mithr

> I really don’t understand people who use these?

> are people so antisocial now that going and grabbing groceries yourself is too much to handle?

> Paying an immigrant worker half a dollar to drive some tacos to a member of the upper class when the math has never worked out in the immigrant’s favor seems… bad? Or atleast a good way to turbocharge inequality

Ok, but then...

> I use Amazon fresh frequently

So... you do seem to understand who uses these (it's exactly people like you), and you have an actual use case for using a grocery delivery service (since you use it yourself), but you just think that Amazon Fresh is a completely different experience and ecosystem than Instacart, that does not promote inequality, and isn't antisocial? Can you elaborate on your reasoning/sources? I wouldn't say Amazon is exactly known for its humane treatment of low-wage workers...

I'm mostly hoping this doesn't end up affecting Costco delivery, which works reasonably well and uses Instacart behind the scenes.

Are they really “addressed”?

They are mentioned as things the union is unhappy with. The city has said they’ll come up with a transition plan by next year, but there are no details and that doesn’t mean people won’t lose jobs. The bill prohibits the horses from being sold to slaughter or other rides, but doesn’t say where they’d go instead.

I think it’s reasonable to raise concerns about both.

One I’d add, from unfortunate experience: don’t procrastinate, even out of fear.

If you think something’s wrong, get it diagnosed asap. Everything depends on cancer type, but with some, a few months in either direction can be the difference between no chemo at all and months of chemo. Biting that bullet earlier can drastically improve what’s going to be a terrible experience.

Yes… because places like Amazon mean I don’t have to :) that’s the point!

> In a fair market, I'd say that Apple can offer their services as an option

But… they do offer their services as an option. One option is to use their devices and services, and another is to use a different, equally popular company’s devices and services. Why should they be forced to make hardware that can be used in ways they don’t think it should be?

I agree that Apple could change or build many of the things you’ve described. You’d like them better if they did. Maybe I would too. I still don’t understand why they should be required to. It feels odd to say that the market would only be fair if they were forced to be more similar to their main competitor in one of the core ways in which they’re different.

You couldn't have, though. Market share was a part of that Microsoft decision. At the time, they had 90-95% of the global market share — there were very few competitors. Apple has a higher though still in the 50s percentage-wise market share in the US, but a 20-30% share globally. Alternatives are much more viable in Apple's case, and often cheaper. You have to want an Apple device to get one, and it's very easy to get an Android instead and not lose out on any important software or functional ability.

In addition, I think Apple has so far somewhat successfully argued that they have reasons for restricting their ecosystem that aren't just a thinly veiled "because we want to crush competition". They argue that their devices are safer to use, and that allowing arbitrary software full access to the system would compromise that. Similarly, they limit third-party software from tracking you. They certainly aren't saints, and I disagree with a many of their choices (their app store cut could've decreased long ago, for one, and they're now adding ads into their own services) but they often seem like the only large corporation of their kind that even tries to have a set of beliefs and care about their users, and I think intent should matter.

I personally like that there's one popular ecosystem that has a particular perspective, and another competing popular ecosystem that has a totally different perspective. If you think all of the above is bullshit and Apple sucks, you're free to use Android and install exactly what you want on your phone. I've never really understood why folks are so adamant that this alternative should not be allowed to exist.

I can't believe they haven't redesigned the Home app interface! I've always thought it was pretty terrible UX-wise and looked like they just threw together a very basic UI to have some support for home automation. I always expected they'd get around to formulating an actual design perspective for what a good-looking smart home control interface may look like, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity for that. I guess not.

That being said, I still think this is cool, and I'm glad Apple's spending more effort in this area. I won't replace my custom HA dashboard with it at this point, but may get my parents one.

Looks like it's explicitly designed to work with special mounts, so the idea was never that you'd use your own cable and mount it yourself, but rather buy one of these USB-C/hardwired/PoE ones and plug the device into it. From the pictures, I'm guessing these mounts are magnetic. https://www.apple.com/shop/browse/overlay/apple_homeview/con...

I don't know. AI is certainly the cause of a lot of anxiety for me about the profession as well as society and the world at large. I also enjoyed my job quite a bit when I had to/could write all the code by hand. I'd been doing it for a few decades, and don't appreciate that the future of this path is now in question. For these reasons, if I had a lever to make it so LLMs never happened, I'd probably pull it.

That being said, similar to OP, I've used AI to create some things I've been thinking about for a long time, and realistically might never have gotten to otherwise. One of them is an app to wean off of Blue Apron for meal prep: it has a (high-quality) scraped database of a few thousand recipes, it works and looks just the way I wanted it to, and it has a lot of functionality I haven't seen anywhere else, that I came up with over time. This morning, I had a feature idea, and before heading out for some errands I outlined its system design to the AI. It wrote a spec, got it reviewed, and built a v1 before I came back home. That's a lot of fun, for me, too: to be able to mostly focus on the higher-level design of a system, and still get where you want to go.

