I'm wondering if you're confusing "AI" with "LLMs" here.
I think LLMs are the equivalent of someone with a PhD in English literature and a few other things, and can be very intelligent and literate without being particularly good with numbers.
On the other hand you have plenty of machine learning numbers that are absolute beasts at everything number-related. I'm assuming you wouldn't put George RR Martin in charge of building your datasets.
“Day 7" would be amazing - all that I see YouTube recommending is "I tried it for 24 hours"
I was listening to an "expert" on a podcast earlier today up until the point where the interviewer asked how long his amazing new vibe-coded tooling has been in production, and the self-proclaimed expert replied "actually we have an all-hands meeting later today so I can brief the team and we will then start using the output..."
I already knew about this phylogenetic tree (although I have always heard the common ancestor be called the "wild mustard", not wild cabbage), but the article was quite interesting.
I only wish that as a PSA, they had included the reminder to people over 30 years old who hate Brussels sprouts, that the delicious ones you can eat today are not the ones they hated in their youth, and if you haven't had sprouts in years you might want to give them a second try (salted, oiled and baked, not boiled or steamed of course!)
I think the sprouts trauma is the result of picking the wrong cooking method.
I was so surprised when I tried baked sprouts for the first time (use a really host cast iron skilet for even better results) that I started to believe that every vegetable can be delicious as long as you bake it!
There’s many delicious and easy ways to eat vegetable! Two of my favorite:
- Belgian Stoemp: basically smashed-potatoes with smashed-other legumes. Cook everything together (with herbs if you can), smash, add lipid and salt and you’re done!
- German Ein Topf: put vegetables, beans and sausages in a pot (I use tofu ones or tempeh). Cover, cook slowly. It’s almost a salty Tajin from the north.
- Recover bland vegetables (sprouts or anything) to a fantastic soup in 5 minutes: add a bit of water, coconut cream (or caw cream / silken tofu…), spices. A bit of tahin and corail lentils if you have. Mix and adjust water.
"I started to believe that every vegetable can be delicious as long as you bake it!"
Baking is good, but I also came to another conclusion - vegetables that are disgusting if they are cooked to a slimy paste, can be delicious eaten raw in a salad!
Raw broccoli in a salad will get you tossed out of the country I was born in :-)
Now the true surprise with broccoli for me was learning that you can dice the stems and butter-roast them, then use them in pretty much anything from rice dishes to pies. Amazing
Great point about brussel sprouts and it's truly fascinating on a number of levels. I think we're all tempted to believe the story that our palate just changes as we get older. But that's not what happened with brussel sprouts! They became cultivated differently to change their taste and so the modern ones we have are not the bitter ones we had as a kid.
I think there's a similar story for, say, canned peas which used to be nasty and made me think I didn't like peas. Granted I still don't consider myself someone who likes peas from a can, but fresh peas in a salad, or flash frozen peas in a bag that stores in the freezer, I'm open to those.
That's not to say that our tastes don't change, but brussel sprouts are kind of a fascinating mirage where it seems like the change might have been growing up into adulthood when really it was a chang in cultivation. These are just off the top of my head, but over the past couple of decades, there's been a quiet revolution in mass produced veggies on a number of levels that in each of their individual instances trace back to fascinating stories of science.
People always say this and no, they still taste nasty. It would be interesting to compare today's sprouts to one of the original examples, they must've been truly foul if there's been such an improvement.
This is an Internet forum and one of the ways such places are valuable is that it enables you to ask questions to other humans and allows those other humans, if they'd like, to answer.
You will get better results asking questions like GP's than Googling because you're asking the specific person who made a claim to quote an example, so you can judge from the specific example they provide, rather than the Google results. The best answers are often technically interesting niche tools which don't have great SEO.
Case in point: the platform you recommended does not show up anywhere on my first page of Duck.com results.
> Given you're interacting with a competent hacker (i.e. a person who is into tech not for money and for tinkering), you can't impress them.
I disagree with this and would instead consider that a technical expert (in any field) being impressed with your work can be the most satisfying reward of craft.
Laypeople can be awed, but the expert can bestow an entirely different quality of respect to your work.
I agree with you that some people find this very rewarding, but this is not a given.
I for one, don't care whether anyone is impressed by my work. That's a nice bonus, but not a requirement. Instead, when I improve my work w.r.t. my previous one, the satisfaction I get is way bigger than an external validation. I seek my satisfaction inside myself.
That's completely true that I love discussing what I did with a competent technical expert, yet it's not why I'm doing this.
> That's completely true that I love discussing what I did with a competent technical expert, yet it's not why I'm doing this.
I agree with this sentiment completely. I do consider "the reason for craft" (which is a joy in itself) to be separate from the "bonus reward" of being able to discuss it with other craftsmen.
... and the latter often ends up surfacing even more challenging/interesting ideas to work on for both sides, which is a huge win.
I've written multiple books, the most recent in 2019. I used to love the em-dash, and considered it the superior form of ellipsis (over the parenthesis, comma or semicolon).
I'm not planning on writing new books now, but if I did, I would completely get rid of em-dashes, because of their second-order effect of making the copy AI-written (and therefore less valuable).
It's also interesting that using a Skill that discouraged the use of em-dashes, I noticed that Claude's "thinking" internal dialogue actually disagreed with the Skill spec itself ("no, actually, em-dashes are perfectly normal and not a sign of AI writing") and therefore kept the dashes, against the Skill instructions.
> it would take all the trucks in the middle east to move a tiny portion of the export that typically goes via ship
May I suggest an alternative mode of freight that pre-dates trucks and can move much larger volumes at a much lower CO2 cost, namely... a transcontinental train line?
(obviously not going to happen, and might even trigger a few PR cycles about a "hyperloop", but if you were going to try to build large-volume freight, that's where I'd start)
I'd say there are orders of magnitude of difference between attacking a narrow passage of water that borders your very large country (here the narrower the area you want to block, the better), versus a few-meters-wide railway that starts in another country and goes thousands of kilometers in a direction pointing away from you (and in the second case, the narrower the target, the more difficult to hit).
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