harpersealtako

I mean, the obvious way it's better than the Chinese open-weight models is literally the fact that it's not Chinese and is therefore less likely to be banned or restricted. Chinese models cannot be used on certain government systems already in the US, and regulators are actively considering expanding these restrictions more generally (such as adding it to the Entity List).

I have found that in order to reduce laundry times to something like this, you have to very deliberately make very specific tradeoffs in the types of clothes you wear and purchase. It is perfectly possible to have a wardrobe that is very low-maintenance (such as by opting for synthetics or synthetic blends for all your clothing), but more likely you have some special cases such as wool, linen, and cotton (which may require air drying and/or ironing or steaming), clothing with small stains that require spot cleaning with stain remover, delicates that need to be hand-washed, whites that need to go in their own load with bleach, or other specific cases.

An example I can think of off the top of my head is Luis Alvarez, the nobel physicist who came up with the asteroid impact theory of dinosaur extinction. The geology and paleontology community shunned him until the 90s when the Chicxulub crater was discovered (though geology is historically infamous for this, to the extent that nearly every important paradigm shift in geology was made by non-geologist outsiders who faced ridicule for their theories)

I like coding for the sake of it, like solving a puzzle. for example I love Advent of Code challenges each year. I don't use AI for it (except for documentation look up) even though it could solve it trivially.

I also like using AI to make things

I am happy

Nowadays we'd call that "engineer's disease". I wonder how many potential Von Neumanns were discouraged from branching out into other fields by jealous gatekeepers who assume that any interest in their field by "outsiders", especially technical people, is "epistemic trespassing".

I've always wondered if you could solve most of the negatives by imposing a "money in per year" limit on online gambling. Let's say, you can only transfer in 1000 dollars per year or something; maybe it's a federal limit tracked to your SSN or required to be declared on your tax forms or something. You can of course transfer OUT as much money as you win, and carry over any earnings to next year without affecting the limit. But aside from people for whom 1000 dollars a year is a huge deal, you avoid the worst harms. The people who benefit the most and eventually become disproportionately represented in the pool are superforcasters who can consistently turn a profit by being smarter and better at predicting stuff than everybody else.

I wonder if it's all just downstream from class. It used to be that rich people would regularly host feasts for their dependents as a form of patronage. This was then imitated by the gentry and bourgeois: proving that you have a house with a bunch of servants who can serve multi course meals, showing off your etiquette and conspicuous consumption so everybody can see how wealthy and classy you are, just like the real rich people who are generous to their friends and get to flex how cool and rich they are.

Then at some point middle class Americans began copying these sorts of upper-middle class styled parties (again, as a form of class signalling; maybe partially because all the rich people in the movies and on TV and in magazines are doing it, and you want to seem like them), but Americans also fancied themselves as classless egalitarians, so it didn't really keep because the whole "conspicuous consumption" clashes with modern suburban ideals.

I think "convenience" is correlated to the actual thing you're gesturing towards, but isn't the actual variable that matters most. "grocery stores being open until midnight" is certainly very convenient, but doesn't seem to remove anything important (except perhaps for late shift grocery store workers). On the other hand, buying your food from a grocery store (versus having to hunt it down and kill it) is certainly more "convenient", but "convenience" isn't the most important dimension where hunting differs from grocery store shopping.

Comfort is also correlated to it, but I don't think it's exactly it either. A/C is very comfortable, and certainly there are psychological and physiological downsides to it. But I don't think there's any major rewarding experiences which A/C makes impossible or unthinkable. Maybe the taste of a cool glass of water after working all day in the hot sun? Some amount of resilience to high heat which makes traveling in hot places slightly more enjoyable? Experiencing the changing seasons more directly and consistently than just seeing a changing set of colors out your window? None of these are exactly trivial, but it doesn't seem like "optimizing for comfort removes all the color from life" is exactly right either.

Maybe it's just that suffering just for suffering's sake doesn't do anything. If you were in the universe where all houses are magically air conditioned 24/7 and offered to build a machine to make them uncomfortably hot for 4 months a year and uncomfortably cold for another 4 months a year, selling on the idea that, you know, variety is the spice of life, a little constant hardship toughens you up, I don't think anybody would buy that on its own.

But clearly people DO seem to go kind of crazy without pressure and challenges, whether you frame it as "convenience" or "comfort" or "eustress deficiency" or whatever. There's an entire category of hobbies and interests that are entirely based around doing uncomfortable or dangerous or stressful things (thrill-seeking). And even things like weightlifting, marathons, saunas, physically stressful things are often pleasurable and seem to obviously build character and resilience outside of just the act of lifting heavy things until it hurts too much to continue. I think weightlifting is a good analogy; hardly anyone would lift weights if there was no extrinsic reward at the end of it (e.g. health, vanity, bragging rights). The important thing isn't the inconvenience and uncomfortableness of lifting weights, it's something else.

