PebblesRox
Joined 17 years ago
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731
Member since
Jun 1
Recent submissions
Comment · 3 days ago
You might only be hearing about it now but the warnings have been coming (including by those who are now leading the top labs) for a long time, since before any of those “incentives” were in place.
Comment · 6 days ago
Also how many ads are we exposed to where we aren’t paying conscious attention to it?
Surely those ads could sometimes cause someone to think or talk about a concept that they might not have otherwise.
If the ad then pops up again and they notice it this time, it will feel really spooky!
I think it’s similar to the phenomenon where you learn a new word and then immediately see it out in the wild somewhere. It grabs your attention because you were just thinking about it.
In the original example of ordering meat from the butcher, I also wonder if it’s possible that the data from that purchase was tracked and fed into the ad system. That seems more plausible to me than the “phone listening” theory.
Comment · 8 days ago
It was a really strange feeling to read through Asimov and get to Robots and Empire, where the story, having ranged throughout a galactic empire in the far-flung future, follows the characters not just to Earth but to Three Mile Island — a place I had seen before! A place less than an hour a way from my hometown! It made the story feel more connected to my own life in a way that I was not expecting.
Comment · 26 days ago
That sounds like meaning and motivation to me.
Comment · 27 days ago
Pangram is flagging the full text of the article as AI-assisted.
Comment · 3 months ago
Wife here. Pre-agentic coding I had automated a bunch of low-hanging fruit via low code tools (mainly Pipedream and Airtable) but I never had enough time to do everything that I wanted to.
Lately I've really been getting into agentic coding (first with Antigravity and now with Claude Code) and I'm really excited about what I'm now able to accomplish on a very small budget of both money and time! It's been a big boon to my ability to automate things that really ought to be the computer's job.
Plus with LLMs, the scope of what is properly the computer's job has increased by a lot! I've created a couple of Pipedream workflows that send freight bills and customer POs to an LLM to extract data. Now I just have to review and occasionally make a few tweaks vs. having to enter everything by hand.
Since building those, my main focus has been on building better tools for myself and the team, such as a little web-app for sales reps to create and send their own purchase orders vs. having to go through accounting (aka me). The nice thing about vibe coding vs. hooking together a bunch of low-code tools is that I can customize the UI to make it exactly what we need.
My current project is building a back-office app to help streamline the process of managing incoming shipping paperwork. This is a much fuzzier problem than regular invoice processing because it's a bunch of different types of documents (BOLs, packing lists, scale tickets) and a lot of judgment calls to make. I don't expect to hand it all off to the LLM but I plan to have the LLM do the first pass of transcribing the data. Then I'll make the human-review portion as ergonomic as possible for myself.
I have a first draft up-and-running but the default interface that Claude Code came up with is not very good. I'm currently discussing the UI design with Claude in chat mode, narrating my manual process as I do it to help flesh out all the details of all the different sources of info and what decisions need to be made.[0] Once we're done I'll ask for a spec that I can take back to Claude Code for implementation.
Comment · 4 months ago
I think the lack of depth perception in a 2D photo is another big factor in why the magic of a forest can’t be captured. There are so many different layers that all get flattened!
Comment · 4 months ago
Thank you for the link to 1/0 — it had a link to Absurd Notions that I had been searching for to read again but couldn’t remember the name of!
Comment · 4 months ago
Oh and the best author from that discovery was hands down Garth Nix. I love the Abhorsen series!
Comment · 4 months ago
In high school I was at a friend’s house. Half of the bookshelf was filled with books I loved and the other half with books I’d never heard of! I felt like a prospector striking gold :) Cool to think that we have something similar on demand now!
Comment · 4 months ago
Kings of the Wyld is a lot of fun. Plus it’s always refreshing to have a middle-aged protagonist instead of a teen or young adult.
Comment · 4 months ago
I don’t like multi-page forms when I’m not able to see at a glance all the info needed to fill out the form. Though I guess if my progress is durably saved that makes it not so bad. The worst is when I fill out a bunch of stuff and then realize it’s asking for info I don’t have, and after I get the info I have to fill everything out again from scratch!
Comment · 5 months ago
We set up a “kid laptop” for our kids (ages 3, 6 and 9) that has a short list of allowed websites and a curated set of installed programs.
We treat it like any other toy: they can pretty much play with it whenever they want for as long as they want. Of course they have to share it between the three of them, so there’s a natural limit there.
Every so often we’ll add something new; most recently I installed SimAnt after we were watching ants in our backyard.
So far we’ve been very happy with this approach!
Socials: - https://bancosparenting.wordpress.com/ - x.com/CBancos
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