On a scale of zero to ten, how do you rate ads and captchas? Zero is completely neutral and harmless, and 10 is enough to spark acts of physical violence.

That seems to be a human trait. Just ask anyone about their political views, which mobile phone they have, sports teams, climate change, vaccinations, dietary preferences, gender minorities, sexual minorities, parenting styles, music genres, pineapple on pizza, medieval siege engines etc.

BTW raspberries are better than strawberries.

How do you sell new airplanes if the old ones are still fine even after crashing into a mountain? Well, mostly fine… Just scrape all the kebab and tomato sauce off the walls, and you should be good to go.

The marketing department seems to have highly inflated expectations, so I think this is mostly a marketing thing. They are painting a picture of something that doesn’t exist yet. The same thing happened with Siri and Google Assistant when they were released. People expected these tools to be capable of doing the kinds of things that modern LLMs are now beginning to approach, so the amount of disappointment was pretty brutal.

But is it a solution looking for a problem? If you need to generate pictures for a horror themed book, image AIs can get the job done properly. You don’t even need to request mutated abominations, because the AI gravitates towards those anyway. If you need to write a pointless self help book that meets the page count without conveying any actual information, LLMs are the way to go.

These are all pretty niche examples, but people should understand that all of the AIs we have today are narrow AIs. The scope is about as narrow as the tip of a torx screwdriver. Try it on a different screw and you’ll see what I mean. Use it as a hammer, and you’ll gain full understanding of the nature of this problem.

If you have exceedingly low expectations, LLMs can actually do some trivial tasks very well. If you have hardly any experience in writing or programming, an LLM will prove to be an impressive tool. If you are a professional though, you’ll notice pretty quickly that the LLM is only good for the simplest tasks, while you still need to do everything that is even a little bit demanding.

Some psychologists also use D&D for therapy purposes. It allows the patient to experience a variety of situations, explore their feelings, practice new skills etc.

I think historical re-enactments could also qualify.

This is probably the biggest problem with that idea. If you hack an ancient space probe, you’ll definitely get the appropriate bragging rights, but that’s about it.

Lots of hobby hackers would love to do it, but they don’t have the hardware for it. Some governments might have the hardware, but they just don’t care about bragging that much.

Lots actually.

Playing house (if you’re 4), larping (if you’re older), table top games, D&D, pretend play etc. Basically all sorts is children’s playing and having fun in the backyard should also qualify even though the structure can be very loose.

Well, at at least they were able to catch something, rather than nothing. Now terrorists know that you can’t just walk through with an RPG on your shoulder. However, with rates like that, you could probably sneak through just about anything through as long as you try to hide it even a little bit.

But you could test the system by trying to violate the rules and documenting the catch rate. Surely, they are already doing so to measure its effectiveness.

Fortunately, there was a simple solution: Buy a new Bugatti on the way to the party.

Meanwhile, in many other countries, education is government funded and free to all citizens. Having lots of educated people is seen as an asset, not a liability.

That’s comparable to today’s millionaire problems.

Oh no, my Bugatti isn’t blue enough for this event, so I had to drive one of my Lamborghinis instead.

Nowadays we have first world problems, but I wonder if something comparable existed 500 years ago. Maybe city problems?

Oh no, they didn’t have salmon at the fish market, so I had to buy perch instead.

Many features seem to come like 5-7 years late. Somewhere around 2016 Apple had finally added so many of the basic features to the iPhone that I could actually start considering it a realistic alternative to Android phones. Before that, there were always several serious deal breakers. Nowadays, things are actually surprisingly tolerable. It took like forever to get there, but now the phone actually does all the basic things.

Fight fire with fire. Figure out which topic he doesn’t care about, and start talking about it all the time. Like, literally all the time when he is in the vicinity.

Could be a new hobby like flying a kite or an obscure interest like the history green colors used in the textile industry. Ideally, you would pick something you can imagine yourself being passionate about. Look up some videos on how autistic people talk about their favorite topic, and you’ll get the idea.

Why would you need to summarize notifications? Usually each notification is just a short sentence, so there’s hardly anything you can do to shorten them further. Summarizing websites is far more useful though.

Consistently inconsistent. Gotta love English.

That can’t be healthy in the long run. I wonder if it makes Americans snap and go totally postal. Or maybe people just burn out and decide to jump in the nearest river.

That sounded very American. Is this a US specific problem?

why can’t you work through lunch?

Seriously, there’s something wrong with your boss or perhaps even the whole company. If you need to get stuff done during your lunch hour, you just go ahead and do it. Why should your boss care as long as you do your job during the other hours of the week.

Good post, but why post it here? There are a few wholesome themed communities that would appreciate the same words even more.