I use actualbudget.org to track all spending, but only update investment accounts ("off-budget" in Actual Budget terms) once a month. Completely deterministic, as all things related to numbers should be.
I have pointed my LLM at the SQLite DB and asked it to tell me what it could see from my last five years of transactions, and I was impressed with the things it picked up, and what it reminded me of, but I'm not sure I saw any value in the sense of anything I would change.
I'm going to have it review things monthly to see if that helps me, but I'm not sure it will. I'm generally already aware of how my finances are going because of my budget updates.
I kept asking this question last year, especially after that initial METR report showing people believed themselves to be faster when they were slower. Then I decided to dive in feet-first for a few weeks so that nobody could say I hadn't tried all I could.
At work, what I see happening is that tickets that would have lingered in a backlog "forever" are getting done. Ideas that would have come up in conversation but never been turned into scoped work is getting done, too. Some things are no faster at all, and some things are slower, mostly because the clankers can't be trusted and human understanding can't be sped up, or because input is needed from product team, etc. But the sorts of things that don't make it into release notes, and are never announced to customers, those are happening faster, and more of them are happening.
We review server logs, create tickets for every error message we see, and chase them down, either fixing the cause or mitigating and downgrading the error message, or however is appropriate to the issue. This was already a practice, but it used to feel like we were falling farther behind every week, as the backlog of such tickets grew longer. Most low-priority stuff, since obviously we prioritized errors based on user impact, but now remediation is so fast that we've eliminated almost the entire backlog. It's the sort of things that if we were a mobile app, would be described as "improvement and bug fixes" generically. It's a lot of quality-of-life issues for use as backend devs.
At home, I'm creating projects I don't intend for anyone outside my family to see. So far things I could theoretically have done myself, even related to things I've done myself before, but at a scale I wouldn't bother. Like a price-checker that tracks a watchlist of grocery items at nine local stores and notifies me in discord of sales on items and in categories I care about. It's a little agent posting to a discord channel that I can check before heading out for groceries.
Or several projects related to my hobbies, automating the parts I don't enjoy so much to give me more time for the parts I do. My collection of a half-dozen python scripts and three cron jobs related to those hobbies has grown to just over 20 such scripts and 14 cron jobs. Plus some that are used by an agent as part of a skill, although still scripts I can call manually, because I'll go back to cron jobs for everything if the price of tokens rises a bit more.
I was super-skeptical, and now I'm not. I think companies laying off employees are delusional or using LLMs as an excuse, but there is zero question in my mind that these things can be a huge boon to productivity for some categories of coding.
You could double or quadruple the number of pixels, and it wouldn't make any difference in how much information humans comprehend easily. You would be using more computing power and more memory to deliver the same amount of useful information less efficiently.
A "proper GUI" is rarely better than a well-designed TUI for communicating textual information, IMO. And the TUI constraints keep the failure-states for badly-designed UI tightly bound, unlike GUI constraints.
What about a map, or an image? We can surely agree that humans can take in a lot more information than a readable letter-grid allows, depending on the type of information.
Sure, of course sometimes an image conveys things better than a thousand words. But a very large percentage of what most people do with computers is primarily text, with more images in ads than useful content. By and large GUIs don't use images to convey information better, they just make text worse.
Modern terminal software supports displaying images, for what it's worth.
> Modern terminal software supports displaying images, for what it's worth.
In a worse, and dramatically overcomplicated way. Like it's kind of funny that largely the same people that is all for this supposed ultra minimalism would be celebrating a Rube Goldberg way of doing graphical interfaces? (Because in the end it is a graphical interface).
Every year or so, I look into alternative to my Paperwhite, which has been in "airplane mode" since I bought it. So far, nothing else seems to be quite up to the level of my existing device for my use case, let alone better.
It's possible I needed to log into Amazon in 2016 and 2020 when I bought my two Paperwhites, but I haven't needed to do so again since, so I'm not sure this will affect me at all. If it does, I'll have to check my notes for what was closest last year when I last checked.
Something seems wrong. A half-million tokens is almost five times larger than I allow even long-running conversations to get too. I've manually disabled the 1M context, so my limit is 200K, and I don't like it to get above 50%.
Is it... not aware of its current directory? Is its current directory not the root of your repo? Have you maybe disabled all tool use? I don't even know how I could get it to do what you're describing.
Maybe spend more time in /plan mode, so it uses tools and the Explore sub-agent to see what the current state of things is?
It's easy on the creators primarily, they get to skip a lot of steps and don't have to explain away things like cell phones.
For consumers, they get quantity.
Although it shouldn't be impossible, it seems really hard to get any kind of real quality out of isekai stories. Usually the stakes are low and the setting is surprisingly similar (even though having a different setting is ostensibly the entire reason for the genre). All you end up with is variety in characters, and even then there are common tropes.
As you said, the readers get quantity and honestly above all else that's what they want.
They already enjoy the stories enough to buy them or support patreons for them, I don't think trying to up the quality would be wise for the authors assuming it slowed down how quickly they wrote.
Most people will sign up for a Microsoft account, or already have, and so won't even see these ads.
But let's say you use Microsoft Windows, but don't want a Microsoft account. You're going to leave Windows over this? And go where?
Wait, is 2023 the fabled Year of Linux on the Desktop, at long last?
I haven't used Windows in many years, and I'm not trying to defend Microsoft here. Still, the framing of this piece seems silly. Very rarely is any single thing reason enough for the average person to completely switch operating systems. The cost of switching is too high.
Of course! I don't disagree. And yet here we are at 69.43% desktop market share[0] for Windows for March 2023, decades after I started hearing about how this year, for sure, was going to be the Year Of Linux On The Desktop™.
Most people don't seem to be using the best possible desktop experience. Their desktop is decided by an employer, or whatever is pre-installed, or who knows what. But an ad in the start menu doesn't seem like it's likely to budge that number much.
And yet Duke Nukem Forever has shipped, and Cybertruck has not. So right now, today, at this moment, DNF is not vaporware, and Cybertruck is. This is true regardless of how one feels about it.
> Regulating data privacy isn't Apple's job, if you want that fixed then you should take it up with the government or someone who can actually hold them accountable.
I live in the United States of America, where the government is bought and paid for by companies who dislike privacy for their users.
In the meantime, it may not be Apple's "job," but it's part of their value proposition, and the grumbling from software vendors indicates it's reasonably effective.
You live in the United States of America, which has had Google, Microsoft and Apple under it's thumb since Snowden's leaks. If you want to insinuate that Apple protects you against state-level actors, you should disprove that or at least refute their own transparency page[0].
> the grumbling from software vendors indicates it's reasonably effective.
If not the software vendors, who are you trusting to keep your best interests at-heart here?
I have pointed my LLM at the SQLite DB and asked it to tell me what it could see from my last five years of transactions, and I was impressed with the things it picked up, and what it reminded me of, but I'm not sure I saw any value in the sense of anything I would change.
I'm going to have it review things monthly to see if that helps me, but I'm not sure it will. I'm generally already aware of how my finances are going because of my budget updates.
reply