Developing for HA with Claude has been great. Not only can it make all of those yaml changes based on natural language goals, but it's so easy now to create a custom dashboard or configure various apps. I was struggling with both the ChoreOps docs and its fairly cumbersome interface until I pointed Claude at it and told it what I was trying to do.

As a father of two young children, LLMs have been kind of amazing. I’ve historically been someone who has project ideas and has fun building them. But for a few years now I just haven’t had the headspace for it — all I’ve wanted to do in the evening is relax for a bit.

In the past month I’ve completed a home dashboard idea I’ve had for years, I’ve built a house management system, a travel planning tool, a guitar chord annotator… it’s been very liberating. I’m not doing the coding, which was fun, but I am doing all of the system design and iteration, which I also really enjoy.

> An LLM isn't human. I don't really understand this thread of "humans do it so of course an AI does"... Why is it not reasonable to expect it to adhere to rules better than a human does?

Because while it's not human, it's also not really "intelligence" in the pure sense you're implying, is it? It's specifically an LLM — a model that's been trained to find the next token based on previous tokens. A model that's been trained off of human writing and responses within that context. If almost every time someone online asked "do you want ice cream?" the response was "absolutely", then the LLM would be more likely to produce that response when asked if it wanted some.

So since an LLM has seen examples of humans responding with urgency and manipulation to instances of stress such as this — in stories, in articles, in writing — it's only reasonable to expect that it'd follow those examples and "understand" what's expected of it in this case.

> Paying a professional to talk to lawmakers about something that is in your best interest

And I believe that if it were that above-board then many fewer people would complain. But it's not.

Because the professional will host a fancy dinner that you're invited to. Or they'll make an entirely legal contribution to your re-election fund.

And even if you think all of the above is totally fine, you have to consider whose voices are more loudly heard in this kind of system. Do you, or your neighborhood, or even your city in most cases, have as much money as a megacorporation, to fund all of these activities at a similar scale? Do you think it's right for the richest companies and people to have the most say in how the country is run?

> no lobbying or money in politics legally ... there is no way to legally speak your mind or pay someone to do so

You could speak your mind at a meeting with a policy maker, rather than at a $500 a plate dinner you've invited them to free of charge. You could pay someone to advocate for your interests in a smart way, without also contributing a million dollars to someone's re-election campaign. If there was less money flowing into politics, it would be more difficult to sway public opinion at large through expensive campaigns.

I don't know anything about this company and what it may or may not have done, but to be clear, the link just says that when you star their github repo, they add your email address to their marketing list.

I think that sucks, but it's certainly not what I thought of when I read your one-liner (which implies that they harvest and abuse your actual recorded data).

> AI doesn't add anything to the ability to do mass surveillance

I recommend reading Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus for a deep discussion around this.

He makes the point that what makes this AI age much more dangerous for mass surveillance isn't just the collection of data, which has indeed been possible for a while, but the new ability to have AI sift through that enormous volume of information, an ability which until recently has not been possible in a meaningful way without a ton of manual work to support it.

Older attempts at mass control of a population already involved mass surveillance, even in a large amount of detail, but even when capturing in detail all citizens' activities, there were just not enough people around to be able to dig through that and analyze it. This has been somewhat true even with the help of computers, though computers have certainly already been making this easier.

But now you can just give all that data to an AI with your instructions, and it'll apply some sort of "judgement" on your behalf, completely autonomously, and even perform actions against those folks it finds, again autonomously, without needing to manually build a whole infrastructure to do that with manual rules. That's a very meaningful upgrade for someone wanting to control a population.

My apologies, internet stranger, for thinking I had different goals than the ones you so cleverly picked up on in my one paragraph comment. Clearly you were more correct about my goals than I was.

Others covered specs etc, but just came here to say the intro video is so much fun! I really enjoyed that.

It's not meant as a perfect analogy for global warming, but rather an illustration of how a constant state isn't necessary for something to be said to be "changing", which was OP's claim.

It doesn't; that's kind of a first-glance reading of the phrase without really thinking about it.

Something can said to change from a certain standard even if it wasn't perfectly constant to begin with. For example, if I always kept my house at 65-75 degrees for the past year, and now it's 85 degrees inside, I could certainly say that the temperature in my house recently changed and gotten warmer. That might lead me to check whether my AC's working, rather than say "well I guess the temperature has never really been constant, and 85 is within the range of possible non-constant temperatures, so everything's perfectly normal and nothing has changed."

Electricity costs are a big factor in this, imo.

