I have an echo show in my kitchen. It displays ads, but they’re super easy to ignore. They’re just basically text pictures on the screen when it’s not being used and on topics that I selected.

I’m pretty massively against ads, but the echo show’s don’t bother me in the least. If Alexa Plus starts giving me verbal ads or injecting them into things then it will quickly find its way into the trash can.

This is the real take away from all this. xAI is trying hard to keep up with the big-boys and has to pay a shit ton of money just to be in the game. xAI’s revenue will be in the deep red for a long time at this rate.

“digging thru trash and bunch of obscure websites for info, using critical thinking to filter and refine your results”

You’re highlighting a barrier to learning that in and of itself has no value. It’s like arguing that kids today should learn cursive because you had to and it exercises the brain! Don’t fool yourself into thinking that just because you did something one way that it’s the best way. The goal is to learn and find solutions to problems. Whatever tool allows you to get there the easiest is the best one.

Learning through textbooks and one way absorption of information is not an efficient way to learn. Having the ability to ask questions and challenge a teacher (in this case the AI), is a far superior way to learn IMHO.

The thing is… AI is making me smarter! I use AI as a learning tool. The absolute best thing about AI is the ability to follow up questions with additional questions and get a better understanding of a subject. I use it to ask about technical topics and flush out a better understanding that I ever got from just a text book. I have seem some instances of hallucinating in the past, but with the current generation of AI I’ve had very good results and consider it an excellent tool for learning.

For reference I’m an engineer with over 25 years of experience and I am considered an expert in my field.

I think this all has to do with how you are going to compare and pick a winner in intelligence. the traditional way is usually with questions which llms tend to do quite well at. they have the tendency to hallucinate, but the amount they hallucinate is less than the amount they don’t know in my experience.

The issue is really all about how you measure intelligence. Is it a word problem? A knowledge problem? A logic problem?.. And then the issue is, can the average person get your question correct? A big part of my statement here is at the average person is not very capable of answering those types of questions.

In this day and age of alternate facts and vaccine denial, science denial, and other ways that your average person may try to be intentionally stupid… I put my money on an llm winning the intelligence competition versus the average person. In most cases I think the llm would beat me in 90% of the topics.

So, the question to you, is how do you create this competition? What are the questions you’re going to ask that the average person’s going to get right and the llm will get wrong?

I asked gemini and ChatGPT (the free one) and they both got it right. How many people do you think would get that right if you didn’t write it down in front of them? If Copilot gets it wrong, as per eletes’ post, then the AI success rate is 66%. Ask your average person walking down the street and I don’t think you would do any better. Plus there are a million questions that the LLMs would vastly out perform your average human.

Then asking it a logic question. What question are you asking that the llms are getting wrong and your average person is getting right? How are you proving intelligence here?

You say this like this is wrong.

Think of a question that you would ask an average person and then think of what the LLM would respond with. The vast majority of the time the llm would be more correct than most people.

I actually bought a sex toy on Amazon a week ago and I was pissed that they asked for my driver’s license to purchase it. WTF? What a screwed up country we live in.

I wonder how Tesla sales in Israel are going?

That’s awesome! I didn’t know you could download an LLM and run it locally! That’s what I’m really interested in is something that’s on my side and not a conduit to Google, MS or other.

I’m so glad Hawley proposed this bill or I wouldn’t have known that deepseek was open source and downloadable! I’ll have to go look for a download.

“The Trump administration has passed a resolution saying that Mexico will now be called ‘America South’ and Canada ‘America North’. Google said it will follow the government’s lead in changing the names on it’s maps app.”

It was probably part of a cost cutting plan too show they were trimming costs in order to get more funding from investors. It clearly didn’t work.

1. Vehicle needed lidar
2. Vehicle should have a collision detection indicator for anomalous collisions and random mechanical problems

This is directly a result of Elon’s edict that Tesla cars don’t use lidar. If you aren’t aware Elon set that as a requirement at the beginning of Tesla’s self driving project because he didn’t want to spend the money on lidar for all Tesla cars.

His “first principles” logic is that humans don’t use lidar therefore self driving should be able to be accomplished without (expensive) enhanced vision tools. While this statement has some modicum of truth, it’s obviously going to trade off safely in situations where vision is compromised. Think fog or sunlight shining in your cameras / eyes or a person running across the street at night wearing all black. There are obvious scenarios where lidar is a massive safety advantage, but Elon made a decision for $$ to not have that. This sounds like a direct and obvious outcome of that edict.

All electricity is overhead for security reasons, routing solar energy through the rails would destroy that. Doing that (beyond the 100m test-track) would mean a prolongued political discussion.

Electricity is overhead for safety reasons (maybe that’s what you meant by “security reasons”). As long as the voltage is kept low (< 48V) and the runs of solar panels aren’t too long, the power can be run safely in the tracks.

My first reaction was how stupid this is. Dirt, debris and other things will get on the panels and cause lots of problems, but after a few minutes I realized it’s actually quite brilliant.

There are three major costs of solar, the panels, the location, and the wiring + inverters. If the tracks are used as the wires (extremely low resistance paths back to an inverter), the location is wasted space so basically free, and the inverter can be placed anywhere along the path to remove the power from the tracks, the cost of this comes down to mainly the cost of the panel, which is actually pretty cheep these days.

The real challenges will be in cleaning & maintenance, vandalism, and modifying the track to limit the conductive paths (assuming they’re used for this).

This isn’t what they want to happen. They know it will happen, but this isn’t the goal or objective.

Amazon is a big boy company, if they want to cut staff, they’ll cut staff. The problem with cutting staff this way, is that they don’t get to decide who they’re cutting. They don’t want to cut talented employees at random, they want to pick the low performers and let them go. This is kind of the opposite of that.

The higher skilled the employee is, the more likely they are to have been hired remote, and to feel they can find another job also. That means they’re effectively shooting themselves in the foot and getting rid of some of their talented employees for the benefit of bringing people into the office.

There has been a swing in the business opinion that work from home isn’t as efficient. This is basically the higher-ups falling in line with that opinion.

Technology has moved from nitch nerdy thing to general public usage and as it did so it became usable without knowing what’s going on. Gen Z doesn’t know shit about technology, they just know how to use it.

When I was a kid, if you wanted to get a computer working you had to screw with the RAM settings or build the computer yourself from components. If you didn’t know how to do this you talked with someone who did. I’ve forced my kids to learn at least some of this, but the idea that they’re more tech savvy is ridiculous. They’re users of tech, but it’s become too complicated (and more user friendly), so they don’t know what’s happening behind their screen.

As an engineering manager, I’ve already received AI cover letters. Don’t do that. They suck. They get “round filed” faster than no cover letter at all. It’s insulting.

(Realistically if I couldn’t tell the difference then it would be fine, but right now it’s so fucking obvious.)