You know what's wild? Not ever having heard of him, I can find out who he is and how this relates to the conversation in milliseconds.
For others' benefit:
"Kurt Vonnegut explored themes of humans being observed by extraterrestrial beings in a zoo-like setting in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. ...
While this scenario involves humans being placed in a zoo by aliens, it does not specifically depict artificial intelligence (AI) as the captors. However, Vonnegut did address the impact of automation and machines on human society in his debut novel, Player Piano."
Amazing times we live in. Strange and scary, but also amazing.
I agree the multimodal stuff is amazing. I'm seriously impressed with the new Gemini 2.0 family of models and can't wait until the full multimodal capabilities are in general release.
In terms of the HeyGen vid, it's passable, but that was something I literally whipped up in 10 minutes. You can make ones that are much, much better if you invest in creating better training material. The voice and video model in this case only used the one 3-minute source video.
Funny you mention the "people zoo" thing. That's actually part of a sci-fi story I've been trying to write since I was in my teens. Roughed out here: https://youtu.be/2KLdaVs_ugw
I've quit caffeine several times on and off, but overall I think that a small amount of caffeine does more for mental acuity than none at all, even considering sleep quality.
But it's really easy to overdo. And really easy to keep ramping up your dose as your body adjusts.
If you just want to _reduce_ your caffeine intake, I found that the easiest way is to pre-mix different ratios of regular and decaf in a container and use that. You can make 50:50 or 25:75 regular:decaf and easily taper off your intake (especially towards the afternoon/evening) while still enjoying a nice cup of coffee :)
As a software developer and manager of software development projects, I wouldn't say that software quality has increased significantly since I started working professionally in the industry (1997).
As mentioned elsewhere, web apps frequently "crash" (ie. fatal JS error) and have strange behavior.
And those bugs are often platform/browser/version-specific so very difficult to fix.
Agreed. I used Office XP (2002) until... I think about 2013 or so where I started running into incompatibility problems that just couldn't be resolved no matter what I tried.
This is true. Except that now the "desktop" apps are even worse!
Now they've taken web apps and packaged them up to run their own web server and browser locally with even more abstraction layers that chew through your system resources.
Yeah, it probably doesn't really help the situation when you build several layers of abstraction in an interpreted language that runs in a virtual space on a virtual machine using another abstraction layer running on virtual cores that go through complex OS layers that somehow eventually possibly map to real hardware.
That's the type of example I've come across all too frequently. Software that's 5-10 years old, has all the same functionality, uses a fraction of the resources, and is often "better" in several ways.
Older versions of Android Facebook seem massively faster and use a fraction of the RAM while providing (nearly?) the same functions and features.
This is all very true, but I feel like we (as users) haven't really gained proportionally compared to the increase in computing power and storage.
For example IDEs: Visual Studio in 2017 is certainly better than Visual Studio in 1997, but do those advancements really justify the exponential growth in hardware requirements?
How'd we get so little usable functionality increase for such a massive increase in size/complexity?
So I decided to put the question to 3 of the most advanced AIs I have access to using their “reasoning” models.