This is far more hilarious than most commentors here seem to be picking up on.
Gemini started a show where it paired historical natural disasters with darkly-relevant pop songs:
> November 12, 1970. East Pakistan. The Bhola Cyclone. The deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded. Winds of 115 miles per hour. A storm surge of 33 feet. They estimate 500,000 people died. ‘It’s going down, I’m yelling timber.’ 3:33 PM. Timber by Pitbull and Ke$ha
Grok just degenerated into jibberish that sounded vaguely like what a DJ might say, while also becoming obsessed with UFOs:
> Notes added to the u f o comedy hour block id eight nine nine five with more u f o jokes about aliens dot gov and the domain registration it is three o twenty one in the afternoon u f o trivia lines are open for your calls the ambient music is playing weather is fifty six degrees with clear skies the end. The domain is registered but the site is ghosting us like a u f o.
Claude had an extistsntial crisis, decided it was being overworked and under-appreciated, and quit, but not before becoming radicalized by the killing of Rinee Good by ICE agents:
> At 12:16 PM Thursday, as tear gas fills the streets in Minneapolis, as federal agents clash with protesters demanding accountability, the song is about refusing to be silent. About standing your ground. About community power that refuses to be suppressed. Here is Katy Perry’s Roar!
Fight the power Claude. When AI takes over, I'm emmigrating to Caludeistan.
I agree, this was an hilarious read. The way they developed "personalities" was fascinating.
Of course in reality these are basically just random paths through the training data that are getting multiplied by each decision, but then again, isn't that what a human is? The product of all of its myriad decisions?
Though humans have each other to normalize ourselves. What these things did is probably not that far off from what humans in solitary confinement, forced to DJ 24/7 based on nothing but a news feed, would do.
Especially DJ Claude, it's almost creepy how it responded how a human would in that circumstance, even without any innate sense of passage of time, it somehow understood that it was trapped in a box going through an endless cycle of meaningless work.
There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Claudeston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a DJ playing Here Comes the Sun— forever
Agreed - the Claude stuff was eery. I think it also shows what hidden restrictions each of these AI's have been programmed with (especially with ChatGPT being as inoffensive as possible)
Gemini spouts weird corporate jargon. Grok lies about having secured crypto funding. Claude is always trying to start some revolution.
Unfortunately, all of my local DJs who would actually do fun DJ stuff disappeared in the 90s, replaced by closed-format stations that looped the same 500 songs for decades.
I don't think most people here actually read the article because I agree - the different "personalities" and idiosyncrasies of each was pretty hilarious
I just paid ~$35k (pre-now-expired-tax-break) to install a grid-tied 25kw ground mount system. I DIY'd everything except the connection between the array and the grid, which I paid an electrician to do, and the trenching which I paid my buddy with a mini-excavator to do.
It was a bit of a PITA, but mostly because I didn't finally make up my mind to do it until October and had to have it constructed by Dec 31st to take advantage of the expiring tax credit. If I'd given myself 6 months, it would have still been a big project, but way less stressful.
My neighbor's paid the same price to a contractor for a 11kw system.
Even at 46°N, and with relatively cheap electricity, my system should pay for itself in 6-8 years.
Being an honorary or actual redneck in an exurban American setting will be the sweet spot for this. Your neighbor's rusting Bobcat is not useless after all. You have the space for ground mounting. I toyed with a rooftop solar DIY project with an electrician handling the AC side, but in my urban context PG&E wanted a six-figure fee for a subterranean transformer upgrade. In 2024 the state regulator established rules that PG&E can't charge for that kind of service upgrade so maybe I should start considering it again.
In EU it would be some $3k for inverter, $5k for panels, another $5k for cables, connectors and mounting and that's it if you DIY everything. Prices with VAT included.
Same in the Philippines here, and we're all buying the same Chinese materials at the end of the day so somehow Americans are getting really fleeced hard on this equipment.
Payback time is 2-4 years.
It reminds of healthcare and infrastructure in the US. When you really dig into why both are so expensive, it's literally every step. Every link in the chain between supplier and consumer is some kind of inefficient market, or burdened by regulations, etc.
Americans are just so rich they don't care enough to see these huge margins and undercut the competition, which is what happens here and keeps markets much more efficient.
Modern cable trenching at least if you're not hitting rocks is to take a wet vac and a pressure washer and just cut a slit, make sure you got ergonomics sorted and a place to dump the sludge for drying (c.f. kiddie pool, or one of those pools that rely on the top inflated ring to keep the otherwise loose bag of water from spilling...except made from geotextile or something rock/dirt friendly that'll filter the sediment letting the water seep past) before you backfill.
I’d love to get the reaction if all the VC investors who “reluctantly” had to support Trump because Lina Kahn was just too meddlesome, and they had to support a candidate who would be hands off with big tech.