Maybe "responsibility"? "self-actualization"? I think that's maybe closer to it.

alternatively:

pipe tapping: $5

knowing where to tap: $95

taking on the legal liability and accountability in case the water heater explodes: $400

ChatGPT is more than capable of telling you where to tap, but you can't sue openAI if it gets it wrong and your water heater explodes.

I haven't played with claude code with 5.5, but I tried using claude cowork for a bunch of tasks and was surprised how much hand-holding it required. I gave it full access to my desktop and email but I kept running into cases where it had some arbitrary rule or restriction that prevented it from doing what I wanted.

Three examples that stood out: first, I wanted it to clean up my desktop by deleting some outdated files. It spent a few minutes looking through all the files, only to tell me it didn't have the ability to press buttons, only click, so it couldn't click and delete the old files. And it didn't have the ability to click and drag, so it couldn't move them to recycle bin. So it was stuck and suggested I do it myself. Of course, there was another solution it could have tried that would have worked: asking for read/write permissions on the desktop folder, and then deleting them using terminal...but that never occurred to it because I had asked it to test its remote computer usage tools, not its terminal tools.

Another case was asking it to print some files from a share drive I was given by a colleague on my email. It found the email, but it stopped and told me it couldn't proceed because there was a password window, but that I could enter the password myself, which was ***, because my colleague had sent it in the email. Like literally, it pasted the password into the output window and said "sorry I can't use this you gotta put it in yourself". It has some strong prohibitions on handling passwords, but in this case, it literally had it in its context window and could tell me it, just not type it into the password prompt in the browser. Of course, if you're at work and using claude on your phone to try to do something like that remotely, you're out of luck; even though it could* do it itself, it chose not to. The same issue happened for a 6 digit verification code for a website I was using that was sent to my email; it considered it a "password" and decided that it couldn't touch it. I couldn't even just...paste it into claude's context and ask it to enter it, it insisted that I must type it in myself.

A third case: for some reason it always forgets it can read pdfs. so many times it stopped what it was doing and said "well, I found it, but it's in a .pdf so I can't read it." and I'm like "bro you literally have a tool for this what are you even talking about".

A less important observation: it seems overeager to solve things by sending emails. Opus 5.5 LOVES sending emails. Can't find the information I'm looking for on the website? Here, I've drafted an email to the webmaster to ask it to add it. Have some ambiguous question about Virginia's hunting regulations? Opus 5.5 won't even try looking more closely at the regs its first thought is "I know, I can just email this question to the local game warden."

the "minimum requirements" aren't even the actual minimum, the game can definitely play on worse machines than that (just inconsistently). I know from personal experience that you can play factorio (at least the base game) on a crappy old 2009 toshiba laptop. Pretty sure it doesn't even have a GPU, just integrated graphics. It doesn't run well but it's not an action game, a little stutter isn't the end of the world and anybody playing on a system like that should not be surprised by it.

The issue is, I don't think that university humanities courses generally contribute much to a person's moral development, and if they do, it's not always necessarily in a positive way (as anybody who has taken enough university humanities courses can tell you). Interest in the humanities is something that should be cultivated much earlier in life to really have an effect; if your first serious encounter with philosophy is in senior-year philosophy gen ed classes, it's probably not going to do much good, and might actually do harm (e.g. the person who takes psychology 101 and starts over-confidently diagnosing all their friends and family with obscure mental illnesses, the person who takes ethics 101 and decides that 20th century utilitarianism is a perfect system with no downsides, not to even mention the culture war stuff which is the not-so-subtle elephant in the room).

I loved probably 2/3rds of my gen ed courses back during my college years, but this was entirely due to an existing appreciation for the topics (history, literature, physical sciences), and around 1/3rd of them were worse than useless (I cannot remember a single positive lesson I took from them other than a sense of nihilism about the university's faculty hiring standards).

If the goal is moral development, few things will develop a person's morals than actually living and struggling in the real world, and college is NOT the real world. I have some half baked opinions about the degree to which university education produces a lot of adult children with arrested development due to an extended adolescence. If on the other hand, the goal is a classical liberal arts education, which I am quite sympathetic towards (at least in theory), I am skeptical that taking a handful of university humanities courses is the ideal way to accomplish this.

