News at 11, the more you use it, the more capable you become.

It's with everything. The more you challenge yourself the more adept and agile your mind will become, it does not only apply to the use of computers and technology in general, but the more problem solving you do - the more likely you are to think things through and become better at decision making as well, even if it was computers.

I've noticed this cognitive ability with myself as well. For example, if I took a look at myself 30 years ago, if I had a down period were I was lazy, not caring, didn't push myself in any way, then the poorer decisions I would make.

I am in a very stressful job these years, and it's been asking more of me than any time in my life, and I have noticed the difference in the other parts of my life that I am simply making better decisions, it's so obvious that I can see it from the real results that is my life, I plan for things better, I don't overreact, I am way better prepared, I focus on things that matter quicker instead of just "spinning" the same loopy wheel like one tends to do if nothing better to do.

It's all about training that brain "muscle" of ours, and it shows results over time.

We know, and we love you. Well - as for Germans, we really do like you, just make sure to leave the garbage IN designated bins, by all means use our free nature to take in, hang out, camp for a day, move on and camp another place. One of the most annoying things is that tourists take stuff with them, never buy anything, leave it out in nature and never use hotels or paid facilities, but basically an RV.

So again - we love you, you're practically our neighbors, but buy something once in a while?

This has been a public message from the good people known as your friendly neighbors.

I Live in Scandinavia,

And the office talks goes like this:
"Did you hear about that poor British tourist that got detained because there was some ESTA issues, she spent 19 days in jail, in an AMERICAN Jail?".
"Yeah, not going there, we've cancelled the family trip to the US".

Etc.
I was planning to go as well as I have a couple of favorite towns I visit over there, but yeah - no one of us is going to America again in that state they're in right now, we do feel their pain, and we have a lot of friends over there. But we ain't going.

Could very well be.

But one thing I do know, is that I am in NO way more competent than the 1000s of books of programming tips and knowledge there is out there, and that no matter how little or much I think I know, I learn all the time, and sometimes it can fast-track me towards what I was seeking, and suggest things I wasn't even remotely aware of.

Competence is many things, also the ability to not overevaluate yourself.

The thing about LLM's is that they are teriffic if you know things already, being just mediocre at something will make you fantastic at your work if you know how to use it.

But it will create a very large shift in equality, for example:

- People with zero skills and afraid of A.i. and LLM's will miss out, they will have a hard time competing with people that has just a mild interest in using it as a tool.
- You will see a huge amount of "dummies" that will think this thing is alive, and they'll have a new best friend, which will create beliefs, create readable articles for the feeble minded to believe and follow.
- Those that are already good at something, stand a chance of becoming 10-100 times better than they were, because if you know what questions to ask, if you don't write one-liners "plz. make me rich$", those who spend time researching and read up on their skills, will have an absolutely revolutionary assistant tool at their disposal.

There are dangers and pitfals, censorship being the biggest one (ChatGPT has suggested a "License" to use it, and I certainly understand why), there are millions of "edgy" teens that will use it to do silly things that can lead to real life complications and liabilities, which is why we can't have nice things, they destroy the engine for all the rest of us (which I suspect, is eerily few).

And by license to use it, I don't mean that there should be some who can access it and others who can't, I mean that their censorship engine should be more merit based, so to figure out the users background over time, learn that what answers it can offer. It's a sinch you don't offer ready-made-solutions to dummies that will use it to blow something up, create terror organizations, lead people into bad decisions because of convincing writing etc.

It's dangerous - so use responsibly!

this is quite true.
But I made an invention the last 3 hours by using it to figure out the minor details, it's going into production via those online Cad services already :P

It's not your friend, it's you.

And that's it. You're really talking to a statistics probability engine that reflects what you write and tries to match what you type up against the vast data it has been trained on.

Technically you're just talking to yourself with yourself.
Is it useful for that? I think so, I talk to it with my endless ramblings and musings, and it sometimes fantasize with me or finds "facts" about my personal musings and ramblings.

This can be useful, think of it as an "ideas sketchpad" where you can rough out your ideas, and it will talk positively with you about the stuff you like and give you tons of fake positive reinforcement (which is technically what you do when you're roughing out an idea you really like).

Is it intelligent - no
Is it concious - nope
Is it sentient - not by a long shot buddy

Can it make you less lonely? Yes and no.
Why? Because if you KNOW all of the above, you KNOW it's technically just you and your thoughts, you'll have fun and possibly learn more about your own thoughts and processes and it can be an remarkably useful tool for sketching out ideas.

No, because if you are like most people, it sorta passed the Turing test for them, (someone back in the 80s-90s even believed Eliza was real, but yeah, each to their own, fantasize all you want, as long as you know the difference, it can be healthy and fun, but if you don't it can be devastating to your mind.

So yeah, like everything in life - use at your own discretion and use caution, doublecheck sources, fact check, and keep real to the world around you, use it as a tool and it will all be good.

ChatGPT like all LLM's is only a probability mirror of you.

