>LLMs are not doing searches, they are doing statistical computation of likely results.
This was true of ChatGPT in 2022, but any modern platform that advertises a "deep research" feature provides its LLMs with tools to actually do a web search, pull the results it finds into context and cite them in the generated text.
In my last conversation with a Google support person, I was sent a clearly LLM-generated recommendation to switch to a competitor's product. Either they're not doing this, or the support person wasn't using Gemini.
It's standard practice for customer support people to chase away unprofitable customers (in the US; no idea how Google works). Human or LLM, they may simply not want your business.
ChatGPT's image generator has been able to do this since last year. That NBP still can't is baffling. They should at least train it to respond to requests for transparency with a solid colour pink background.
This. Gpt-image-1/1.5 are the only ones that have this built in - though I'd love to have an insider view if its natively considering the alpha channel or just feeding it through a rembg-style post processor.
Interesting read! A lot of AoC challenges involve navigating 2D grids, which can map quite nicely onto the text adventure model of connected rooms with compass direction exits (a grid of straightforward little passages, all alike). This insight led me to attempt Day 6 from last year's Advent of Code in Inform 7[1], though I ultimately admitted defeat on the second half. I've always found Inform 7's Mathematics Textbook English syntax quite charming, though perhaps I would have a different perspective if I'd ever attempted to build anything substantial with it.
Last year was my first participation and did everything in javascript in the browser. It’s high level enough to not lose your time in details, you have a graphical output if needed (canvas), text output, threading, parsing, …
I'm trying to complete each challenge in a different language. I've written up the first five days on my blog[1]. Have completed a few more than just these, but I don't know that I'll get all of them done by Christmas.
I wrote a short blog post[1] about this pattern a few years ago. I still don't understand why so many apps use this workflow, especially ones that previously didn't. Just let me deal with the project creation stuff on the first write instead of requiring all this up-front commitment!
I used my Priv for five years, best phone I've ever had, barring some battery & heat issues. Showing people a normal-looking phone and then sliding out the keyboard was a fun party trick. If there were any modern phone like it I would buy it in a heartbeat.
I think the lockdown concept as implemented in 2020 was a great illustration of the problem of scale. It's trivially true that if you as an individual avoid all contact with others during a flu season, you won't catch the flu. You can probably extend that to your family, maybe a bit further, but at a certain scale it just becomes impossible (and undesirable) because of individual variations in occupation, lifestyle, risk and infinitely many other factors. And because someone has keep the wheels of society turning. There was no lockdown for supermarket cashiers.
My own government got very excited by the prospect of dictatorial central planning that lockdown mania created an enabling environment for and immediately set about writing all kinds of complicated rules about what food and clothing people were allowed to buy, as well as putting a prohibition on alcohol & cigarettes and imposing a curfew. Pandemic response immediately became a vehicle for imposing by fiat whatever pet policies ministers could vaguely link to it. Years later, they've all been rolled back, but the damage was done, and everyone still caught Covid.[1]
I definitely agree about the schizophrenic restrictions - buying food is fine but God forbid you want to buy socks in the middle of winter (which are sold in the same store)
Similar things happened in Québec. There was a curfew, unless you had to walk the dog. You couldn't buy certain products, but the stores were as much as crowded.
If it was that deadly and every knew someone who died, they wouldn't go outside.
I think the lockdown concept as implemented in 2020 was a great illustration of the problem of scale.
This is not a popular opinion but I think the fundamental mistake of lockdowns, at least in North America, was starting from a top-down approach instead of bottom-up. People are going to act like selfish assholes. We ordered them not to. I think instead of threats, we should have aligned their selfish interests with the public good by making it easy to sue someone for infecting you. Could you prove that in court? 99% of the time absolutely not. But the fear that killing other people might hit them in the pocket book would, in my opinion, have made a lot of the assholes put on a mask or skip that concert.
Agreed, the cost should have been borne by those who did not take sufficient measures to reduce transmission. Similar to how, when you do something dumb in the ocean and need a rescue, you pay the coast guard back if they determine negligence.
It was negligent to live as if there weren’t a huge pandemic.
I was thinking a legal framework analogous to the one used in Texas where regular citizens could obtain ten thousand dollars by suing women who had abortions. Sort of a "turnabout is fair play" approach.
> You can probably extend that to your family, maybe a bit further, but at a certain scale it just becomes impossible (and undesirable) because of individual variations in occupation, lifestyle, risk and infinitely many other factors. And because someone has keep the wheels of society turning. There was no lockdown for supermarket cashiers.
I don't understand what point you tried to make. There were naturally essential workers that were excluded from the lockdown. So what? What's your point?
> My own government got very excited by the prospect of dictatorial (...)
I'm going to cut you right there because you're diving into loony conspiracy territory, and one which was already widely proven to be utter nonsense.
The point of lockdowns is to hinder the spread of a disease so that emergency services had a better chance of coping with the demand without being overwhelmed.
Where I lived, the local government had to commandeer a sporting venue to temporarily store dead bodies. Because hospitals and mortuaries found themselves over capacity.
Some responsible people staid home voluntarily. Others could not stay home because they were front line workers. And then there were the sociopaths and morons who even went out of their way to violate even basic health and safety rules, such as spitting on people on the street.
