I found GP2.5 to be great at academic-style research and writing; it was absolutely awful at writing code. So; I would tell it to plan some thing for me and write it in a way that could be used by another agent (Claude Code) to build the code to do the thing. In this way, it has been great! I haven't yet attempted it with 3.

That said, I found GP3.0's page to be hilarious:

It demonstrates PhD-level reasoning with top scores on Humanityâ(TM)s Last Exam (37.5% without the usage of any tools) and GPQA Diamond (91.9%). It also sets a new standard for frontier models in mathematics, achieving a new state-of-the-art of 23.4% on MathArena Apex.

It then proceeds to show, lower down on the page, an example of what it can do, by showing off 'Our Family Recipes". If there's anything that touts PhD-level reasoning and writing, it's a recipe book.

The big problem here is people who've been carefully taught and never managed to overcome that part of their education.

The last great recession was due to precisely this sort of spending pattern plus a collapse in payment. Banks may be healthy, for now, but they can't keep lending forever with no recover. This is not a good sign.

Yes. I remember seeing a movie that took place in rural Arizona in the early '50s. Part of the plot had to do with moving a small herd of horses across country to a dirt road that was good enough that they could drive a truck up it and load the horses on it so they could take them to market and sell them. One evening they stopped at a ranch house that was still lit by kerosene lanterns because the team stringing electric cables wasn't due to get there for another six months.

Just an idea. Maybe understand that youâ(TM)re going to need people who work from science based principles who are inside âoeTrumpistanâ to both help prevent and mitigate future climate problems.

Letâ(TM)s start by getting everything nuclear powered.

There's a lovely collective facepalm right now as Virgin Gin isn't allowed to be called Gin anymore because the regulations governing alcohol say to be called Gin it has to have certain ingredients in it.

That might or might not be fucking stupid depending on what Virgin Gin is and what those required ingredients are. As an example, I'd think that most people would find it quite reasonable to require that anything called "gin" would have to have juniper berries as an ingredient.

Yes, that mean that nowadays, "advanced users" means "know how to read".

Alas, knowing how to read isn't enough now, if it ever was. All too many computer lusers (not misspelled) are aliterate and won't bother to read any warnings that accompany those links. To paraphrase an old saying, you can show a person all the warnings you want, but you can't make them read them.

And I don't want Google having complete control over search either. Which is why all my searching is done with non-Google search pages.

I agree with everything in your post except for that. My search engine is startpage.com, which acts as a proxy between me and Google so that it has no way of knowing who made which query.

Old school - a note under the door, at least when they make the bed and provide fresh towels.

Not everybody is going to notice a note slipped under the door or bother to look at it. Much better would be hanging the notes from the room's doorknob, similar to the Do Not Disturb signs. If you make them the right size, they cover up the place where you use your keycard to unlock the door so that you can't even get into your room without at least looking at the notice and there's no plausible way to claim that you thought it was spam.

Yes. In fact they are - well planning to. ATSC 3.0 allows encryption of so called "free" over the air TV and they are only doing that so they can actually override the FCC and stop people recording shows.

This feels like one of those stupid "free market" republican ideas that later comes back to bite everyone in the butt. Probably on the same level as the promise Congress people used to make that we could one day buy our own TV cable boxes.

I used to play in a band with a mate who bought a Transit Van in the mid 1990's. Weirdly the van came with an 8 track player (rather than the usual radio and compact cassette player) and the only two 8 track tapes he had also came with the van. They were Ted Nugent's "Cat Scratch Fever" and a compilation featuring various British miltary marching bands.

We spent several years driving up and down the country to various gigs alternating the tapes. Absolutely tedious but also somehow fun. At some point someone did find a Neil Sedaka album on 8 track in a local charity shop but sadly the tape snapped after about the third play :(

Alas the van, and the 8 track player, are no longer with us but my mate still has the tapes !

I've written about this before, but it bears repeating. My father worked for several supermarket chains as a department manager. I don't mean that he ran the delicatessen for one market, he was the delicatessen supervisor for the entire chain. He told me once that if a market was doing very, very well, it would have a net profit margin of 2%. Now imagine what all of those CC fees are doing to that.

I like that old time rock and roll That kind of music really soothes my soul

And where were you The Day the Music Died?

No; it's absolutely a terrible idea. It may be great for the businesses; but, it's absolutely fucking terrible for the consumer.

This is absolutely fucking insanity. Imagine having to carry 6 different cards and wondering which one a particular store is going to take.

Remember, I did specify lakes as a place where a ship would need a pilot.