I hear you, but I'm scratching my head here, trying to figure out whether there is any way this makes sense. The basic function of a seatbelt is that it's a strap to restrain your forward moment during quick decelerations, so that your head doesn't hit the windshield. What difference does it make what direction the crash is in? What difference does it make what your weight is, or what the road conditions are? Maybe there's a good answer to these questions, maybe not.

It also seems like you're replacing one point of failure (the mechanical mechanism that makes the strap "catch" when it's pulled quickly) with about 10,000 different points of failure.

I'm hearing Morgan Freeman in my head... "Let me get this straight. You're a criminal, and you hear cops talking to each other about how they need to go check on a house. And your plan is to *rob* that house?"

I can't imagine why you would need a motherf**cking seatbelt to receive "updates" at all, signed or not, opt-in or not. The seatbelt adjusts its settings based on a very modest amount of data (passenger weight, and apparently also road conditions-- although I'm not sure how the latter would be useful in adjusting a "seatbelt setting"). How complicated can that be? Are they expecting some major advances in seatbelt-setting algorithms to emerge in the next decade?

Also, since the sensors are right there in the car and so is the seatbelt, why does the seatbelt need to be part of the IoT?

Also, what happens in 20 years when the "Internet-connected" part of the seatbelt becomes hopelessly outdated and unusable?

Yes, I thought of Eliza when I made my comment. LLMs in their current state are far more convincing than Eliza, but they still have all the limitations that I described. I have no idea whether LLMs can advance to the point where they don't have those limitations anymore-- that's a whole other discussion. My point was to discuss the limitations they have now.

"The therapist's role is to create a safe space for the client to explore their thoughts and feelings, fostering self-awareness and personal growth"... OK. That's an accurate statement, as far as it goes. But the therapist often has to do *more* than just "create a safe space for the client to explore thoughts and feelings". The therapist has to identify when these thoughts are the product of a cognitive bias, when they're maladaptive, and even (in some cases) to identify when the thoughts are delusional. They also have to do a whole, long list of other stuff, as I'm sure you know.

Your description of Rogerian therapy (I won't call it a *definition* of Rogerian therapy, since you didn't claim that it was a definition) sounds to me like a description of "supportive" therapy. You listen, you make sure the patient feels listened-to, you make sure they feel "safe" and that they don't feel judged, you offer validation as appropriate and mirror the patient's affect when appropriate. But this is a description of *supportive* therapy only, and supportive therapy is a very, very limited and unambitious type of therapy. It's also a potentially *harmful* form of therapy if it is applied indiscriminately to all patients and all situations. "Your supervisor is mean to you, and your last supervisor was very mean to you and the one before that, too. I'm really sorry to hear that. It sounds like you've had a rough time with supervisors". (Or worse, "Of course, you feel frustrated. I think anyone would feel frustrated if the Pope was harassing them on Twitter".)

It has the capacity to deliver a good *parody* of a Rogerian therapist. In other words, it can be taught to use the technique of "reflection"-- repeating what the patient has said back to them, using different words.

But the thing is, a real therapist will use reflection with a specific purpose in mind. (Sometimes the purpose is to clarify what the patient has said, and make sure you understood it correctly; sometimes the purpose is to summarize a long statement into a short one; sometimes the purpose is to simply let both the therapist and patient stop and think about how strange the patient's statement was). The LLM doesn't have a "purpose". It's just blindly emulating a technique. It's like a carpenter who has learned to use a hammer and can hammer nails really well, but doesn't know that you are trying to build a set of bookshelves (or even understand what a bookshelf is).

Also, not to beat a dead horse, but LLMs notoriously lack either a "bullshit detector" or a "reality detector"-- both of which are essential equipment for a therapist. The LLM will "reflect" your statement, but it won't notice if the statement is implausible, if it's inconsistent with other statements you've made, or if your comment reflects some type of cognitive bias or problematic core belief. Hell, the LLM can't even tell whether your statement is delusional or not. If you say that the Pope is sending you secret messages on Twitter, it will probably take that message at face value.

Just curious. This seems like the kind of thing that you would expect in a "vanity" publication (where the author pays a fee to have his book published, instead of being paid by the publisher, and all submissions are accepted for publication as long as you can pay for it). Surely, if it was a real publishing house, there would be an editor who read through the book.