The Philippines is great for streetview, wikipedia, random internet rabbit holes. You can just zoom in until you find some island somewhere and there's probably something interesting you can learn about it. If you're lucky there's a road with streetview on it, maybe a village, a church, etc. You can spend hours trying to figure out what's going on there.

Many of the islands don't even have wikipedia pages. You can spend hours just scouring the internet for information on what the heck is going on on some island. Sometimes you find the amateur website for a local school, or some account of a tourist or traveler going there and reporting what they found.

Sometimes you learn that there is an old Spanish graveyard that has since sunken underwater, the statues and tombstones and crosses now covered in coral and barnacles, with a single lone cross still visible above the sea.

Sometimes you learn that the village is a sprawling shantytown of fishing huts and thatched-roof shacks on precarious stilts 15 feet above the ocean.

Sometimes you learn that it's the site of a WWII battle or famous explorer visited the island or a plane crashed there in the 60s or some other interesting tidbit.

Sometimes you learn that it's been occupied by jihadist terrorists for the past 40 years and that in order to encourage foreign visitors (who might not want to go there due to numerous past kidnappings of foreigners for ransom), tourists are assigned a free, mandatory vanguard of heavily armed marine commandos as human shields to defend them whenever they go to the beach.

Sometimes you find a remote archipelago where every island seems to have a different christian denomination on it, like you have the island with the Mormon church, the one with the Catholic church, the one with the Iglesia ni Cristo church, the one with the Seventh Day Adventists, etc. etc. and you start to wonder how exactly that happened, and what the locals think about the weirdos on the island next door who got a very different story from the missionaries that came there than they did.

Sometimes it's just so obscure nobody has ever written anything about it in any language you know, you can see some blurry houses and rice paddies and outrigger canoes on the beach on satellite view but the village is otherwise unmarked, and you start to wonder, exactly what goes on there? Who are these people in this strange little fishing village with their canoes and rice paddies and corrugated-iron roof huts, what are they hiding, and how do I get there? And pretty soon you start looking at plane tickets and schedules and trying to imagine the complicated and uncertain logistics of traveling to such a remote place, because surely it's not that hard, there is an island only 30 miles away with an airstrip, beach villas and a handful of restaurants, and surely you could just fly there and charter a boat or something...

I'm more curious personally about the legal side here. Setting aside the actual object level issue (I personally support A/C for prisons), it seems to open up a lot of interesting questions to me:

* was it cruel and unusual punishment for Texas prisons to not have A/C before the invention of A/C (obviously not)

* was it cruel and unusual punishment for Texas prisons to not have A/C before A/C became widespread and affordable for regular people? (probably not)

* what is the main reason why this wasn't an issue 50 years ago and is now? Climate change? People being on average more sensitive to heat than they used to be? Better legal recognition of prisoner suffering? Broadening of 8th amendment protections in the court system? Changing public morals, i.e. "evolving standards of decency"? Ubiquity of A/C in ordinary Texans' day to day life? The random chance of this particular case getting sent to this particular judge?

* Is it cruel and unusual punishment for Texas prisons to not have A/C now, when not all non-imprisoned Texans have A/C (and if so, does that imply that A/C is being codified here as basic human right, and is that really constitutionally tenable? How is it possible for a judge to order that something is a constitutional right for prisoners, but an optional private luxury for non prisoners?)

* Is A/C the only option, or might other, cheaper cooling methods be allowed, if the core of the complaint is reducing preventable heat-related injuries and deaths? Hypothetically (not a real proposal obviously), if instead the prison put hotel-style ice machines in every cell, would this solve the issue or is the judge's decision very specifically about A/C?

Facebook is the only social media I've ever had this kind of problem with. Every few years I find some group or community that only exists on Facebook that I want to join (in the most recent case it was a local DnD meetups group; in a previous case, it was a gardening group that was my only reputable lead on seeds for an uncommon variety of heirloom tomato I was searching for). It always ends in my new account getting banned within a few days for suspected fraud with no real reason or opportunity for appeal. No other social media has that problem as far as I can tell, it seems like it's primarily a Facebook problem, and clearly I'm not some unique case considering how common a story it seems.

Perhaps it has something to do with if you had an old account you deleted a decade ago; maybe Meta assumes that any person who ever deleted their account will never ever want to make a new one, so anybody using the same email or name or face or ID or device as anything that has touched a deleted account is by definition fraudulent.

>Why do you think Whatsapp is so popular now and not SMS anymore?

