this... tracks.

I've been using Claude Code at work for a low-stakes project so that my company sees me being all "AI forward" and stuff (They're really drinking the Kool-aid) and yeah I'll admit its been doing OK on the project.... and yeah I see where you're coming from, there is a certain prose about how it outlines/summarizes things that feels familiar here.

I would really like a true new browser that doesn't use WebKit, Chromium or Gecko (and don't get me started on Goana) but I question such a tiny team being able to do so securely and in a manner that is actually maintainable. I WANT it to be true but I have my concerns and the AI summary thing just kind of puts the icing on the cake.

Forty bucks lets you turn pages on a non-paper device. What a world we live in.

Its reply to me:

"Yes, in large part."

Maybe we could just cut to the chase and go straight to Plaid Intelligence? It's not like anyone outside 1600 Pennsylvania is taking this "rebranding" seriously anyway, so why not have some fun with mocking it while we can?

At least the voters are not talking about things like Epstein, Iran, and the price of gas, which is likely the whole point; look at all the stupid, forget about the serious, and (for ~50% of the them) be sure to tick the name with "R" next to it next month like you're programmed to.

But that is mostly caused by NVidia's lackluster driver support in Linux.

Uh, sure.

That's not the issue - insurance companies have no problem giving insurance to humans which have "individual learning capabilities."

The problem is that while insurance companies can extract compensation from humans - essentially they can coerce the humans to work "for them" to pay them back - they can't get compensation from the AI, and there isn't a good framework to get compensation from the AI developers.

The issue isn't that the AI learns - the issue is that our legal framework doesn't have a good way to get "compensation" from errant AI - because the AI itself doesn't care if it gets shut off. You can't hold the AI itself "liable" like you can a person. So until we change the liability framework, we'll be stuck. This isn't a technical problem, so much as a social one.

Governments are people.

That was a new one for me too. My guess was what we used to refer to as "red tops" in the UK; the tabloid / gutter press because they typically have a red banner with the name of the paper on the front page, although some of the worst modern examples of that (the Mail & Express) actually don't have a red banner. In the mostly online world, that obviously needs to cover online-only and broadcast media forms too so "red top" seems to be falling out of use.

Apparently though, it's actually a reference to totally fake or low-quality news sites, masquerading as legitimate outlets purely to push misinformation and is named for the "Mystery Meat" by-product that resembles pink slime used as filler in some processed meats (mmm, yummy!) Defining characteristics include:

• The content is generally produced by low-wage employees, automated content production (e.g. AI), and templates. It might just list information without any analysis or context.
• Purport to cover local or hyperlocal news and to some extent are taking advantage of a decline in traditional local news.
• Many outlets are part of networks financed by partisans to push their narrative or point-of-view.

If you're thinking that mostly means the likes of Reach's portfolio of garbage and so-called "independent journalist" sites, take a look at the default Microsoft Edge homepage on MSN, which would totally qualify. It's clearly largely AI-generated, highly formulaic/template based, seldom provides any analysis or context, pretends to be local (because clickbait sites that include a country's name in them are *totally* relevant to another country entirely), and, yup, is financed by someone with a definite narrative to push. It clearly only exists to get people to doomscroll and generate clicks and ad-revenue. Bingo! Full house!

Part of self-driving cars being safer than people is that they don't drive "very close together" - they follow at the appropriate following distance and speed for the lines of sight. This alone accounts for a large portion of the improved safety performance of these systems.

Autonomous cars are actually very good at the driving task. Where they fail is when they encounter situations that are "abnormal" and I think the industry has a problem here; state of the art is either to train specifically for every situation (impossible in the limit) or to kick the decision to a human in a support center somewhere. Things like emergency vehicles, school buses, farmer markets, construction zones, etc.

The industry needs to figure out how to get their systems to "get confused, then reason their way out of a situation."

This long tail is where humans still do better - when there is some "new" scenario, like a particular combination of debris in the roadway, on a Tuesday, with gawkers, during a fireworks display. You will never be able to "train" your way out of that - you need the correct structural formulation for the problem space.

"These fuckers are why you are seeing less physical switch games as an example"

Buwhaha

The big takeaway I have from their study is that their study areas - major metropolitan centers - is that cities have way, way worse than average incidents per vehicle mile travelled.

I mean the national average is only something like 1.25 fatalities per 100M miles, injuries only 75 per 100M miles, and "all" incidents like 140 per 100M miles. But the benchmark numbers on the linked websites range from 200 to almost 700 injury incidents per 100M miles in those cities.

Like, if you are using the average number, you can't even reduce the number of incidents by 841 over 271 million miles, because the expected value is only 203. You have to have a rate of at least 300 injury-incidents per 100 million miles to reduce by 841 at over 271 million miles. So really, their results are driven by San Francisco, Austin, and Atlanta.

Their confidence bands are also pretty low; for example they quote 2 serious or greater injuries in San Fran, which on 82 million miles there is a rate of "0.02 per million miles". But 2 injuries is not really enough to make a statistical inference.

Least of all because all the miles are with different versions of their software - you can't make any predictive claim.

Statistics never lie, but you can make them say whatever you want...

Yeah, I know what you mean. I just did it the easy way - dropped out of university, eventually move to Montreal where it was almost *difficult* to be a programmer and not end up at a game studio. Thankfully the industry grew in Toronto as well and I was able to move back after some lovely years there.

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

I'm an oldhead programmer (still) in the games industry. You're thinking of DigiPen. (I didn't go there.)