Rates for my northeast town increased by ~25% in 2024 and are going up by another ~10% this year. It's a hard sell to spend a large amount of up-front money (even after rebates, which decreased this year) to convert to a system that will cost you more than you pay today, and may not work as well in cold weather (every heat pump company I talked to suggested keeping my existing gas heating in place and automatically switching to it when it gets cold enough).

I was also told that the electrical grid in my area is having difficulty keeping up with the push towards heat pumps, which increase load exactly on the coldest nights of the year, when you need heating most.

I agree with some aspects, and think the author perhaps misunderstood some others.

> If I collect 100 XP, what does it mean for my language skills? For that matter, why do I collect extra XP when I receive a potion? Can the XP I collect be used in a way to carefully guide me towards the specific language skills I would explore next?

Using XP to guide the user towards a particular path is an idea, but it's just not one that Duolingo uses. The purpose of XP in Duolingo is simpler: people like numbers to go up, so they get XP for using the app. It also enables an ecosystem of rewards; I'm generally not a competitive person, and there have still been days where I took a few more Duolingo lessons because I was close to completing a "daily challenge".

Similarly, friend streaks, leaderboards, etc, all have innately appealing hooks. They won't all appeal to everyone all the time, but one of them will appeal to someone some of the time. If they get you to practice for 5m a day more than you would've otherwise, I think they've served their purpose.

Broadly, I agree with other comments about expectation management and time commitment. Could you get yourself to a solid level of understanding in a new language only by using Duolingo? Possibly, but you'd need a lot of dedication and hard work, and much more than 5m a day. If you really wanted to learn a language, and had the time, there are much more effective ways to get there.

Duolingo isn't really built towards encouraging that kind of intense learning, because they know most people who download the app are looking for a bite-sized learning experience, and are willing to accept bite-sized results in return. For myself, I can say that after a couple of years of leaning Spanish on Duolingo, with no previous experience in the language, and an average effort of probably ~10m a day (many days less, some days more), I can read texts if they aren't too complex, follow a casual conversation, and communicate basic things. That's way more than I would've been able to do if I wasn't using the app.

I'll respond to the content, because I think there are some genuine questions amongst the condescension and jumping to conclusions.

> telling kids the truth before they're ready and without typical parental censorship

Does AI today reliably respond with "the truth"? There are countless documented incidents of even full-grown, extremely well-educated adults (e.g. lawyers) believing well-phased hallucinations. Kids, and particularly small kids who haven't yet had much education about critical thinking and what to believe, have no chance. Conversational AI today isn't an uncensured search engine into a set of well-reasoned facts, it's an algorithm constructing a response based on what it's learned people on the internet want to hear, with no real concept of what's right or wrong, or a foundational set of knowledge about the world to contrast with and validate against.

> what exactly is the fear

Being fed reliable-sounding misinformation is one. Another is being used for emotional support (which kids do even with non-talking stuffed animals), when the AI has no real concept of how to emotionally support a kid and could just as easily do the opposite. I guess overall, the concern is having a kid spend a large amount of time talking to "someone" who sounds very convincing, has no real sense of morality or truth, and can potentially distort their world view in negative ways.

And yea, there's also exposing kids to subjects they're in no way equipped to handle yet, or encouraging them to do something that would result in harm to themselves or to others. Kids are very suggestible, and it takes a long while for them to develop a real understanding of the consequences of their actions.

This. The idea is super cool in theory! But given how these sort of things work today, having a toy that can have an independent conversation with a kid and that, despite the best intentions of the prompt writer, isn't guaranteed to stay within its "sandbox", is terrifying enough to probably not be worth the risk.

IMO this is only exacerbated by how little children (who are the presumably the target audience for stuffed animals that talk) often don't follow "normal" patterns of conversation or topics, so it feels like it'd be hard to accurately simulate/test ways in which unexpected & undesirable responses could come out.

Is it just me that finds the angle here odd?

"The cost of treating illnesses has gone up due to X" rather than "more people are getting sicker due to X".

Makes it more of a detached conversation about pricing than about how something is hurting actual people, who perhaps have value beyond a purely economical one.

In Massachusetts, Kia has disabled Kia Connect for all vehicles purchased over the past few years. Any data collected by cars must be made accessible to third-party shops, and Kia opted to disable any data collection (and thus disable Connect entirely) rather than allow that to happen. It doesn't matter where you actually live — as long as you bought in MA, the car's VIN is locked out and no one can do anything about it. You're typically told this at the very end of the sales process, after everything is signed, and it's framed as "oh, by the way, MA has a terrible right-to-repair law that has forced Kia to disable Connect, you should write your state senator."

It's... interesting to see just how easy it is to access this functionality if the VIN check is bypassed.