There is also https://apertus-ai.org/ but yeah, "not useful yet" if you were looking to replace your coding agent. Very useful if you are doing LLM research.
Yes. I paused reading at some point just to marvel at the clarity of writing. It seems absurd to complain about length, it isn't long. Maybe we have different ideas what good writing is, but I'd say this is in the top percent.
AI can mirror this style of writing, but it can't mirror the clarity of thought behind it.
Also the pixels were probably downscaled in sRGB gamma by JPEG instead of linear light, so the overall brightness will be wrong anyway, if there was lots of high-frequency content in the original.
No, work is supposed to be at least useful for somebody. Ideally for the society you live in, at least indirectly. If you are wasting your work time, you are also wasting you life time in the same breath. Would you turn every leaf in the forest around twice, if it was the highest paying job? No, because that's a bullshit job.
> Would you turn every leaf in the forest around twice
if someone is paying for this, then it must mean it is useful to the one doing the paying. If you're not the one paying, you also cannot decide whether it's useful to the payer or not.
Of course you can't decide whether it's useful to the payer. You can and should ask yourself why someone would pay for it, and then decide according to your own personal criteria whether to trade your labor to that particular employer.
It is perfectly rational to choose lower income occupations for your own reasons. Income maximization at all costs is how you become a pawn in someone else's game even (especially?) if it makes you rich.
Some people earn a million per day just from passive income. They could make you turn leaves all day long just for a quick laugh, and you would be unable to decide if this was useful. (They probably won't do that, I agree, but they won't think about wasting your time by accident, given how cheap it is.)
"Gemin" I'd support an argument to bring back the "I" to computing. The gem in I.
Perhaps humans need their own APIs for others to then mash-up in the way they please?
For example, I think the goal is to merge all entry fields into a local one that manages and monitors output. I should be able to see and record a stream of everything I do online but I can't. That stream, being a representation of me, is what's valuable. Straits of Hormuz on a person-by-person basis.
How many entry fields are there that you use? email, video, social, crypto, HN, chat, apps... the list goes on. There's a lot of duplicated effort there. Why so many?
I think the whole "One device to rule them all" that I mentioned here [1] is about putting a layer around yourself and letting others interface with you on your terms.
My experience is that if you try to sit still for 5 minutes, the opposite happens. The thoughts and feelings that you weren't aware of start mobbing you, and you have to at least acknowledge them to get your peace. It's also one of the hardest ways to waste time, getting busy with any distraction is much easier.
Yes? Like trying hard to get into that state of meditation. Then you notice that you're getting tense and stressed about it not working, realize that this is not helpful, get angry at yourself for doing it wrong, try harder to do it right this time, etc.
It's my favourite puzzle about meditation. You have to approach it sideways, but if you really try that it won't work. So you try hard not to that instead, which won't work either. It's kind of funny how focusing on your breath tends to work, but... don't hold that thought.
It's a contradiction, and that's okay. Get comfortable with it ;-)
FWIW a good trick is to be aware of your thoughts, watch the tension/stress/realisation/anger/effort arising, the sort-of ignore them because they're thoughts and look for the way your mind tenses moving between them, then do the opposite of that tensing or let the tensing move you to a feeling of (say) extreme love or connection because if you're going to feel something that is more pleasant than stress. These things come and go, as you illustrate. Once you don't lean into them they tend to just go away.
None of those things are doing meditation wrong, they're just things minds do. The mistake is in focusing on them instead of focusing on the process generating the changes.
When I started meditating, I actively tried to ignore my thoughts, which was exhausting. So when I couldn't, I'd engage and ruminate instead, which was just as tiring.
The approach that finally worked for me (and one I still use today, years later) I learned from a book by Adrian Wells called Metacognitive Therapy. It's not self-help, actually; it's a clinical manual for therapists, but I read it anyway. The idea, in my own words, is not to engage with the thought but simply to recognize it, almost like greeting it and saying goodbye in the same breath. A thought comes, and you say, "Hmm, okay, I just thought that. That was a thought. That's fine." And you move on.
Of course, the book goes much deeper than that, but this simple approach helped me enormously with rumination and anxiety around intrusive thoughts.
> Writing is art and art requires a human soul for lack of a better word.
I think it's the other way around. The human soul requires the art. Or rather it craves the process of creating art, more than art-the-trade-item. When image generation was new, someone raged: "They want to build a genie to grant them wishes, and their wish is that nobody ever has to make art again."
> As for proving that you wrote it...yeah that could be tricky.
On social media, when people share their drawings they often share a photo with their tools visible (pencil, eraser) instead of a clean scan. It sends a message like "Look! I made this!". Or they post a time-lapse. Or details about their process, like here: https://www.viruscomix.com/makingofpartfive.html
The point of this is not mainly to "proof" anything, I think, but more a community signal that they care about their craft and are curious how others work. You can probably generate a convincing fake process with AI now, but... I wonder if anyone is willing to go that far.
The point is that not everything of value can be easily measured.
Instead of wasting some resources on corruption and bad judgement, we now waste them by forcing people to chase the wrong goal. In other words: "If you rely on incentives, you undermine values." (Barry Schwartz)
So I don't disagree with you, but I think we went too far into that direction. We have allow people to use their better judgement sometimes.
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