Claude is what I had installed as an app on my phone. I don’t remember any particular reason I installed that app and not the others. I hadn’t heard at the time that Claude had the weakest vision, but even if I had I’d probably have used it anyway for convenience.
I’d be vaguely interested to see how other models perform, but not interested enough to put in the effort.
I feel very meh about “wake up the world”, firstly because AI capabilities companies are going to do it for us, and secondly because whether it’s good or bad depends a lot on the quality of what we funnel the world towards
These two points seem contradictory. AI capabilities companies aren’t going to do the good thing for us. (Or maybe you think they are? But I’m a bit surprised if you think that.)
Things like how shadows cast on oil barrows (I think)
Yep. If you have a sattelite picture of an oil tank with a floating lid, you can compare the shadow cast on the ground against the shadow cast on the lid to see how full it is.
When the charity sells the stock, what cost basis do they use? Market price on the day they received it?
I’ve donated £5000 again.
Thanks! It mostly did better at object recognition than me. I imagine I’d have improved with the full res unscuffed images, but I still don’t think I’d have recognized the fridge so quickly (though admittedly it wasn’t helpful). The only place I thought I’d have done better was when it got confused by the door in the mirror.
I’m interested.
Hm, I think I’d bet against this:
The instruction referred to “the doorway on your left”, not “on the left”; “on your left” is even worse in context.
It doesn’t give a coherent world model that the rest of its instructions follow. e.g. if it thinks I didn’t take a photo from that door when it asked me to, then its instruction “walk straight ahead past where that bedroom doorway was on the left” gets me past the kitchen again.
Overall agreed, but I note that the video (which I enjoyed) is a significantly different challenge—when the dad starts sliding the bread around the table with his knife, he doesn’t give the kid a chance to say “ah, I see the problem! You need to dip the knife in the peanut butter...”
The EU executive, on the other hand, where most of the real power lies, is apolitical, and the individual commissioners are appointed by member states, not by political parties.
What does apolitical mean in this context?
Like if Fred’s business costs $1m to start and creates $100k/year surplus value, it gets paid off in ten years
Oh, not quite. “Costs $1m to start” sounds like it’s talking about the cost to Fred. Some of that will be e.g. wages paid to construction workers. For this accounting to work, we need to talk about the costs to society versus the value to society. (The costs to society being similar to those from Tom’s shop—space, time and materials.)
The only one losing out is Fred.
The article mentions fixed costs of building Tom’s business. Like if Fred’s business costs $1m to start and creates $100k/year surplus value, it gets paid off in ten years, which seems like a good return on investment. If Tom’s building costs $1m to make and only creates an extra $10k/year surplus value (growing the market a little but mostly taking Fred’s business), it gets paid off in 100 years, which seems like a bad return on investment.
I guess some things involved in the fixed costs are
Tom’s space isn’t used for some other purpose
Time and materials spent building Tom’s shop are lost
How much should we expect the market to be like “well, if Tom’s business is a net negative socially, then I’ll be able to find some other use for that location and time and materials, which will leave society-at-large better off”? I don’t know.
I donated £5000 through the Anglo-American charity last year and found it fairly painless. Details in this prior comment.
This has been proven to me on multiple occasions when I have done relatively “transgressive” things in public, things like jumping fences, and been surprised that no strangers noticed.
I guess it can be hard to distinguish between “no strangers noticed”, “someone noticed but didn’t care”, and “someone noticed, cared, but didn’t react”. I once saw someone do a wall backflip in public, and thought it was cool, but he presumably didn’t notice me notice him.
I feel like jumping a fence is pretty likely to be noticed—though not shocking if it isn’t, depending how many people are around. But even if someone does notice, and dislikes that you’re doing it, what are they gonna do?
So distinguishing between them also doesn’t usually matter.
The ways that printing and 3d printing are cursed feel different, to me.
My expectation is that if I manage to give a printer any instructions at all, it usually prints the thing I expect. If not, it’s usually because it’s out of paper or (more rarely) ink/toner. If it has raw materials and receives instructions, I expect it to print a document that looks substantially like I expect. But “trying to give it any instructions at all” may well be an exercise in frustration.
With my 3d printer, giving it instructions hasn’t been the hard part. (It’s maybe not quite straightforward. You need a microSD card, formatted correctly, with a .gcode file, and I can see those feeling cursed to someone, but they’re the kinds of problems I know how to solve. Then you put the card in the printer and select it using the sufficiently-intuitive interface on the printer.) The hard part is that the instructions I give it don’t reliably result in a physical artifact that looks or functions like I intended. Airflow, ambient temperature, properties of my filament, bed adhesion, calibration. There’s too much that can vary in the environment, and those differences can mean I need to give my printer slightly different instructions (like different nozzle or bed temperature, more supports, slower speed).
2d printers, in my experience, seem to have solved that kind of problem. Though I imagine professional printers have exciting problems that I don’t.
(John’s blank page 1 is an admittedly weird case here, but “printing a blank page” is still less surprising than, say, “oops, near the top of the page I printed a black area that was too large, and that caused the paper to skip 3mm up higher than the printer thought it was, to fix that next time I need to make sure the printer slows down in that area, or inject some subtle yellow dots”.)
(Maybe part of the difference here is “printing at some point on the paper is independent of printing at some other point”? There might be calibration errors, that mean every point is slightly offset or slightly the wrong color, but because they affect everywhere equally I’m unlikely to notice them. And there might be random errors, where ink is fired slightly too late and a specific red dot is in slightly the wrong place. But I don’t expect that red dot to cause the next line to also be in the wrong place. With a 3d printer, a missing or unexpected bit of plastic causes the next bit of plastic to be in an unexpected place too, so the random errors compound, sometimes into a goopy blob. Part of the point of printing a skirt is to avoid this: the perimeter of the first layer is some of the most likely plastic to be not-where-expected, but if it’s in a skirt it doesn’t get printed on top of so that’s okay.)
I confess I don’t know what this advice is. “Include a picture partway through your article” is my best guess?