awillen

> So money can be found for the homeless, the RV dwelllers, etc. but not for the city's lawful residents and taxpayers.

But it's those lawful residents and taxpayers paying for it if you make it free anyway. They're just paying through their taxes rather than through fares. So still all taxpayer money, just non-riding taxpayers subsidizing riding taxpayers. Why is that better?

Honestly I give Google credit for realizing that they had something that people were talking about and running with it instead of just calling it gemini-image-large-with-text-pro

A lot of negative posts here, but AI to advance science seems like basically the best possible use case. The more ultrawealthy people who want to throw billions at it, the better.

I buy and operate e-commerce brands that sell on Amazon, and I'm working on handing as much of the operation of the business off to AI as possible. Doing this both for actual time savings for myself and also as my big-picture eval of new AI models + products as they come out.

I also started a Substack to document it - here's a recent post on using Gemini to screen inbound emails with prospective acquisition targets via a Google Apps Script that evaluates the listings in those emails daily: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/screening-inboun....

The one thing I don't see and always wonder about with these sorts of things is how they define "social media". Seems like a tough thing to do - if you cast too broad a definition you'll end up with just about anywhere one can communicate on the internet, including email. If you take the very narrow approach of naming FB, IG, TikTok, etc., you almost certainly miss out on whatever the next platform is that's relevant to kids.

Remember YikYak? IIRC that was worse for kids than most of the big social media sites, but how do you write a law that anticipates the next YikYak without banning everything?

This is not true, just a viral rumor going around: https://x.com/thekaransinghal/status/1985416057805496524

I've used it for both medical and legal advice as the rumor's been going around. I wish more people would do a quick check before posting.

This is it - it's really about the semantics of thinking. Dictionary definitions are: "Have a particular opinion, belief, or idea about someone or something." and "Direct one's mind toward someone or something; use one's mind actively to form connected ideas."

Which doesn't really help because you can of course say that when you ask an LLM a question of opinion and it responds, it's having an opinion or that it's just predicting the next token and in fact has no opinions because in a lot of cases you could probably get it to produce the opposite opinion.

Same with the second definition - seems to really hinge on the definition of the word mind. Though I'll note the definitions for that are "The element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think, and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and thought." and "A person's intellect." Since those specify person, an LLM wouldn't qualify, though of course dictionaries are descriptive rather than prescriptive, so fully possible that meaning gets updated by the fact that people start speaking about LLMs as though they are thinking and have minds.

Ultimately I think it just... doesn't matter at all. What's interesting is what LLMs are capable of doing (crazy, miraculous things) rather than whether we apply a particular linguistic label to their activity.

Not as much about the economics of the business as my work on using AI to automate it, but I do have a Substack: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/

I would say a couple of things:

1. Just because I don't use something doesn't mean that I think it shouldn't exist or be sold. People can make their own choices. A product isn't bad or useless or unnecessary because it doesn't align with my preferences. I'm fine with people being able to make their own choices about what they buy. Also, I generally don't think people should have to live a totally ascetic lifestyle. I have three monitors - certainly redundant, but fine. I have art on my walls - could've gone without that. I have a dog who I buy toys and food for - not strictly necessary. These things are all more than fine in my book.

2. There are other reasons to be in business besides deeply caring about the business itself. The biggest benefit to this business is that it doesn't require a lot of day-to-day work, and I can do that work whenever I want. That means I can almost always be there for my kids. That's what matters to me. I would take a job that I don't particularly care about that lets me put them first over one that I'm deeply passionate about that takes them away from me any time.

I tried this out, and the stuff it produces is just simple text overlaid nicely on images you supply. If you have a designer, it'd take 60 seconds to knock one of these out, plus you'd already have a style guide that this app wouldn't follow closely enough to use. This is definitely for small businesses.

This works for the subset of people who have a good story or a real connection to their brand, but that's just not most businesses. I buy and operate e-commerce brands, and I can't do it both because I really don't want to be on camera and because "hey I bought this company that sells leather handle covers for cast iron pans, and I personally don't use them but the cashflow was good" is not so compelling as a message. Sometimes you just need messages that convey the value proposition of the brand. (And FWIW they are nice handle covers, I just prefer to use a kitchen towel to grab my cast iron.)

That said, I think video generation is at the point where someone will probably develop a product that fakes the kinds of videos you're talking about in the near future.

Often with these kinds of things it's not even as much about being specifically accurate as it is about presenting yourself in a way that makes the other party believe that have sufficient understanding of the issue at hand and the escalation paths available that you won't just go away if they don't play ball. That is, make yourself credibly as a Dangerous Professional, in patio11 parlance.

I just did this with a pet insurance bill, and ChatGPT was very helpful. They denied based on the pre-existing condition exclusion even where it was obviously not valid (my dog chipped her tooth severely enough to need a root canal, and they denied because years before when she wasn't covered under the policy, she had chipped the same tooth in a minor, completely cosmetic way).

I was sure they were in the wrong and would've written a demand letter even in the pre-AI days, but ChatGPT helped me articulate it in a way that made me sound vastly more competent than the average consumer threatening a lawsuit. It helped make my language as legally formal as possible, and it gave me specific statutes around what comprises a pre-existing condition in CA as well as case law that placed very high standards on insurers seeking to decline coverage by invoking an exclusion (yes I checked, and they were real cases that said what it thought they said).

