tkdb

Agree with the overall sentiment of commenters:

Digital minimalism is less time on devices/platforms.

This article is more about digital curation, which has value in it's own right.

So... now you're not forward deployed?

Insurance was invented to pay for emergencies. Your home insurance doesn't pay to perform routine maintenance on your roof, but neither will it pay to repair "normal" wear and tear. Your home insurance pays when a tree falls on your roof.

Our healthcare system has co-evolved with insurance in a sort of partial free-market, partial heavily regulated environment. Arguably we get the worse parts of both: Kafka-esque beaurocratic mazes and shareholder value optimization for private firms.

There's a paradigm shift needed in how health insurance works: optimize for total cost of care.

Can the invisible hand do this when providers are offering mainly treatments with token preventative care visits thrown in?

I don't know that I would have thought of The Culture as a Utopia. Interesting comparison.

Star Trek has always had a sort of hammy or "of course we're jumping sharks, that's kind of our thing, but when we do it's not really jumping a shark" tone to it. Especially the action sequences.

I've oft criticized novels and movies that are too thin a shell on philosophical givings forth, but in the case of Star Trek (mainly Enterprise and Deep Space Nine for me, but I think the original has the same appeal for many) it's like I can't get enough.

It's the thinking that appeals to me, and the inspection of the human experience in a manner that feels familiar to me.

THERE. ARE. FOUR. LIGHTS.

I'll never forget this line, and what it means. I think of it often.

How much aesthetic freedom are you giving to opus?

The technical ability of anthropic models continue to steadily improve, but I still find the creative and compositional choices to fall far short of anything I would ever use.

One of the better TLDR's I've seen recently.

I'm not sure consumer rights protections would deliver better experiences.

Government is predictably slow, inefficient, and does just about everything at a service level that is only accepted because there is no other choice.

We are seeing an increasingly exaggerated cycle that goes like this: 1. Innovation takes huge investment to launch 2. Early adopters enjoy amazing new product(s) while companies bear losses 3. Companies eventually must face debt so quality of products decrease and price increases

OpenAI and Anthropic have perhaps set the record for going from 1 to 2 in the biggest (financially) and fastest manner ever, and we are all hurtling towards step 3 with a possible too-big-to-fail scenario.

Back to Disney Plus: I don't have a sagely answer. Free markets do sometimes need government to curb monopoly power, and Disney is certainly has a sort of monopolistic power due to their huge portfolio of franchises and content.

This essay format is surprisingly challenging, and one that is fresh every time you try it.

One that stuck with me from the NPR series is "I believe in BBQ"

Give it a try!

Agreed.

I think there is another overlapping factor at play too: good writing is novel in some way. AI can produce so. much. volume. so even if some of the patterns it uses have been markers of "good" writing, those same patterns become almost unbearable when you have millions of people pumping out content using them.

I wonder if model router adoption is higher for LLMs performing in-app functions, instead of the author's case of writing software?

One of the ways I can make a custom app/harness for a given task more of a competitive advantage is by striving for model agnosticism - the thing works and so has the valuable part outside of a model.

We've already seen older models being unavailable, and the newer (supposedly better) model doesn't do the work as well for some reason. Or a service is just down for minutes or hours.

Unpopular take: AI slop is actually just slop. (Most) people ultimately don't or won't care if writing or other media is partially or wholly authored by AI. Same with art. I feel as much righteous indignation as the typical person as I write that, I think. "I want humans making art that makes me feel these profound feelings!" I say to myself. But if I don't know who the creator is, all I have to go on is the art.

A sort of related concept is that I may dislike, actively hate, or be completely indifferent to some of the authors and artists whose work I love. I love their work, but I may not love them. I may choose to spend time with people whose art I dislike. So it is with AI. I dislike the idea of AI, so I claim to dislike the art.

As amazing as AI writing is, we are still in the uncanny valley, and that is why we hate it.

Imagine the holodecks in Star Trek, which for my argument I'll consider to be significantly more advanced AI, and significantly closer to crawling out of the uncanny valley... the people using them ultimately hit the same wall of "oh but this falls short of real human experience."

...and LLMs seem to be another obvious threshold, right? Perhaps the fastest and most dramatic introduction ever of new, automated ways of producing the same output?