So the Chinese are impersonating US immigration officials, who are themselves impersonating NYC police for raids on Columbia university. I feel like this is turning into a "turtles all the way down" situation.
Has anyone tried Amazon's pathetic chatbot, Rufus, which only exists because they block other chatbots from accessing Amazon's catalog? It's pathetic and frequently factually wrong on the only dataset which it should be an expert at - Amazon itself.
Given that ChatGPT is going to start advertising, this seems like a logical move. It gets rid of the Rufus problem and is in line with OpenAI's strategy.
My only question is whether this is another circular deal where no money is actually changing hands.
If you get rid of all the premium seats, 100% of those people aren't going to be jammed into crappy economy seats. They'll look for other, likely more inefficient, ways to travel and they will all land on private aviation. The trend is going that way already.
Plus consider the economics, most airlines make a significant amount of their money from premium passengers. No way they'll go for this either.
Also, and highly relevant from an ancient @GSElevator Twitter joke:
Junior: Have you seen that new all-business-class airline thatâ(TM)s launching? It looks pretty great.
MD: Why would I want to fly that?
Junior: Well, everyone on the plane is in Business Class, so it's a better experience.
MD: Exactly. If everyone is in Business Class, then I'm in Coach. Where do I sit to show I'm better than you?
What is it with fridge-makers that they feel that every new technology must somehow be shoe-horned in to fridges?
When I think of a fridge, it's a cool and cold place to store food (and batteries!) and not a place for technology.
Having worked on my out-of-warranty LG fridge recently, I was truly shocked in the shoddy, low-quality design and cheap parts being used. For a $1600 "normal" fridge.
I feel like this stuff is a distraction away from what a rip-off fridges really are.
FTFA:
"Some industry executives say that the more conservative hiring practices are in anticipation of productivity gains from AI, not because those gains are necessarily yet being realised."
"Clients are quite legitimately asking, what are you doing?" said Rob Hornby, co-chief executive of the consulting firm AlixPartners. "That's become a new credentialisation, to explain how you are applying AI to your firm."
So my take on this is that it's a win-win, pay fewer people less and then use that savings to attract new clients by showing that AI will cut costs. And the best part and final win? You don't need any actual AI!
There's a big difference between New Zealand/Iceland and the UK: you can easily drive out of the UK, either to the republic of Ireland or to mainland Europe. You can't do that in either of those other examples.
I get the idea of charging for road use by mile within the UK but how is this going to take into account distance driven outside the UK?
Just counting miles on an odometer ignores miles driven on roads that aren't in the UK and therefore shouldn't be taxable - the same as if you put petrol in your car in France and drove it there - if the intent really is to actually fund roads.
Something about this seems cynical and I get the sense that it's just a tax-grab.
I have Octopus Energy as my provider (in the UK you can pick your energy provider for gas, electricity or both) and because I have a real-time smart meter, every so often they give 1 hour free electricity "fill your boots" periods. They send an email out a few days before, you click a button to sign up, then on the day and time you can use as much electricity as you can for no cost. I imagine this is to offset supply and demand issues within the grid. It's a cute perk but doesn't really save much money overall.
Separately, I also have an electric car and they offer cheap electricity (about 1/4 the price) if you charge at night and let their systems control the charging process. This is a much more valuable perk and is likely supply/demand balancing for them as well.
I live in Panama and there is a HUGE Chinese car presence here. Every day I see more and more of them on the road, as they are cheap and cheerful with appealing styles for not a lot of money.
However. what I don't see much of is *electric* Chinese cars. The models sold here all seem to have a virtually identical 2 litre single turbo petrol engine. There are a few electric models available but they're not making much of a market impact - unsurprising because there is very limited charging infrastructure here and most people live in apartment buildings without the ability to install a charger at home.
Personal anecdote, I test drove the Jettour T2 because I thought it was a cool design from a distance. The spec sheet is impressive too for not a lot of money. But the actual experience let me down: that single turbo petrol engine is so laggy (think 80s turbo cars) that I couldn't possibly live with it. And while the design is cool, the materials quality is not up to the standards of other modern cars. Neat to look at though and I see lots on the road.
I'm curious how well these things are going to hold up over time in this very harsh environment with high heat, torrential rain, and rough roads. For now, I'm sticking to my 17 year old Toyota FJ Cruiser which is the most dependable car I've ever owned.
When GTA 3 came out, I was living in a nice area of London and I had a friend visit from North America. He had plans to see all the sights and do all the things but in the end we sat in my basement and played GTA for a week straight. No regrets on either of our parts.