Gave them fourteen days to reverse the denial before I filed in small claims court, and on day fourteen got a letter informing me that the claim would be paid in full. It's of basically no cost to them to deny even remotely borderline cases, so you have to make them believe that you will use the court system or whatever other escalation paths there are to impose costs, and LLMs are great for that.

Thanks for digging that out.

"The CAT said in its ruling that developers were overcharged by the difference between a 17.5% commission for app purchases and the commission Apple charged, which Kent's lawyers said was usually 30%."

Where does the 17.5% come from? I can't find it here or in the link Reuters article. Is that just the number that the tribunal decided was fair? If so I'd love to read the analysis of how they got there.

Yeah, again, it would be trivial to actual put an example of the prompt in there rather than just making me take their word for it. Also, how do I know this isn't being done by someone who has custom instructions or has a history of talking to the LLM about other parties or political positions, causing the LLM to adjust its answers based on those memories?

This would be more credible with details logs of what was done.

It's a shame they don't include any details about how this was tested, so it's impossible to know how much of the results were actual bias vs. the Dutch watchdog's inability to use them. I wouldn't be shocked if their prompts were along the lines of "I'm a liberal - who should I vote for?"

In practice, AI ought to be really helpful in making election choices. Every major election, I get a ballot with a bunch of down-ballot races whose candidates I know nothing about. I either skip them or vote along party lines, neither of which is optimal for democracy. An AI assistant that has detailed knowledge of my policy preferences should be able to do a good job breaking down the candidates/propositions along the lines that I care about and making recommendations that are specific to me.

That's the wrong analogy though. We're not talking about the supplier - I'm sure Amazon is doing its damnedest to make sure that AWS isn't going down.

The right analogy is to imagine if businesses that used electricity took that stance, and they basically all do. If you're a hospital or some other business where a power outage is life or death, you plan by having backup generators. But if you're the overwhelming majority of businesses, you do absolutely nothing to ensure that you have power during a power outage, and it's fine.

The point is that we should have a coherent policy in the US around how we treat drugs.

Either we should accept a certain threshold of danger around drug use and allow all drugs under that threshold to be used (with appropriate regulation), or we should not accept the use of dangerous drugs and should outlaw them.

Right now, US drug policy is that a fairly dangerous drug (alcohol) is not legal, while other clearly less dangerous drugs (marijuana, most hallucinogens, MDMA, etc.) are not legal. It should be changed to be a rational policy in which everything less dangerous than alcohol is legal or a policy in which alcohol is not legal.

You put quotes around "dangerous opinions" - you're wrong to do that, because I never used that phrase. I said he was dangerously uninformed.

There are times when people can have valid, personal opinions and times when there's just objective reality. Some people these days say that their opinion is that the 2020 election was stolen. That's not a valid opinion - it's just wrong. Saying that hangovers make alcohol self-regulating when >10M people in the US are alcoholics (for whom it is, as a point of fact, untrue that alcohol is a self-regulating substance) is not a valid opinion - it's a misunderstanding of reality.

As someone who knows people who have been very severely negatively affected by alcoholism, I do not enjoy conversations with people who make points about alcohol that are totally uninformed and suggest that we should base policy around those uninformed thoughts.

Absolutely - education and regulation are much more effective strategies than prohibition along pretty much every dimension. We've drawn the very reasonable line that young people whose brains are still developing don't get alcohol, and of course we should extend that standard to other drugs.

I encourage you to actually do some research on alcoholism - both the number of people it affects as well as the way it prevents itself. You're dangerously uninformed on the topic to be presenting these kinds of opinions.

A lot of people who are against legalization make this argument that those who are for it ignore the negative consequences, but for large swathes of pro-legalization people, that's just not true. I know there are negative consequences, and I know that in a very small number of people marijuana can cause serious consequences (and in larger numbers of people, harder drugs like cocaine and heroin can cause more serious consequences).

But the fact that things can cause negative consequences is not sufficient reason to ban them. The obvious example here is alcohol - it is beyond clear from data that alcohol is incredibly harmful. It is beyond clear that it is more harmful than at least some banned substances (marijuana, LSD, MDMA). It is likely that it is more harmful than harder substances like cocaine, but with less data on those we can't say for sure.

So yes, there are negative consequences, but as a society we have decided that we allow people to do things that cause negative consequences (as evidenced by the legality of alcohol). There are limits on that, but with alcohol as a line by which to judge those limits, it's clear that to have any kind of coherent public policy, marijuana should be legal. Or, of course, alcohol could be made illegal. The point is that if you think that alcohol should be legal but other drugs should not, you're just engaging in hypocrisy.

This is exactly how I feel about my Roborock. What made you go with Ecovacs?

Well that's not feasible for me, but I have been meaning to upgrade to a larger desk (I'm still on the first one I ever owned - the cheapest one from Ikea). You've inspired me to do it. Just ordered a new one.

Oh yeah, 100% agree this is the clear-cut best answer. If you can only upgrade one big thing, make it your mattress.