speak_plainly

There is an entire field of study dedicated to this sort of thing called Psychophysics. It’s hardly trivial. Perception isn’t an absolute measure of sensory input as it’s influenced by context, comparison, as well as prior experience. Improvements in one experience can change the standards by which we judge subsequent ones. These principles have had profound implications across entire industries. A good primer is the book Priceless: the hidden psychology of value by Poundstone.

I was optimistic that Apple would get this right but Siri AI is yet another embarrassment in a long continuing series of Apple embarrassments.

I went from being overly exuberant on AI to now thinking it probably should be banned outright. From a consumer perspective, the tech industry is a dead end and the internet now is at best a pipeline for content for your TV and sound system and the rest feels like it should be ignored and avoided.

Unless there are radical changes on the horizon, there is no way I’m investing any more in the Apple ecosystem and I’m saying this as a former Apple employee and fan.

For many outside the US, and undoubtedly some within it, the term SI is a source of embarrassment. But it’s good to know who bends the knee.

‘LLMs don’t reason’ seems to equate reasoning with explicit, auditable deliberation. LLMs can draw inferences from premises, even if their explanations do not reliably reveal how they arrived at their conclusions. The article makes a case for more transparent and reliable reasoning, but does not establish the absence of reasoning altogether. The more substantive question, in my view, is whether their representations have semantic content, what could ground that content, and how this affects their reasoning capabilities and limitations.

Apparently there is a flap you can place on them to block out light.

The real political theatre is coming from Alberta. Secession can't be achieved unilaterally under Canadian constitutional law. A clear majority on a clear referendum question would create an obligation to negotiate.

More critically, the Numbered Treaties (6, 7, and 8, and to a lesser extent 4 and 10) make the entire idea, for all practical purposes, a legal dead end. These are nation-to-nation covenants with the Crown and not with the province.

To leave with its borders intact, Alberta would have to negotiate constitutional amendments with Ottawa and the other provinces, while securing affected First Nations’ consent to any transfer or replacement of their treaty relationships with Canada in a situation where Alberta has almost no leverage.

Good luck.

I’m hopeful that closer ties with Europe could give Canadians a chance to learn from European agriculture and food culture.

Canada needs a new perspective in how we produce and sell food here. I’d love to see us move away from a food system dominated by crappy US-style highly engineered, ultra-processed products and toward a much greater variety of fresh and minimally processed foods, stronger regional production, and a richer everyday food culture.

I would welcome EU grocery chains and food producers to shake things up here and bring some sanity back to Canadian food culture.

I think you're right. We're at the point where Apple is sort of out of steam in terms of hardware and software and their products are mature and the company has become more risk averse. They need gimmicks to get people to upgrade and I'm sure we will see more attempts like this in the future. These sorts of devices have limited use cases, like people who are on the road a lot for work or leisure, and of course this appeals to tech enthusiasts or the vanity tech crowd.

It'll be a nice device for some, but I think we're at the stage where device upgrades are no longer going to be a yearly or even biennial thing with all things considered.

Pre-IPO positioning … or how a charity dedicated to saving humanity from the apocalypse realized the most responsible thing to do was float 15% of the apocalypse on the NASDAQ.

After struggling with Gemini for months, I think the trick to getting the most out of the model is writing a really solid personal intelligence/instructions prompt. The results are night and day in terms of performance.

A percentage chart does not always have to start at zero. Scaling the y-axis to the range of the data is commonly used to make within-chart trends easier to see. I don't think this is evidence of a nefarious motive... it looks more like a stylistic choice.