monitron

Oh, heavens.

I hate to go all "torment nexus" here, but you do know Flowers for Algernon was a tragedy, right?

That's a good point. As my wealth level has risen a bit over my life, I have tried not to let go of ever actually learning and doing things. Both because those are among my foremost pleasures in life, and because I don't want to become totally helpless in an unexpected situation where delegation isn't possible. Of course fixing a faucet because I feel like it isn't the same as fixing it because I'm forced to DIY, but it's something.

Still what you're saying is very real. I'm reminded of the tweet that said that "in terms of cognitive impairment, [being a billionaire is] probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day"

My first thought is that, before LLMs, getting out of your comfort zone to work with folks in Kyoto in their language would have been an important step in getting yourself ready to live there successfully. It would have been difficult and awkward, but that's part of the process. Or it was. I wish you luck once you get there.

One time I was messing around with the settings for a 3D printer in whatever software I was using to control it, and found a dropdown for "Machine type" or similar that defined my printer as a "3-axis robot." That gave me pause. Is it a robot? Maybe. That printer didn't even have any sensors, apart from the thermistors that fed into the temperature control PID loops. But by someone's definition, it's a robot.

That was and remains fun to think about. I guess that like the author, I will "be pedantic all day long."

I'm not sure if this is a serious question, but: buses, subways, (e-)bikes, working from home, carpooling. I know these aren't an option for everyone in every situation, but congestion pricing areas tend to be set up in places where public transit is good and normal.

This was fascinating, thank you. I expected to read about legal threats against the folks collecting this data and am glad that those didn't materialize.

Also I only realized after finishing the article what a breath of fresh air it was to read something that came straight from another human's brain without LLM intermediation. Thank you to the author for that too.

Waitasec...wouldn't you have to hold it at a very specific distance from your eye for the "viewfinder" to be accurate?

At work I am sitting on a small pile of incomplete/wrong/missing-the-point bug reports right now, all generated by Opus 5 on High effort. Even under good conditions, LLMs are still wrong quite a lot, and confidently so. I can see why you think instant dismissal of LLM generated work is shallow, but I think it's at least as shortsighted to assume that when it creates poor quality work it must be an old/cheap model, bad settings, bad prompting, etc.

Precisely! I don't think this is the whole problem but it's a part of it I keep coming back to. We took the one thing that computers were good at (getting the same answer every time, quickly and efficiently) and tossed it out the window.

Good AI system design can help somewhat, but even if you give the LLM a calculator tool, it's not guaranteed to use it every time, or to write the tool use correctly, or to copy out the answer correctly.

My friends and I used to do this all the time in that same time period. It was all fun and games until one day I caught one of them spoofing a message from me to [email protected] making vague threats. He seemed to think I overreacted when I dove under the desk and unplugged the machine.

I really appreciate the reply, and all your work. The difficulty of what you're doing is not lost on me; I was honestly blown away that you all launched a browser project at all. I think it's vitally important that the web not become a monolith in terms of user agents (even if, alas, one single rendering engine takes all the market share) so kudos to you.

I'm a devoted Kagi user and really want to use Orion but keep running into perf issues and jank that frustrate me enough to switch back to something else. My most recent attempt was this past week.

You all seem to maintain a very fast pace of development (the changelogs are always chock full of cool stuff) but the problems I am hitting have remained broken for ages. Some examples include:

* The app hangs for 1~2 sec partway through typing a URL/search, when using the back button, or during other navigation

* The 1Password extension fails to fill usernames and passwords most of the time, regardless of which version I install. It works fine in Safari, Chrome, Firefox.

* Your built-in ad blocking triggers anti-ad-blocking measures on many news/blog sites now, resulting in the entire page being blocked.

I don't know your business, but maybe pausing new features and pushing for stability/perf/quality of life for a while (a la macOS Snow Leopard) would make sense.

This was unexpected and wonderful. Thank you so much!