I read the Steven Poole essay you linked. It's not a bad essay, and he makes a couple of valid points here and there. I'd never noticed before that Orwell singled out the perfectly ordinary word "predict" as being pretentious. (Orwell wants us to use the "Anglo-Saxon" equivalent instead-- what would that even be? "Forecast"?)

Still, these are pretty minor nitpicks. If you look at Orwell's *other* examples of pretentious diction, they're all pretty spot on.

And a lot of Poole's objections to Orwell seem baseless. Quoting from his essay: "Orwell's eccentric final tip-list includes 'Never use a long word where a short one will do' (why ever not?), and 'Never use the passive where you can use the active.' No good reason is offered or indeed imaginable for always avoiding the passive, though Orwell did thus influence a whole generation of incompetent style-guide composers who repeated this loony stricture as gospel."

I've quoted that bit so I could make a couple of comments on it. My first comment is that it's, IMO, flat-out wrong (the rule about passive construction is a damn good rule 99% of the time). The other comment is-- well, Poole's writing style is a little bit pretentious and mannered, isn't it? ("Why ever not" indeed). One of the reasons I listen to Orwell is that he's one of the best prose writers of the 20th century. Poole's OK, I guess, but I don't think he's in the same league.

...that a mainstream newspaper can use a phrase like "illegal information", and most people aren't going to even bat an eyelid. I can't imagine anyone writing that 25 years ago.

The examples of "illegal information"? 1) How to make illegal drugs, and 2) how to hack a computer network.

In the first place, both types of "illegal information" are available at any good library; LLMs don't provide any information that isn't already published. So you've effectively just declared that some of the information at your local library is "illegal".

In the second place, both types of information have legitimate, legal uses. For instance, a cybersecurity expert would be well advised to learn about all the possible ways to hack a computer network.

...I'm not sure how I feel about semicolons.

George Orwell once wrote a letter to a friend where he said that in his new novel, he was proud of the fact that he hadn't used a single semicolon, because he'd decided it was a "completely useless" piece of punctuation. (IIRC the novel was "Coming Up for Air".) Funny thing is, though, there *are* some semicolons in "1984" (which was his last book). Did he change his mind, or just forget about his rule? (He was pretty sick when he wrote 1984 so it could have been the latter).

Also, as TFS points out, Vonnegut said "don't use semicolons" but he *did* use them here and there.

One thing is for sure-- semicolons can be sort of a crutch for lazy or bad writers. To borrow a phrase from Orwell, they can prevent a lot of sentences from "coming down with a bump". In college I had to read a lot of Henry James and I remember thinking that he was addicted to semicolons. I started to mentally substitute a period whenever there was a semicolon, and I noticed that when you did that, his prose sounded flat and clumsy.

Semicolons can also be very, very pretentious if you use them wrong. Here's an example, from a crappy article about olives that I read many years ago: "Bottled olives are acceptable; canned are not". Kind of vomit-inducing, isn't it? (It's funny how examples of bad writing stick in your head).

...will be using AI to somehow insert ad content *into* the movie itself. Michael Corleone will sip on a Starbucks latte as he sits there talking to Fredo.

There's a scene in one of William Gibson's novels where an older character is talking to a younger character, and he mentions "commercials", and the younger character doesn't know what a "commercial" is. The implication is that advertising has become so ubiquitous and pervasive, there's no distinction any more between "advertising" and "content".

I'm not sure why you are so hell-bent on making this assertion that "material doesn't matter". I guarantee you, *any* listener with an intact set of eardrums will notice the difference in tone when listening to a plywood instrument vs. one with a spruce top. The difference is not subtle. When you listen to a fiddle, the main thing you are listening to is the sound of a vibrating piece of wood.

Again, there's a reason that *every* maker of quality violins uses the same general type of wood, and will routinely pay $200 or so for a good piece of tonewood, and will tap on the wood before they start carving it to see if it has a "ringing" tone. (The cosmetics of the wood are another thing they consider, admittedly). Modern fiddles have been around for 400 years and a *lot* of craftsmen have experimented with a lot of different ways of making them, including different materials and different shapes. It's a pretty mature piece of technology.

