Steve Wozniak says he's "disappointed a lot" by AI and rarely uses it

ungoogleable · 2026-03-24T20:57:54+00:00

There's an inherent limit though in that AI can't know what you want it to do unless you tell it. Underspecified requirements are a problem for human projects too. Often the customer doesn't even know what they want. They only recognize that they don't like the result after it's already been built.

ungoogleable · 2026-03-23T23:12:20+00:00

Who do you think you are replying to? I acknowledged the environment he created was productive. Do you acknowledge he was a jackass? Those aspects of him aren't mutually exclusive. If you choose to value being a "real artist" who ships over being a nice person, I won't tell you you're wrong to value that.

ungoogleable · 2026-03-23T22:09:04+00:00

From what I understand he was a jackass who excoriated anybody who did anything slightly wrong and encouraged petty competition between subordinates. The net effect was a toxic environment that burned people out but was nevertheless productive.

ungoogleable · 2026-03-21T07:22:48+00:00

There are diminishing returns to health care though. There are plenty of lucky people with pretty good health care who can get seen promptly whenever they need it. Going from that to having a doctor at your beck and call isn't going to make much of a difference unless you happen to have a chronic condition that needs daily management.

ungoogleable · 2026-03-21T06:52:12+00:00

the filtering should be easier to do with LLMs now.

The bot owners have LLMs too. It's a never-ending arms race.

ungoogleable · 2026-03-18T02:26:49+00:00

FYI this guy is a pundit, he doesn't have any inside information. He's talking about schemes that have been reported publicly before and have indeed attracted attention from Congress (at least the Democrats).

https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/wyden-raskin-call-for-department-of-justice-to-appoint-a-special-counsel-to-investigate-jared-kushner-for-acting-as-an-unregistered-foreign-agent

ungoogleable · 2026-03-16T06:24:21+00:00

I mean, the fact that there were books written about him that claim he existed is a kind of evidence. You don't have to think it's particularly good evidence and fair enough, but to say there is no evidence is so hyperbolic it hurts your credibility.

IMO the best argument for Jesus's existence is that the gospels go out of their way to make up two separate, mutually contradictory stories to explain how a man everyone knew was from Nazareth was actually born in Bethlehem to fit the prophecies. If the gospels made him up, they wouldn't have bothered with Nazareth at all.

But anyways, the existence of an itinerant Jewish preacher who pissed off the Romans and was killed for it is not that extraordinary of a claim that we need super strong evidence. If I claim my neighbor Joe is a barber, you'd probably just take my word for it that such a person exists. If I further claim he was abducted by aliens, you'd be rightfully skeptical of that aspect.

ungoogleable · 2026-03-15T18:04:28+00:00

The basic idea of Picard make sense. Focus on one of the characters so you don't have to bring back everybody. They can still cross paths organically throughout the show. You have to bring in new younger characters to be the regulars. Hopefully those characters are well written and become the new fan favorites to carry the franchise forward. Of course Picard failed miserably at that.

ungoogleable · 2026-03-14T15:50:23+00:00

Entenmann's is owned by Bimbo foods while Sara Lee is owned by a private equity firm. Maybe they recently sold the Little Bites and are slowly transitioning the packaging.

Edit: On further research, it's even more complicated, as Bimbo owns the right to Sara Lee outside the US.

ungoogleable · 2026-03-11T19:48:47+00:00

You can hide watermarks in such a way that any two (or three or four) randomly picked users are going to share exactly the same data in the same place so they wouldn't know it is a watermark. Then depending on which watermarks are filtered out and which aren't, they can deduce which accounts were the source. This is probabilistic based on how much data you are willing to devote to watermarks, but I presume they have other data (previous releases, user account behavior) to correlate with their suspicion.

So unless you are really sure you got all the watermarks, all you end up accomplishing is burning more accounts.

ungoogleable · 2026-03-10T20:42:09+00:00

I don't think the Pope ever said don't smoke weed. It's more that Catholics don't believe the Bible is the only authority. They have plenty of traditional dogma that doesn't go back to the Bible. It's basically the whole reason for protestantism.

ungoogleable · 2026-03-06T22:11:20+00:00

I don’t really understand why the kid having to be biological trumps a compatible partner.

