foobarian

Honestly the top AI use case for me right now is personal throwaway dev tools. Where I used to write shell oneliners with dozen pipes including greps and seds and jq and other stuff, now I get an AI to write me a node script and throw in a nice Web UI to boot.

Edit: reflecting on what the lesson is here, in either case I suppose we're avoiding the pain of dealing with Unix CLI tools :-D

I'm also from around there. Another very effective flavor enhancer for pretty much any soup or stew or chowder is cold smoked pork. Ribs, pancetta, sausages...

I think that is a significant factor as well - we can debate how related or not it is. I think in this case, there was a gradual ratcheting effect of how much work is extracted from people who would otherwise be contributing to childcare i.e. "the village" of elder people and women. No doubt this has a separate negative impact on the fertility rate. All IMO though, these are speculations without rigorous quantitative backing.

> collapse of fertility in developed nations

My pet theory is that once societies stop enslaving women, enough choose not to bear children to skew the stats below replacement level.

Wording might have been ambiguous - yes to inverter, no to requesting permission to attach it to the grid (for good reasons, backfeeding power during outages, avoiding overload and fire etc etc.)

I feel very optimistic about battery storage for this reason. I would love nothing more than be able to run on battery for a week or so so I can give a middle finger to the utility and just rip out the grid connection. No more solar inverter or power limit permits needed.

> you have serious regulatory issues

... until people decide they are OK with things being less than 100% and relax the regulations. Helped along by the purveyors of the AI tools no doubt

Not sure if this is a tongue in cheek post referring to how many modern languages already work like this? TS, Kotlin, C#, Java 29+, ...

> dumb as rocks

> working on drivers

Yup, checks out :-D

> They tend to pay industrial rates like any other industrial consumer would

Well yeah, you don't need to look further than Econ 101 and supply and demand. If demand goes up, prices go up.

The real problem is that the gains from the new demand don't end up fairly distributed, which is bad but not really directly related to the discussion.

That's actually a great point. If this community keeps claiming building a bike shed is trivial, surely we can expect some good ideas. My acceptance criteria would include a solution for water damage, and anchoring - based on previous failed attempts to do that task :-)

Regardless of some unknown quantum consciousness mechanism biological brains might have, one thing they do that current AIs don't is continuous retraining. Not sure how much of a leap it is but it feels like a lot.

Juffo-Wup fills in my fibers and I grow turgid. Violent action ensues.

This is something you quickly learn when you read the theory in the textbook, get excited, and sit down to write some code and figure out that you'll have to pick a finite buffer size. :-)

They have "Trash can", but not "giant pile of trash bags" :-)

Apparently the surge tolls they implemented recently contributed to less traffic, in Manhattan at least

The thing is, we did have telcos and others provide siloed services. AOL being the big one, but also things like Prodigy, Compuserve, French Minitel, etc. What I wonder about is, would an Internet-like system have arisen anyway just because it's such a better ux? You saw a development like that with Fidonet for example but I think the Internet stole its oxygen.

That is amazing, thank you for this note!

For sure. Couple other issues, one, the blade tends to wander, leaving not-perfectly-straight sections. You can mitigate by going slow and careful. Second, it needs a straight edge guide offset to the blade, which is harder to set up than direct.

All in all when I needed a one-off cut I used a box cutter knife, and when I needed a series I used a circular saw with a plywood blade. The setup is similar (needs an offset guide) but the cut is much straighter, faster, and less error prone. I think the only time I'd use a jigsaw is for making non-straight cuts like some curved artistic shape or something.

I found that a ceiling light fixture is really bad for painting as well, since wet paint reflects a lot of light. I got some powerful LED lamps [1] pointing up as an experiment and they have worked out well; I was afraid of the 6000K temperature looking too blue but I think when they are powerful enough they look really nice. The trick was to put them somewhere aside so there is no direct reflection path.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0962X573M

Jigsaw cuts look like garbage IME. The boxcutter knife would work, I've done that to trim plywood before and while it takes a while the cut is sharp and precise.

Nokia has been at the edge of the abyss for a period, and then they made a giant leap forward /s

Honestly, I feel like this is what Nokia always was, and why they fell behind in consumer tech

This sounds to me like the old hexagonal architecture [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_architecture_(softwa...

The Alexa product as it is, is already lighting money on fire. Adding LLM integration to it would just be pouring gasoline on it; iirc inference is still not profitable even in easier sectors so Alexa would be a particularly bad place for it. (Even though it would be amazing UX, but I doubt enough people would pay the price it costs to break even).

Hopefully it's a well paid guy, or I wouldn't be surprised if they helped the bar disappear for how much gold that is.

Our uncle had a CX when we were kids. When he would visit we loved waiting in the driveway for him to start it so we can watch the air suspension engage and lift the car a good foot up.

This always seemed intuitively inevitable if you ever played with a graph layout tool like dot or similar kinetic layout engine. With weak connectivity the nodes don't cluster readily, but with more connections they "snap" into rigid subassemblies. It always seemed to me like a bad thing for society but it could well be a case of "old man yells at moon."

I was imagining hearing the bird-chirping-like beeps of thousands of PCs constantly rebooting, since some subset is always in the process of restarting. Probably not audible outside.

Hydro does rule. Top 8 power stations are hydro right now. And the top power station has been a hydro for over a hundred years now. Very cool! Three Gorges has capacity of 22.5 GW.