> Other places you might want to exchange photos - on a plane, on a cruise, maybe on a bus. You can't always count on being able to communicate through WiFi.
That's also a double edged sword. My kid's middleschool banned phones on buses after some miscreant airdropped naughty pictures to everyone who had airdrop enabled and open.
Yeah, I fully admit this is all my taste, and I won't argue taste! I didn't watch season 2 or 3, so perhaps they did improve. Or maybe everyone who didn't already like it stopped watching? Beats me. I was obsessed with Wheel of Time from the 6th grade on. My friends and I waited several hours to meet Robert Jordan at a book signing once. We went to midnight book releases. We debated casting ideas for a WoT movie, etc. That was a lot of emotional energy to live up to you! And, for me, the series failed completely.
I'll just add that Lord of the Rings was similarly important in my friend group, and we all loved the movies (mostly), so I don't think I'm just being crusty!
My list of TV shows I've enjoyed from 2010 on would include.
Breaking Bad (started 2008)
Parks and Rec (started 2009)
The Office (started 2005)
30 Rock (started 2006)
Mad Men (2007)
Severance (new!)
Ted Lasso (only the first season)
So other than Ted Lasso and Severance, my list is entirely things that were already running by 2010 (and some would say peaked by then).
The only shows I'm currently watching are Fallout (I'm only two episodes into season 1) and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms--both seem fun so far.
My list of television shows that are insultingly, mindnumbingly, subject-destroyingly bad:
Star Trek Discovery
Star Trek Picard
Wheel of Time
Rings of Power
Frustrating for me. I was always primarily a book reader as opposed to a comic book / movie consumer as a kid. I would have killed for a Wheel of Time TV show, and it was just so bad. Rings of Power, ditto. More Star Trek tv, ditto. I did like Game of Thrones for a couple of seasons, but I quit watching so I wouldn't get book spoilers (though that's probably moot anyway!)
I guess it's just an Elo score, though I'm not clear why they all caps it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system
No it didn't. The last 15 years have arguably been the high point of TV.
What would you say is the best TV of the last 15 years?
Meta, for instance, just signed a 6 billion dollar contract with Corning for glass for fiber optic cables.
You got it in one, NeXTStep provided a dock on the right side which grew from the top right corner down. This put the menu in always the same place. This only makes MORE sense in the age of wide screen displays but Apple ruined it when they made it into OSX. You can put it back where it belongs but I believe it requires plist editing, at least it did last time I did it. But that was a lot of versions ago, back when they still called it Mac OS X.
System Preferences > Dock > Position on screen.
It doesn't latch to the top right, but it's centered on the right.
AFAIK, it's always been this way in OSX (I've been running OSX/macOS since 10.2).
The equivalent native Mac function is that the Apple menu is always top-left corner, so you move your mouse to the very corner of the screen, and that's clickable. That's Mac Human Interface Guidelines going back decades, There was a kerfluffle at some point because one revision of OSX made it so the very top-left corner was not clickable. That got reverted.
Personally, I've never liked bars on the left or right. But, that's just like my opinion, man.
Mac Minis are solid at running models locally.
I have four kids. I have a very good income, my wife works part time, we own own a nice house with a yard (that has probably tripled or quadruple in cost since we bought it...adding another wrinkle to the mix), my kids attend public schools (both charter and traditional), and we live in an area that, at least until recently, has been lower cost. It's still not easy!
My wife and I got started with our family later than some but earlier than many--after grad school and a couple of years in full-time employment but still in our 20s. It would be much harder had we waited until our 30s to start having kids.
There's immense pressure to have all of your kids participate in sports, clubs, tutoring, music, etc. Many of these are very costly. My kids are mostly a chip off the 'ole block and suck at sports, so that's been a big time and expense saver, but for kids who participate in higher levels of athletics, even at the middle school level, you are looking at multiple thousands of dollars per year per sport per kid and many, many hours per week. It's crazy! Toss on piano lessons, summer camps, daycare/childcare if needed, and all the "extras" add up very, very fast.
Add up preschool and K-12 private schools, which many people feel they must, and you can be paying 15k - 40k per kid per year.
A couple of years ago we were on a family trip to Boston and we popped into a coffee shop. A woman came up to me and said "Three kids?! Wow, it's like the old days. How do you afford that? Are you a crypto bro?" (I am not!)
Similarly, we were on a trip to Italy and multiple people--probably at least 10 over the course of a week--came up to us and said something along the lines of "It's so great to see a big family. I was part of a big family. I would love to have more kids [or any kids at all] but it is so expensive!"
