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> It’s like learning how to drive. It’s a skill for sure but anyone can do it after practice.

The analogy only illustrates the parent's point. Most licensed drivers have been doing it for years and are still terrible drivers, because they never grasp the intricacies of driving — smoothly accelerating and decelerating, smoothing out corners, anticipating light changes, gauging merge distances and timings, using mirrors well, ensuring cars get by when making a left turn in an intersection, etc, etc


>The analogy only illustrates the parent's point. Most licensed drivers have been doing it for years and are still terrible drivers, because they never grasp the intricacies of driving — smoothly accelerating and decelerating, smoothing out corners, anticipating light changes, gauging merge distances and timings, using mirrors well, ensuring cars get by when making a left turn in an intersection, etc, etc

This is not true at all. Most drivers pick this up. You only tend to see this with beginning drivers and it eventually becomes better. The overwhelming majority of people learn how to drive and they learn how to drive quite well.


After riding in countless Ubers and Lyfts, with drivers who drive all day for a living, I can say confidently that good drivers who grasp the intricacies of driving are by far the exception.

Obviously to have an unregistered gun?


Why not just improve the free public wifi?


That's a good mid-term project, but this is how you give kids internet access today. Whether Chromebook/internet-based schooling is something worth pursuing in general is another matter.


> It’s a good idea to enable cellular service for those who don’t have adequate access at home.

But then the students with mobile access have an advantage over those who only have home access. And how do you determine who has adequate access at home and who doesn't? Much easier and more equitable to just provide it for everyone.


The endless hand-wringing over extreme equity at all costs is causing a lot of bad decisions.

How about this: Anyone who needs cellular can request it by filling out a form and then it’s activated on their machine.

No equity problems. No need to buy a million lines of service for 800,000 students up front.


The business trajectory will be like Uber. A few big companies (Google, OpenAI) will price their AI services at a loss until consumers find it to be indispensable and competitors run out of money, then they'll steadily ramp up the pricing to the point where they're gouging consumers (and raking in profits) but still a bit cheaper or better than alternatives (humans in this case).


You should filter out authors from the input books in the output. If liked a book by an author, surely I'd read more of their work if I wanted to — recommending them isn't helpful. Along the same lines, I think interesting recommendations tend to be the ones that (1) I like and (2) I didn't expect. The more similar the recommendations are to the input, the more likely I already know them, and the more likely to create a recommendation echo chamber.


> You should filter out authors from the input books in the output.

No, or at least make it configurable.

I’d agree for series, but not for Authors, just because I once read a book by someone doesn’t mean I even know they have other stuff, the list of Authors I read and enjoyed is very long.


Configurability is fine, but it's too obvious a recommendation and just creates noise. The purpose of a recommendation system is to help you find things that aren't obvious. I'd still filter them out by default even if it's configurable.


I don't agree at all.

VERY few authors write consistenly good books.

If you liked one book by an author, it is not at all likely that you will like the other books as well. For example, Neil Stephenson is probably my favorite author alive today, but I hate almost half of his books.

The only author that I can think of where I read and liked every single book was Terry Pratchett, and that might have be a case of "I was still young and easy to impress".


I didn't say it was likely that you'd enjoy the other books by that author. My point is that it's not helpful for a recommendation system to recommend more books by that author — it's common sense. If I've read a book by an author, it's easy enough to look up their other work and decide whether I want to read more of them.


yep, was gonna say this. Getting recommended all of the same books I've already read isn't great


Agree entirely - more excluding series than authors but both should be options.

I also i need a way to describe its recommendations as "meh". For example, if I put Gone Girl in, I get Girl on a Train. Which, personally, I thought was bad. I want to exclude that from all future rec sets, and ideally align my preferences to the intersection of liked A and disliked B. vOv


> There's no air traffic after all

No air traffic until their are drone deliveries. What will the sky look like when you take every _individual_ package from Door Dash, Uber Eats, Postmates, Instacart, Amazon, UPS, Fedex, DHL, etc etc etc and put them on _individual_ drones? Even if the logistics could be sorted out, I worry about the quality of life issues it poses for communities, especially with the amount of noise drones make.

NYC handles 3,000 flights a day; it handles 2,300,000 package deliveries a day.


> There's a divide between people who enjoy the physical experience of the work and people who enjoy the mental experience of the work

Eh, physical and mental isn't the divide — it's more like people who enjoy code itself as a craft and people who simply see it as a means to an end (the application). Much like a writer might labor over their prose (the code) while telling a story (the application). Writing code is far more than the physical act of typing to those people.


Isn't that basically the same premise as Chrome, which already dominates the market? Google even made something called ChromeOS. Arc wasn't really more than a distracting skin on Chromium with a few innovative bits of UI...


Exactly, they basically have better designer. For the real tech feature, I really don't think they ever brings any new invention to the product. Data sync, AI, etc. All other competitors have these features. They even need to count on chromium update.


Did they drop data sync? Could have sworn all of my spaces, tabs, folders, favorites and etc synced anytime I logged back in on my other machine (with access to spaces on iOS well)

It’s been a while since I used it regularly though.


Perhaps the absolute worst use-case for an LLM


My mom was looking up church times in the Philippines. Google AI was wrong pretty much every time.

Why is an LLM unable to read a table of church times across a sampling of ~5 Filipino churches?

Google LLM (Gemini??) was clearly finding the correct page. I just grabbed my mom's phone after another bad mass time and clicked on the hyperlink. The LLM was seemingly unable to parse the table at all.


Because google search and llm teams are different, with different incentives. Search is the cash cow they keep squeezing for more cash at the expense of good quality since at least 2018, as revealed in court documents showing they did that on purpose to keep people searching more to have more ads and more revenue. Google AI embedded in search has the same goals, keep you clicking on ads… my guess would be Gemini doesn’t have any of the bad part of enshitification yet… but it will come. If you think hallucinations are bad now, just you wait until tech companies start tuning them up on purpose to get you to make more prompts so they can inject more ads!


And one that likely happens often.


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