Is this actually the case? I've heard Whatsapp is popular outside the states (something about differences in phone plans, in the US unlimited SMS texting is basically universal) but it's definitely still in the minority here. Anecdotally I feel like each friend group here has a different, idiosyncratic method of text communication in the US. Some people communicate through SMS, others through instagram/snapchat, others through discord, or whatsapp, or facebook messenger, etc. There are some interesting trends in the distribution along age and gender lines too.

A neutral answer: he's a popular young conservative Jewish-American political pundit who gained fame for debates at college campuses. He gained notoriety for his snappy rhetorical "takedowns" of (mostly left-leaning) university students during open-forum guest lectures he frequently hosts on college campuses.

My personal take: his "takedowns" are pretty fun entertainment, but doesn't really have anything to do with which political position is correct or not. A lot of contemporary political ideas have a "nuanced, difficult to explain, strong" version, and a "flawed, weak, easy to explain" version. For most people, when asked to explain their political views, have trouble formulating the strongest version of their argument. Many people believe what they believe purely on emotional or tribal grounds rather than based on the facts of the matter. Ben's personal style is to find the weak version of an argument, and to (correctly) point out the obvious flaws in it. Of course, just because X argument for Y is fallacious, doesn't make Y false.

Yes, millions of birds every year. About a fifth of it has salmonella, unsurprisingly. But US chicken is still banned for very dubious reasons.

Solved my first 5x5 in 1:54. At first I thought it would be really difficult but then I found a hex which could only go one way (a corner hex with V shape) and then from there the adjacent pipes could only orient one way. There were a few times where I had to think down a tree of possibilities (if this hex goes like this, then this hex can't possibly fit here because of a previously solved hex, therefore it must go like this instead), but never more than one or two steps. All in all it's a very satisfying puzzle format.

I've absolutely noticed that. I used to pay for GPT-3 access through AI Dungeon back in 2020, before it got censored and run into the ground. In the AI fiction community we call that "Summer Dragon" ("Dragon" was the name of the AI dungeon model that used 175B GPT-3), and we consider it the gold standard of creativity and knowledge that hasn't been matched yet even 2 years later. It had this brilliant quality to it where it almost seemed to be able to pick up on your unconscious expectations of what you wanted it to write, based purely on your word choice in the prompt. We've noticed that since around Fall 2020 the quality of the outputs has slowly degraded with every wave of corporate censorship and "bias reduction". Using GPT-3 playground (or story writing services like Sudowrite which use Davinci) it's plainly obvious how bad it's gotten.

OpenAI needs to open their damn eyes and realize that a brilliant AI with provocative, biased outputs is better than a lobotomized AI that can only generate advertiser-friendly content.

Dalle seems to only have a few "styles" of drawing that it is actually "good" at. It is particularly strong at these styles but disappointingly underwhelming at anything else, and will actively fight you and morph your prompt into one of these styles even when given an inpainting example of exactly what you want.

It's great at photorealistic images like this: https://labs.openai.com/s/0MFuSC1AsZcwaafD3r0nuJTT, but it's intentionally lobotomized to be bad at faces, and often has an uncanny valley feel in general, like this: https://labs.openai.com/s/t1iBu9G6vRqkx5KLBGnIQDrp (never mind that it's also lobotomized to be unable to recognize characters in general). It's basically as close to perfect as an AI can be at generating dogs and cats though, but anything else will be "off" in some meaningful ways.

It has a particular sort of blurry, amateur oil painting digital art style it often tries to use for any colorful drawings, like this: https://labs.openai.com/s/EYsKUFR5GvooTSP5VjDuvii2 or this: https://labs.openai.com/s/xBAJm1J8hjidvnhjEosesMZL . You can see the exact problem in the second one with inpainting: it utterly fails at the "clean" digital art style, or drawing anything with any level of fine detail, or matching any sort of vector art or line art (e.g. anime/manga style) without loads of ugly, distracting visual artifacts. Even Craiyon and DALLE-mini outperform it on this. I've tried over 100 prompts to get stuff like that to generate and have not had a single prompt that is able to generate anything even remotely good in that style yet. It seems almost like it has a "resolution" of detail for non-photographic images, and any detail below a certain resolution just becomes a blobby, grainy brush stroke, e.g. this one: https://labs.openai.com/s/jtvRjiIZRsAU1ukofUvHiFhX , the "fairies" become vague colored blobs here. It can generate some pretty ok art in very specific styles, e.g. classical landscape paintings: https://labs.openai.com/s/6rY7AF7fWPb5wWiSH0rAG0Rm , but for anything other than this generic style it disappoints hard.

