Yeah, I have a never ending need of things I could easily make myself I I could set aside 7-10 hours to plan it out, develop and troubleshoot but are also low priority enough that they sit on the back burner perpetually.
Now these things are being made. I can justify spending 5-10 minutes on something without being upset if AI can't solve the problem yet.
And if not, I'll try again in 6 months. These aren't time sensitive problems to begin with or they wouldn't be rotting on the back burner in the first place.
> In the story the engineers weren't designing a tool well-suited for the customers, but for whatever abstract scenarios they had in their head.
A joke exists about how developers will never be displaced by AI because that would require clients and/or project managers to accurately describe what they want the AI to build. On one hand that is extremely egotistical of developers. On the other it is also factual.
To my understanding of the story the developers had designed what was being communicated to them by someone who described what customers asked for and not what the customers actually wanted or needed. Nothing to do with what the engineers thought customers wanted and everything to do with what project managers had expressed to the engineers about what customers wanted. Speaking with the customers directly gave them a better idea of what was actually being asked for. So they built that instead.
My takeaway from the story is to fire the project manager. Not to make devs call clients.
If a user holds an ice cream cone upside-down and their ice cream falls to the floor, do you blame the user for not holding their ice cream cone upright or the creator of the ice cream cone for a stupid design that allows the ice cream to so easily fall out of the ice cream holding device and onto the floor?
I find far more often that bad UX is the result of someone trying to use a tool for something it wasn't designed for. They might even clob several different tools together in an unholy abomination to get it to do what they actually want instead of having a tool built to do precisely what they want (and once that tool has been built - people will inevitably misuse it to do things other than what it was designed for and then complain about its poor UX for doing those things).
Yes, but none of that is truly unique. The odds of a doppleganger sharing my name are astronomically slim but my looks, voice, interests, personality, etc. are not truly unique to me.
For an example, what of voice impersonators? Sounding like Morgan Freeman is not unique to Morgan Freeman. What if a soundalike legally changes their name to Morgan Freeman? What if a lookalike changes their name?
I'm familiar with the existence of such laws but less so with how they are enforced or how they can even be enforced at all. The laws have never made that much sense to me.
The argument of likeness seems odd to me because there are at least a dozen people who might look almost exactly like you who are alive somewhere in the world.
What if I give explicit permission to use my likeness but my lookalike demands it can't be used? We're both dead. Do my wishes not get respected because someone who looks like they could be my identical twin had other wishes? Whoever's estate has the deeper pockets?
See photography by François Brunelle. The similarities went past appearances too. Many of the stranger dopplegangers had similar hobbies and even similar personalities. So if an AI recreation looks like me, acts like me, and has the same hobbies as me that means nothing unless someone is trying to claim it is me (rather my likeness).
Very useful for flagging any O(n^2) that make assumptions about the size of N because N is not expected to exceed a certain size. Especially for when N inevitably exceeds that size.
Documenting it saves the poor dev doing profiling in the future a bit of effort so they can come up with the better solution that you failed to come up with when writing the code.
Often times code has to be written and committed and I don't have the time nor the brains to come up with a novel solution that solves a future performance issue that is not yet and is not expected to ever become a performance issue.
Rust is like walking across a mine field with all the mines flagged for you. You can dig up the mine and remove the flags over time. Or at least know to avoid stepping carelessly around them.
In C you only see the flags people know of or remembered to plant. There's an awful lot of mines left unflagged and sometimes you step on them.
It's very obvious to me which would be more safe and I find myself questioning why it is isn't so obvious to others.
I'm a Memrise beta member w/ lifetime premium access for my contributions to the site in its early days. I cannot recommend anyone use Memrise for anything nowadays it has been so heavily enshittified. In fact, I recommend against using it in favor of Anki (Memrise's biggest strength over Anki in the early days was the community mnemonics and courses (Anki equivalent "community decks") - none of which really exist in any way today).
I tried following the modern Japanese track on Memrise and was appalled at how bad it is nowadays.
I would greatly appreciate if you engaged with what I wrote and not what you think I wrote if you're going to make the bold claim that I'm not engaging in good faith.
Absolutely nowhere did I equate writing a book to grooming. I equated selling the book in the greater context that "providing children with potentially harmful/dangerous information should be illegal because it grooms them to commit harmful actions to themselves or others" and this context would carry the implications that by "selling" I am referring particularly to "selling it to children" since "providing children with potentially harmful/dangerous information should be illegal because it grooms them to commit harmful actions to themselves or others". With my argument being would it be criminal for an AI but not for a human?
So to clarify the argument: Writing the book is fine. Selling the book to adults is fine. Adults reading the book is fine. But if providing dangerous information to children should be made illegal - how would selling such a book to a child not be considered illegal? Because it was written by a human and not an AI?
After wasting the better part of a decade on speed reading as a teen and using speed reading tools I can only find myself to agree with them. Remove multiple-choice questions and ask questions about the material and speed readers comprehension crumbles apart to such a degree it is difficult to call what they do to be "reading".
There are quite a number of studies on this, but I'll reference a blog that does all the referencing for me [0] since their experience and thirst for knowledge that led them to later be an advocate against - rather than an advocate for - speed reading is basically a 1:1 match of my own.