My wife and I both knew we wanted kids and we're very family oriented. Giving up socializing, going out drinking, going to costly sports and other events, was not a problem for us! We also have family nearby, which is another lifesaver. If we didn't have the money, the family, and most importantly the desire, we never would have been able to have a large family.
I completely agree with you regarding subsidies. It takes a lot to move the needle. A thousand bucks here or there is just not going to move the needle.
The idea of neural networks was studied in the 1980s
The idea of neural networks goes back farther than that and originated in pure mathematics. In the computer arena, perceptrons go back to the 1950s. We trained a neural network for identifying handwritten single digits as a simple project in my (only) AI class ~25 years ago. This was nothing special.
One of the themes we keep seeing is that "large" networks behave differently from small networks, and emergent behaviors appear at various points. We don't know why (maybe people smarter and more informed than I am have some clues)
Despite the term "AI winter" which is really more about public impressions (and funding), AI progress has been very steady since the birth of computers. I would suspect it has followed Moore's Law pretty closely up until very recently.
I don't think that's it. Pruning of search spaces has been part of AI since..AI has existed. Generally, pruning and other search methods like A* (again going back decades) are not simply random, but heuristically driven. I don't think you can consider LLMs to work at "random" due to their training and guide rails, nor are they generating infinite solutions and pruning them down.
For the end user, the best description I have heard is to think about LLMs as excellent natural language parsers with strong pattern matching abilities. Discussion about "AGI" or "what intelligence actually is" can go off the rails rather quickly. Sticking to parsing and pattern matching is a pretty reasonable use case. Pattern matching between massive data sets that are too large for humans or other manually programmed methods to do effectively seem like a valid and reasonable use to me.
So, the new student for "is it real artificial intelligence" is winning a Fields Medal? Anything less than that is unimpressive? According to Wikipedia, that's 64 people total.
I *think* gweihir is sincere in his anti-AI and anti-LLM beliefs, but I do have a level of uncertainty as to whether or not he's just running a multi-year long trolling operation.
Like the entire point of a D&D adventure is that you are collectively telling a story. If you let the AI in to tell the story, then it's no longer your story.
Star Trek has for decades portrayed "holonovels" as things that are kind of a mix of novels and video games. A human is behind the idea, the writing, the story, and many of the plot beats. The indivduals characters in the holodeck are AI, but they're also programmed to have certain personalities, goals, behaviors, etc. (See, e.g., Picard and his Dixon Hill holonovels, Tuvok's mutiny holonovel on Voyager, the holonovels that Bashir and O'Brien play through together on DS9, etc.)
People go into the holodeck to experience the holonovel. There are series of holonovels. We see some characters going through the same holonovel multiple times to learn the secrets and to see what else might happen.
Now, this is obviously fictional technology, but as a thought experiment, in this science fiction scenario, would you say that the author of a Holonovel is NOT the author because some of the the individual characters in the story are computer generated and have a degree of freedom within the story?
(I'm totally fine with Warhammer banning AI in their products. I also personally think one can use LLM and other AI tools without losing your humanity.)
If you're in the United States at least, the existence of neighborhood grocers, bakers, or butchers, is
There's no longer much of a tradition of local bakers or butchers, though quite a few grocery stores have pretty decent butchers attached. I do most of my shopping at coop grocery store with a butcher (though I'm told "meat cutter" is the preferred term today) who I'm on a first name basis with, and I'm not going to say anything bad about it, other than the cost! They get fresh baked goods from a few local bakeries and another local coop grocer that also specializes in baked goods and other prepared foods.
What would I say about Costco? They have good price on gas. I will often buy 20+ lbs of flour, big bags of sugar, etc there. The butchers at Costco are quite good, they have a very good and wide meat selection, they will custom cut things for you, and they often have good sales. They also often have great prices on electronics, computers, video games and system, etc., and Costco is very well known for their very generous returns policy. I very rarely buy any prepared foods from grocery stores, but Costco does have a taco tray that's pretty tasty, affordable rotisserie chickens, etc. I'm fortunate to be able to cook large meals for my family most days, but if my circumstances were different, I'd feel pretty good about eating food from Costco.
I get feeling grumpy about Costco as a kind of icon of American mass consumerism, but compared to most of the other big box stores (Walmart, Target, Sam's Club, etc.) Costco is my personal favorite for quality.
"Open the pod bay doors, HAL." -- Dave Bowman, 2001