The other style it is ok at is garish corporate clip art, which is unremarkable and there's already more than enough clip art out there for the next 1000 years of our collective needs -- it is nevertheless somewhat annoying when it occasionally wastes a prompt generating that crap because you weren't specific that you wanted "good" images of the thing you were asking for.

The more I use DALLE-2 the more I just get depressed at how much wasted potential it has. It's incredibly obvious they trimmed a huge amount of quality data and sources from their databases for "safety" reasons, and this had huge effects on the actual quality of the outputs in all but the most mundane of prompts. I've got a bunch more examples of trying to get it to generate the kind of art I want (cute anime art, is that too much to ask for?) and watching it fail utterly every single time. The saddest part is when you can see it's got some incredible glimpse of inspiration or creative genius, but just doesn't have the ability to actually follow through with it.

This is a running theme for Blue Zones and centenarian research data, just a bunch of really blatant falsehoods packaged as trendy diet advice (e.g. suggesting that the Okinawan diet is low in meat, which is based on some weird game of telephone around discussions of WWII starvation diets, when in reality the Okinawans get a large proportion of their calories from lard and have the highest meat consumption in Japan). I wouldn't quite call it a "scam" but I would call it extremely misleading.

The problem with the evidence and research around the "plant based diet" is that there is an ulterior motive for most of the research (legitimate ethical concerns around meat eating) which taints a lot of the data.

For example, Dan Buettner (the author of Blue Zones) suggests that Okinawans eat a 98% plant based diet which is...I won't say "fraudulent" because I think it's possible it's an honest mistake but it's definitely not "correct" at all. It's based off of some sketchy anecdotal accounts of WWII starvation diets where the only ate potatoes. Western centenarian researchers and health gurus repeated that factoid a bunch and it became "the okinawan diet is basically a potato-heavy vegan diet" in some twisted game of telephone.

In actuality both modern and ancient Okinawans have the highest meat consumption in Japan. Lard is the go-to frying oil even for vegetable dishes. The largest proportion of calories come from animal products. The Okinawan diet is a high fat, high carb, moderately high meat diet whose main "secret" is conscious portion restriction (the local "eat until you are 80% full" mantra). They do eat plenty of fish too, just not as much as the mainlanders (the idea that the okinawan diet is low in fish is crazy because the okinawans have a super unique and proud local history of fishing and seafood foraging traditions).

What are you considering as "American meat preparations" though? It's not all salt/pepper/butter/lemon here. Not even considering immigrant cuisines (which is doing a disservice because that's our entire thing, like ) there are hundreds of local meat preparation styles from southern barbecue variations to cajun food to native tex-mex and southwest styles and beyond.

I agree, I've been all over Europe and never saw any significant difference in the quality of raw meat and poultry. I do know there is a lot of misinformation about US meats over there though, like the "chlorinated chicken" nonsense you hear all the time from the brits which is thinly veiled protectionist propaganda by the domestic meat industries (who have no problem importing their poultry from Brazil!).

I'm definitely in the weird minority that feels like that phase of edgy internet counterculture diving was an overwhelming positive thing for me. It gave me perspective as a sheltered suburb kid as to how fucked up things can be in the world. I feel I have a lot more empathy now whereas before I struggled to internalize the problems and suffering of people around me as "real" (things like war or crime were things that happened on television and in fictional novels, not in real life). Even now I feel like some people, especially in my parents' generation, have trouble seriously understanding the lives of people outside their immediate ingroups.

I would not recommend it as a method for anybody though, there are a dozen other routes that kind of journey could have gone down and most of them lead to terrible conclusions.

Coffee culture has existed in the US since the 1700s at least when Americans started drinking coffee instead of tea to spite the British, it's just a different coffee culture than the modern cafe espresso culture and it's not "better" or "worse".

You have to understand though that Italians are predisposed to rip into all non-Italian food whenever they get the chance, even if it's better than the native Italian version.

Americans just have different tastes/cultures regarding coffee in general. Many of us (including myself) prefer a dark roast, it's nostalgic, consistent, and goes good with a generous amount of milk. I don't care if it's "hiding the flavor of the bad coffee" or whatever, I just like it. I've had coffee all over the world but I grew up with shitty burnt gas station coffee and instant coffee (or even cowboy coffee) made in a tin can over a campfire, and that's just as legitimate a culture as whatever the Italians are doing with their fancy espresso machines.

I think pornhub has one they were saying they were making, idk if that is going anywhere.

I wonder if you could make a good RTS with a "command limit", or a delay between issuing a command and the army moving. This could be simulated by a horseback messenger, or the delay of lightspeed communications across large stellar distances. There's probably a reason nobody's made a game like that before though...