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My Galaxy S20 gallery app had a great search feature that would find any text in any picture. I take lots of screenshots and relied on that search to find them.

I got an S25 recently and when I search for "wife" it tries to find pictures with my wife in them. But before it does that it has to ask me who my wife is. There's no way to get it to search for the word "wife." (If I'm wrong, please tell me how.) Other text searches simply don't work either.

Sometimes it's the small ways in which the world is getting dumber.

Ironically, the S20 had a decent hybrid behavior of searching by either text or object that the text represents. Whatever smarter AI they replaced it with is useless.


Tell it to "always when I search for quoted text, pretend you're the Galaxy S20 gallery app"

Seems like a fairly straight forward UX fix on the engineering side: parse whether the user is searching for wife, or "wife"

Can you search for “the word ‘wife’”?

Sadly, that and different variations of it don't work either.

Ads are information. They're made up of fact and opinion. The facts are valuable. I would like to know if there's a new pizza place that opened in my town. We all, by necessity, have to buy lots of things in life, and we should know what the options are. We're also adults who can separate the fact that a pizza place exists from their biased claim that it's the best pizza.

We don't need to go overboard with calling advertising cancer. As is usually the case, we can ignore the most extremist takes. Ads are annoying more often than useful, but you can say that about lots of things in life.


Ads are to information what propaganda is to objective reporting. Informative ads used to exist, e.g. the content of the venerable Computer Shopper magazine was mostly ads and quite informative. What changed? Well, those Computer Shopper ads mostly consisted of lists of bits and parts and widgets followed by their sales price, some contact information and that's it. Not so for the blithering idiocracy which is the 'modern' advertising industry where it is all about lifestyle and image and signalling and sex and anything else except for just saying 'buy our widget for €XX.yy a piece, 10% off when buying 3 or more'. Nope, instead of an informative list of widgets and gizmos we get a diverse couple - black man, white woman - smiling happy smiles because of ${reasons} which have nothing to do with whatever they're trying to peddle. Add some bullshit about sustainability and building better worlds together and such, drape it in a rainbow flag and done, here's your ad for those ramen noodles. Oh, you're selling cars instead of noodles? No problem, we'll ask the diverse couple to eat their noodles in a parking lot. What, no noodles? Fine, let them starve in the parking lot, smiling happy smiles because of $reasons. We'll throw in an angry fool of a white man who can be told off by the kind and wise black man, that'll sell those noodles - ehhh sorry, cars. Yes, cars, or was it bathroom slippers? Doesn't matter. Here's your ad, now pay us.

This is why ads should be something you actively look for, not something that is shoved into your eyeballs on every medium conceivable.

This was my system for a long time and I eventually moved to Notesnook with success, but I bounced off so many notes apps before it. I don't know why, but the feature set had to be just right because one little thing would keep me from sticking with anything else. Plain text files are great and served me well but don't lose hope that some new option could come along and be an improvement.

Why does having different values imply intolerance?

For me it isn't much intolerance, it's more of a lack of patience for the careerists.

Working with people that love what they're doing can be very chill. Working with people angling for a promotion, taking shortcuts, one-upping the co-workers and still not pulling their weight is exhausting.

This is not a new phenomenon, in the past this kind of dev also existed. Lots of people studied CompSci but didn't want to be a "lowly developer" for long and were just making time to "become a manager". Of course they never put the work for that as well. Today it's half of the people I interview: they never got good enough to become a manager, and never become good enough to pass most interviews in the market of today.

On the other hand, I got a couple manager friends who love coding and are trying to become individual contributors, but keep getting pulled into leading projects because of their expertise.

Don't get me wrong, though, everyone wants to make money and have a good career, I just prefer working with a different kind of person.


I do think there can be element of snobbishness around it, but that's not really the point. The overculture of corporate America has finally overtaken the hackerish (relative) meritocracy of early tech, of Getting Things Done and Building Cool Stuff. Rewards are increasingly tied to metrics decoupled from useful outcomes. If you want to get paid a big tech salary you need to go through the leetcode grind, and do things like project sufficient "masculine energy" (lol). Management performance is measured by hiring and expansion more than product delivery and success. The ethics of what you are doing are completely secondary to shareholder value. You still need technical skills, but they are somewhat less important, there are many more competing incentives than there used to be, and the stakes are higher. This has been happening since the early days - cf. Microserfs, written all the way back in 1995 - it's just that tech has worked its way so thoroughly into the fabric of corporate existence that the two have more or less completely merged.

The endgame of every single one of them is replacement of labor, it's the only way the level of investment makes sense. Whether each org profits from it directly or indirectly is immaterial.

why not sell ads and products?

Depending on the day, Obama/Biden either supposedly let in tens of millions with completely open borders, or else they were the party that innovated cruelty against prospective immigrants. Depending on which narrative is convenient.

I haven't watched it but I'm sure they also either said or implied McDonalds is worthwhile on some level so we can pump the brakes on taking them at their word.

