I work in tech, and both with and around AI. Seems to me that it needs to be highly constrained to do a good job. Too much leeway and it goes astray. So more and more I see people developing skills for AI that basically run scripts or do tightly defined tasks that are pretty much like scripts. So to me it feels like the future of our current version of AI is most likely to be a user interface. And it could add a lot there. Many teams have lots of scripts to do tasks, but the people who need them either can't find them, or don't even know to look. AI can solve that. Thoughts?

Most of the time the companies say the layoffs are because AI is doing people jobs, but the reality is that making things that use AI is just a lot more expensive. And enabling employees to use AI more than the free tier is really expensive too. So, they need to cut cost elsewhere to balance it out.

More and more games seem to suck on thier own, but can be great with mods. You have entire platforms like roblox where all the games are more or less mods. How long until the platform itself is community created and managed and the viability of games created by companies dissappears?

The reason of course is money apparently defines what is "good".

Ideally, it would not be a roblox game. I personally would rather not make a roblox account at all. And I want to be able to save progress. I don't usually end up with unlimited time to play games with him and such. But the game is mostly simple. It co-op, and he likes it.

Like my thermostat. To hook it to the wifi it has two parts. One connected to the furnace board that is the wifi board. Then a second device near my router that bridges the part at the furnace to the router. Why? Why can't the part at the furnace board just connect directly to the router? I have several other things like this, most I don't hook up.

edit Some clarification. Thermostat talks to furnace board via wire. Next to the furnace board is an add on board that is the wifi board. Next to my router is a small box that plugs directly into the router and the power. The wifi board at the furnace talks to this small box to get to the router. Why is the small box needed.

Another example. I am looking at a hot tub. To connect it to the wifi you need two parts. One wired to the tub, and one wired to your router. It talks wirelessly between the two. But why the box near the router, why not go direct from the wifi add on part at the hot tub to the router. Should cost them less.

edit, update: Some have commented they could be using a different protocol and/or frequency that allows greater range and such since they don't need as much bandwidth. This would also reduce frequency conflict with existing wifi devices.

Others pointed out that configuring the wifi connection would require a way to give the board a password. Which they can avoid if they add that wired device that sits next to the router. Customers can interface with that via phone or computer and enter like a serial number for the board that will sync them.

Also, it has been pointed out that newer thermostats often do have direct wifi to the router, so no extra board on the furnace even.

I fully understand backup in layers. Ideally you want an onsite backup, and an offsite backup. But for the onsite... do you even try to protect it from fire?

If not, doesn't that mean all your "fire" protection is really just the one online layer?

And if you do, where do you get such a thing. I have looked around, I can't find anything that actually lists hard drives as protected. Like sentry safe has "data protection" safes, but they say this

"CDs, DVDs, memory sticks and USB drives up to 1700°F (927°C) for all FPW base models. These products are NOT intended to protect computer floppy or 21⁄4” diskettes, cartridges, tapes, audio or video cassettes, or photo negatives. "

That doesn't seem to include HDD or SSD. So I started wondering if anyone actually tries to protect their onsite backup from fire.

Ideally something with decent AI summaries AND headlines.

For a lot of news, a well written headline is all I really want to see first so I can decide if I want to read more. Then a good summary is often all I need. Most articles are loaded with garbage fluff and some random person's opinion (or a hand picked person for a sensational opinion) making me simply not want to read articles.

I have been trying ground news (paid) for a few months, and it's AI is pretty sad. The headlines are just direct copies from one of the sources, and can often be very far from what the summary says (I assume it miscategorized an article about a different subject into the bucket, and happened to grab that one's headline to use). Oh, and I don’t care about baseball scores, but I do care about sports. I don't seem to be able to tell it that as it doesn't have a label for that.

All in all, this is really the kind of thing LLM AIs should be good at... language. So I would hope someone out there sells a service to get me news efficiently.

Edit: let's pretend we are not on reddit. If you think my request is bad, you probably are making assumptions that aren't true. So rather than tell me I am wrong for wanting something, say nothing at all. Some people who actually want to help will eventually try to do so.

Planted this in early June. Not from seed, got it at home depot. It has grown a few more stalks and leaves, but it isn't spreading out like usual. This is a new spot for it. Other stuff has had trouble growing in this dirt, so I dug out a bigger hole and put some soil from my main garden in it.

The sunflower stalks you can see in the image are to it's east. So it should be getting plenty of sun. Watered every morning, same as my main garden, Soil moisture meter says its moist in the evening.

Last week I sprinkled some 4-6-5 on the soil around it and watered that in. Ph meter says 6. No change.

