This is why I pay for YT Premium. No way in hell am I watching ads, but I do want to be able to use the platform, and the money has to come from somewhere. So far it’s been pretty good value, although SponsorBlock is of course still required.

So what will everyone having their own AI look like in a way that doesn’t just sound like a chatGPT joke? What would make it a desirable future?

I guess that depends on how much authority you’d want to delegate.

For me, it would be nice if I could have it do things like shopping tasks without being more of a pain than doing the task myself. For example, I needed to buy a hot-water carpet cleaner today. It would be great if I could tell it

Hey Staffie, buy a carpet shampoo machine for home delivery within the next two weeks. Pick a highly rated machine from a widely recognized brand, and focus on carpet cleaning and water extraction performance, I don’t need any upholstery cleaning features. Don’t spend over $400. If the best option is under $200 don’t ask, just buy it. If it’s over $200, show me the top two options before buying.

And end up with something pretty close to what I’d have picked if I did the shopping myself.

It would also be great if I could have it reliably perform arbitrary tasks that it isn’t specifically programmed to do. Like

Hey Staffie, check if I’ve got enough PTO to take next Thursday and Friday off, and if so, reserve a campsite for me at Foo State Park for three nights, preferably one close to the water, then send Mr. Boss an email letting him know I’ll be out those days.

If it were particularly smart it would infer from previous conversations that I might want a 1lb propane cylinder, marshmallows, graham crackers, and Hershey bars added to my grocery list and would add them automatically (because it already knows my preferences about small automatic expenditures like that and is aware of the spending limits I’ve given it).

Then it might come back a few minutes later and say

'Hey boss, all the campsites within 250 of the water are already reserved, but site 1701D, which is near the only restroom and a tailhead, is available. Reviewers report that the park WiFi access point is installed at the restroom, so that site has good free internet service. Shall I reserve it?

So yeah, in general, the ability to take arbitrary directions and execute them in reasonably intelligent ways (for example If I ask for a site Foo State Park, and there are two such parks in my country, it should be able to guess which park I’m talking about based on the context (like, if I’m reserving 3 nights and one of the parks is an hour down the road and the other is a two day drive, just assume the closer one)) and not require pre-programmed interfaces to every single thing. It should be able to search the web, find the interfaces humans use, and use those to do the kinds of things humans can do. It should also have some capabilities to use my accounts and passwords under a delegated authority to get shit done as my authorized assistant.

Ideally it should also do things like observe my choices and infer my preferences so it can constrain choices it offers me:

Hey Staffie, order lunch from Subway for pickup at 3.

Sure boss, do you want your usual 6 inch turkey sub?

Yep

Nacho cheese chips or salt-n-vinegar?

Nacho.

Done, I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

Stuff like that.

It’s funny how much this varies from family to family. We never eat dinner before 9PM. Usually two meals per day, lunch at maybe 1PM and dinner between 9 and 10PM. We’re just doing desk-work though, so no extra calorie needs. If I’m doing physical stuff I’ll usually add a light breakfast.

I was curious if that would work on ethernet cable! I’ve seen it done on coax, wasn’t sure if it would work well enough on UTP to be useful outside a lab setting. Cheap too. Cool!

Wire tracker maybe? You might want a higher quality version than that particular one if the cable run is long, one of the reviews suggest that the distance is limited.

I grew up playing World of Walmart

Me too! Good memories. It was better before they nerfed the produce department though.

huh, Windows still distributes a handful of .com programs. Neat.

I liked .com back in the day because it was easy to write assembly and dump it through the MSDOS ‘debug’ program to create an executable.

Yep, two simple mechanical knobs is easily the best microwave oven interface. Although I do like the fancy Samsung microwave I have that is almost completely silent and lightweight, I think it uses an inverter instead of a chonky HV transformer. I wish I could get a combo of that inverter with a couple of simple knobs for controls.

Sure: Dry Steam

Dry cleaning fluid too!

If I hadn’t already deactivated my account this would have been a good time to do it. I had like 135,000 accounts on my block list.

It probably comes partly out of the social dynamic that causes the tendency to value men primarily by their usefulness rather than who they are personally. Feeling gets in the way of me getting shit done, earning money to support my family, etc., so I turn feelings off, mostly. I could turn them back on and learn to manage them and whatnot, but if that doesn’t make it easier for me to earn money, fix the house, etc., or worse, actively gets in the way of those things by taking more of my work time or making it harder for me to want to do those things, then I don’t have an incentive to be genuinely emotionally connected.

