I eventually switched to a midsize truck, because I need to do some light towing sometimes, and my first thought was, it feels so much safer in the rain.

Legitimate question: I can understand that record-low snowpack would cause less water to flow into the lake, but the "erasure" of the snow pack by heat is just melting that would be captured in the lake, right? So if the record-low snowpack had been followed by record cold, would we have even less water in the lake?

It was interesting to observe the other engineers around me, none of whom had ever managed people. They tended to try to "program" the agent to produce exactly the code that they envisioned, and were very cautious, seemingly quite afraid that the agent would do something unexpected.

Having managed engineers, I was much more comfortable with asking someone to do something and having them do something more-or-less different from what I was expecting or had envisioned. Sometimes that was worse, sometimes better, than what I'd had in mind, but it was very rare that I would ask an engineer to do something and they would produce exactly the thing I'd imagined.

Having had that experience, I was quite comfortable giving a task to an agent and saying to myself, "Okay, let's see what you come up with," and then evaluating the result. And as with people I knew I had to learn the right way to talk to the agent in order to make myself understood, just as I'd had to learn the right way to talk to each person on my team.

The big differences were that (a) I didn't have to wait days or weeks to see what the agent came up with so the cost of being misunderstdood was much lower, and (b) the agents generally had much, much better reading comprehension than they typical engineer, so in fact I was misunderstood less often.

Funny that IBM would describe its own profits as “exorbitant”. A little truth in advertising for once?

I live in the USA, and there are certainly many ways in which the USA is negligent on health care, but making sure people can stay cool in hot weather isn't one of them.

In any case, this isn't a zero sum game, where the USA's negligence in one area negates Europes negligence in another.

Why does it have to be framed as all-or-nothing? I agree that using air conditioning to reduce the number of people who die from the heat does nothing to help with the problem of jellyfish, but how is that relevant, exactly?

The idea that Europe could slow warming by not using air-conditioning is absurd, when the emissions mostly come from elsewhere. France, in particular, gets most of its energy from nuclear power, but also makes it very hard to get climatisation.

I think the only conclusion you can draw from that plot is everyone thinks they'll be in the third quartile.

Without AI, it's likely that neither of these videos would have been made, right? Five years ago, was it a normal thing for even one, much less two, groups of wedding guests to produce a video to show at a wedding, and if so, would the video even have been good? I mean actually good, not "it's the thought that counts, A-for-effort" good.

Isn't this like saying, "I decided to write a song for my friend's wedding, and I used AI to help me, and I played it and everyone liked it, and then someone else played the song that they had AI write for them, and it sounded just like mine, and everyone loved that too!"

Writing songs is something that's been around long enough, that if guests had made a habit of performing their original songs at weddings, even a graybeard like me would have experienced it. The baseline to compare to is no original songs were performed.

As it happens, in the weddings I've attended, I've heard exactly one such wedding song, and it was awful.

I managed a guy like that. He was capable of very complex thinking, but he wasn't in love with complexity, he was in love with simplicity. His solutions tended to be of the form, "we can ignore all these things, and just focus on X, and it will provide all the value." He'd notice something and simplify it and the benefit to the company would be measured in multiples of his salary.

Every manager who'd ever directly managed him knew what a treasure he was, but it was often hard for us to convince others of the value of his solutions because they were so simple, and people were convinced that hard problems must have complex solutions. (or else they would have solved them, right?)

He eventually got bored. He retired and joined a seminary.

a) In order to make us safe, the LLM should help us find (and fix) the vulnerabilities in our own code.

b) In order for us to be safe, the LLM should not find vulnerabilities in other people's code.

I don't think this is resolvable in a way where both (a) and (b) win.

The typical design that I've seen plumbs the main condensate drain into the sewer, and usually has an overflow that dumps somewhere harmless if the main line clogs. (like out of the ceiling over the bathtub or out of an exterior wall in a visible location, so you can see it and fix it)

The few times I've seen the overflow, it's been quite a fair amount of water. Certainly enough to help with garden irrigation, if nothing else.

I started out prompting ChatGPT kinda how I would with Google, one small prompt at a time, asking about various details. But after one or two of those I just tried "I want to tow a car of make A with my truck model B, from point C to point D, what are my options?" And it wrote me a report with comparison tables and computed towing weights and other details for different options.

At that point, I was like "Oh. This is different. And it's just the beginning."