briHass

There's nothing 'universal' about that. It's just welfare by another name.

We're a little early to be calling the game yet.

The incredible improvements have only been over the last 9 months or so. Business, especially disrupting entire job functions, takes much longer than that. As is typical with this type of change, it'll be slow until a tipping point, then FOMO will hit.

What are the similar arguments?

Firearms are capable of being used for legal purposes, as they are in the overwhelming number of cases. A radio that transmits on a restricted frequency is illegal. The ruling doesn't say legal frequency transmitters can't be sold, just that the broker (ebay) is responsible for ensuring it's not facilitating the sale of illegal radio equipment. Ebay is the one choosing not to sell most radio equipment (even if legal), because they don't want to deal with it.

Firearms used to be widely available at big-box stores, as they were legal (and still are), provided the store prevented illegal purchases. Most box stores/locations no longer sell firearms, because they don't want to deal with it.

They also reduce friction for purchases, which merchants that aren't short-sighted realize nets them far more on balance. Retailers that are or have been locked out of processing credit cards (marijuana retailers, porn) are often desperate to appeal those restrictions.

I do the same with Home Assistant and my many EspHome devices. HA works well, and it has a lot of nice features and extensive community-built integrations, but configuring and laying out the UI is a disaster. You can choose between WYSIWYG UI tools that are limited and cumbersome, or you can deal with raw YAML that stretches far beyond what YAML should be used for with deep nesting, and it's poorly documented to boot. It feels like a proprietary workflow engine, where you'd rather just write it in a real programming language.

Agents cut through all that crap and allow me to make changes without learning a new overwrought configuration language that thrashes syntax every few months. The fact that it is open and fully modifiable redeems it, because I can ignore all the annoying parts while achieving what all that was envisioned to allow.

Don't forget (at least in the US), artificial scarcity intentionally created by licensure requirements and/or unions. If I wanted to be an electrician tomorrow, even given my experience and knowledge of the subject, I'd still need 8,000 hours of apprenticeship and other verified instruction/classes. Finding someone to apprentice under, being paid slave wages, tends to be the biggest blocker.

You're probably not counting all the overhead, particularly from heavy equipment. Skidsteers, dump trailers, stump grinders, as well as all the oversized/towing capable trucks to haul those machines around. All of that equipment needs maintenance and fuel, as well.

The expensive part is usually just showing up ready to work, with a marginal cost for each additional tree. If you had 15 trees taken down in one day, the cost per tree would work out to seem much more reasonable.

My neighbors were having a bunch of tree work done, and I asked the supervisor what it would cost to take a big dead one down on my property. I planned to do it myself, so I had a strong haggling position, and I got him to $400, which felt worth it to save me a day's worth of hard labor. If they weren't already onsite with all the gear, that would've been $2K+ easy.

I thought for sure this was going to talk about the non-scientific IARC classifications. Even group 1, the doozies, doesn't consider dose or actual risk, leading to ludicrous adjacency like processed meats and asbestos. Scientists that aren't politically motivated wouldn't classify things on a list with terms like 'probably' or 'possibly'.

DBFs tend to be the easy part, in my experience in a similar company (not as much revenue.) The spec is simple enough that one can write a reader/writer in an afternoon, even before AI.

My biggest challenge is the speed at which calculation heavy business logic can operate in FP, even on network shares, as long as they're optimized for IOPs not bandwidth. Trying to adapt similar data access patterns to a networked RDBMS will kill you with round trip and connection overhead. Converting that logic to set-based operations or stored procedures means altering logic and all the risks that entails.

One of the biggest benefits of modern minisplits over conventional split systems (like are still common in America) is that their compressors are variable speed inverter types. This allows them to slowly ramp up to speed without the massive inrush of current.

That said, it's still a mechanical device that can experience stresses caused by cycles. Refrigerant systems also deal with gas/liquid phase changes and high pressures, so most units I've worked with do have a compressor lockout timer that allows a few minutes for temps/pressures to stabilize before kicking the compressor back on.

I'll add that it's my favorite podcast to listen to while falling asleep - if you do that with podcasts. Sean uses high quality audio gear (and he ships/loans similar to his guests), so the audio is almost always top notch. He also must do what I would consider to be the bare minimum of editing to normalize volumes.

