Thanks for that.

And yet, in my lived-experience at an unnamed Big Co when we did lots of UXR work in the on-call, monitoring, and incident management software/tooling, when it came to people being the primary on-caller handling a page for an incident when the company is losing millions for every minute of downtime that the 8pt font information dense UI they said they wanted actually led to increased stress, more mistakes, longer time-to-mitigation etc. Turns out that a carefully and deliberately designed UX and information architecture and - gasp - white space (that was all carefully and minutely tuned to specific CUJs over many rounds of research and prototyping) is really important.

Even if you have all the information available, just throwing stuff at the screen doesn't always help IME. Less is often more.

Just basic stuff like smart dictation that listens to the conversation the practitioner is having and auto creates the medical notes, letters, prescriptions etc saving them time and effort to type that all up themselves etc. They were saying that obviously they have to check everything but it was (and I quote) "scarily perfectly accurate". Freeing up a bunch of their time to actually be with the patient and not have to spend time typing etc.

It's not just content/info/data, it's a performance (in the creative sense).

Brands spend a lot of time honing their appearance - not just fonts and colours but the whole composition and visual pacing - their entire "say something without saying anything at all" aspect etc. Just walk through any place with physical shops and really look at how the stores have worked on their appearance and how they present themselves to customers. They're not just selling a product, they're selling a lifestyle/feeling/etc/etc. They're not just going to give that creative control away to some LLM.

Another way to think of it is instead of people watching a movie or play when they go to the cinema or theater, they're just given the script to read. Same information but the entire artistry of both the performers and the directors is totally absent, leaving it up to each reader to imagine the delivery of lines or the scene's setting etc.

I think on HN and in tech in general people seem to forget that "the first bite is with the eye", and that is why "normal people" never liked or used RSS. The desire to leave our mark and to create (and view!) visually appealing things seems to be pretty innate in humans - we've been doing it since cave paintings. I struggle to think of a world where we just hand that over to AIs and humans have zero creative control.

I personally use bitwarden on my chrome profile across Windows Mac Linux and android and think it's great. Highly recommended.

Of course I tell this to family and friends and no one does it so I dunno...

Its not just JavaScript, it's cookies, it's "auto loading" resources (e.g. 1x1 pixels with per-request unique URLs), it's third-party http requests to other domains (which might art cookies too).

I think the XKCD comic about encryption-vs-wrench has never been more apt for Gemini the protocol...

I can't think of a single blog that I read these days (small or not), yet there are loads of small "old school" sites out there that are still going strong.

Of course, as others have said, we could just use HTML without JavaScript or cookies and we'd be a lot of the way there with 95% less effort but hey in the future we'll probably just query an AI rather than load a web page ourselves.

The early web had a lot going on and allowed for a lot of creative experimentation which really caught the eye and the imagination.

Gemini seems designed to only allow long-form text content. You can't even have a table let alone inline images which makes it very limited for even dry scientific research papers, which I think would otherwise be an excellent use-case for Gemini. But it seems that this sort of thing is a deliberate design/philosophical decision by the authors which is a shame. They could have supported full markdown, but they chose not to (ostensibly to ease client implementation but there are a squillion markdown libraries so that assertion doesn't hold water for me)

It's their protocol so they can do what they want with it, but it's why I think Gemini as a protocol is a dead-end unless all you want to do is write essays (with no images or tables or inline links or table-of-contents or MathML or SVG diagrams or anything else you can think of in markdown). Its a shame as I think the client-cert stuff for Auth is interesting.

E.g. the first x kWh electric you use, or the first X litres of water, or the first x GB of data you use is entirely free, for everyone (where X is some reasonable number that someone could just conceivably survive on). Then as you use more and more the prices start to gradually increase across a series of bands so that the heaviest users are subsidising those using the least.

It would promote efficiency, would be progressive, and would allow people to live without quite so much "bill fear" for essential utilities.

Plus it is not literally putting money in people's hands which is often unpopular with some demographic groups. People would still need to work but there would be some element of safety net.

In my mind, MCP & Skills is inseparable part of chat interfaces for LLMs, not a distinct level.

This is the thing though, prioritization doesn't matter in the same way it used to.

We only needed to prioritize before because engineering was relatively slow and precious resource, so we had to pick and chose what to work on first because it took time.

But now we effectively have a limitless supply of SWEs, so why not do everything on the backlog?

I think the question now is more about sequencing than prioritization. What do we need to do first, before we can do these other things?

But yes generally requirements are still very important. Which features do we need etc.

Is a newborn baby without learnt-knowledge not an intelligent being to you?

Or is an empty vessel such as a newborn baby intelligent merely because it has the ability to learn?

It gets pretty philosophical pretty quick. This is why I don't think there'll be a "moment" when AGI happens - there is so many ways to interpret what constitutes intelligence.

But yeah I agree that until models can learn in real time then I think we're probably not there yet. As I said - 5 years give or take I reckon.

So that leads to the question of what qualifies as intelligent? And do we need sentience for intelligence? What about self-agency/-actuation? Is that needed for "generally intelligent"?

I don't know.

But I feel like we're not there yet, even for non-sentient intelligence. I personally think we need an "unlimited" context (as good as human memory context windows anyway, which some argue we've already surpassed) and genuine self-learning before we get close. I don't think we need it to be an infallible genius (i.e ASI) to qualify as generally intelligent ... or to put it another way "about as smart and reliable as the average human adult" which frankly is quite a low bar!

One thing for sure though, I think this will creep up on us and one day it will suddenly become apparent that it's already there and we just didn't appreciate/notice/comprehend. There won't be a big fireworks display the moment it happens, more of a creeping realisation I think.

I give it 5 years +/-2.

Don't assume people want to talk. Respect boundaries, leave people alone.

It's supreme arrogance. Read the body language and just leave people alone.

If someone is up for talking they'll show the obvious signs - facing you, eye contact, smiling, that sort of waiting-for-something look/expression. I've had e-fucking-nough of people thinking they can "fix" me when I am trying to get some time to myself waiting for a train or whatever after a stressful day at work or being woken up endlessly by kids/neighbours/whatever.

Otherwise it should be "talk to anyone who is obviously open to and willing to have a conversation with you", at which point it's a total tautology anyway and you don't need a guide, it's just natural chat that you don't need to force on someone to make it happen.

Respect people's boundaries please. Don't force yourself on people unless they're obviously willing participants.

People put extroversion/introversion as like this binary, permanent thing that cannot be changed. In reality I think it is a spectrum that changes throughout the day and the situation. Someone might be introverted at 8am on their commute, but a wild extrovert at 9pm in the bar. Don't assume, don't try to "help" people you know nothing about.