Lots of useful things have a random number generator as an essential component; that's not a meaningful criticism. It's bound by statistics, so that gives you a useful sandbox to work within.

Indeed, a lot of what you're doing is asking it to give you an idea of what's going on and then fact-checking it. Part of 'learning AI' is understanding what it is and isn't good at, and the kinds of prompts that are likely to get you useful answers.

For instance: I use ChatGPT now and then to help me diagnose and fix tech support problems. Its ability to trawl through forum posts and surface good fixes for weird issues is much better than google's. For the most part, this is a safe and fast usage of it, because any fix is going to be tested to see if it works, so checking for validity is built into the loop.

I also use it to help me learn programming languages. I tell it in advance: do not do any programming for me; give me general examples only, do not use the project I'm working on and accidentally do the work for me; no compliments; provide links to source documentation when possible. As a tutor, it can be extremely powerful because again, validity checking is built-in. It's generally more readable than the official documentation, if I need more examples, I can ask for them. I try the new thing I've learned, and if it doesn't work, I go back and check the source documentation to see where things have gone wrong. I ask it later to come up with exercises and test questions so I can make sure I've learned what I thought I learned.

None of this is particularly difficult to learn, obviously. If you're a programmer, it shouldn't take you long to work out how it can best support you without turning you into a mindless typist that requests it to spit semi-working code back at you.

It isn't an essential tool by any means, but if you're interested in LEARNING things, it can certainly help you do that. I think people that use it the way I do will ultimately come out ahead of the people that get it to do the work for them. I'll always be able to work independently, but also I can say that I 'learned' AI.

Good drip coffee really just amounts to something automating the pourover process, IMO. I'm with you, I've never had good drip coffee of the type that most people are talking about.

I read the Guardian summary article, but I guess I missed the link to the full article. It sounds like the experimental setup is just bad coffee being compared against bad coffee, as I was guessing. Thanks!

Housing is a human right is an acknowledgment that humans need shelter to survive, and as a society we should attempt to provide the requirements for life at a basic level. I'm not asking for a lot here: I think governments SHOULD provide basic housing—nobody's trying to take anyone else's private property here, I don't know why you jumped to that conclusion—but if they don't, they shouldn't be tearing down encampments where people have built their own basic housing. Nobody's labour was appropriated, and yet those people are left with nowhere to go and no protection from the weather. Abjectly immoral. If governments are going to tear down encampments, then THEY'RE the ones destroying personal property and should be REQUIRED to house those people.

I didn't say that it requires the labour of others, just that it's a right. If your government doesn't provide it, it should at least not stop you from providing it for yourself.

But I do believe that societies that are moral should provide housing for people that need it. That's basically what society exists for. If we can't provide for the least of us with such abundance, why are we even here?

Yes, housing is a right. If the government can't provide it, it shouldn't be allowed to stop you from providing your own. So if you buy a tent and pitch it somewhere so you don't die, that is a fundamental human right. People need shelter to not die.

IF your government is in the business of protecting human rights, it should provide housing, but at the very least, it cannot deny housing if you can provide it yourself.

I'm not in favour of these weird dumpster-diving rules either. Food that could be used to feed people going to waste for NO REASON other than profits. That's insanely fucked up. I will not defend a system like that. Food is ABSOLUTELY a human right. And again, if the government isn't going to provide it, it should not stand in the way of you making or acquiring it for yourself. You should be able to hunt wild game, collect fruits, garden, whatever. Depriving people of food to protect one someone else has THROWN AWAY is so obviously immoral I cannot even believe it happens.

People COMPLAIN about the cost, but they do nothing about it. Case in point: pickup trucks are almost never used as pickup trucks. 70+% of people with pickups don't tow with them or use the bed for more than a car trunk could provide. Trucks are enormously expensive and even when gas is expensive, people still buy them.

We had a carbon tax here in BC and I think it worked a bit, but I still saw an enormous number of trucks on the road during that time. People just blame the government and don't change their behaviours much. People that do change were probably already going to.

I don't think that means giving up on carbon taxes; if nothing else, they're a good source of revenue and can be used for other green initiatives. Even if you make them carbon neutral, it's a good way to transfer money from polluters to non-polluters.

The story isn't clear and I haven't been able to find a link to the actual study yet.

If 'drip' is really just coffee from a coffee machine, this is easy to believe, since coffee made for most coffee machines is going to be cheap garbage. Does it include Nespresso machines and the like?

I assume they're not talking about espresso or Americanos, nor pourovers or French Presses. The language is too vague here.

If I grind fresh beans and put them in a high-end drip coffee maker, like a Technivorm, I'm pretty sure people will be able to tell the difference between that and instant, and I'd be able to find something that they enjoy.

So yeah, garbage coffee compared to a different way to brew garbage coffee isn't really revealing much.

Housing is a human right, and the pricing is relatively inelastic (particularly right now) even before landlords collude to price fix. So it's a pretty different situation than Walmart figuring out what the optimal price for tomato paste is.

But also, this is just straight-up price fixing, and we don't let gas stations do it either.

Because your great-grandfather who hated loud noises, family gatherings, and was at his happiest tilling the fields in extremely straight rows day after day.

When he retired, he built ships in jars and organized all of his stamps in his spare time. Of course he was autistic.

We just didn't say that, we said, "ah yeah, Grandpa Joe was eccentric. Helluva farmer, though."

I was a programming lead, and this is pretty close to how I worked. We scheduled my time as 50% management and 50% programming. If I started getting over 50% management, it was usually an indication of something else significant happening. Sometimes that was fine and sometimes it wasn't, and we'd do something about it.

But doing that "individual contributor" work was the only way I could ACTUALLY manage. If I'm not reading and working on the code, I have no way to assess the programmers I'm supervising, and no way to know if as a team we're actually achieving our goals.

Management for the sake of management is honestly a bit insane to me. I understand that not everywhere has a structure like a game company (fortunately), but I firmly believe if all you do is manage, you'll always be easy to manipulate and lie to, and you'll never actually know what's going on. It makes you a worse manager.

Oh, it's because people with success, people that are demonstrably skilled at something—they start to think that their knowledge in one field means that they're smart at EVERYTHING. You see it with physicists all the time. Doctors, too.

They start believing their own hype and think they know better than actual experts. Then they end up dead, like Jobs. It's sad, but it feels like maybe it was inevitable.

Actually, drinking hot coffee or tea is really common among Asians on hot days. It makes you sweat, and that sweat cools you off. My Chinese mother was forever giving me tea to drink during the summer.

(The hot bath part is definitely true.)

Anyway, it is FOR SURE true that corporations don't want to pay us AND AI at the same time, but the reality is that they'll need programmers to oversee all this stuff. The current fantasy that AI can do it all is absurd. The summary says that 70-something percent of coding problems can be solved by AI, but that's such a low level of complexity. I'm a gameplay programmer, and yeah, I use a lot of simple programming elements composed together to make a big system, but I still have to understand the big system, and then the bigger system that it lives inside, and then the whole game. Junior programmers are often lost in the complexity, or take shortcuts that cause bugs. AI is no different.

I have a whole diatribe about natural language programming, but Dijkstra said it first, and he said it better, so I'll just leave the link here. tl;dr Natural language programming (like vibe coding) is a stupid waste of time that provides no gains at all.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD...

1 cent is just what they're buying the shares at, not what they're worth.

Yeah, their weird fixation with hydrogen isn't doing them any favours. It's a terrible fuel and the engines are complicated and underperforming.