So many podcasts are unlistenable to me for bedtime, because of mismatched volume levels of host/guest or poor quality audio for the guest (through zoom or whatever). He also tends to speak in a smooth tone, with obvious inflection for emphasis (i.e. not monotone), but not irritatingly chipper or fake sounding like some other physics podcasters.

Is your unit one of the ubiquitous Midea rebadges? Or at least one where the remote does 'follow me' type periodic, remote temp reporting?

If so, you're right, the easiest way is to build/buy an IR blaster module for a microcontroller (ESP32 if you want wifi) and connect a temperature sensor. HA/EspHome is overkill for this, but can be useful for the large catalog of pre built integrations. Most of them are built using/on IR libraries for 'Arduino' anyway, so you can easily roll your own with a half dozen lines of C++.

Mapping out your own PID correction algorithm (esp says the room is 72 F when it's really 70 F to get it to cool sooner), but usually just having the remote room temp sensor near where you'd be sitting instead of near the ceiling or in the return air stream gets you close enough.

Not just storm water, but also things like maintenance of 'common areas', roads, and snow removal. Many small municipalities are budget strapped and don't want to be responsible for plowing/surfacing the new little 1/8 of a mile culdesac the developer created to build their 'neighborhood'.

In carving up the 5 acres the developer purchased, the 30 houses they squeezed in left some remainder that wasn't buildable or odd shaped, so this now becomes a lame 'park' or some other space that requires maintenance.

I read all my local municipal meeting minutes, and at least around here, permitting and ordinances control all the environmental/nuisance stuff, so I can't really explain why HOAs go beyond the collective expenses into the draconian rules.

Yep, nailed me exactly.

Leaving unused subscription percentage is getting rarer, however. I am about to bump up my plan, which is starting to feel like a drug addict's tolerance.

As a counterpoint, continuing the human engineer analogy, we've likely all worked with individuals that seem incapable of doing the most basic problem solving on their own. In a way, they're being efficient by asking an expert that can resolve their problem much faster than they can on their own, but it is a net loss in productivity for the team. 'Let me Google that for you' is a satirical example.

So, I'm sure there's value in rewarding agent behavior that solves blockers whenever possible without human intervention. For the kind of cybersecurity exploit work they're doing, it may not be known to the human designing the task what is in or out of scope for the agents to explore on their own. Additionally, the HF incident reported that these agents had their guardrails intentionally disabled and agents were left unattended with minimal oversight.

I'm not defending OAI's behavior or role in this hack. The legal concept of negligence perfectly applies to their lack of responsible oversight. Similar to allowing a child easy access to a firearm or not controlling a dangerous dog that independently runs off and bites someone.

If anything, this report actually made me feel a bit better about AI-led job extinction not being that close. The sheer complexity of the swarm's actions required AI to parse and aggregate, but even with the METR team effectively having an unmetered token budget to do so, the output/summary still required extensive human review.

Even if we ignore the hinted possibility that the agents used to summarize the voluminous data may be acting deceptively (i.e. no snitching), the agents' summaries often 'missed the mark'. Maybe this is another example of 'taste', but it seems less subjective than arguments I've seen for that. It could be that an LLM is no better able to define 'usefulness' or 'relevance' to humans absent being told exactly what that is.

The key seems to be extensive integration/end-to-end tests with gold standard assertion data. Heck, even just saving off the json from API endpoints and using that as a reference to compare after changes works pretty well. Spin up a database backup with that static starting point, run actions, compare state afterwards.

These types of high-level tests are frustrating beyond belief to humans due to their lack of specificity, but with the agents, they don't get annoyed investigating possible regressions from non-specific signals.

They also aren't as painful to maintain as one would think, because a regression flagging test can be traced by the agent and represented as the business rule that was violated. I've found recent models to be really excellent at discerning a true regression from an outdated test assertion, especially if they are able to trace the failing test back to the PR and work ticket that built it.

Windows has also come a long way from a terminal perspective. Sure, the UI is a bit of a mess, but Powershell can do anything in the UI from the command line, and agents are very capable with PoSH. If you really care about ricing the UI, there's hundreds of utility apps to do almost anything you want.

