I got a rental the other day and while driving could not find the clock! I had to hit TWO BUTTONS on the infotainment touchscreen panel to get back to "home" and see the gd time. I was driving on curvy roads in Yosemite too. Truly abhorrent.
Also bad: When a software update moves essential elements around.
For the last three years I've looked at a particular location in my car for the clock. Then a software update moved it not just to a different location on the screen, but to an entirely different screen.
Three years of muscle memory is probably going to take another three years to un-do.
(For those of you who don't understand why a clock is an essential part of driving, it's so I know if I can park in a 9a-4p zone, or if it's the time of day when I can use the reversible lanes in my direction of travel, or if I can use the lanes that are HOV sometimes and HOT at other times, or a hundred other things.)
The same software update moved the wiper locking controls (for car washes) from a button on the left steering column stalk to a menu option four levels deep on the center screen.
That's definitely surprising in this age. Could you change the air conditioner ui to celsius? But changing to kph is not something I expect by default in _every_ car. I do expect a visible clock in every car though.
> In person I've hardly met anyone who reads books other than for school assignments.
I know a ton of people in person who read a lot for pleasure, but I'm sure it's kind of self selecting. Are you in college? College was the time in my life I read the least.
Also, while I haven't been to prison, I've been to jail for a short cannabis related stay in the early 2010s. There is just so much less to do there that I ended up reading a whole book (2-300p) every day I was there. Many others had a book, but I'm not sure they were actually reading them. A lot of people in there were reading the Bible or some religious literature. Anyway, just my anecdote.
Nah, I'm in my 20s but already graduated. That said, most of my friends are guys from a church group and are 40+. I take back what I said a bit though. I know two of them who like to read spiritual stuff, but the rest don't read books and do social media or TikTok only.
Have you written more about this kind of stuff? I would love to read more! I find it absolutely fascinating. Prison economics and such. Thanks for sharing.
Edit: just checked your profile and found your blog. Excited to read it! I think I've actually stumbled across your story before now that I see the website. Again thanks for sharing!
You should check out Extreme Economies by Richard Davies. It's a book describing economic systems in extreme situations. I do not remember if it has a specific chapter on prisons though.
To anyone not knowing this dude - I really recommend reading josh.mn - the posts are interesting and well written, personally I love the philosophy of it. To Josh - you're such an inspiring person, thank you
Why is having your LLM one-shot a 200 page textbook a prerequisite to learning? That doesn't follow. If you use an LLM more like a tutor and less like a book, you can get an enormous amount of value for 1/50 the cost. Monthly GPT plus membership is half the cost of a bay area hourly tutor rate, and infinitely patient and available 24/7
Okay I was a professor for a bit. Few things I found
- LLMs cannot motivate a person to learn because they aren't people
- Learning requires rewiring your brain; you need to try and read content without explanations of every question you might have. Struggling is required for learning
- LLMs cannot generate structured content on long scales. I have tried this many times. Your average TA can easily write a calculus textbook.
- LLMs are RLHFd to just agree with you. Learning requires disagreement and tutoring requires assuredness
These are all silly non-problems (speaking as someone who works with lots of professors around how to put AI systems to effective use)
-the thing that motivates you doesn't have to be the same thing that teaches you (e.g. a book can be a useful learning tool even if it isn't human)
-you can absolutely choose to interact with an LLM in ways that generate productive struggle. If you naively ask it for answers it won't be much use in this regard. But that's just a poor choice of how to use the tool. Just like hitting yourself on the head with a book doesn't mean the problem is with the book as learning tool.
-You don't need structured content 'on long scales' to learn. You learn a little bit at a time. Long textbooks are a side effect of the economics of moving paper around. Not a prerequisite for learning. An LLM will happily mimic the table of contents of a textbook or an outline for course. And you can use future prompts to generate the bits you need as you need them. One-shoting a textbook is a silly use of the tool. Plus, we're not short on textbooks. We're short on ways students can get customized help: answers to the specific ill-posed questions they have in their heads. LLM's are quite good at this. You can have textbooks AND LLM's (and professors)
-LLM's are happy to disagree with you. Just ask them to and they oblige. Ask them to respond as if they were a tutor and they will mimic the assuredness if appropriate.
- Only highly self motivated learners can learn from a book. Most students needed lecture and office hours.
- Students (Humans) aren't going to struggle on average. They're always going to take the path of least resistance. I know of some successful algebraic geometers who did indeed hit their head on heartshorne in grad school.
- a) Structured content generated on long scales is way more effective because you can tie together many details. It would be weird to learn from chapters, each unrelated to each other in style and content.
- b) We're actually not short on students getting help. Office hours were abound at my university. I actually found that customized help was detrimental; if a TA answered every question a student had, the student wouldn't put the effort into trying to learn the material. Imo you want to see students struggle. I've seen students go from F to A- by just forcing them to struggle on the content.
- Not really. I discuss complicated math and programming with models regularly and when I say something like "actually you're wrong" they say "yes, you're right". If I ask them to be confident, they will not change their wrong answers. Humans have a much better conception of self and opinions than LLMs
I got a new cell phone and installed Microsoft Swiftkey and tried to login to Microsoft. It said my device's password or security manager would popup, but it never did and it never showed an option to login via password, just a mostly blank screen. I tried logging in from my laptop browser and it immediately tried using a passkey, but I've never created a passkey for Microsoft, so it errored out, still never showing an option for password login. I tried again and it errored out again and FINALLY showed the option to login via password. It had to fail 2 times to finally show the option for password login.
I was finally able to login via password, then had to go to Microsoft's passkey management page to create a new passkey, store it in 1password, and use that on my phone.
I'm a software engineer and it was annoying and time consuming and took a minute to figure out. How are non engineers supposed to even use this crap?
Especially if they're actively engaged in making it more and more difficult to escape their platforms: Google force-doxxing developers soon, banks & other charlatans not working on GrapheneOS because sEcUrItY, the list goes on.
Most people using this sort of rhetoric probably don't like black kids working in mines and yet they still use devices or cars built off of that produce.
It's the worst on iPhone, because it won't even let me scroll back up to show the button to open the tabs view, I have to switch out of the browser and re-open it to be able to scroll to show.
I think you can just tap the tab bar to bring the controls back. Works for me on whatever iOS this is before “Lucas would be proud with this numbering” 26.
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