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Arguably, the opposite is true. Ars Technica and others have written about this extensively [0].

Having summarized results appear immediately with links to the sources is preferable to opening multiple tabs and sifting through low-quality content and clickbait.

Many real-world problems aren't as simple as "type some keywords" and get relevant results. AI excels as a "rubber duck", i.e., a tool to explore possible solutions, troubleshoot issues, discover new approaches, etc.

Yes, LLMs are useful for junior developers. But for experienced developers, they're more valuable.

It's a tool, just like search engines.

Airplanes are also a tool. Would you limit your travel to destinations within walking distance? Or avoid checking the weather because forecasts use Bayesian probability (and some mix of machine learning)? Or avoid power tools because they deny the freedom of doing things the hard way?

One can imagine that when early humans began wearing clothing to keep warm, there were naysayers who preferred to stay cold.

The most creative people I know are using AI to further their creativity. Example: storytelling, world building, voice models, game development, artwork, assistants that mimic their personality, helping loved ones enjoy a better quality of life as they age, smart home automations to help their grandmother, text-to-speech for the visually impaired or those who have trouble reading, custom voice commands, and so on.

Should I tell my mom to turn off Siri and avoid highlighting text and tapping "Speak" because it uses AI under the hood? I think not.

They embrace it, just like creative people have always done.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-is-reimaginin...


Socrates had a skeptical view of written language, preferring oral communication and philosophical inquiry. This perspective is primarily presented through the writings of his student, Plato, particularly in the dialogue Phaedrus.

I confirmed that from my own memory via a Google AI summary, quoted verbatim above. Of course, I would never have learned it in the first place had somebody not written it down.


> Socrates had a skeptical view of written language, preferring oral communication and philosophical inquiry. This perspective is primarily presented through the writings of his student, Plato, particularly in the dialogue Phaedrus.

He did not. You should read the dialogue.

> I confirmed that from my own memory via a Google AI summary, quoted verbatim above.

This is the biggest problem with LLMs in my view. They are great at confirmation bias.

In Phaedrus 257c–279c Plato portrays Socrates discussing rhetoric and the merits of writing speeches not writing in general.

"Socrates: Then that is clear to all, that writing speeches is not in itself a disgrace.

Phaedrus: How can it be?

Socrates: But the disgrace, I fancy, consists in speaking or writing not well, but disgracefully and badly.

Phaedrus: Evidently."

I mean, writing had existed for 3 millennia by the point this dialogue was written.


It is both exciting how far we got and depressing how far we didn't.


I used Spacemacs for years and recommend it to others. It was fantastic in the early days, but the stability seems to have diminished. I encountered more bugs over time that I'd have to troubleshoot and fix myself.

I switched to Doom Emacs a couple of years ago. It's well-maintained with regular updates, fantastic language support, and lightning fast. The CLI tooling is also nice (i.e., you can run 'doom upgrade' to update everything, or 'doom doctor' if you encounter an issue).

It's the closest equivalent to VS Code in terms of working out of the box. Not to mention the advantages of Emacs with Vim keybindings. There is a learning curve, but the GitHub documentation is excellent.

Adding support for Ruby on Rails development, for example, is as simple as uncommenting '(ruby +rails +lsp)' line in the '~/.config/init.el' file, and then running 'doom sync'. There's a long list of supported languages and tooling [0].

[0] https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs/blob/master/static/in...


That's a common refrain, but an inaccurate one.

Musk was heavily involved in the engineering efforts at SpaceX. NASA struggled to keep up with his continual and extremely detailed stream of questions regarding engineering choices, with an obsessive and relentless focus on blueprints.

The list of engineering achievements and innovations (often unorthodox) is too long to list in a comment, but I highly recommend the book The Space Barons by Christian Davenport [0]. It's a fantastic read.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Barons


I agree. I've used FSD v13 on a Model Y with hardware version 4 for a couple of months now. Checking my mileage, that's over 2,000 miles, most of which was with FSD enabled (road trips on interstates, backroads, two-lane country roads without lane markings, interstates, highways, etc.). It's been absolutely fantastic.

Even my parents and sister use FSD v13 regularly now in their Teslas.

It's come a long way from the early days when I first started testing it.

It makes me wonder how many people are using Autopilot (included as standard) instead of FSD on a newer Tesla with the new AI hardware?

It's pretty wild to be able to start from park. Tap a button, and go.

Just the other day, it managed merging onto the interstate and then immediately changing 7 lanes to the left to merge onto the next interstate exit heading north. It performed flawlessly.


Apple has a pretty good trade-in program. If you have an Apple card, it's even better (e.g. the trade-in value is deducted immediately, zero interest, etc.).

Could you get more money by selling it? Sure. But it's hard to be the convenience. They ship you a box. You seal up the old device and drop it off at UPS.

I also build my desktop computers with a mix of Windows and Linux. But those are upgraded over the years, not regularly.


You’re better off taking it to the Apple Store for trade-in. There are a lot of easy-to-miss reasons the mail-in one might reject it.


You'll be glad you did. I loved my 2015 MBP. I even drove 3 hours to the nearest Best Buy to snag one. That display was glorious. A fantastic machine. I eventually gave it to my sister, who continued using it until a few years ago. The battery was gone, but it still worked great.

When you upgrade, prepare to be astonished.

The performance improvement is difficult to convey. It's akin to traveling by horse and buggy. And then hopping into a modern jetliner, flying first class.

