JieJie's comments

Author Christine Wenc is on a media tour marketing her book (available Tuesday, March 18th). Here are some excerpts and interviews.

https://soundcloud.com/wort-fm/christine-wenc-on-the-legacy-...

https://soundcloud.com/hachetteaudio/funny-because-its-true-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/12/books/new-nonfiction-book...

Sign me up for non-profit AI.

I'm a strong advocate for a united effort to create a training set of the collected works of mankind free to any AI company to use if, for instance, it uses its profits to fund UBI, or some other program to pay us for what they use.

Anything but AGI profits being used to keep score in the Oligarchy Olympics. I agree that is a bridge too far.

I hear what you're saying, but The Guardian does have an opinion section this could have been printed in, but they chose to print it in Tech. The UX in Firefox for me, I could barely tell it was even in the Tech section, because the font is small and only bolded, where the rest of the menu options are in normal style. The News heading, however, is quite large, and has a strong red underline.

I think I was fair to call this out, and the article has been flagged by others.

This is an opinion piece published to the News section of The Guardian. Interesting.

I don't see any how for-profit AI is a threat to anything but for-profit art.

However, I do know that printing opinion pieces as news is definitely a threat to journalism.

My friend uses Oko on iOS to tell her when the walk light is on, and when the numbers are counting down. There is also a navigation aid that she doesn't quite feel comfortable using yet, but I will say the Oko app being able to tell her (quite precisely) what is going on with the stoplight has been a big confidence booster for her getting out into the busy world.

https://www.ayes.ai

The leader in the field is BeMyEyes, of course. They've been working with Microsoft to integrate GPT-4o vision models into their app, with some great success. What we haven't seen yet is the move to live-video image recognition that could come from something like an OrCam or Meta glasses (they recently announced a partnership with Meta). I'm guessing there are serious safety issues with the model missing important information and leading someone vulnerable astray.

https://www.bemyeyes.com https://www.bemyeyes.com/blog/be-my-eyes-meta-accessibility-...

OrCam has a new product (woe upon those of us who have the paltry OrCam MyEye2) that the Meta glasses will be competing against at an eye-watering > $4K price point, that seems to do less.

https://www.orcam.com/en-us/orcam-myeye-3-pro

As with the hearing aid industry which recently went over-the-counter causing prices to plummet, the vision aid product category is in temporary disarray as inexpensive new technologies makes their way into a premium-price market.

I’m not sure if this is exactly what you are referring to, but Anthropic has done a lot of interpretability work on Claude, which they’ve published along with the famous "Golden Gate Claude".^1

"We also find more abstract features—responding to things like bugs in computer code, discussions of gender bias in professions, and conversations about keeping secrets."

1: https://www.anthropic.com/research/mapping-mind-language-mod...

ACE of 9. Founded two successful alt-weekly newspapers, worked on world-famous collectible card games, lost it all due to illness that nearly killed me, recovering and slowly making my way back.

One thing a high ACE score did for me was make me an irresistible force, even as it seemed to turn the rest of the world into immovable objects.

The US had a president for eight years who was re-elected on his ability to act on his “gut reaction”s.

Not saying this is ideal, just that it isn’t the showstopper you present it as. In fact, when people talk about “human values”, it might be worth reflecting on whether this a thing we’re supposed to be protecting or expunging?

"I'm not a textbook player, I'm a gut player.” —President George W. Bush.

https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/2003/01/12/going-to...

My share chat link moved into the sidebar in the … menu to the right of each chat title (MacOS Safari).

Sometimes it seems as if convenience and price are the technologies that are at the top of the list of consumers in the US market, and that other considerations come in a distant third. We seem to pay little attention to our collective goodwill these days.

I hope we can start putting our money where our mouth is, though.

(Adding on instead of making a new comment)

These are the kind of personal robots I am more interested in. I'm imagining an autonomous, voice-controlled (this isn't exactly that, but it's very close) little robot buddy, like a Destiny 2 Ghost. This is productized to be something different than that, but maybe this is a closer form factor (with what seems like useful protective nacelles to prevent it from damaging its environment).

It has wifi, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to have a 5G modem in a more expensive model (DJI has a deep bench at this point, all the way up to agriculture and delivery drones that have serious radio communication arrays).

I feel like with all the companies rushing to humanoid robotics, there should be a place for alternate forms like little drone buddies?

There seems like there could be a really sweet price-to-performance ratio that could open up a $1K or 2K personal robot that isn’t about doing tasks, but about remote sensing and processing?

Right. At my school, the accessibility option for tests is to give us more time. A three hour test would be made "accessible" by extending it to six hours or even more.

I was really hoping AI would make our world more accessible, not less.

(eta) Additionally, it would take more instructor or docent time, because no one can't be trusted to actually learn the material we're paying tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for.

It ain't the future dystopia I'm afraid of, it's the one we're creating this week.

Loved Wizardry.

Before Wizardry, there was Akalabeth.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Akalabeth:_World_of_Doom

I'm having fun with this visual editor for LLM scripts. It's almost like Hypercard for LLMs.

On my 16GB MacBook Air, I did not have to set the OLLAMA_ORIGINS env variable. Maybe I did that a long time ago, as I have a previous Ollama install. This is the first really fun toy/tool that I've found that uses local (also supports foundation model APIs) LLMs to do something interesting.

I'm having a ball!

I think I take your point, though that just sounds like another type of insecurity to me. I meant to turn what I took as the original meaning (personal insecurity as a character trait associated with goodness, kindness, happiness, etc.) around on itself by implying exactly what you seem to be saying about the point I missed.

If you mean what I think you mean, well, we probably don't disagree so much at that. How to make society less cruel, eh? There's the rub.

It seems that with that last quote you're agreeing with my point that people who have lost hope in achieving food, money, romance, work, housing, etc. (becoming insecure), would reach for tools in the authoritarian toolkit.

I do wonder if maybe you misunderstood me.

"Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi."

In my experience, "Secure people never go Nazi and are generally kind, good, happy, and gentlemanly."

There is considerable proof in the public record for just such a belief.

"The logic of humanitarian military intervention gained force in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, “the unipolar moment” of American dominance, and after the Sept. 11 attacks, when it became increasingly common among conservatives to tie national security to democracy promotion abroad."*

*https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/opinion/biden-afghanistan...

NYT Gift Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/technology/nvidia-microso...

Comments here are useful and on point for 20-30-year-olds. Pot makes boredom less boring, and that's probably not an ideal outcome for a young person.

With any luck, y'all are going to be 60 someday, or 80, and pot making boredom less boring is going to become your every waking thought, and staying awake all night is going to become a curse and no longer a superpower.

And cannabis is going to be there for you as an alternative to benzos and opiates, and it will be a good thing. Count on it.

Absolutely. We're looking forward to Apple's announcements at WWDC this year, which analysts predict are right up that alley.

We're planning on getting a phone-carrying lanyard and she will just carry her phone around her neck with Be My Eyes^0 looking out the rear camera, pointed outward. She's DeafBlind, so it'll be bluetoothed to her hearing aids, and she can interact with the world through the conversational AI.

I helped her access the video from the presentation, and it brought her to tears. Now, she can play guitar, and the AI and her can write songs and sing them together.

This is a big day in the lives of a lot of people whom aren't normally part of the conversation. As of today, they are.

0: https://www.bemyeyes.com/