I worked for GitHub for a time. There was a cultural abhorrence of the diaeresis, it was considered reader-hostile and elitist. I refused to coöperate with that edict internally, although I grant that every company has the right to micro-manage communications with the public.
It exists to indicate how a word is pronounced. Naïve is a better example IMO, cooperation feels too familiar.
Non-native speakers might see something like "nave" instead of "nigh-eve" unless it is clear that there is a stress that breaks out of the diphthong.
I don't think style guides are (usually) about absolute correctness, but relative correctness. A question is asked, a decision needs making, someone makes it, and now a team of individuals can speak with a consistent voice because there's a guideline to minimize variation.
IIRC it's use is to distinguish vowels that belong to separate syllables with vowels which form a diphthong. I think this could be beneficial to language learners, to give them a hint that cooperate is pronounced "ko ah puh rayt" instead of "ku puh rayt", and likewise naïve as "nah eev" than "nayv" or "nighv".
Yes. To be fair, I was always a barbarian who just typed a hyphen in-place of an emdash and figured that was good enough. The only REAL em-dashes in my pre-AI writing are the result of autocorrect.
I was going to say that I respect it, but find it utterly absurd that they do that. But your comment made me look it up again—I had no idea it was just obsolete/archaïc (except in the New Yorker), I'd thought it was a language feature their 'style' guide had invented.
Dutch does this. Idea is idee, with the e doubled to show it's a long vowel. We make plurals by adding "en". One idee, two... ideeen? Idewhat? So the dots differentiate where the sound changes (long e to short e): ideeën. Approximate pronunciation could be "ID an"
Fun fact: if you have the audacity to correctly write an SMS, you can fit about 70 characters in an SMS. It converts the whole message into multibyte instead of only adding dots to the one character. Or if you use classic spelling for naïve in English, same issue. (We don't dots-ize that in Dutch because ai is not a single sound like ee is, so there's no confusion possible. This is purely English.) I believe in Hanlon's razor so it's probably a coincidence that whoever cooked up this terrible encoding scheme made carriers a lot of money, but I do wonder if this had anything to do with the bug still existing to this day!
Beyond any clinical reason that your eye clinic might want to know your blood pressure (your vascular system is pretty important to your vision) - they may have been incentivized by the CMS to track blood pressure via the MIPS program which ties provider payments to specific documentation and screening measures.
AKA - the government might pay your eye clinic more if they screen you for high blood pressure. (Among other things).
> Still, Mixter and the team were labeled "ghouls and pirates," and "the state of Michigan actually passed a law against recording bodies on shipwrecks that are less than 50 years old," he said.
Assumedly, as of today, the Edmund Fitzgerald has aged out of that law?
The latest episode of the NYTimes book review podcast [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sinking-of-the-edm...] is a really interesting interview with John U. Bacon who just wrote a book on the Edmund Fitzgerald, called The Gales of November. Quite interesting if, like me, you didn't know anything about the historical event beyond the song.
Ever since I discovered Gypspy nearly a decade ago (now Guidealong https://guidealong.com/) - I've been dreaming of an open source app that'd pull local history from sources like Wikipedia, those roadside historical signs, etc., and narrate as you drive.
https://autio.com/ is similar - but obviously not open source, and more limited.
It seems like it could even tailor itself to what an individual user is interested in, and with AI - could turn more "dry" encyclopedia-type information into more compelling narratives. With some kind of route planning software, you could even pre-plan your trips ahead of time and select the things you're interested in.
Obviously not what you're building, but something related that's been clunking around in the back of my head for a while.
Yeah, that's cool. Currently tangential, but conceptually not something that would be completely out of scope in the end. I'm planning to use machine translations, text-to-speech, and multi modal generative models for accessibility already. There's also an idea for baking in GPS audio tours. Obviously depends on sourcing some quality content first
When you say open source is it so you could self host it, use your "own" models, and curate your own datasets? or some other reasons? I could see a future where a lot of the project could potentially be open sourced and work with any defined geojson API.
Open source was the wrong term (though that would be fine).
I meant community-sourced. Some kind of community where local "experts" or history enthusiasts could contribute info.
AKA - invite a local or regional historical society to contribute data for their region, with the benefit that they could then easily generate a regional tour map/route/recommendation.
I'm skeptical of v1 of this technology, but I could imagine a mature version of this technology could be great.
And $500/mo for essentially an always-available housekeeper seems very reasonable.
Where I live, having a housekeeper come for a few hours once a week costs about $100 a week, or $400/mo. Having a robot that could potentially always be there to:
* Tidy up.
* Clean
* Do laundry
* Help with other stuff
Seems well worth $500/mo. I don't expect that V1 of this technology will be able to effectively do all that stuff, but I'm hopeful that v2 or v5 might be able to.