There's a wonderful (British) book about this exact sort of thing only with people not AIs all doing pointless tasks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Companies love to *announce* that they will accept crypto at some point in the future, only to quietly either kill the project or to walk back the idea. Biggest and most obvious example, Tesla (https://apnews.com/article/tesla-buys-billion-bitcoin-061817c6795e75d1c3c9e9d6cfc4a911, "soon" in 2021)
But even the EFF walked back its Bitcoin donations back in 2011 (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/06/eff-and-bitcoin).
There are many others. It makes a good PR but is hard to operationally implement from a treasury and payments processing point of view. So I don't see how this is any different, especially given that airlines are extremely focused on cash management due to their razor-thin margins.
I posted below and I forgot to mention this use case - it's great for learning just about anything. It's infinitely patient and answers any stupid question I might have. It also very readily identifies when I'm outright wrong about something and corrects me.
I've surprised myself with some of the things I've been able to do with AI, particularly in the last few months. There are definitely limits - I'll give examples below - but from the mostly fun projects I've done, it's been quite enlightening. I've used both Ollama and the public AI's, mostly Gemini.
1. Code a daily random Wordle word email. This has been really helpful. I run a few "Wordle groups" where we all start with the same word. Before I had to use a website that picked a random word which was usually nonsense and I had to refresh until I got something useful. I had a local Ollama AI write me some database-driven Python scripts, one that scrapes the past words and stores them in the database and another that picks a random word from those remaining and sends a nicely formatted HTML email to me that I can share with the groups. Saves me a ton of time although there was a lot of testing and rework until it got it right. I didn't write a single line of code, on purpose. It's been running for over 6 months every day with no faults.
2. Build a simple circuit. I had Gemini build me a circuit with a power regulator, transistors, resistors, LEDs and a very specific fluid level sensor. It worked first try. What really surprised me was the questions it asked before it started building the actual circuit - it didn't make assumptions.
3. Build a test jig circuit. Gemini used an Arduino and designed a test jig for some hardware I wanted to test, with pull-up resistors and all the code required to display on a simple 16 character LCD and read the input from the device itself. The big problem with this project was that it used a lookup table for about 100 values and Gemini simply couldn't keep those numbers straight. I had to integrate that myself.
4. Write an AI torture chamber (for itself!) based on this https://youtu.be/7fNYj0EXxMs?s... crazy video. I was intrigued by this artist's vision so I had Ollama write code to basically have an AI be born, grow up learning from real news stories, get sick and eventually die leaving a final deathbed summary of its life. Dark stuff I know, but really fascinating. I used a model which had its limits removed so it was free to do anything. The nutty thing was that the "coding AI" gave lots of tips on how to make the "living AI" suffer and was totally on board with the whole thing. I am slightly concerned about that last part.
5. Write a screenplay. I loved The Black Hole (campy, Disney Sci Fi) as a kid and I wondered what a prequel to it would have been like. I wrote out what I thought the plot outline would be and then had Gemini write me an entire screenplay. It wasn't bad, certainly no worse than the original. Not gonna win any awards but now I know what that movie could have been about. Spoiler, Dr Hans Reinhardt is not a good guy.
6. Investigate an under-reported fraud. This my favorite use case. I used Gemini to gather sources, many really hard to find, about a crazy London-based fraudster who ran a FX trading firm. Then I fed those sources into NotebookLM and had it generate a research report and a podcast, the latter of which was actually compelling. This took a bit of work on my part.
7. Take a bunch of procedure documents from my business and look for weaknesses and potential regulatory issues. This worked OK but the funniest part was getting a podcast made from them. Literally the most boring podcast I've ever heard although I laughed quite a bit as the "hosts" tried to make this stuff sound interesting.
8. Making a podcast about my Dad's life. My Dad did Storyworth and we self-published his book at the end. I fed that book into NotebookLM again and got a really fun podcast made from it.
So yeah, these are actually helpful things. In addition, I've been using the public AIs to give me summaries of daily news stories, do search-engine type things, and occasionally get a deep dive on something I wrote to check it or just to hear a podcast about it. The circuit design stuff really surprised me, particularly where the Arduino coding intersected with it. But what I took away most from all these (and other) projects is that it makes a really good assistant that, while you don't give it free rein to do everything, if you give it enough "management", it can produce useful products - with limitations.
So yes, I do get use out of it.
Does the author mean to say that there will be quiet chaos, or do they mean to say that by making a quiet move, chaos will ensue?
Personally I like the concept of quiet chaos. Also would make a great metal band name.
Here's a quiz if you want to see your semicolon skills for yourself. Quite humbling.
All the simple programs have been written.
