When did snark replace thoughtful commentary?

2014

Around the same time websites like polygon came to the forefront to produce rage bait for echo chambers rather than thoughtful articles.

This is an ill-informed take. My lifetime has seen transformative, inexpensive medications dramatically increase the healthspans of literally billions of people. Atorvastatins have reduced heart disease and extended lives across the globe for pennies a day, and GLP-1 drugs are helping countless people overcome an epidemic of obesity - those, too, will fall in price over time.

Very well said.

So much new housing has been built in the last year in Canada that Canada is now unrecognizable? That is unmitigated bullshit.

LLMs don’t think, silly goose.

Thinking is when biological brains create new ideas from old thoughts and inputs.

LLMs can take old ideas and inputs, as text, and create text that turns into useful new ideas when a human reads them. The new LLMs actually do this in a meaningful way, bullshitting far less than older LLMs, and actually producing meaningful criticism and suggestions. The reader does not do the thinking needed to create the new idea. They just decode the text into the new idea.

So either actually meaningful new ideas can be created without thinking, or the LLM is doing a kind of artificial thinking.

Critics will say that we may as well argue that bones can think, because casting bones in a cup influences the prediction in a soothe sayer's mind. But the words created by LLMs - especially higher grade ones - are much more meaningful and thought like than bones in a cup. They can clearly advance a line of thinking in a way that is analogous to how a brain advances a line of thinking.

Therefore, it's reasonable to say LLMs are capable of limited artificial thought. They can effectively process thoughts represented externally to humans.

Maybe we should call this co-thinking, because it still requires a human as the final mile of the loop, to turn the result back into a real thought.

I’m sorry, but a major home improvement investment of $6,500 per room relying on a small VC-backed startup is a recipe for disaster, given its cloud-connected nature. If it shipped with Matter/HomeKit/etc support out of the box, I might feel more confident knowing I can still configure it long after the company goes belly up, or Google buys in and inevitably kills the product 10 years from now.

> If it shipped with Matter/HomeKit/etc support out of the box

Tech specs mentions Matter on their website.

It's too expensive anyways.

$800?! This is a sandwich in search of a picnic.

Stock buybacks were always an illegal form of stock manipulation, until Reagan decided it was fine, and then it stopped getting prosecuted.

That explains it, the class was BR (Before Reagan).

That guy really planted the seeds of all the issues we are having now.

Stock buybacks are an illegal stock manipulation that were routinely prosecuted as such before the Reagan administration waved a magic wand and decided it was kosher. If Google has $70 billion for stock buybacks, then Google has $70 for taxes, and strong pro-unionization rules are called for to tip the balance of power towards workers. Why did we create rules of the road where corporations and shareholders became the guiding force of our economy, when workers’ spending power keeps us afloat?

When I saw the backlash, I thought it was silly. Until I saw the ad. It really was in poor taste. It shows Apple’s total lack of engagement with the real world, with art and artists and their instruments and tools. In Apple’s universe, those are all distilled to digital facsimiles that can fit on a glass slab.