It is like an advanced universal translator with a probability statistics engine, it will basically try to predict your next sentence and words.
It will try to get whatever you are searching for, right. And what is right isn't always right, that depends on you and the probability it has been trained on.

It's really just as simple as that.

I'm one of those who love to watch Youtube on the big screen, except - even as a Premium user, Youtube is going to the dogs.

Now more than ever, youtube is transitioning into a giant Tik-Tok channel with Vertical videos, and that makes regular TV youtube watching ...well, unwatchable.

Who want's to watch videos that fills only 33 percent of the screen real-estate?

Same here, and I live in Sweden (we have the LEAST of the EV's of our nordic countries), and people kinda oppose EV's here.

But I've given up on explaining to my coworkers how i literally laugh all the way to the bank after having bought my cheap second-hand EV 2 years ago, even with the smallest battery available. I save 3500 euro / usd - every year, and the car paid for itself within 5 years. It's hilarious.

The people have such idiotic type of arguments:
- Your car will blow up (yes, when an EV blows up its so rare it makes the news, when an ICE blows up - no one bats an eye, yet it happens more often)
- You'll always have range anxiety (yes, as if I need to travel 200 miles every day, it happens 1 time a year, for that money, take the train)
- Your footprint is worse (no, with a small battery, the footprint has matched an ICE car by 2000 miles, 6000 with a big battery), and it never emits anything.
- EVs are too expensive (you can get used EV's for less than 20K now, that have only a five miles on them with 5-6 years battery warranty left, by that time you've actually gotten the vehicle for free)

And I could go on, it's an argument you can't win with rabid people, they're used to an ICE car for 100 years, and they are the majority, the vocal majority.

So I don't argue these things anymore, I say things like "Oh shit, you're right, I'm such a dumbass, how could I be tricked into an EV? Darn Car dealers", Oh yes you're right, I've not noticed, my battery is so small I'm worried every day of my life (looks at bank account while hearing others complain about gas prices).

We will grow much stronger from the sabotages.

What we do is we practice low energy usage in our homes, we learn to depend less on electricity, oil and gas. And we learn to install solar, batteries, and thus reduce our footprint anyway, and as a bonus we become less dependent on external partners.

Not to forget the image processing we do.

We literally recognize the characters (letters) in various shapes and sizes, in real-time, while putting together words, fill in missing gaps, visualize from words and from images to words.

Some of us are even capable of looking at something, and in a split second imagine an entire film scene, fully rendered with special effects worthy of a hollywood production (visual thinkers), some of us are capable of creating music with complete synthesized sounds developed in-house (in-brain) and capable of playing 1000 variants of those.

No, the brain is insanely fast, it's capable of seing the bigger picture of an massive amount of historical and present data.
Is it as accurate as a computers memory? No! Is it faster than anything we know, absolutely! We're barely capable of emulating an insect as it is.

I can't stress enough how important it is for you as an LLM user to use caution and understand what an LLM is.

An LLM is a translator, and dechiperer, an reflection on everything you ask of it up on a trained database that is trained on the available data out there, it will strive to reach whatever you ask of it in a "Positive" light if you like, aka an advanced form of search and reasoning engine.

It's not sentient, and it's certainly not really A.i, it's more like an mirror of yourself combined with an advanced form of translator.

I'm a gamer and a coder all the way from the 80s. Still I guess I call myself a "gamer".

The thing is, it's no longer about the vessel, call it console, call it a PC - call it a vessel for your entertainment.

If you have a 1000+ team making an AAA+ game, you are in for a visual treat, sometimes the fun of the game can get lost in all the detail, but oh boy is the details good.

The resolution don't matter so much if you make realistic game graphics with good anti-aliasing and all that DOF goodness with proper lights, the more realistic the lighting environment is, the more real the game will look. The more natural the motion is the more real the game will look.

Walt Disney said it best when he said a good story won't be destroyed by bad animation but all the best animation in the world is not going to save a bad story, and that still holds true today.

So - game devs and even hardware devs, focus on story and content, there's where the future truly is.

These and other oddball watches were the smartwatches of our time back then.

I had several weird watches like the Seiko Data 2000, Casio Phone dialer watch, One that could talk, and several with compass and barometer built in. It's too many to remember, but I do remember I used them like a statement, just to have something curious and be the "odd-one-out" with all the tech, it was on purpose.

When the smartphones came along, the watches had outlived their attraction value for me, and even though I got a smartwatch like the Galaxy S3 gear, I never truly used it beyond its credit-card function (that ceased to work after a while due to phone incompabilitity, Samsung sucks like Apple if you try to go outside their ecosystem).

I do still believe in handy gadgets, today for me - it's more about how small and practical I can get stuff in my workshop. Say a pocket Spectrum analyzer instead of a half-a-meter of Boatanchor, or an electric screwdriver I can carry in my pockets rather than the Milwaukee-bulk-o-matic that looks like a fisher price toy from the 80s (which seems to be the de-facto standard for all "worksmans tools".