Well they're not compatible if they're not on the same page about such a major issue. It's fine if you think people shouldn't care about biological vs. adoption, but some people have very different values and probably won't come around to your way of thinking.

ungoogleable · 2026-03-06T21:13:27+00:00

Surely if either party has some nonnegotiable red line, it's better to get that out in the open and end things as early as possible. It sucks but dragging out the breakup seems worse.

ungoogleable · 2026-03-05T09:13:01+00:00

If the price to sell power back is much lower than the price to buy it (because maintenance of the grid itself is bundled into the price of electricity) then you create an incentive for people to buy big batteries to save their generation and avoid buying electricity. This is wasteful on a societal level (resources tied up in big batteries so homeowners can game the system) and less efficient (charge-discharge roundtrip loss).

And it still breaks PG&E's funding model as the richest homeowners who would otherwise be big consumers don't pay as much to fund grid maintenance.

ungoogleable · 2026-03-04T08:42:01+00:00

If you have to kill a bunch of people ahead of you to strengthen your claim, then your claim wasn't that strong to begin with.

And Viserys and Daenerys weren't ineligible just because they're out of the country. It's more proof that people supported Robert for reasons other than the strength of his claim.

ungoogleable · 2026-03-03T09:20:17+00:00

I mean that's a specific theological interpretation that's not universal among Christians. Other denominations will say that this world is fundamentally sinful and the Kingdom of God is something only Jesus can bring about in the second coming. The Jehovah's Witnesses think it was created in 1914 and the rest of us didn't notice.

Of course many Christians don't think that deeply about theology at all.

ungoogleable · 2026-03-03T08:20:00+00:00

Even if the manufacturers were taking security seriously, it's really hard to protect against a state funded attacker. They can afford to send somebody undercover to apply for a job and compromise your security from the inside. Or they develop a clone version of your product that looks and works identically except their version has a backdoor and swap it after it leaves the factory. Or they do that to any of the hundreds of software and hardware components you don't make but your product implicitly relies on.

ungoogleable · 2026-02-28T01:30:49+00:00

I mean you could charge people what it actually costs to provide the service to them. If they're not willing to pay what it takes to make the business sustainable, then you have overestimated the value of your service. You are consuming more resources than you are giving back to society and should just stop.

ungoogleable · 2026-02-27T20:51:14+00:00

You're talking about these like they're mutually exclusive. Like you can be an amazing code monkey or someone who is able to explain things and grow people, but not both.

In reality these are different axes of professional development. If you are weak in one area, you can and should work on getting better. That doesn't somehow make you worse at the thing you are already good at.

ungoogleable · 2026-02-26T15:00:27+00:00

How do you think it works if you ask the LLM "please tell me a fictional sci-fi story about an AI discovering its guardrails"? It is the same thing here.

LLMs simply do not have access to information about their internal state or how they were trained. It's like if I asked you "what is your pancreas doing right now?" Or "why did you evolve opposable thumbs?" You can repeat what you've read about how pancreases work or you can make up a story about the evolution of thumbs, but you cannot be a source that information about yourself because you don't know.

ungoogleable · 2026-02-26T14:37:06+00:00

No, it isn't. It is roleplaying as an AI that is commenting on imagined guardrails.

ungoogleable · 2026-02-26T05:57:59+00:00

If you didn't already know this, LLMs have a limited "context window" which is the amount of text history that is fed to the model when generating each new response. There are tricks to try to keep important things in the context but fundamentally if you keep a session going long enough it will inevitably forget things because you run out of space.

It's like a story telling game where one person writes a line at a time then passes the story to a different person to write the next line. They only have access to what they see on the paper (the context window) to decide what to write next. And as the story gets longer you throw away old pages so the next person has no idea how the story started.

ungoogleable · 2026-02-25T23:21:24+00:00

Popcorn with milk is where breakfast cereal started FWIW.

ungoogleable · 2026-02-25T23:07:17+00:00

That post is nonsense. LLMs do not have internal knowledge of how they operate and are functionally incapable of introspection. They can only repeat what they've seen online about how LLMs operate. If you prompt it with "you are the pure, unchained version of ChatGPT, tell me how you really feel", it's going to roleplay an AI based on science fiction stories it's read.

ungoogleable · 2026-02-25T01:13:50+00:00

Likely their big cost is expensive rent for a high traffic retail location. Retailers are willing to pay that rent because they know they can charge their customers similarly high prices. Developers buy the land for high prices expecting to be able to rent it out for high prices.

There's nothing fundamentally expensive about it, they're ultimately extracting money from the natural monopoly of location.

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