My other boston pickle cucumber in the main garden has taken over it's space and will need trimming soon. So I feel like this one should be spreading more. It also doesn't look as green as I think it should. Is there some kind of fertilizer I should be adding to help it out?

Was away about a week. One carrot decided to grow super tall and looks like it will make a big flower. The carrot under isn't as big as it's brethern that I harvested. This is a new variety of carrot for me called "short and sweet". Never seen this with my other carrots.

Edit: I didn't notice that the image failed to upload. I have tried adding an imgur link.

As a guy closing in on 50, losing my near vision really annoys me. And the current solutions are weak at best, which annoys me even more. These and the other companies working on similar sound great. But someone tell me why I would need a prescription for them? And is that true in the EU? The article makes it sound like getting them approved to be prescribed is a big hurdle. They seem like better reading glasses, which I don't need a prescription to buy.

This article got me thinking that maybe blue states "should" pause or relax some gun controls and say it is because they think the people may need to defend themselves from a fascist government. They could add in some subsidized gun saftey classes in the same bill.

The concept is symbolic mostly. It may give people like ICE agents a little less confidence when they do a raid because it seems more dangerous to them. And if things get really ugly, it could arguably be a deterrent. Ideally national guard troops ordered into a blue state might refuse such an order because they expect armed resistance that would force them to shoot civilians. Where as right now, they would expect no or very little civilian resistance. And that possibility might deter the feds from ordering troops in because they don't want to risk the order being refused.

At the end of the day. Most americans don't want Americans killing each other. So anything we can do to make that less appetizing to the people in charge that don't care about Americans, the better.

I downloaded a few things thinking I could watch offline. Turns out you can't. Does the app have a way to remove the downloaded content?

I am looking to visit a friend in a place where the major airport is like 3 hours away. But there are regional airports too. But the search engines I have tried either won't take just a town, or they seem to only choose the closest to the town, and the major airport. Skipping all the other regionals. Any good engine out there for considering all of the regional airports?

Very sad for sure. But I get lost trying to parse the article. Google says "Caravan park" is like an rv park. Generally for recreational vehicles on vacation. But the image looks like a fixed structure type place. Google also says a caravan park is for spending holidays, and the article talks about them being excited to spend the holidays together. So I thought I had an idea of what this was. Then the article has a bingo caller saying that everyone behind the bar knew them well. And my first thought was... she's 10... in the US, "behind the bar" means bartender. My second was that doesn't sound like a holiday place. Can someone fill me in on what a caravan park is, what behind the bar means, and what kind of place this pub is. Thanks.

Assuming the fit hits the shan and things get real ugly in the US, what happens with all the electronically managed money. Like say I make a break for Canada and get there. Can I still access my funds? Can the government freeze everyone's assets to prevent those who make it out from getting at their money?

I have retirement stuff in vanguard and fidelity mostly. I would assume they are international companies, and thus might not have to abide by a US freeze order. But then again, it might be in their interest to keep the money frozen so they technically still have it.

And what are other people doing to be prepared for the possibility that things get civil war like in the US. Are their places you can put your money that are safe from US hands? And what are the tax implementations of moving money to them?

Edit: I realize from the comments that it might look like this is my reaction to the falling market. It isn't about that. I don't react to market conditions in general... This is more about my family being in the administrations top 5 groups they hate. And if we feel the need to flee, is there anything I can do to ensure access to some money while having a minimal impact on my financials if it never comes to that.

I remember way back watching the show west wing. I always assumed the staff on the show was small just because it was TV. And that really the Pres had a large staff with experts on just about everything. But seeing the current administration use chatgpt to figure out reciprocal tarriffs and such, maybe they really don't have much more staff than the TV show portrayed.
If true I would find it kinda funny that they struggle to do their job due to limited staff while claiming that government agencies have too much staff.

It sounds like just a standardized set of api's for interfacing with data sources. I'm not even sure why it seems to need a server in the diagrams from Anthropic. Couldn't the data source just implement the API's directly?
I am all for a standard set of API's, I just don't understand the middle man.

I have heard that linux doesn't play as nice with nvidia as others. So what type of graphics card is best for both linux and windows. And what other hardware considerations are there that I should consider when building my new PC? I machine is mainly for day to day stuff, web browsing, games, taxes...

So, AI can do a lot of things. But it needs input data. So I was thinking, do we currently have any technology that could generate metrics that an AI might be able to train on such that it could estimate calories gotten from a meal. Not what was in the food, but what the body actually absorbed.

Obviously it could be used to make a killer diet tracking app. Cause tracking what you eat is the worst part.

And collecting the metric doesn't have to be "practical" today. This is just more of a thought experiment. So if currently it would require multiple blood tests per day or something, that would still be interesting to me.