Like everything in LLM land it's all about the prompt and agent pipeline. As others say below, these people are experts in their domain. Their prompts are essentially a form of codifying their own knowledge, as in Rakyll and Galen's examples, to achieve specific outcomes based on years and maybe even decades of work in the problem domain. It's no surprise their outputs when ingested by an LLM are useful, but it might not tell us much about the true native capability of a given AI system.
You know all those dark patterns in software? What if we applied the same concepts to gigantic mechanical devices, taking advantage of human psychological faults, and generate a profit margin on those? Sure seems what seems to have happened with motor vehicles
As much as this may have unintended consequences, I can appreciate the motivation. I can't let my kids play iPhone games unless I turn the device into Airplane mode. Almost all these pay to play mobile games have 60 second interstitials after each level that can't be skipped. It's insane. I've taught my kids how to force kill the game and reload to get out. Definitely depressing compared to the PC shareware days I grew up with.
As a fellow parent, I cannot recommend Apple Arcade enough. My son is only allowed to play games that come from AA. These games aren't allowed to have any ads or in-app purchase. In return, you pay seven measly bucks a month (though I have it included as part of a package since we use iCloud and Apple Music and Apple TV+ anyway).
The games in AA are either made for Apple Arcade (some great indie type games) or, very commonly, they are basically 'de-fanged' ones from the regular App Store, with all the IAPs and ads ripped out. Where there is an in-game currency that normally is scarce without paying, they'll either just give you a bunch of it to start with, or you will earn it naturally while playing.
I agree with you that the number of ads and purchase-pushing mechanics in all regular App Store/Play Store games is insane. It's all because a few whales who do buy these purchases are what pays for the whole thing.
I'm leaning towards letting the kid play games only on an XBox and never on the phone. Even if I get rid of the ads, I don't want the games to be accessible wherever they are. Whereas with a TV, they need to situate themselves in a dedicated place to play games.
I haven't used it much, because I was dragged kicking and screaming back to iOS by family inertia (photo library and iMessage), but there is this which bills itself as the same idea:
> only on an XBox and never on the phone. ... I don't want the games to be accessible wherever they are.
I couldn't agree more that a carry-anywhere gaming (or worse, social-media) device is too corrosive to childhood.[1] My eldest is only 7, so unsurprisingly he doesn't have a phone, and uses an iPad. The size of it has a nice side-effect that it's impractical to carry around, so it's only used at home and in the car.
When he's older, I plan to give him a phone that can only text and call.
[1] Sure, some of us had things like Game Boy, but consider how long those batteries even lasted, how bulky and limited the devices were, how expensive games were, how there were zero ads... It's really far from the same thing. I'd be fine with him having a thing like a Game Boy.
At this point, I've just decided that I'm going to actually pay for my games on iPhone.
Stardew Valley cost me $15 on iPhone a few years ago, which is a lot for an iPhone game, but I don't regret it at all. It's a direct port of the PC version, meaning it's a complete experience, but also not a single ad. No attempts to get me to spam my friends, no prompts for me to buy gems to make my crops grow faster, no need to watch an ad to unlock fighting in the mines. It's a game that I paid some money for and then I got to play. What a concept!
I have a borderline-irrational hatred for ads and will very actively go out of the way to avoid them. I understand the whole "no free lunch" economic theory, so you could argue that they're a necessity in some cases, but at this point I'm in a stable enough position to justify paying a few bucks to play games uninterrupted.
Outside of Stardew Valley, I play Binding of Isaac and Organ Trail. Both of them cost a few bucks but both also give you a complete, ad-free experience.
Yes and reality is the hard part. Moravec’s Paradox [1] continues to ring true. A billion years of evolution went into our training to be able to cope with the complexity of reality. Our language is a blink of an eye compared to that.
Reality cannot be perceived. A crisp shadow is all you can hope for.
The problem for me is the point of the economy in the limit where robots are better, faster and cheaper than any human at any job. If the robots don’t decide we’re worth keeping around we might end up worse than horses.
Look I think that is the whole difficulty. In reality, doing the wrong thing results in pain, and the right thing in relief/pleasure. A living thing will learn from that.
But machines can experience neither pain nor pleasure.
You're joking, but that's probably the right strategy: make sure to enjoy things on both sides of the aisle, so you don't have to worry about which side adds, and which removes, years. And then don't fret about it.
Aside from that, I'd love to know how each of those items affects life quality. Living long is only a life goal up to a certain age, and from what I've seen around me, that age is very rarely 90.
Yeah, living to old age at the cost of overoptimizing every little thing in your life does not seem like a worthwhile endeavor.
You'll only add years that won't be terribly useful or pleasant anyway, because anyone has to deal with some form of wear and tear regardless. At the very least, all the old people I know have to deal with some audition and sight loss, and even when they are in decent physical shape, they seem to be hurting somewhere.
It feels like trying to be immortal, which is a bit of a folly.
Anyway, the other day I noticed that Warren Buffett is just retiring at the age of 94. The man has eaten McDonald's for breakfast for much of his life. Diet cannot be that big of a deal.
What those epidemiological studies reveal is that food associated with higher class makes you live longer, which is reverse causation, at best.
Yes there are a bunch of weird niches that got a lot of Twitter traffic but found a home on LinkedIn when there's an overlap with professions. Another niche example that I see is applications for AI powered architectural visualization, many folks posting actually useful stuff there on a regular basis.
Honestly I wish people stuck with good old forums. There's forums for everything out there, in every niche, gaming, modding, hardware, cars, boats.
Every single community you can think of has likely a great forum out there, easily readable and searchable, where discussions on single topics last _years_ and go in extreme informative depth, the kind of depth that no platform like HN/Lobsters/LinkedIn can ever dream of.
The closest surrogate we have are issue trackers (like GitHub) or mailing lists, but even those offer such a poor UX that I can't but wonder..
The difference to linkedin is that biostars has 'in-domain experts' only; the postdocs, the staff bioinformaticians, etc. those are not the people who will hire you. The people who will hire you are on linkedin.
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