fy20

I'm not sure about freezers (I guess there was no monitoring) but when I worked for a large UK supermarket chain in the 2000s this was how the POSs worked.

When I first started credit cards were not taken as online payments, the system just stored your card details and the amount. That was sent to server in the back office, which collected all the data, then every night it would make a dial up or ISDN connection to the head office and send all the data there.

There are various plugins to make ChatGPT queries in Codex, so you can use your allowance from there. I'm hoping this just closes that gap, and in reality it doesn't change anything.

Also remember this was typed with typewriters. That gives its own set of constraints. It's quicker to type two different characters than the same character twice in a row, as you need to wait for the typebar to return enough.

There was a paper that popped up a month or two ago (I think published earlier though) about being able to inject "thoughts" into the neurons. E.g. Ask it what I should eat, and steer it towards "bread".

AI will be claiming it's just the Mandela Effect.

Yes but you are missing the point. It's the case where Luna is not good enough, and Sol is too much. The problem is that on benchmarks Luna xhigh is typically comparable to Sol low in terms of capability. So where does Terra fit in?

Yeah I've experienced that at work. I see a lot of comments on here saying you can't one shot features in real world software, but we do, and yes we still have a human review the code with a high bar.

But we've also spend a lot of effort over the past year and a half to make the codebase and tooling more approachable to LLMs so they know how we like to do things and follow our standards.

I think it's worth remembering that outside of our bubble the quality of software is pretty bad. I had a Hitachi heat pump (not recommended) installed earlier this year, and the software is pretty disappointing. It mostly works, but there are so many undocumented features and hard coded values that should be a configuration option but are not.

For example when the heat pump reaches the target temperature it shuts off, then after 3 minutes switches on again. To prevent short cycling, I'd like to decrease the time between runs (so increase the 3 minutes) but that can't be changed. Somebody decided that 3 minutes is the correct value for everybody and that's it.

I bought a €400 interface box (basically just a serial to IP interface, I guess $20 of hardware tops) to try and improve it. The €8000 heat pump doesn't come with WiFi or ethernet out of the box, you need to buy an accessory for that. It's not made by Hitachi, but it's an officially recommended accessory. One of what feature I wanted it for - which is advertised in their marketing materials - doesn't work.

I emailed them, and they said it's probably because the display I have is a newer revision and doesn't allow access to the setting I need to turn on. And without turning that setting on I can't use the feature as advertised. They said I should email Hitachi and talk to them instead as it's not their part that's the issue.

I look forward to the world where all software is either open source, or at least reverse engineerable to the point where you no longer have nonsense like this.

Maybe it's better with lower latency, but I get really annoyed by this with ChatGPT Voice. I almost always start my chat with "I'm gonna ramble, I'll tell you when it's your turn".

It's not even that. If you take a look at videos of India etc you will see rivers full of plastic, plastic rubbish being burned, etc. It's just normal way of life for them.

But we are told that plastic straws are the issue, and switching to paper straws (that you need to use twice as many of when they inevitably dissolve) will solve the problems. Meanwhile, the H&M polyester dress that you wear 3 times before throwing it away takes as much energy as 2000x paper straws to manufacturer.

To be honest it just feels like they were steering the model, which was needed to stop older models hallucinating.

> Do not assert that WhatsApp is or is not responsible for any damages

This doesn't seem such a bad thing, and if as they say it's to steer their support chat bot it makes total sense, as that hallucinating could actually make them legally liable for something it shouldn't.

Depending on what you are doing you may find all the models are written for CUDA though. I'm playing with gaussian splatting and it's like that. Codex is doing a good job porting stuff to Metal, but it would be easier & faster if I had Nvidia hardware to just run the models natively.

Not everything with AI is LLMs running on llama.cpp.

Another thing that's interesting is dental hygienist / cleaning.

I grew up in the UK and never knew this was a thing until my mid 20s. My parents have never been, my dad never had a filling, and only broke his first tooth in his 80s (from eating a toffee).

But where I live in Europe now, it's suggested to do it every 6 months at €80+ a pop.

Being able to remotely trigger a defrost cycle makes sense. Being able to remotely trigger a defrost cycle to run for so long that it wastes products does not.

Did everyone forget about Therac-25?

Sounds more like they to be in a mental hosptial than a prison.

I bought the kit (~€140) because I wanted something building with my kid, rather than spending forever debugging electronic issues and figuring out which obscure parts to buy. Under the hood it's still an ESP, so you can hack it. I 3D printed the body, so my kid chose the colours.

However the software was a bit disappointing. It has weird issues that kind of ruined the fun of it. Sure you can write your own code, but I wanted something approachable for my kid.

Plus they wanted a walking robot... so I guess this will be next :D

And people say art doesnt pay!

Depends what the end goal is. They could pull a card from the EU playbook, and through regulation effectively ban the hosting and use of open source models (read: uncertified models) by US companies.

If the only choice you have is Anthropic or OpenAI, where will the money go?

The same report said 67% of regular AI users have increased job satisfaction, so that has value. Even from an entirely capitalist mindset you cannot argue that increased satisfaction = increased wellbeing = less time on sick leave = increased productivity.

https://www.bcg.com/press/3june2026-ai-reshaping-jobs-faster...

I've been using it to build things that don't exist in the market (or GitHub). Either where the product just doesn't exist, or existing products do not fully meet my requirements.

