azornathogron

Digital cameras made photography more accessible to people though, even if they didn't improve it (in an artistic sense) directly.

Being able to take pictures at effectively zero marginal cost, and being able to see them instantly, both make it much easier to get into the hobby.

What indications do you see of significant and effective societal pushback?

I would love to believe this but I don't see it yet. I see a lot of anger in some circles, but I also see the machine marching on as normal.

Pilots can do that because they go through a ton of training and they deliberately do things to maintain their manual flying skills, including regularly taking manual control outside emergencies when the autopilot could fly perfectly well. And when a pilot takes control "for practice" there's no reduction in productivity for the airline compared to if the pilot is sitting in the seat with the autopilot engaged.

How can software engineers maintain a healthy "manual programming" skill set? What employer would be willing to pay for so much wasted time for their software engineers to do deliberate training courses, or willing to accept the productivity loss from their engineers occasionally working manually for practice, when working manually is so much slower?

Is "token" a directly perceivable unit for the LLM? If you ask it "how many tokens are in this sentence?" can it count them (again, not guessing or making a tool call)?

I've never tried it and it might take some thought and effort to conduct an experiment to find out properly, but I would be interested in the answer.

Which are you referring to as the primary comparison?

If I'm understanding the book's structure correctly, the comparison at the end of Part 1 (chapter 18 "Can we live on renewables?") is based on estimating existing demand. Deployment of heat pumps in Britain even today is woefully low, and when the book was written it was no doubt even lower, so of course it wouldn't make sense to include heat pumps as a significant factor when comparing actual demand when the book was written with potential supply.

Chapter 27 "Five energy plans for Britain" discusses large scale ways to make the energy budget "work", and those hypothetical comparisons do include use of heat-pumps. Maybe those numbers are inaccurate and a better hypothetical could be produced today, but I would first put that down to the difficulty of forecasting the future.

It's been a long time since I read the book fully though. Did I miss something?

Going to the doctor for expert advice is often inconvenient, or time consuming, or expensive, or stressful. I think a lot of people want, and seek out, information and advice based on their symptoms, as a first step before a possible doctor's visit. Before LLMs, WebMD (and excessive self-diagnosis based on WebMD) was a meme for a while.

So with regard to LLMs, for me the question is not purely "how often does it get it right?" the question is "how does it compare to the sources and self-diagnosis methods people use otherwise?"

Of course, I agree people should be careful with any form of self-diagnosis or LLM-diagnosis.

The way this used to be handled is to sell new versions.

Oh, interesting. That does make sense.