sundarurfriend

20 quadrillion ants is about 2.5 million ants per human - pretty insane to think about. I thought I had a grasp on their abundance, but I'd still probably have underestimated their numbers by an order of magnitude previously.

We still mog them on mass and volume though. 2.5 million of the average ant would only make the size of a human leg, if that.

Their claim is not about the prompt or skill tokens, it's about output tokens - skills can help the model bypass some thinking tokens or avoid reasoning deadends, and that way reduce output token usage. That's what they seem to have found empirically from their testing. (If it's truly 2x-4x, the time savings in waiting for the output is a pretty nice benefit too.)

That idea about keeping maintainer balance is pretty neat, interesting to see this kind of diligence in maintainership in the same project where legal ownership belongs to a single company, Google, via the Contributor License Agreement. My interest in jj cooled off a lot after seeing that, even though I realize in practice it's pretty unlikely to be of consequence - I just don't need even that kind of low probability Sword of Damocles hanging over my VCS, forks and drama in case Google decides to mess things up. (Good to see that the Readme has been changed to say it's not a Google-supported project btw, less misleading than the old claim that it's not a Google project at all.)

Because it's evolutionarily favourable - the same reason sex feels good. One is instantaneous pleasure, and the other is sustained doses of feelings of satisfaction, because they optimise for different things; but ultimately you can understand them easily if you think about how core they are to what evolution favours.

Yes, that was Grok's strongest point for me previously, and it's been basically unusable these past few weeks. I think there have been a few posts in the Grok subreddit (maybe on r/LoveGrok). It has a lot less personality which is a shame, but I'd take that if the answers themselves were good - but they lack information, have zero nuance, and repeat themselves pretty often too. Such a disappointing change.

And yet, even for programmers, that output is full of info that is useless 99.9% of the time. That is just bad design. It is basically a debug log that is shown by default all the time, instead of written to a log somewhere for the <0.1% time it's useful.

And I point out the attitude because I've seen it for decades and seen the harm this kind of "it's just harmless extra info" type thinking has brought. I don't know what tone you're reading into it, but I'm quite literally and explicitly criticizing the attitude, not you personally.

> Because git is an open-source project written by nerds, it shows you all of this information. Feel free to ignore it!

This is the type of attitude that kept most Unix tools quite user-unfriendly for several decades. What information to show the user, and when, are important design decisions to make. Just dumping it all on the user and making them wade through it is not doing the user a favour. Thankfully newer tools seem to be better about this, which has brought the Unix shell forward by leaps, even if there's still ways to go. (You can still make a conscious design decision that the info needs to be all there, and git is one of tools where that's at least somewhat justifiable, but a lot of the time the attitude is more like in the quoted text, that dumping out more info is always better.)

Because the patterns of consumption and harm are very different. It's the constancy and immediacy of social media that makes up the major part of its harm. It's not something where a 15 minute smoke break or a weekend binge is the main mode of consumption and harm. So the parents have a lot more opportunity and power to handle it if they give it reasonable time and attention.