AI research has always been a series of occasional great leaps between slogs of iterative improvements, from Turing and Rosenblatt to AlexNet and GPT-3. The LLM era will result in a few things becoming invisible architecture* we stop appreciating and then the next big leap starts the hype cycle anew.
*Think toll booths (“exact change only!”) replaced by automated license plate readers in just the span of a decade. Hardly noticeable now.
Well Phreaking in 2003-05 (no clue when anymore), so at the same time you could still get free phone calls on pay phones in the library or hotel lobby.
There isn't a viable computer use model that can be ran locally yet unfortunately. Am extremely excited for the day that happens though. Essentially the key capability that makes a model a computer use model is precise coordinate generation.
So if you come across a local model that can do that well, let us know! We're also keeping a close watch.
You are correct in that ByteDance did releas UI-TARS which sounds like a really good open source computer use model according to some articles I read. You could run that locally. We haven't tested it so I wouldn't know how it performs, but sounds like it's definitely worth exploring!
I don't know too much about training your own computer use model other than it would probably be a very hefty, very expensive task.
However, I believe ByteDance released UI-TARS which is an excellent open source computer use model according to some articles I read. You could run that locally. We haven't tested it so I wouldn't know how it performs, but sounds like it's definitely worth exploring!
I’m not sure it’s one or the other. Firing off a prompt to Claude Code and letting it rip can be great for productivity but I won’t pretend I’m reading every line it writes unless I have to.
And yet if I’m inquiring into a subject matter I have scant knowledge about, and want to learn more about, I voraciously read the output and plan my next prompt thoughtfully throughout.
The dividing line is intellectual curiosity. AI can stimulate the mind in ways people may not have thought possible, like explaining subjects they never grasped previously, but the user has to want to go down that path to achieve it.
Social media doomscrolling, by contrast, is designed to anesthetize, so the result should not surprise.
To me AI feels like the early web. I can get information without sifting through heaps of SEO trash, and it’s like having this weird magic thinking mirror to explore ideas. Unlike social media it’s not a sea of culture war rage trolling and slop.
I am not trying to use it as a companion though. Not only do I have human ones but it feels super weird and creepy to try. I couldn’t suspend disbelief since I know how these things work.
goimports makes everything look the same, the compiler is a nitpicky asshole that won’t let the program even compile if there is an unused variable etc.
Yep, that's why I like strict tooling with LLMs (and actually real people as well, but that's a different conversation :D)
When you have a standard build process that runs go vet, go test, golanci-lint, goimports and compiles the code you can order the LLM to do that as the last step every time.
This way at the very least the shit it produces is well-formed and passes the tests :)
Otherwise they tend to just leave stuff hanging like "this erroring test is unrelated to the current task, let's just not run it" - ffs you just broke it, it passed perfectly before you started messing with the codebase =)
As someone who has done biz with China (specifically with Tsinghua University) - the key phrase is "for now". China's strength in economics is to take what works elsewhere, bring it to China to understand what about that product or service works domestically, and then China-fy / reverse engineer what's great about the product, and then get Party backing to scale it in order to beat the foreign competitor. This is their default strategy and no matter how many factories Tesla might have in China now, it's not a certainty that those factories or technologies will be in Tesla's hands in 3-5 years from now.
Specific to the automobile industry, remember what VW's mistake in China was. Long story short: they taught the Chinese how to really build and scale auto production. The Chinese learned, and then shut VW out of the domestic Chinese market once they had a strong Chinese competitor - they were able to scale and produce cars for significantly cheaper.
“When you loan money to a friend, be prepared to lose the money or the friend” is a maxim I’ve lived by and has guided me through some tough decisions over time.
I’ve also seen this happen in NYS. Tenants do the craziest shit (selling showers to crackheads and discovering a near thousand dollar water bill was one of the tamer tales), fight tooth and nail to stay, and leave the place uninhabitable when they finally are forced to go.
Unfortunately the local mom and pop landlords get wrecked by this while only the big corporate landlords have the resources and scale to weather these situations.
It's a law of large numbers thing. Americans romanticized mom&pop landlords vs big greedy landlords, but.. it's a bad business to be a smalltime landlord. It's like putting all your money in one stock.
If, say, 5% of the population is crazy, and make for bad tenants.. then owning 10-20+ units puts you in a position of always having 90%+ of your revenue coming in.
If you have 1 unit then most of the time you are OK, but every once in a while you may lose 100% of your revenue for 3-12 months, while you have to keep spending on mortgage/tax/utilities, plus lawyers, repairs, etc.
The key thing would be the government finally go and improve the situation around mental health care accessibility and a proper social safety net.
People don't fall for drugs on their own - the utter, utter majority fall for drugs to self-medicate for whatever crisis they're facing. Be it perspectivelessness, losing a family member or one's job - across the Western world, governments have completely given up supporting people who hit a rough patch in life, and now it's a situation that is very, very hard to resolve.
>The key thing would be the government finally go and improve the situation around mental health care accessibility and a proper social safety net.
You're right but we are so far from this now I can't imagine it being possible until one or two full generations of people die out and we start teaching empathy
There’s a great podcast that delves into the Big Dig. It was an exceedingly difficult giant construction project. The original cost estimate was a made up number for political expediency. They lied knowing once they dug a big hole the sunk-cost fallacy would pull them over the finish line.
*Think toll booths (“exact change only!”) replaced by automated license plate readers in just the span of a decade. Hardly noticeable now.