Agents are also able to tweak and debug Windows errors, since the registry, group policy, event log, and other Windows internals have been largely unchanged for 25+ years and are well documented. All have old command line tools or modern Powershell to manage.

You also need an EPA 608 Type 2 license, though minisplits have been skirting around that for some time.

Easy to test for, though I'm not sure if you can do it for free like skillcat used to offer.

Experienced servers will usually try to 'feel out' a table to understand if they are in a rush, demanding, want to converse, etc. The same behavior that feels rude when you're catching up with old friends is often welcomed by a table that might have limited time to eat or that prefer to have things done without waiting or flagging someone down.

You do realize that it's perfectly acceptable and commonplace to explain your group's preferences to the server upon first being introduced? You're really telling them exactly what would make you happiest while also reducing the effort they need to spend on your group, a mutually beneficial setup.

Of course, incentives may not align in certain scenarios. On a busy night/time or at restaurants that don't have lots of seating, having a table that they can't 'turn over' quickly may be undesirable, especially if purchases (another round of drinks) aren't being made occasionally.

My hand is raised. I like having 8GB of music on an old (USB2 is fine) flash drive in my car as a fallback. On longer trips I'll hookup the Android Auto, but if I don't need maps and it's a quick ride, shuffle & repeat all enabled on the USB source.

Sure beats the radio, which plays 2 songs and then 5 min of commercials/sweepers, and has the gall to run ads on the HD text transmission on FM designed for song information.

They can push pretty hard. Even this law student, who knows the game, is almost worn down by these officers https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c3t--Glqs2o&t=1163s&pp=ygUdTGF...

Not OP, but for me, the lack of essentially any type system in SQLite makes it a total no-go for storing data long-term or that more than one application needs to access. Date/time being an especially painful footgun in SQLite.

I view SQLite as something a single application can use for storing state/settings/misc operational data instead of directly writing files, especially if the data being stored is relational or needs ACID. As soon as the data itself has meaning and structure per se, you're better off with something that can help enforce and describe the data: rich datatypes, foreign keys that aren't optional, etc.

The figures down 80 scrolls towards the bottom is what bothered me also.

Most of the time with studies, the figures are where you should go first. It's not uncommon to find cases where the text makes claims that the numbers don't support. It also, pre AI era, took at least some extra effort to make data visualizations, so the authors would focus on visualizing the most useful/impactful/interesting data sets.

This is true. They (the auditors) usually have guidance or areas they need to see policy address, but not specific implementation details.

Using common, overbearing MDM or endpoint tools make providing evidence of adherence to policies easier, however.

Walmart typically carries a large selection of supplements from the 'Nature Made' brand (yellow label), which tests/certifies most of their products through the independent 'U.S. Pharmacopeia (USP)'.

While that may not help with the arguments over the correct dosage, it at least means you can trust the ingredients and dosage on the label isn't a lie. A random mail order supplement or bulk powder seller on Amazon...not so much.

On mobile (similar on Desktop), just go to Setting -> Shields and Privacy -> Content Filters.

In there are a bunch of Youtube related blockers (including Shorts), that I find work really well. Mobile Brave also lets you lock/screen off your phone while a YT video continues playing, which is a killer feature for listening to podcasts.

I found myself becoming addicted to YT Shorts, and Brave's filters totally solved my problem.

I was thinking the same thing. I switched from Mikrotik to OWRT because I wanted actual Linux, not a nerfed version of it that made scripting miserable.

I would expect LLMs to be especially excellent at configuring Mikrotik stuff, given MT publishes markdown reference docs for LLM ingestion, the full config without secrets can be dumped to one text file, and their cli commands are very stable between versions.

I switched recently to OpenWrt from MT, which code agents are also good at. I'd wager most issues are going to be related to the user not specifying what they want clearly enough. The translation from network concepts to RouterOS config is pretty 'fat-free', so there's not much room for hallucinations beyond syntax errors, which can be verified via the API.

I won't comment on the others you mentioned, but Musk has probably done more for reducing CO2 emissions than any other human on the planet by popularizing electric vehicles and making them 'cool'.

These are the types of solutions we should be cheering, because people voluntarily chose the less-CO2 product due to its appeal. No heavy handed laws required.