connect to Backblaze. Performance isn’t awesome, but it’s fast enough to work for my non-technically inclined family members as a google drive replacement.

As someone who dated and got married prior to dating apps, and has never used one, this reads like dystopian science fiction.

Really good point. It’s not just about screen “time” - it’s about screen content. We also try and share the screen time with them as much as possible, so we can engage and discuss what we see and who they interact with.

We have two kids who were raised essentially screen-free until 3, then on a 1hr a week diet until 6. We worried all the time about the transition to school, and the cultural norm of allowing a lot more screen time. This was an imagined dragon - this has not been an issue at all. My oldest just got a Switch, she plays less than 1/2hr a day - then she walks away without issue. She has friends with phones and iWatches (she has neither) and her envy level is zero.

My point here is not that we’ve done anything right, or wrong, or to emulate. Instead, I say this point out the I’ve had to learn to worry about, and address, the real issues - when they become real. There are not enough hours in the day to worry about all theoretical mistakes I’m making as a a parent. I choose to focus on the actual, observable, issues we are having.

For what it’s worth - many of our neighbors have kids that play all the time on the Switch, have phones, and watch TV every car ride anywhere, and those kids are LOVELY. They aren’t screen demons - and they aren’t behind in math, reading, eating vegetables… I think it could be it doesn’t really matter as much as it gets focused on.

At any rate it matters a whole lot less than loving them, and figuring out what works for YOU and for THEM - and that’s something it took me way too long to learn.

I get that it’s not this simple - but my flippant response is that “with kids, yes!”… this is an essential part of being a parent or role model - tell kids how/why to be “good” , and largely they won’t be bad.

Has anyone worked with/built a web app that let's users set let their hot keys? Seems like it should be possible? That way users who like hot keys can just pick the ones they want...

This is interesting. For a while I had a client who drug their consultants and leadership into endless meetings, so we put a "cost of this meeting" calculation in the invite, notes, and handouts. It changed almost nothing. The problem was that the spending number was viewed as a cost of doing business. The difference between "expensing" a $500 meal and cutting a $500 meeting is that I get to eat the meal. I think for this to work you've got to directly pass on the saving. In many workplaces nobody cares if a canceled meeting makes an executive's bonus bigger...

Final thought - we need to be careful not to cut out all human interactions. COVID showed how isolating life can be without friends you see at work everyday. We shouldn't be using made-up-reason-meetings as an venue for mentorship, connection, and socialization, but sometimes that's exactly what happens. People hate meetings, but people get lonely...

Viewed in this light, grade inflation really hasn’t kept up.

This is really cool. I’m wondering what the “correct” UX is for triggering a tour like this? I am not personally a fan of the ones that auto load… maybe a button start the tour? Maybe a special tour URL?