500-600 WPM is the upper limits, 99.99% of people claiming otherwise are bullshitting, I always leave that 0.01% because some people are literally just built different and are truly one-of-a-kind (or one-of-maybe-a-dozen people on Earth). Anyone claiming such speeds is going to be under a lot of scrutiny the same way I'd be skeptical of anyone else claiming to be in the top 0.01% of anything. If someone tells me they're a Top 10 Challenger ranked League of Legends player I'm not just going to take their word for it without some solid evidence.
So selling the Anarchists Cookbook is illegal? Being a YouTuber targeting teens for <extreme political positions> is illegal? This is honestly news to me given how many political YouTubers there are who are apparently criminals?
Given some of the examples I'm not so sure a human would be charged for saying the same exact things the AI has said. Without an actual push to suggest violence and even that's difficult to prove in cases where it does happen (eg. The cases where people pressured others into suicide or convinced them to murder)
People can give children terrible information too and steer/groom them in harmful directions. So why stop there at "AI" or poorly defined "algorithms"?
The only content children should see is state-approved content to ensure they are only ever steered in the correct, beneficial manner to society instead of a harmful one. Anyone found trying to show minors unapproved content should be imprisoned as they are harmful to a safe society.
It's such a common aspect of languages too that many people don't even realize when they're doing it in their native language!
People get lazy - especially natives who don't get confused because it's how most natives will talk. For example, every word ending in "ing" in your comment could drop the "g" sound when spoken. Plenty of English speakers do that when speakin' and not many people would think anythin' of it until a frustrated person learnin' English asks why nobody is pronouncin' the endin' "g". Droppin', changin', and blendin' sounds is why learning a language by listenin' to natives speakin' is so important instead of crammin' textbooks all day.
Some might consider this a regional thing/accent and I'd argue that it both is and isn't. To the extent I tried to illustrate it would likely get seen as an accent but the occasional droppin' of it is somethin' I've heard across so many different English accents that I'd argue it isn't only an accent thing.
In the US it's mostly associated with a Southern accent and in England it would be the English Midlands like Brummie or Mancunian.
Every now and again a site exists that has a massive community, tons of resources, ways to speak with other learners, ways to meet language exchange partners, and are greatly successful. Then all of that gets gutted for what is essentially a worse version of Anki but for the web when the company runs out of funding and has to start turning a profit somehow. This burns the community and the people providing most of the value move elsewhere.
It's happened to italki (now iKnow), Memrise, DuoLingo, and a few sites that were so short-lived I no longer remember what they were called.
My takeaway is that language learning apps are a lot like dating apps. They profit less if people actually learn a language and so can't be too good at their job because they'll bleed users faster than they can gain them - similar to dating apps. It needs to work just well enough that users are tricked into believing it is working but not so well that it actually works for most people.
It seems like the ETA before enshittification begins is about 2~3 years. If you're an early enough adopter you might actually benefit from it but you have to be willing to jump ship and not fall for the engagement/gamification tactics that keep you sticking around after it has stopped providing any value.
I spent way too long 'watering my garden' on Memrise before I looked around and noticed all of the once useful community-providing mnemonics were gone, you couldn't correct bad definitions anymore, it was difficult to actually speak to anyone else in the community (unless you could find them on the forums), and eventually I stopped using it altogether. The community I had signed up for and was a huge part of Memrise's success no longer existed.
Anki for vocabulary building, Ryan Estrada's comic for learning to read Hangul (https://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/) as it sticks true to its promise. Over 8 years ago I spent 15 minutes learning how to 'read' Hangul. To this day I can still slowly sound things out and, at the least, read people's names. It truly is a fantastic writing system although I do sometimes struggle with which vowel is which that's 100% an issue of only having spent 15 minutes learning.
Unfortunately I can't help much with learning grammar as I never dove into actually learning Korean due to a dislike of how it sounds. There's the "Tae Kim Japanese Grammar"-like approach for a Korean grammar guide at: https://www.howtostudykorean.com/ although I'm not a big fan of how overly simplified (and sometimes wrong due to the simplification) Tae Kim's approach for Japanese was. So I can't attest as to whether How To Study Korean makes the same mistakes or not.
As for writing - Korean is simple enough to read/write that you can simply find any Korean news source and practice writing the sentences as you read them.
And this is how you end up with rewriting the world and spending more time rewriting dozens of existing libraries to avoid adding them as dependencies and less time working on the problem you're actually trying to solve because you're fixing the same dozen bugs that the first person already went through the trouble of fixing for you had you simply used their library instead of eschewing it and having to learn everything that they had already learned for you. Often times because the problem space is deeper than you could have known before getting into the weeds and hopefully you don't get bit by sunk cost and decide to do yourself a favor and just use a library instead of continuing to work on solving problems that aren't related to what you set out to do.
There's a balance to be struck between LeftPad scenarios and "Now there are 37 competing libraries".
The site was taken down earlier today. Mail service remained up for some time. Sent myself a test email - seems I managed to migrate most of my emails over just in time as I'm no longer getting mail.
I used cock.li since about a few months after its initial opening. It was reliable enough and I trusted Vincent had his heart in the right place.
Even if it comes back up - I have no plans to migrate anything back. I've been self-hosting my email for a few years now but never took the time to reset my email everywhere until today. I wish I started about an hour sooner than I did as there are 2 accounts now stuck in potential limbo assuming the domain doesn't get moved elsewhere or temporarily hosted so people have time to migrate away from it.
Now these things are being made. I can justify spending 5-10 minutes on something without being upset if AI can't solve the problem yet.
And if not, I'll try again in 6 months. These aren't time sensitive problems to begin with or they wouldn't be rotting on the back burner in the first place.