Now if you were talking about electric solid-body guitars... then the differences might be more subtle and debatable. (I've heard people argue that the body material doesn't matter at all, but other people would argue the opposite).

Anyhow, this is all irrelevant to the OP's (rather interesting) question, which is "what would a violin made with this super-wood sound like"? Answer: It would definitely sound different, but I'm not sure whether the difference would be good or bad, because I don't know enough about it. I was kind of hoping that someone with expertise would chime in, but alas, that hasn't happened.

No one is denying the fact that the shape and size of the violin makes a difference to the sound-- that's just common sense. My point is that the material (especially for the resonating plate) also makes an *enormous* contribution. I've played cheap student violins that were made of plywood or improperly seasoned wood, and the sound is radically different. (I've also played violins made of metal, and it's like playing a completely different instrument).

The material matters a lot. The top (resonating) plate of a violin is nearly always made from spruce, because it has particular qualities as a tonewood. So it's quite reasonable to wonder "I wonder how this new wood product would work as a tonewood?"

(Unfortunately, I don't know enough about tonewoods to make a prediction here. One thing you'll read about spruce is that it has a high "stiffness to weight ratio", allowing you to create a thinner top plate, and I would suppose that this new wood product has an even better "stiffness to weight ratio". But I'm sure that's not the only factor that matters.... if it were, they'd be making top plates out of titanium or something).

I used to work for a clinic that was bought out by United Healthcare. (I quit shortly after they were bought out). The number of dumb corporate "initiatives" and "programs" was overwhelming-- the company seemed like they were running a make-work program for MBAs. For a company that is notorious for wanting to make a lot of money, they sure do spend a lot of it on nonsense. (They would routinely call long, rambling meetings with a dozen "executives" and "consultants" present, and I would look around the room and try to estimate how much money this meeting was costing them per hour).

Observation #2: Using AI to summarize a "clinician visit" is a popular idea these days, but it's a dumb idea. A big part of a doctor's training is learning how to write good encounter notes; you have to know what's relevant and what isn't, including all "pertinent negatives" (the signs/symptoms that you didn't observe). It's not something that should be handed off to an AI.

Observation #3: Whatever happened to "expert systems"? A computer program that sorts through all available best practices and available research in a formalized, predictable way could be useful to medical professionals. An LLM is not useful for medicine, for obvious reasons (stated in TFA). At best, it's a sort of souped-up search engine that *might* point you to a useful peer-reviewed article.

"Rewiring your brain" is a pretty common figure of speech, and that's what most people mean when they use that expression-- "changing the way your brain works". So your comment is kind of nitpicky.

Thanks.

There are times that I might want to reduce the perpetual onslaught of distractions but I might *still* need to be reachable promptly by phone/text. Actually, that's true for me about 95% of the time.

I don't know whether this *specific* reduced-functionality phone is well designed and well made. (I've looked at the article and the photos, but frankly, you can't really tell unless you use the phone). What I was saying was *if* they did a really good job of designing a reduced-functionality phone, I'd buy one.

Exactly. That's worth a few hundred bucks, for some people. It's not daft for someone to pay money for "discouraging" bad habits or "encouraging" good ones. It's the main reason I used to go to a personal trainer every week.

Fair enough, I believe you. It sounds like this kind of phone wouldn't be useful to you.

But I've seen a lot of people (mostly teenagers or twenty-somethings) who are way, way too attached to their smartphones. They play with them compulsively, to a point where they aren't fully present during social interactions; it's almost like the phone is what psychologists call a "transitional object", like a toddler's blankie or teddy bear. Some of them even *acknowledge* that they are "phone addicts".

Well *that*... is a whole other topic. I happen to like e-readers. I like e-paper. I also really like having single-purpose devices that are fully optimized for their purpose. (Yes, I know I can just use my smartphone to dim the lights and to read a book on Kindle, but I'd rather not do that, for all sorts of reasons). I'm a sort of moderate Luddite. I welcome some forms of technology, but reject others.

Ludditism has been making a sort of quiet comeback in the 21st century (albeit in a non-dogmatic form that is tailored to the individual or to individual communities), and that's a good thing, IMO.