QuantumGood

I've had so much greater success using the built-in AI ("Alexa for search") that I no longer use the regular search except briefly. I imagine it will be destroyed eventually as regular search was, but for now it's dramatically better.

It really, really varies, person to person, optimized time vs non-optimized time. With keto plus several other optimizations, I'm sometimes good (focused, motivated, energized) for over 12 hours. Alternatively, I can have days where I never reach "good" at all.

For reference, I'm in my late 60's, and I don't inject anything. I've had a wide range of life-long health issues, but partly because I've optimized to be acceptably focused and productive while living with those issues (that I've been resolving one-by-one), I can have some pretty long periods of focus.

TOEFL = "Test of English as a Foreign Language"

When we provide written documents with embedded videos revealed by on-screen toggles, covering different sections of a help document, almost no one reads the doc, they just find the relevant video. Many of our docs require images, and videos do a better job of, for example, showing how to clamp an arm onto a structure.

Video that cover different parts of an outline are a great use of videos. Videos that try to cover too much all in one are a lesser use. Yes, you can use scrub to find in a video, but showing a text outline and letting users click to reveal videos for specifics topics works very well.

Generics need to be more carefully sourced if outside the U.S. I prefer brand names from reputable manufacturing areas (Singpore, Germany, etc.), and can get them for close to the price for generics, often starting research at PharmacyChecker.com

More perhaps at the appearance of logic. I still find all models make easy to find mistakes in logic, if you think carefully about what they say. Usually they allow "close enough" assumptions that are not, actually, close enough.

When I ask about acoustics, they still often make incorrect assumptions, e.g. overlooking that they are speaking of logarithmic display of digital levels when the discussion has shifted to SPL (sound pressure level in air).

The more data in the PDF, the more nines you need in the OCR accuracy. Plenty of 5/S, O/0 and other issues exist at frequencies that cause problems.

AOSP = "Android Open Source Project"

One of many "new normal" artifacts that seem all the more strange when the pace of change accelerates.

The Kia factory recall key cylinder fix solved the hotwiring issue; and the engines that burn oil last pretty well as long as you keep adding oil. Not saying these countermeasures are solutions, nor that the issues are minor, but they produce a car that can't be easily hotwired and lasts a long time.

Some of these cars (older Kia Souls, for example) become a great value if you implement the countermeasures, and also because they have a lower cost of repairs than some Hondas and Toyotas.

I learned this because I seemed to find cars that had few problems that had nonetheless been given up for salvage. What I found was that if a stolen car is not recovered quickly enough, insurance will pay the (properly-insured) owner an amount close to the replacement value of the car; they may then recover the car later in the same shape it was stolen in other than a broken window, door handle and steering column cover. They then put it up for auction even though it would be better financially to work with a dealer or fleet network to cherry pick these high value cars that only need some simple fixes.

For example, my $2,220 bid won a 2015 Kia Soul+ (49K miles) at auction that a dealer had sold for ~$12,000 some months previous. Bidding competition was light primarily because of the "easily stolen" and "likely to burn oil" issues. But with fees and a few cheap repairs, I got a $12,000 dealer-prepped car for under $4,500. I added remote start, Android Auto and a backup camera, gave it a little ceramic spray coating and got a nice car for my wife.

I also threw in a fake $12 steering wheel lock bar as a deterrent. (It's a real bar, but I don't lock it because the "unable to unlock the cheap lock" risk is to me a more likely hassle than a broken window). I considered adding an immobilizer, but the car was stolen with one installed, and I could always add a switch to the battery under the hood in case better-prepared thieves than the "hoping for an easy hotwire" type show up.

I love digging into questions and seeing where they lead; this all started with a vague sense that dealers made a lot of money on a high volume of used cars via auction houses, and trying to learn how it worked. This also leads me to argue with AI quite a bit, and until recently, made the idea of AI "thinking" kind of laughable due to its many mistakes once you start following the chain of reasoning.

I used to do demonstrations in large workshops, and I would stand behind someone reading a script, and hold up a flag 3-5 words BEFORE they would stumble. I could tell when their compulsion to say the next word had gotten ahead of their sense of the meaning of the word, and 3-5 words later they would reliably stumble.

In voiceover, where you have to read rather than memorize most scripts, some percentage of your available bandwidth visually processes the words that you must look at. This causes issues for the majority of talent, and significant issues for a minority of talent. Part of the issue is a compulsion to keep speaking words due to a feeling that they seem to be pushing at you and piling up.

It was rebranded as "Alexa for Shopping"; that is what I am referring to.

Amazon's AI search doesn't do that, however. For that reason, 90% of my searches are now prompts to the AI, instead of regular searches. But it occassionally freezes the app.

One of the things not represented well by the hype cycle is how hype is a moving target. When "ai defenders and hype" assign a number to things, the early numbers can become closer to the later realities.