Also, evident confidence in one’s ability to handle shit helps to make dependents feel happier and safer, so experiencing uncertainty, fear, and other such emotions tends to act against one’s own interest in getting shit done and avoiding drama that distracts from shit getting done.

So yeah, it’s kind of a question of ‘who do you want to be?’. Personally, I put a fair bit of effort into suppressing ‘negative’ emotions (fear, uncertainty, sadness, envy) and try to encourage positivity (curiosity, joy, whatever the word for the opposite of envy is (ChatGPT says ‘mudita’, vicarious joy). I figure this tends to blunt some of the more subtle and nuanced emotional states since I’m kind of artificially managing the states, but it is a practice that helps people who depend on me feel stable and safe so they can do the things they want to do, which is important to me.

Compassion is probably the hardest to manage this way, mostly because it is a response to sympathetic feelings of negative emotions. Like, if I see someone who is sad and I am suppressing my sadness emotions this also has a heavy damping effect on my sympathetic sadness which is what usually triggers compassionate behavior. So I have to kind of manually watch for situations where sympathetic responses are appropriate and ease up on the suppression a bit (but not too much) to allow the empathy to kick in.

whatever technical bullshit they needed to do to reverse them

Apparently ultimately this involves hitting the person hiding the encryption keys with a $4 wrench until they provide the keys.

need to be taught how to feel.

And before that you’d need to convince a lot of us that that would be more useful than the current situation.

Thanks for this tip, very useful

I use a cheap paper notebook, like 5x8 inch size. Each day, first thing when I start work, I write the date at the top of the next blank page, copy the items from the previous page that are not done, and add new items at the bottom of the list as they come up. Tasks I haven’t started have a blank box next to them, tasks I’ve started get a half-filled box, and finished items get a filled box. Anything that moves from one day to the next that hasn’t been started gets a digit in the box that increases by one each day. If the number gets to 10 I cross the item off as cancelled. When I’m picking a new task I try to prioritize some the tasks with higher numbers.

If I need to take notes I’ll use nearby blank space, sometimes a facing page. Generally I keep notes very short, long details go into whatever ticketing system we’re using with the ticket number in my notebook so I can find it again. There are a few other habits I use that are generally in line with the Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity techniques, like simple flags for what sort of action I can take on the item (completable (about half a day or less), needs more info, needs decomposition (more than half a day of work)), with the notable difference that I don’t make any effort to ‘capture everything’. I load-shed aggressively and early, which is in-line with the way I want to live my life.

Mostly I don’t keep very many active tasks, so it’s rare that I have to cancel items. If my list is getting long I stop putting new items on it and just tell people I’m too busy to accept new stuff. I used to try to track more stuff, but I learned that just meant I ended up with lots of notes about stuff that I never had time to do, so I quite wasting my time tracking them.

When the notebook is full I put it on the shelf and get a new one.

I keep the notebook next to me on my desk. If someone asks me for something I check the book, if it looks like I’ve got time, I add it to the book. When I go to a meeting, I take it with me. If I don’t happen to have it I usually remember what’s on the current page because I just wrote it there that morning.

It’s low-tech, and I like it that way. Partly because I like to find nice pens to write with.

That’s me! Moved to a very small town with fast internet so I could have a house for about 0.75x my annual salary. It’s great, now we can almost afford to pay for student loans!

perfect mechanical shuffle

What’s perfect in this context? It’s maybe a little counterintuitive because I’d think a perfect mechanical shuffle would be perfectly deterministic (assuming no mechanical failure of the device) so that it would be repeatable. Like, you would give it a seed number (about 67 digits evidently) and the mechanism would perform a series of interleaves completely determined by the seed. Then if you wanted a random order you would give the machine a true random seed (from your wall of lava lamps or whatever) and you’d get a deck with an order that is very likely to never have been seen before. And if you wanted to play a game with that particular deck order again you’d just put the same seed into the machine.

While the outside screen is too thin on my fold

Yep, I’m hoping they’ll do a slightly wider tri-fold model at some point. I’d like to have a wider front screen, like Galaxy S22 Ultra sized, and then be able to unfold twice to get a ~3x sized tablet-sized screen.

Not that that would help with the already astronomical price-tag of the Z-Fold.

> ChatGPT currently knows the text of the Harry Potter novels, but it does not recite them when asked to do so.

I tried that several weeks ago while discussing some details of the Harry Potter world with ChatGPT, and it was able to directly quote several passages to me to support its points (we were talking about house elf magic and I asked it to quote a paragraph). I checked against a dead-tree copy of the book and it had exactly reproduced the paragraph as published.

This may have changed with their updates since then, and it may not be able to quote passages reliably, but it is (or was) able to do so on a couple of occasions.