For example I got a smart cat litter box and wanted to pair it to Home Assistant. There's an existing integration for the manufacturer, but it seems that although my box has the same model number, it's a different revision with completely different data point mappings - so the existing integration doesn't work. I pointed AI at it, and it figured it out, and it works.

Could I have done it? Sure, if I'd spent an entire afternoon doing it. I don't care that much about my cat litter box though.

Right and there are also quite a few industries where Europe is way ahead of the US, to name a few:

- Railways and signalling equipment

- Container shipping

- Reinsurance

- Industrial machinery

- Wind turbine technology

- Luxury goods, luxury fashion and fast fashion

- Tourism

A big difference is that in Europe most companies are not big conglomerates. Yes everyone has heard of Siemens. But then you have tonnes of companies like WALDNER, based in a small German town with revenues of €350m, they make packaging equipment that can fill 100,000 yogurt pots per hour. Oh and they are a private company.

https://www.waldner.de/en/about-us/company/

The way it worked originally was it would trigger a different system prompt, and then the permissions system would prompt you (even on YOLO mode) before running any non-readonly actions.

Cursor would also write a plan document, which was useful when working on larger tasks (due to context size). I still find that part useful today.

I think the rise of Claw's, Grok Bot and Muse is a good counterpoint to this. Yes they are still niche specialized interfaces right now, but they are basically allowing non-technical people to do things that have been easily possible with scripts and cronjobs for a long time. Its basically the Ford and faster houses analogy.

Those are all techbical limitations that will be solved with time. In 5 years I would be surprised if we do NOT have an AI as smart as today's frontier models, that runs completely locally, and has a real time voice interface.

I'm not a Treky but I think Star Trek has the right interface here. For basic operations you just use voice and tell it your intent or what you need to know "Computer, what's the fastest route for me to get home?". "Madison is fastest right now, it's 3 minutes faster than Lake, it traffic is building up".

This isn't just whatever Waze gives you, it knows about your constraints and preferences. So you need to program that somehow. Imagine taking it one step further "Computer, what's the fastest route to pickup my daughter and get home?" or even it just responding to the first prompt "Take Roosevelt, and today you need to pickup your daughter from volleyball".

In Star Trek they often do this when they create "simulations". They tell the computer constraints and then it refines it. No writing programs, but effectively that's what you are doing but with the natural language voice interface.

"Computer let's create a simulation to figure out the fastest way for me to get home. I want to take a route along the expressway and know whether to get off at Roosevelt, Madison, or Lake. I need to pickup my daughter when she has volleyball." You don't need to repeat the whole instruction each time, and behind the scenes it is probably turning it into some deterministic code, so next time you trigger that program it's not going to hallucinate some nonsense.

Do you change the oil on your car yourself? No? Why not? Buying the oil, filters and all the tools you need to do it forever would cost less than one oil change at the dealership. Plenty of videos on YouTube you can learn from.

Note that they gave the mice 10mg per day, which is around 3g per day for a 70kg human - i.e. a normal dose.

> with just HTML/CSS/vanilla JS

I was building web apps like this until 2017 when I entered the React + Typescript world. For B2B you can get pretty far, rendering HTML on the server is fast! I was using Rails on the backend, so templates, partials, shared chunks, made it easy to manage and have a consistent UI without repeating too much.

The hard part is when you then need to build an infinite scrollable table, that has bulk select, and in-placs updating of columns. Ok maybe that's a bit too extreme the other way, but when you get to the point where it's easier to build full-on frontend components, you basically have to use a JavaScript framework for your entire UI. And they are basically all or nothing.

Last time I checked (a good few years ago; I gave up and accepted un-optimized frontends as the rule) there wasn't really a good way to do progressive ehancement like the above: the page rendered on the server as HTML, and some components then become fully frontend managed. And no, frameworks like Stimulus and HTMX don't really solve it for me, I want something declarative.

I'm a bit pissed off with DHH, that he went so far in the anti-Javascript direction, as IMO that was one of the big factors in Rails loosing it's limelight status. For backend I still haven't found anything as easy and fun to work with.

Agree. Now imagine the same thing in less developed and/or less well off countries.

There was a post here a few weeks ago about a UK court being inundated with some kind of claims (unfair dismissal?). To submit a claim you do not need a lawyer, but the process is (intentionally?) vague and very complicated, so it takes a lot of effort to figure it out yourself. But AI makes that kind of stuff easy.

AI is not going to replace layers billing big corporate clients millions a month, but it will replace things that are fairly standardized processes, that don't require a lawyer, but today are just too complicated for regular people.

Cables are something I have no qualms about buying from AliExpress, and I'd say they are better quality than what I can buy locally.

I power my laptop with a WOTOBE 100W 3-meter braided USB-C cable, I got three years ago, for €5. I roughly reel it up and throw it in my backpack, and the next day it comes out again.

I actually bought another one this year (as a spare) as I feel I've had it too long and it should break sometime soon. From a visual inspection there's absolutely nothing wrong with it though.

Compare this to paying €10 for a 1.5m cable from the supermarket, which is just a 50c Chinese product in a box that'll last 3 months, or €30 for something from an electronics store that is whitelabeled with the brand of a phone manufacturer - and neither is actually rated for 100W.

That's around €1.96 per litre. Still cheaper than Europe