Hallucination exists but is massively exaggerated in popular discourse about AI. The worst examples of all time are paraded and amplified, meanwhile people use these tools successfully every day. I’ve spot checked results and not ever really gone wrong. I do prefer the tools that provide links to their sources though.

Mm. Siri doesn’t do information lookups in the sense that I mean. It resorts to “here’s something I found on the web” very very quickly, and that’s not very helpful.

If you hit every goal you set, you aren’t attempting enough.

A while ago I set up a Siri shortcut that opens ChatGPT in voice mode. Now I can just say “hey siri, ask the demon” and in a moment start talking to ChatGPT with no further commands and zero buttons pressed throughout. It answers in voice mode.

This is pretty useful for things like doing units conversions while my hands are sticky during cooking, or just doing simple information lookups while my hands are busy. I use ChatGPT responsibly, never trusting it for things that aren’t one-dimensional information retrievals and summarization. It works great for me for like 50-60% of the things I used to Google. Internet search is, once again, just for finding websites, like it should be.

What’s my point? We don’t need Siri Apple Intelligence to ship. There’s already something better. And it runs on my iPhone 14, which isn’t even compatible with Apple Flatulence.

Yes. He took too much inspiration from Stanford University’s “Stanley” winning the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005. This was an early completion to build viable autonomous vehicles. Most of them looked like tanks covered in radar dishes but Stanford wound up taking home the gold with just an SUV with cameras on it.

It was an impressive achievement in computer vision, and the LiDAR-encrusted vehicles wound up looking like over-complex dinosaurs. There’s a great documentary about it narrated by John Lithgow (who, throughout it, pronounces the word robot as “ro-butt”). Elon watched it, made up his mind, and like a moron, hasn’t changed it in 20 years. I’m almost Musk’s age so I know how the years speed up as we go on. He probably thinks about the Stanford win as something that happened relatively recently. Especially with his mind on - ahem - other things, he’s not keeping up with recent developments out in the real world.

Rober just made Musk look like the absolute tool he is. And I’m a little worried that we may see people out there staging real world versions of this somehow with actual dangerous obstacles, not a cartoonish foam wall.

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Elon is getting slapped by the invisible hand.

You can blow that exact point up pretty large. The MAGA verse is a parasite on the rest of the US. I would love to see them try to stand on their own as an independent nation. It would be Texas + a bunch of little shithole countries gathered around its skirts. They wouldn’t have the economic wherewithal to GDP their way out of a wet paper bag.

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Interesting copyright question: if I own a copy of a book, can I feed it to a local AI installation for personal use?

Can a library train a local AI installation on everything it has and then allow use of that on their library computers? <— this one could breathe new life into libraries

Honestly I think they suffer a little from early-mover disadvantage.

“Cheap Chinese” and all the associations that come with that is a little reductive in this case. Roborock vacuums are not actually cheap - they are extraordinarily well-made, featureful, and a good value compared to iRobot.

Decades ago, iRobot probably spent millions in R&D just to arrive at navigation algorithms that were worse than what you can get with open-source libraries today. They also spent the marketing dollars to convince people these robots were safe and effective. They weren’t always, so there were some ups and downs in that.

Nowadays the supporting technologies are all much more advanced (and cheaper) and the market for these robots has been created already and is very robust. Companies like Roborock just have to come in and build a good product and they’ll see much faster returns than iRobot did for all those years. They can go straight to lidar, which was probably prohibitive for iRobot for many years, leading iRobot to invest heavily in other technologies which are now a generation behind.

So in addition to their decades of tech legacy. iRobot is burdened with the expectations of longtime investors who want a big cashout, just as they are getting eaten alive by all this new competition. They pinned their hopes on a big exit and are now holding the bag. It’s not surprising that this all left them in trouble.

setting up companies just to be bought by mega corps

iRobot was originally founded all the way back in 1990 and have sold quite a lot of Roomba vacuums, advancing innovation in home automation along the way. I don’t think anyone can ever say that they set up this company for a quick flip corpo pump and dump.

I take this as a sign that it genuinely still works to block ads and hasn’t sold out and become malware like those others that used to be popular.

I’d like to see more options out there. But there are reasons it could be difficult. I’ve been a software dev for 25 years and we’ve had take our software from local installs to web services, then mobile web services or responsive interfaces for all screen sizes. Then mobile APPs came along… and we do have to decide which devices and screen sizes we’re going to support. It’s hard to justify spending 20% more time so that you can support 2% more people. And for my app anyway that’s how many tablet users we have. 2%. So we’ve never done tablets, period. If we had to support some phones that were 3x the size of others, that would be kinda hard too, and we’ll always choose to spend the bulk of our time where the bulk of our users are.

Just a real answer. Supporting different screen sizes isn’t free.

It’s not even required that apartment buildings have laundry services at all. There are commercial storefront laundromats in the US which serve as the ground floor for where people do their laundry. Until landlords are required to provide laundry, it will be hard to legislate what payment forms they must accept.

“Free trade” means letting everyone do what they’re best at and then exchange the goods they produce. This is so that everybody is focused on what works best in their country, everything is done as well and as cheaply as possible. However this makes no guarantee about any one country’s ability, at the end of the day, to stand alone without dependencies on others for vital goods. In fact if anything it works against that.

I don’t know why Trump talks about globalism as some Democrat thing. It’s his own party that has been driving for free trade since forever.