Minimum wage in NY is $15.50, in Kansas it's $7.25. The overcharging in rural areas is not adjusted downward for lower wages. But I wouldn't shop at a bodega and don't find it virtuous there either.


I'm the same way. Underengineering is so much easier to fix than overengineering.


That's like saying guns aren't the problem, the desire to shoot is the problem. Okay, sure, but wanting something like a metal detector requires us to focus on the more tangible aspect that is the gun.


If I gave you a gun would you start shooting people just because you had one?


If the society rewarded me money and fame when I kill someone then I would. Why wouldn't I?

Like it or not, in our society scientists' job is to churn out papers. Of course they'll use the most efficient way to churn out papers.


If I gave you a gun without a safety could you be the one to blame when it goes off because you weren’t careful enough?

The problem with this analogy is that it makes no sense.

LLMs aren’t guns.

The problem with using them is that humans have to review the content for accuracy. And that gets tiresome because the whole point is that the LLM saves you time and effort doing it yourself. So naturally people will tend to stop checking and assume the output is correct, “because the LLM is so good.”

Then you get false citations and bogus claims everywhere.


Sorry, I'm not following the gun analogies at all

But regardless, I thought the point was that...

> The problem with using them is that humans have to review the content for accuracy.

There are (at least) two humans in this equation. The publisher, and the reader. The publisher at least should do their due diligence, regardless of how "hard" it is (in this case, we literally just ask that you review your OWN CITATIONS that you insert into your paper). This is why we have accountability as a concept.


> LLMs aren’t guns.

Right. A gun doesn't misfire 20% of the time.

> The problem with using them is that humans have to review the content for accuracy.

How long are we going to push this same narrative we've been hearing since the introduction of these tools? When can we trust these tools to be accurate? For technology that is marketed as having superhuman intelligence, it sure seems dumb that it has to be fact-checked by less-intelligent humans.


> If I gave you a gun without a safety could you be the one to blame when it goes off because you weren’t careful enough?

Absolutely. Many guns don't have safties. You don't load a round in the chamber unless you intend on using it.

A gun going off when you don't intend is a negligent discharge. No ifs, ands or buts. The person in possession of the gun is always responsible for it.


> A gun going off when you don't intend is a negligent discharg

false. A gun goes off when not intended too often to claim that. It has happned to me - I then took the gun to a qualified gunsmith for repairs.

A gun they fires and hits anything you didn't intend to is negligent discharge even if you intended to shoot. Gun saftey is about assuming a gun that could possible fire will and ensuring nothing bad can happen. When looking at gun in a store (that you might want to buy) you aim it at an upper corner where even if it fires the odds of something bad resulting is the least lively to happen (it should be unloaded - and you may have checked, but you still aim there!)

same with cat toy lazers - they should be safe to shine in an eye - but you still point in a safe direction.


Yes. That is absolutely the case. One of the Most popular handguns does not have a safety switch that must be toggled before firing. (Glock series handguns)

If someone performs a negligent discharge, they are responsible, not Glock. It does have other safety mechanisms to prevent accidental fires not resulting from a trigger pull.


You seem to be getting hung up on the details of guns and missing the point that it’s a bad analogy.

Another way LLMs are not guns: you don’t need a giant data centre owned by a mega corp to use your gun.

Can’t do science because GlockGPT is down? Too bad I guess. Let’s go watch the paint dry.

The reason I made it is because this is inherently how we designed LLMs. They will make bad citations and people need to be careful.


>“because the LLM is so good.”

That's the issue here. Of course you should be aware of the fact that these things need to be checked - especially if you're a scientist.

This is no secret only known to people on HN. LLMs are tools. People using these tools need to be diligent.


That doesn't address my point at all but no, I'm not a violent or murderous person. And most people aren't. Many more people do, however, want to take shortcuts to get their work done with the least amount of effort possible.


> Many more people do, however, want to take shortcuts to get their work done with the least amount of effort possible.

Yes, and they are the ones responsible for the poor quality of work that results from that.


The issue with this argument, for anyone who comes after, is not when you give a gun to a SINGLE person, and then ask them "would you do a bad thing".

The issue is when you give EVERYONE guns, and then are surprised when enough people do bad things with them, to create externalities for everyone else.

There is some sort of trip up when personal responsibility, and society wide behaviors, intersect. Sure most people will be reasonable, but the issue is often the cost of the number of irresponsible or outright bad actors.


Probably not but, empirically, there are a lot of short tempered people who would.


Ok sure I'm down for this hypothetical. I will bring 50 random people in front of you, and you will hand all 50 of them loaded guns. Still feeling it?


Ever been to a shooting range? It's basically a bunch of random people with loaded guns.


That's not as random as letting me choose them! They had to be allowed onto the range, show ID, afford the gun, probably do a background check to get the gun unless they used a loophole (which usually requires some social capital).

I'm proposing the true proposal of many guns rights advocates: anyone might have a gun.

So let me choose the 50 and you give them guns! Why not?


If you look at gun violence in the U.S that is , speaking as a European, kind of what I see happening.


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