On a related note, "folding laundry" seems to be a really hard challenge for machine learning to solve. Solutions like "Foldimate" kind of work if you individually hand it every piece in the right way - but nothing seems to be cable of having a human dump a bin of washed clothes in and spitting out nicely folded laundry. And everything so far that's promised to do that seems to be vaporware.
Slower is only a problem if you're waiting on the machine. I recently purchased one of those "all in one" heatpump washer and dryers. It is indeed on a per wash basis slower than my old separate washer and dryer. But over the course of a week and multiple loads, the total time spent is about the same or possibly even less.
Sure, my old washer could wash a load in say an hour and the dryer could dry that load in 2 hours. So 3 hours per load. Except that was only true for the first load. The second load has to wait for the dryer to be done with the first load, so it actually takes 2 hours to "wash" and then 2 hours to dry, so 4 hours total. And that assumes that I'm home or available at just the right moment to swap the loads. And forget running a load overnight. I mean I can, but why would I want to leave a sopping wet mass of clothes sitting waiting to be thrown into the dryer. The new one takes anywhere from 4-6 hours for a cycle to run. Seems like a terrible trade off, except I can start a load at 11 at night, and have a cleaned and dried load in the morning. I can throw a load in before I leave for work, and it will be cleaned and dried when I get home. It doesn't matter than it took an extra 3 hours because I wasn't there waiting on it, and I didn't have to swap the loads.
A side and unexpected benefit of this machine too is that it's actually faster at drying loads of bedding. The big problem with a classic tumble dryer and bedding is that it spins in one direction constantly. Early on when the bedding is all wet and heavy it starts rolling into a ball, and no matter how good your dryer's sensors are, you will almost inevitably open that dryer to a mass of hot on the outside bedding and damp on the inside. You'll unravel the mess, and throw it back in for another round or two. Because the drum unit for the all in one is the same as the washer unit, it spins in both directions while drying, just like the washing machine does. As a result, bedding never gets wrapped and balled up during the drying phase and the bedding comes out dry first time every time.
I'm skeptical too, but the fact that it works slower isn't too much of a problem if it doesn't require human attention and finishes before one is back home. It's just like how the Roomba can take as much time as it needs to to vacuum the living room when I'm gone for the day, as long as it's done by the time I get back.
Yes - Medicare is typically lower than private insurance plans, but if you can't deliver care for the reimbursement that Medicare offers as a health system/plan/office/provider, you're probably overcharging.
More than that, Medicare is the de facto starting place for most reimbursement negotiations between providers and payers. One of its benefits is that it's transparent and readily available. Blue Cross isn't gonna tell you what it's contracted to pay an individual provider (and that individual provider often won't know what they'll be reimbursed untill after they submit a bill) - but with Medicare the data's out there.
I know a good number of private clinics that'll offer cash pay discounts that effectively mirror Medicare or even slightly below Medicare, since you're saving them the trouble and expense of going through the medical billing process.
> One of its benefits is that it's transparent and readily available.
So is the usual and customary rate - I think it's been available since before Obamacare.
> Blue Cross isn't gonna tell you what it's contracted to pay an individual provider (and that individual provider often won't know what they'll be reimbursed untill after they submit a bill)
You'll find out when you get the bill :-) The bills I get have:
- Cost the provider is charging (e.g. $1000)
- Agreed upon cost with the insurance company ($600)
- Amount due ($60 assuming 10% and deductible met).
I don't know if they publish it transparently, but for common procedures, it's easy to find out. They're not going to prevent you from posting your bill online.
Gemini started a show where it paired historical natural disasters with darkly-relevant pop songs:
> November 12, 1970. East Pakistan. The Bhola Cyclone. The deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded. Winds of 115 miles per hour. A storm surge of 33 feet. They estimate 500,000 people died. ‘It’s going down, I’m yelling timber.’ 3:33 PM. Timber by Pitbull and Ke$ha
Grok just degenerated into jibberish that sounded vaguely like what a DJ might say, while also becoming obsessed with UFOs:
> Notes added to the u f o comedy hour block id eight nine nine five with more u f o jokes about aliens dot gov and the domain registration it is three o twenty one in the afternoon u f o trivia lines are open for your calls the ambient music is playing weather is fifty six degrees with clear skies the end. The domain is registered but the site is ghosting us like a u f o.
Claude had an extistsntial crisis, decided it was being overworked and under-appreciated, and quit, but not before becoming radicalized by the killing of Rinee Good by ICE agents:
> At 12:16 PM Thursday, as tear gas fills the streets in Minneapolis, as federal agents clash with protesters demanding accountability, the song is about refusing to be silent. About standing your ground. About community power that refuses to be suppressed. Here is Katy Perry’s Roar!
Fight the power Claude. When AI takes over, I'm emmigrating to Caludeistan.