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As time goes by I’m finding a place for AI.

1. I use it for information searches, but only in cases where I know the information exists and there is an actual answer. Like history questions or asking for nuanced definitions of words and concepts.

2. I use it to manipulate documents. I have a personal pet peeve about the format of most recipes for example. Recipes always list the ingredient amounts in a table at the top, but then down in the steps they just say “add the salt” or “mix in the flour.” Then I have to look up at the chart and find the amount of salt/flour, and then I lose my place in the steps and have to find it again. I just have AI throw out the chart and integrate the amounts into the steps: “mix in 2 cups of flour”. I can have it shorten the instructions too and break them into easier to read bullet points. I also ask it to make ingredient substitutions and other modifications. The other day I gave it a bread recipe and asked it to introduce a cold-proofing step and reformat everything the way I like. It did great.

3. Learning interactively. When I need to absorb a new skill or topic I sometimes do it conversationally with AI. Yes I can find articles and videos but then I am stuck with the information they lay out and the pace and order in which they do it. With AI you can stop and ask clarifying questions, or have it skip over the parts you already know. I find this is way faster than laborious googling. However only trust it for very straightforward topics. Like “explain the different kinds of welding and what they are for.” I wouldn’t trust it for more nuanced topics where perspective and opinion come into it. And I’ve leaned that it isn’t great at topics where there isn’t enough information out there. Like very niche questions about the meta of a certain video game that’s only been out a month.

4. Speech to text and summarization. AI records all my Zoom meetings for work and gives summaries of what was discussed and next steps. This is always better than nothing. I’m also impressed with how it seems to understand how to discard idle chit chat and only record actual work content. At most it says “the meeting began with coworkers exchanging details from their respective weekends.”

This kind of hard-and-fast summarization and manipulation of factual text is much easier with AI. Doing my job for me? No. Hovering over my entire computer? No. Writing my emails for me? Fuck off.

The takeaway is that specific tools I can go to when I need them, for point-specific needs, is all I want. I don’t need or what a hovering AI around all the time, and I don’t want whatever tripe Dell can come up with when I can get the best latest models direct from the leading players.

They’re not enforceable, binding laws anyway. It’s a bunch of corporate CYA. They want to be able to tell a judge someday that they did everything they could to inform you of their business practices and get you to agree to use their product responsibly. The company’s chance of facing a court action is much higher than a user’s chance of being held to whatever they agreed by checking a box.

Putting the “mildly” back in mildly infuriating.

Yeah exactly. Hank Green hints at this in the video title but skin is the biggest problem that had to be solved to move us onto land. How does one keep from drying out? It’s like we made a spacesuit for ourselves and now live in it.

They went through a very public divestment of the company from all the “family” centric hate groups. The owners still donate to them personally but the company’s charitable giving arm does not.

You could call them woke for “backing up” a gay marriage or you could say they chose not to go to the trouble of breaking heads over some gay marriage. I know the Trump era has emboldened the worst of us, but that doesn’t mean everyone is for sure willing to prove that their PR has been phony all along. They don’t have enough to gain.

I learned about this from an awesome Hank Green video about how life evolved to move out of the ocean onto land. Developing air breathing lungs was one step in that, and it appears that lungs developed from stomachs. Any soft tissue with a lot of blood flowing through it close to the surface can absorb some oxygen. Some fish began to develops such sacs and use them to gulp and capture airborne oxygen. And he notes that there are some surgeries today where they may “aspirate the patient’s colon” with oxygen to keep their blood oxygen up when conventional breathing must be supplemented. Breathing through your ass is in fact a thing.

Not only does it need to become possible, it needs to become more effective than other treatments like crowns and implants. I think it’s going to be a long time, and even then will only be applicable in limited cases for a long time, and will be really expensive.

In theory. Long term vacancy is not in any corporate landlord’s plan, though. They will adjust rather than seek impossible rent forever. And aside from large apartment buildings, most residences (75% of 1-4 unit buildings) are owned by small landlords who don’t give a shit about network effects.

The only way that happens is if the rent is too high.

That’s not the only way. It’s not even very likely. If they are looking for too much rent and can’t get it they will lower their ask rather than sit there month after month getting nothing. Too high rent is the most easily fixable situation conceivable.

Other explanations include things like: it’s owned by someone who is elderly and due to their health or other problem they simply aren’t managing it actively or are even incapacitated and can’t make major decisions. Perhaps the owner died and the property is in the probate courts, which can take years.

Also, the presence of squatters doesn’t necessarily indicate it has been vacant for a long time.

It will eventually get heaped on there no doubt.

Check the wind first.

A “strategically placed” incendiary device that is placed in your next door neighbor’s lot? Right over the fence from your own house? That doesn’t seem very strategic at all.

Yeah this is a case where some kind of HOA or city blight regulations would actually be a good thing.

Granted this was 1999 but I wish I could unsee the shit I saw one day when I did a SELECT password FROM user

And what is a private key? How exactly do you “keep” it across multiple devices? It’s all still black magic to me.

It reminds me a little of Game of Thrones, where all the major players, the royals etc all have spy networks. This is a world where very poor peasants and servants are everywhere and many of them, including children, end up in the employ of this person or that person, watching who is coming and going and reporting back, such that one’s movements and meetings are trackable to a minute degree. The better your spy network, the more power you have.

Of course Varys, spymaster to the crown, is famed for the effectiveness of his network, which spans the continent and even across the sea to other major cities.

He himself is a master of disguise. This was left out of the show entirely but he frequently appears by surprise, whipping off the guise of an old woman and later leaving the scene dressed as a priest, etc. He grew up with actors and uses makeup and costume changes to hide his tracks. He can change his voice and gait at will and routinely shocks people by his ability to blend in and appear or disappear at will. He knows how to leave a place by a different entrance than he came in, and knows all the secrets passageways of the castle.

Basically, in a world with no privacy, the world’s foremost surveillance master is a model for all of us in these times. If you want to move freely in public but do so without a trace, be prepared to pull your hood up and when you leave a restaurant, take off the hoodie you were wearing when you went in. Practice different postures to throw off gait tracking.

You don’t have to like it, but this is the world we live in.

Of all the things you might miss by moving to a rural area, this should be the least of your worries. There are places to take a shit out there. Have you ever heard of a septic tank?

Any one you walk away from…

Good breakdown. Pretty obvious now that you point it all out.