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Comment Why the US? (Score 1) 158

Why don't they strike their beloved South Korean home market with these "value-strengthening" ads first? :-/

Does it violate an unspoken social contract the Korean people have with their chaebols?

A few weeks ago, my 2 year-old Samsung 'The Frame' TV proposed new TOS to me. I think I rejected it... :-\

Comment Re:OpenAI is the new crypto - All hype no value (Score 1) 75

Your first assumption is correct, my usual ingredient panels are in English. Allergens are helpfully highlighed.

Yes, I occasionally point my phone at English ingredient panels - but only to blow up minute fonts, not interpret their information.

(No, I am not willing to learn Korean - I have an AI for that. Even if I did learn, a little knowledge can be a dangerous. Say I recognized Korean representations for milk and cheese and whey. But then missed the significance of the Korean word for sodium caseinate)

Comment Better safe than sorry (Score 1) 62

I think that after every 3rd wave of Missile Command (what a disgustingly irresponsible creation!!), the game should require that the player's parents check to make sure the player isn't getting depressed by the prospect of nuclear war.

And in Asteroids, after any ship destruction due to collision with an asteroid, the game should require parental attestation that the player isn't starting to develop symptoms of petraphobia.

In both cases, if the parents aren't available (e.g. dead because the player is in their 80s) I suppose a Notary Public or a AMA-certified doctor would be a good-enough replacement.

We have learned so much since the early days of computer games, and it's better to be safe than sorry. (But don't fuck with Joust! I want to be able to play without having to call my mom every time the Lava Troll touches my mount's legs inappropriately.)

Comment Re:OpenAI is the new crypto - All hype no value (Score 1) 75

Looks like I have set off your LLM allergy. Or is it simply an Altman allergy? Well, there's no accounting for taste.

Yes, I have a learning difficulty, you insensitive oddity! I don't understand that things like whey and sodium caseinate derive from milk if the entire ingredient panel is in Korean. And have you ever seen the *amount* of ingredients in Korean processed food? Pages! Your typical 'Whole Foods' product it is not.

  So ... I just tell the AI my allergy, take a picture and have it sort everything out and give me a yea/no answer. And move on to the next product. I could lovingly decipher Hangul or/and brush-up on food chemistry. But I don't like unnecessary cruelty, especially on myself.

Comment Re:OpenAI is the new crypto - All hype no value (Score 1) 75

:-) Different strokes for different folks. My 3-year old $200 Android phone does nothing of that sort you experience with the default camera app. Moreover, I don't have to interpret "denatured whey protein" as pertinent to my diary allergy -- the AI picks it up and warns me.

My experience has been to successfully use plain text to instruct AI LLMs to:

generate poetry -- even blending unrelated genres that I am sure no one attempted before)
summarize documents
research diseases, medication and side-effects
review CT scan images for issues of concern
generate tour itineraries
translate languages (Hebrew , Korean, ...)
explain code
generate code (Perl, Bash, VBA...)
generate an Excel document with ISBNs and book summaries from pictures of my physical library

That's general enough for me. It should be general enough for you too - LLMs pass the Turing test.

Comment Re:OpenAI is the new crypto - All hype no value (Score 1) 75

Like you, I have more own interest in my experience than OpenAI's or other AI vendor claims. And my experience has been to successfully use plain text to instruct AI LLMs to:

  1. generate poetry -- even blending unrelated genres that I am sure no one attempted before)
  2. summarize documents
  3. research diseases, medication and side-effects
  4. review CT scan images for issues of concern
  5. generate tour itineraries
  6. translate languages (Hebrew , Korean, ...)
  7. explain code
  8. generate code (Perl, Bash, VBA...)
  9. generate an Excel document with ISBNs and book summaries from pictures of my physical library

That's general enough for me. It should be general enough for you too - LLMs pass the Turing test.

Yes, LLM AIs tend to behave like a skilled, over-confident intern, whose work is useful but must be double-checked. Call it slop if you want, but its useful slop. It got me past the initial inertial friction with VBA for my test analysis project. I had to correct flaws in code structure and parsing strategy. But it ended my 20-year procrastination. Now I have a 1000-line VBA codebase that I am familiar with enough to reuse in other projects.

You ask how does "checking multiple slop hallucinations against each other" help? Comparing two hallucinations will cause the "disagree" alert to light up, won't it? It's not like the two AIs are coordinating via seance.

Comment Re:OpenAI is the new crypto - All hype no value (Score 1) 75

I was in Bali, Indonesia earlier on, and OpenAI translated to Balinese. Also, OpenAI claims it can translate Turkmenistani food labels. And Google indicate Turkmenistan seems to be catching up in food labelling standards. Entities in the world move ahead of the pigeon holes we slot them in :)

Of course AI makes mistakes. That's why you must exercise your judgement. Also, use multiple AI to check each other's work where important.

Yes, 20 years. What can I say? I really hate VBA. They made me employee of the month after I turned it in.

If AI can translate between me to VBA, Balinese and Korean, what else could I call it but general purpose?

Comment Re:.bin (Score 1) 31

I haven't read the text of this Swiss law, but if it's anything like USA's, UK's, or EU's laws, then it regulates "providers" and/or "carriers," not software applications themselves.

If you are sending already-made ciphertext through a regulated service, the service won't be in trouble. But if the service offers to encrypt for you, then they will be in trouble.

It just occurred to me that the now-common conflation between web apps and local apps (to a lot of phone users, these two things look the same) matters.

Comment Re:OpenAI is the new crypto - All hype no value (Score 1) 75

I get your point. But my point is LLMs are truly general purpose. I don't need "an app for this" or "an app for that" or an app for something no one thought of yet. It is intellect on tap. If the question deals with general knowledge and logic, you can ask it and typically get a decent answer.

Standing in the Korean convenience store after my flight came in at night, searching for food after everything around had closed, I didn't need to research OCR and label translation apps for Korean products. And then interpret the output. I could take a picture, ask a 1-sentence question and get the answer I wanted. And do it for a couple dozen products. If I go next to Indonesia or Turkmenistan, I probably will be able to do the same thing there. And a few months ago, I used Claude to write a 1000 line VBA script for Excel. It analyses results of automated software testing and does 'bisection analysis' of results (comparing result before and after a change date). I had been putting this off for 20 years, because VBA is not my skillset.

Comment Re:Why does it gotta be a white oak leaf? (Score 1) 78

Maybe ASF just likes whiskey.

White oak has more tyloses and a tighter grain structure than other oak varieties, which cause its barrels to be more waterproof. It chars better. And it generally wins most taste tests. It's just perfect for barrel aging.

Save your red oaks for furniture.

Comment Re:OpenAI is the new crypto - All hype no value (Score 2) 75

I dunno about that bro..I am paying OpenAI and Claude subscriptions.

I've given them as much money in a year as I paid Google for a quarter century of use.

Having a general purpose intellect on tap is very handy. I was in Korea recently and it was handy to take pictures of product labels of groceries and ask AI if it contained the things.i was allergic to.
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