I hear that, but we are so dependent on network connectivity for commerce (and entertainment) here that there would be riots from a different subset of the population if they turned that off.

You can harass brown people and murder activists here, but if you turn off the TikTok spigot, disable access to finance, or frankly fuckin' DoorDash or Uber, people are going to have a meltdown. Modern life here just grinds to a halt without data services.

You're thinking nationally. Think smaller.

It's not tremendously hard to imagine the internet being selectively shut down in a state or city.

Look at the events of the past week. Now imagine the Insurrection Act being invoked in Minnesota, and the state's internet is cut off as Governor Walz's helicopter flees to Canada to avoid being arrested.

If you can't imagine that, remember that nobody could imagine COVID lockdown, either. We've shut down the national air system twice in the last 25 years. Unimaginable in 1999. Yet, here we are.

If I can build better/faster with reasonably equal quality, I'll trade off the joy of programming for the joy of more building, of more high level problem solving and thinking, etc.

I've also seen the opposite: those that derive more joy from the programming and the cool engineering than from the product. And you see the opposite behavior from them, of course--such as selecting a solution that's cool and novel to build, rather than the simple, boring, but better alternative.

I often find this type of engineer rather frustrating to work with, and coincidentally, they seem to be the most anti-AI type I've encountered.

Its always been the case that engineers come in many flavors, some more and some less business-inclined. The difference with AI imo is that it will (or already is) putting its trillion-dollar finger on the scale, such that there is less patience and space for people like me, and more for people like you.

I get that, but I do witness a lot of compassion and help directed to homeless folks. However, even if they're regularly gifted by strangers, it's likely not enough to materially change their situation.

I would suggest that the staggering efficacy of panhandling does demonstrate how remarkably willing strangers are willing to help a rough looking homeless person on a street. And beyond that, there are a lot of invisible homeless (the ones not struggling with mental health or drug issues) that remain off the streets because people in their community will give them a few days on a couch here or there, or help fix their car, give them a place to park a trailer, etc.

In my neighborhood, there's a homeless man that lives in a camper trailer in the back yard of some neighbors. They just met him one day and offered him a stable piece of land to be and help him out as they can. He comes around asking us neighbors for lawn care work and such to earn some money, which is how I learned about the situation.

When I've looked at the data, the majority of homeless people have been homeless less than 12 months. This means that the majority of homeless people who benefit from support will use it to get out of that situation quickly. And for the most part, if you give help it will be immediately and materially useful.

SOTA improvements have been coming from additional inference due to reasoning tokens and not just increasing model size. Their comment makes plenty of sense.

Someone gambling on human lives is getting paid no matter what, though.

Here's a use case for me last week: I'm re-organizing my bathroom sink/vanity, and I want a few counter top organizers to keep things neat and tidy. I have a low mirror, low medicine cabinets, and generally tight spaces to work with and want to maximize storage.

So, I have a 10" wide space and I can't have anything over 16". I want to find a drawer organizer as close to 16" tall without going over, and as close to 10" without going over. Given a choice between the two, I want to bias for more height.

Go to Google or Amazon and try finding that. You're going to be trying permutations of 10x16 and 9x16 and so on, and digging through pages looking for something approximate.

In theory maybe there's some filter options on Amazon that might work, but they're usually incomplete, wrong, or absent. It's a terrible experience even when it's supported.

ChatGPT (or even Amazon's kind of janky Rufus) immediately finds top near-perfect matches for me to choose from. 15-20 minutes of aggravating digging turned into 90s of letting ChatGPT think and search while I was off grabbing a coffee.

True, LLMs are quite good in things where I have limited knowledge. It shortens exploration phase considerably. Before, I would need to go to web pages, compare parameters (somewhere), think out why this, not that.

Is that worth it to you? Perhaps not. But plenty of us pay similar amounts of money for software subscriptions related to productivity, so it's not especially outlandish compared to paying for Standard Notes, Todoist, etc.

When no one’s looking obviously.

Not sure how that would work with the ring. Either lots of small similar notes. Or a dead battery.

But when you're having a conversation with someone and they ask you to pick up milk from the store later, or you're running to the bus and want to just jot down an idea you had briefly, and other moments where the friction is higher...then this seems like the solution.