It's not just speed. Display quality, build quality, sound quality, keyboard quality, trackpad, ports, etc., have all improved considerably.


The performance jump between a top-of-the-line intel MBP (I don't remember the year, probably 2019) and the m1 max I got to replace it.. was rather like the perf jump between spinning disks and SSDs.

When I migrated all my laptops to SSDs (lenovos at the time, so it was drop-dead simple), I thought to myself, "this is a once-in-a-generation feeling". I didn't think I would ever be impressed by a laptop's speed ever again. It was nice to be wrong.


> The battery was gone, but it still worked great.

A family 2018 Macbook Air got a second life with a battery replacement. Cheap kit from Amazon, screwdrivers included, extremely easy to do. Still in use, no problems.


You can search for videos on YouTube and filter by HDR. Apple TV shows are typically in HDR (Dolby Vision). Here are a couple of examples:

[0] Hawaii LG Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBJzp-y4BHA [1] Nature Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFFGbZIqi3U

YouTube shows a small red "HDR" label on the video settings icon for actual HDR content. For this label to appear, the display must support HDR. With your M3 Pro, the HDR label should appear in Chrome and Safari.

You can also right-click on the video to enable "Stats for nerds" for more details. Next to color, look for "smpte2084 (PQ) / bt2020". That's usually the highest-quality HDR video [2,3].

You can ignore claims such as "Dolby Vision/Audio". YouTube doesn't support those formats, even if the source material used it. When searching for videos, apply the HDR filter afterward to avoid videos falsely described as "HDR".

Keep in mind that macOS uses a different approach when rendering HDR content. Any UI elements outside the HDR content window will be slightly dimmed, while the HDR region will use the full dynamic range.

I consider Vivid [4] an essential app for MacBook Pro XDR displays.

Once installed, you can keep pressing the "increase brightness" key to go beyond the default SDR range, effectively doubling the brightness of your display without sacrificing color accuracy. It's especially useful outdoors, even indoors, depending on the lighting conditions. And fantastic for demoing content to colleagues or in public settings (like conference booths).

[2] https://www.benq.com/en-us/knowledge-center/knowledge/bt2020... [3] https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/32320 (see section 4) [4] https://www.getvivid.app/


> With your M3 Pro, the HDR label should appear in Chrome and Safari.

Ahh. Not Firefox, of course.

Thanks, I just ran a random nature video in Safari. It was pretty. The commercials before it were extremely annoying though. I don't think it's even legal here to have so many ads per minute of content as Google inserts on youtube.


Hah, I tried skimming through a 2 hour youtube video in Safari and every time i fast forwarded a couple min google inserted two ads. Basically I watched ads more than the video.

How can people use anything that doesn't run ublock origin these days?

They can keep their HDR.


I realize this isn't your particular use case. But with newer iPhones, you can use USB-C directly for audio. I've been using the Audio Technica ATH-M50xSTS for a while now. The audio quality is exceptional. For Slack/Team/Zoom calls, the sidetone feature plays your voice back inside the headphones, with the level being adjustable via a small toggle switch on the left side. That makes all the difference, similar to transparency/adaptive modes on the AirPod Pro 2s (or older cellphones and landlines).

I use a small Anker USB-A to USB-C adapter [1]. They're rock solid.

As great as the AirPod Pro 2s are, a wired connection is superior in terms of reliability and latency. Although greatly improved over the years, I still have occasional issues connecting or switching between devices.

Out of curiosity, what's the advantage of a jailbroken iPhone nowadays? I'd typically unlock Android phones in the past, but I don't see a need on iOS today.

Interestingly, the last time I used Android, I had to sideload Adguard (an adblocker). On the App Store, it's just another app alongside competing adblockers. No such apps existed in the Play Store to provide system-level blocking, proxying, etc. Yes, browser extensions can be used, but that doesn't cover Google's incessant quest to bypass adblockers (looking at you Google News).

[0] https://www.audio-technica.com/en-us/ath-m50xsts [1] https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-Anker-High-Speed-Transfer-Not...


> Out of curiosity, what's the advantage of a jailbroken iPhone nowadays? I'd typically unlock Android phones in the past, but I don't see a need on iOS today.

I have custom scripts, Ad blocking without VPNs, Application firewalls.

I enjoy having most-full control of my device.


Adguard is on the Play Store. Netguard as well.


I'm part of a local physics meetup where AI is often a topic of conversation. One member is a well-regarded high school physics teacher (his students end up at MIT, Georgia Tech, etc., and some go on to get physics PhDs).

He shared that some teachers now require AI/LLMs for homework assignments, such as writing essays. The actual assignment is to critique the output of the LLM.

As a millennial, even our middle school classes taught information literacy in various forms in the "computer lab". And that was the nascent days of the web.

AI is a tool, not unlike a calculator or Wikipedia. They were both controversial and even forbidden at times. Students adapted. So did education.


That seems dubious. Consider the "stylistic choices" of the former president in social media posts.


I'm not sure what you dispute or your point is here. If people slightly or strongly start aping Trump's writing style in various forms I'd say there's a good chance those people are right wing or simply "not the same people writing in all lowercase" you know?

You highlight stylistic choices. I'd say we can observe the differences in different styles and see how uses them. Is Trump writing in all lowercase? No. Is this poster writing like Trump? No. Do a lot of left-wing people use the all-lowercase style? I see it all the time, yes.


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