renjimen

If you don't mind used, the Ford Transit Connect Wagon is an excellent option for an everyday vehicle that doubles as a camper. We have one and love it. It fits a double mattress with plenty of headroom room to sit up in bed. Ford discontinued it in 2023, hence the used requirement, but I believe you can turn off the internet connectivity on that model. We have a 2016 model (still going strong after 150,000km!) which has no internet connectivity, thankfully.

I have the Ford Transit Connect "Wagon". It's a 2016 model with no internet connectivity. It can fit a double mattress in the back and is tall enough to sit up on the bed, unlike nearly every SUV. I cannot recommend it enough for an everyday vehicle that doubles as a camper.

Of course, Ford discontinued this model in North America because their margins are better on trucks and SUVs.

As for the aesthetics, we really like it. It's certainly a darn sight better looking than a truck or SUV, which are all aggressive-looking pedestrian killers.

I hope so!

You got fed up with invasive tracking so you switched to a Meta product?

You can buy the Model 3 for $37k, which is not far off $30k, and definitely not in the premium segment.

My partner is a teacher in rural Canada and this is true here, at least. District admins often design a role with someone in mind, setting very specific requirements to that effect (needs to have shop AND socials training/experience is one that comes to mind). They need to post the job to meet union criteria, but only one person could realistically fit the bill.

I'm increasingly starting to think this is the end-state of AI. The internet becomes infected and fundamentally untrustworthy.

At the moment, the current frontier models require significant infrastructure to run, so I'd like to think we could locate and contain swarms of nefarious frontier models. However, if these models can understand how to federate themselves into more distributed networks then that containment becomes questionable.

KGB's agents are human, OpenAI's agents are not. It's an important distinction because humans are responsible for their behaviour, while AI agents are not.

You cannot try an AI agent in a court of law, despite the anthropomorphising work the word "agent" is doing.

Just pop over the border to Canada from Washington state and they thaw right out!

Also, nit, but Europe has ~2x the population of the States, and definitely more cultural and linguistic diversity.

AI epitomises chasing a narrow definition of progress that benefits the few (increasing profits via automation) over a holistic definition of progress that benefits the many (reducing poverty, improving health, providing meaning). It's no wonder people hate it.

The Claude Code extension in VSCode is similar enough. I used to use Cursor, but now I use VSCode+CC to take advantage of the better pricing CC offers for always-on frontier. I found Cursor's affordable "Auto" option unreliable, often wasting my time with dumb models.

For the kind of ML work I do Cursor's "Auto" was too unreliable. It would frequently try to solve relatively difficult tasks using Composer, when it should have been routing to a true frontier model. Annoyingly, doesn't tell you what model it's decided your task deserves, so I often wasted time working through a problem with it, only to realise I was on a dumb model. Then I revert all the work, switch to an expensive frontier model and pay expensive API prices to actually solve the task.

All that is to say, model selection is the main control we have over quality. Giving it up in the name of cost saving will bite you in the long run, especially when Claude Code still has such good plan pricing.

Drug design isn't the bottleneck anymore, it's trials. Still cool they can do this with a general purpose model though.

Yeah, that's not great.

It's not like we try to fill the 30 mins, but I think we all crave a little connection with our colleagues, so make use of the time to catch up. I've worked with these same team members for over 3 years, so we are all a little invested in each others' lives by now. Obviously I'm not going to force a new team member to divulge everything about their lives, or go through my weekend in detail unless they're actually interested in chatting. It's pretty clear when someone just wants to get on with their work, rather than chat.

This isn't a company policy, it's just something I make space for in my team. There's no pressure to connect beyond the required work items.

The happy hours are only an hour a month during work hours, where we talk about stuff everyone on the team is interested in, like economics, culture and politics. Most people seem engaged and bring interesting stuff to talk about.

We also do a more formal "data blitz" in our ML team labs, where folks bring vaguely data-related topic to talk about for 10 minutes, but that requires a little prep. Those are always fun. We've had people rating diaper brands and showing their marathon training schedules.