Lockdowns were sold to the people as something that would stop the spread. If you can get every infected person to infect less than one other person on average, you can stop the spread of an infectious disease completely. At least in theory.
There are two variables here. How infectious the disease is and which percentage of the population can isolate themselves at home without society breaking down.
If everybody stays home you don't have hospitals, you don't have electricity, nobody picks up the garbage, and people will go hungry. Needless to say, that doesn't work. So what percentage of people still need to go to work? And it turns out you need a lot of people to work. From elderly care to daycare, from hospitals to supermarkets and their entire supply chain. And those people will inevitably get sick and infect their family and so the spread continues.
And how infectious is covid? Very, and variants increasingly so.
Which means you can use measures to slow down a disease like covid, but you have no chance of stopping it completely. And that's something some governments refused to accept, and they enacted a ton of erratic and ineffective countermeasures in a desperate attempt to do something impossible, instead of taking a more measured approach focused on slowing down the spread and increasing hospital capacity.
Some people will insist that government policy was in fact reasonable and measured, but it really wasn't. Deutsche Bahn still required masking in January. This year. 2023. I kid you not. It's totally absurd.
> Lockdowns were sold to the people as something that would stop the spread. If you can get every infected person to infect less than one other person on average, you can stop the spread of an infectious disease completely. At least in theory.
No, I do not think so. The curve in "flatten the curve" was referred to the daily number of cases, and the impact it's growth had on saturating health care services. Lockdowns hindered the spread so that services could be able to respond to the daily inflow of new cases.
> If everybody stays home you don't have hospitals, you don't have electricity, nobody picks up the garbage, and people will go hungry.
This is a totally disingenuous and completely wrong strawman, and one that springs either from intentional ignorance or outright bad faith.
No, you don't lock people up and expect everyone to stay in house arrest. You are pretending that the whole concept of "essential workers" didn't existed, let alone was a central point of lockdowns. People were arguing if occupation X or Y should or should not be classified as an essential worker explicitly because that meant either the workers should or should not stay at home.
It was to slow the spread. It was as the parent comment said - to slow the rate of hospitalization so the medical system wouldn't collapse and have needless excess death from lack of capacity.
You're making all valid points and all those points were immediately clear at the start of the lockdowns, for anyone who would listen. Problem is, a lot of people are simply unable to listen to reasonable arguments. That was a problem back then, and they'll remain convinced of their own opinions even in when they are proven to be wrong over and over. It's like people who are religious. You can't reason them out of it.
As a South African, it's weird seeing this presented as a strange/futuristic idea. I pay most of my bills through bank transfers and it's the standard way for two people with bank accounts to send money to each other. As long as you know someone's bank and account number, you can send them money.
All local online retailers, investment brokers, etc, support bank transfers, with some[1] even providing discounts for paying via bank transfer instead of credit card. I've even paid this way at a brick and mortar place that didn't have a card machine.
The comparison between SA bank transactions and UPI is pretty superficial. Precisely because the sender needs to know banking details about the receiver and to confirm the transaction on the receiver side you need access to the receivers bank data. UPI does not require either of those! It’s pretty great, and what modern bank transfers will look like.
SA bank transfers, like non-US bank transfers, are newer, cheaper and faster than their US counterparts, but aren’t fundamentally different in the mechanics and the edge cases. More in the regulations and market forces on banks.
That’s not to say they aren’t good! They certainly are in comparison to US bank transfers. But UPI does compare closer to sci fi.
True. UPI is amazing. The Zelle in US is similar, but lacks in that private group of banks control it, whereas UPI central processing is public or government controlled. Also, zelle is not implemented same in every bank. For a person with multiple accounts in same bank, Capital One allows a unique email address for directing zelle txns to each unique account. Discover allows that specific mapping only if initiated from discover itself. Chase does not allow you to have zelle connected to more than 1 account of yours.
Later on the article, when he talks about not needing access to the receiving account to confirm payments, I kinda got it. Just the initial framing of "what if we used bank transfers for payments" threw me for a loop.
> As long as you know someone's bank and account number, you can send them money.
This works in the US just fine as well, although you probably need to go to a bank to do it.
I've also been given the option to pay plenty of bills through bank transfers but usually choose not to if I can use my credit card for the same price.
> This works in the US just fine as well, although you probably need to go to a bank to do it.
Venmo and the like exist because that's not "fine". If you have the same bank, there's a good chance you can do it online, or with some crappy third party app. If you have different banks, there's a very slim chance they use the same crappy third party app, leaving you driving in person to initiate a digital transaction that usually takes between a few days to a week to clear.
Not all banking systems are realtime. Some are batch processed at each X hour marks or during weekday nights and updated 9AM, on literal mainframe computers somewhere running COBOL programming. It's fine for sending a plush to a friend(literally did recently) but not for a lunch takeout and so where that's common it'll be strange.
Everything you've said here applies to New Zealand too. Most of the banks maintain a register of businesses' bank account details so you usually don't even need to know their account number to make a payment - you can just search up the business name when you're making the transaction.
SA banking regulations are meant to be extremely sensible[0]. It's possible that the US has very strange ones that not only enable some awful things, but also disable good ones.
[0] Source: worked for African Bank for a bit, years ago
This was true of ChatGPT in 2022, but any modern platform that advertises a "deep research" feature provides its LLMs with tools to actually do a web search, pull the results it finds into context and cite them in the generated text.