Since the dawn of the current "AI" I've continued to buy and read books at the same pace. Likewise downloading interesting human-created PDFs. I know I'm not the only human who takes zero interest in the output of word-sausage extruders.
Thank you for remembering and sharing this - I knew I'd seen it before, I just couldn't recall where. Mr Scott is and was (and maybe will be?) the obligatory xkcd of nerd experiments.
Yup, Apple user since 2001, desktop and laptop, 20ish years in an office environment used for 8+ hours a day, now 5 years retired. Total faults - zero. Desire to upgrade RAM before rest of machine needed updates (eg storage+CPU+screen) - zero. Dissatisfaction with "Apple model": zero.
But... lately I've felt a hankering to run Linux as a first-class citizen rather than a VM and that's definitely a gap in Mac functionality. I wouldn't sacrifice the five years I enjoy MacOS on my machines for the ability to then move them to Linux, but it would still be nice.
I think the farther allow non-free implementations of technology to go, the harder it will be to bring us back from the brink.
We sacrifice our freedom now, because of convenience and feature sets thinking everything is going to work out in the end. In 25 years I think we are all going to look back on this moment and wish we didn't make the choices we did, myself included.
Thinks: this video[1] is the processed feed from the Huygens space probe landing on Saturn's moon Titan circa 2005. Relayed through the Cassini probe orbiting Saturn, 880 million miles from the Sun. At a total mission cost of 3.25 billion dollars. This is the sensor data, altitude, speed, spin, ultra violet, and hundreds of photos. (Read the description for what the audio is encoding, it's neat!)
Look at the end of the video, the photometry data count stops at "7996 kbytes received"(!)
> "Turns out, 40Mbps video streams don’t appreciate 200ms+ network latency. Who knew. “Just lower the bitrate,” you say. Great idea. Now it’s 10Mbps of blocky garbage"
Yeah, I'm thinking the same thing. Capture the text somehow and send that, and reconstruct it on the other end; and the best part is you only need to send each new character, not the whole screen, so it should be very small and lightning fast?
And when you’ve finally switched to the last LLM and it tells you it can’t answer you, and you decide not to use LLMs for important life-changing questions anymore, your world will be a better place.
Still have it, intermittently. A sort of nameless-but-familiar "chemical" smell that comes and goes, along with any sense of taste. That is, I have bad days with no taste, just a chemical smell. Other days I have a pretty good sense of smell, generally with a good sense of taste.
Intriguingly some of the really unpleasant smells never get through to me - I could probably work at a sewage works now. Worryingly I have next to no ability to smell burning, though I do now get the smell of natural gas (or the additive used to make it smell).
There has been promising work on olfactory training, which you can do very inexpensively at home. If you can, I would consider seeing any ENT first to rule out polyps, etc.
This is something I'm still testing, so take it with a bucket of salt, but I've found that exposing myself to very strong samples of things that I was unable to smell made something click again and I started to smell them again. Seems like something in there needs to be retrained to odors.
That's the basic method of retraining. I've got a bunch of essential oils in tiny jars and I regularly take a 20 second sniff of each whilst thinking strongly about the smell in context. For example, when I smell the lavender oil I recall the garden at my grandma's house which obviously was full of lavender. It's definitely helping, but there are still a lot of gaps.
I'm convinced that over the decades we'll continue to be a little surprised but just how much of our body-machinery is doing jobs of self-calibration, regulation, and safety-interlocks.
reply