It comes with a safety tag: "Not for use with bicycles"

It's not just about which tools an AI chooses. After several months using GPT-5, I keep seeing the same pattern: "cheating" is not a binary state but a spectrum. On the bad end you have both the obvious failures, like agents selecting inappropriate or harmful tools while insisting they are doing the right thing and also something subtler and, in many ways, more damaging: the model claiming to have done research or analysis that it demonstrably did not perform.

The Stanford transparency index gives scores to various models. The models that exhibit lower transparency in one way will also tend to be less transparent in another way. In ChatGPT's case, a major structural issue is that current feedback loops are too short. The system asks the user whether the user liked the answer immediately, not whether the answer turned out to be correct or useful several steps later. But in many real tasks, I only discover the flaws in an answer a few interactions down the line. At that point there is no mechanism to assign blame to the earlier faulty reasoning. If users could give delayed, fine-grained ratings ("this part held up, this part failed"), models could learn to match surface confidence with actual reliability. It would also reduce the incentive for models to "wing it" with imaginary research because the evaluation would eventually catch up with them. And the same delay mechanism would improve safety as people are able to recognize in hindsight dangerous steps taken.

That response sounds like "Yup, we're doing it. but by arbitrary definitions we keep your data safe and only use it for our marketing purposes, as detailed three layers down into the user agreement you clicked through"

The only decent thing to do is to keep these anonymized. If they become public record every bit of personal information entered into chat GPT will be public knowledge. SSNs. ID card scans. affairs. mental problems. Health problems. There shouldn't even be a question here.

This is the purest illustration of rule by committee. It beautifully illustrates how competing interests result into something that's somehow worse for almost all involved than doing nothing. On paper, the goals sounded noble: Reduce emissions from fleets. Avoid crushing small businesses that genuinely need work trucks. Nudge consumers toward cleaner, more efficient vehicles.

In practice, CAFE is an abomination. They created a loophole big enough to drive a Ford Super Duty through, and then the automakers did exactly that. A quick recap for anyone who has not followed this saga since the 1990s:
here has long been a dual standard: one for "passenger cars" and a more lenient one for "light trucks", the latter including pickups, vans, and sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) That classification created what many call the "SUV loophole." In effect, a vehicle that might, in all practical respects, resemble a car but classified as a "light truck" could escape the stricter fuel-economy and emissions constraints applicable to cars.

Because automakers must meet only a fleet-wide average, not each vehicle individually, this gives a strong incentive to produce and sell more of the looser-regulated "light trucks." Light trucks with poor fuel economy can be balanced in the fleet average if the manufacturer sells enough efficient cars (or EVs, nowadays) but with the loophole, upsized SUVs or trucks became a rational choice. This dynamic has been identified in economic analyses of CAFE's impact on the US vehicle market. this does not prove that every driver of an SUV did so because of regulations. Consumer preferences, marketing, and cultural factors also matter. But the regulatory structure plainly created a meaningful incentive for automakers to shift production toward heavier, less-efficient but more profitable SUVs and light trucks. When the consumers must choose either vehicles too small for winter, families, and vacations or a behemoth because there's no actual light pickup pr large sedan on the lot, they're not picking the smaller one.

And let's not pretend it's all an innocent mistake. The automotive lobby absolutely noticed what these overlapping rules made possible and spent years making sure the loopholes stayed open. Millions of dollars flowed into Congressional campaigns to ensure that "light truck" definitions remained comically broad. Tighter average fuel economy numbers or looser ones will do nothing to fix this. The whole scheme needs to be undone.

It can be a version of make work for the US, and I would argue it should be: work that isn't as productive as the market demands people be to be employed, but will in the future make enough by a huge margin to pay for it. These tech layoffs should be working on robotics.

That's the official inflation rate. The stuff people actually have to buy has gone up way more.

Money only available in the future is on one hand pointless imo because this won't outpace inflation*. On the other hand, it will definitely turn peoples eyes toward the future, which is invaluable.

*Rich people money way outpaces inflation because they keep it in investment accounts, borrow against it at extremely low interest rates, and re-invest, providing huge leverage.

Here you go.

There's an element you're not considering. These engineers are eating their own dogfood, poor quality will lead to product changes, and so expected quality must rise.

They need to read Proverbs 27:1

Those are application tasks, I wasn't talking about those. I'm thinking set dark mode, power settings, network settings, add Japanese typing ability after OS install, TTS, change printer driver, update graphics driver, downgrade graphics driver, restore system to earlier configuration, user account configuration, stuff like that.

It's not really about those home licenses. The thing is, the higher the percentage of home users the easier it is to build a Linux shop, the more people have a cousin who can tell them how to fix their computer, the more IT support companies have a Linux guy. It's a network effect.

I don't care about the look and feel. I need an OS that I can plug a sound card into, start up my machine and it installs the driver and starts working. I need my system administration routine down around 30 minutes per month. I want GUIs for all common tasks and I want it intuitive enough the I'm not spending hours looking up which command line options to use or installing package managers to install drivers to install features to install programs.

I'll try Linux, but it has failed me in this respect several times in the past, despite the insistence among lovers of Linux that it's actually just as low-maintenance as Windows.

If they didn't make schools like prisons, how would they be preparing children for the modern workplace? The resemblance is not accidental. Much of the structure of contemporary schooling originates in what historians call the factory-model education system, developed in the nineteenth century to produce punctual, compliant workers for industrial economies. The daily schedule of bells, queues, silent compliance, and permission slips is an elegant rehearsal for adulthood. The workforce positively demands graduates who have mastered the sacred arts of waiting quietly, asking to use the restroom, and performing repetitive tasks under surveillance. How else will they thrive in open-plan offices?

Of course, a few idealists complain that future workplaces demand creativity, autonomy, and adaptability. The Center for American Progress prattles on about students needing a "broad range of skills and abilities," as though the modern manager prefers innovation to punctual obedience. If schools were not structured like prisons, how would they possibly ready students for a labour market where surveillance software tracks keystrokes, badge systems record movement, and annual reviews determine whether one's metaphorical sentence is extended? Fortunately, most K-12 schools heroically resist such destabilising tendencies. As the Discovery Institute points out, schools have admirably retained their industrial-era structure. Proof of their commitment to preparing children for the only thing that truly matters: sitting down and doing as they're told!