Another restatement of Brandolini’s Law. The cost of parroting this kind of information is very low, while the cost of refuting it is very high. And the value an outlet can extract from its readership to fund that refutation is nowhere close to cover its outlay. Maybe a counter is the occasional take-down article can sometimes go more viral than the original claim, but chasing those is probably unprofitable too.
> It is not yet optimized for desktop OS-level control
Alas, AGI is not yet here. But I feel like if this OS-level of control was good enough, and the cost of the LLM in the loop wasn't bad, maybe that would be enough to kick start something akin to AGI.
I'm not sure I understand your statement. Are you implying that once an LLM can do something, "it" is not intelligent anymore? ("it" being the model, the capability, or both?)
We should be very specific and careful with our words. pseidemann said "most humans cannot properly control a computer", which isn't the same as "most people are incapable of using a computer".
I would agree with pseidemann. There's a level of understanding and care and focus that most people lack. That doesn't make those people less worthy of love and care and support, and computers are easier to use than ever. Most people don't know what EFI is, nor should they have to. If all someone needs from the computer to be able to update their facebook, the finer details of controlling a computer aren't, and shouldn't be important to them, and that's okay!
Humanity's goal should have been to make the smartest human possible, but no one got the memo, so we're raising the bar by augmenting everyone with technology instead of implementing eugenics programs.
Well written but I disagree with the eugenics part. I think we can all achieve high quality of life with (very) good education and health care alone, and we have to. All other ways eventually turn into chaos, imho.
It’s the same old superiority complex that birthed the “IT Guy” stereotypes of the 90s/aughts. It stems from a) not understanding what problems non-developers need computers to solve for them, and b) ego-driven overestimation of the complexity of their field compared to others.
Ok, but you didn’t define what “proper” use of a computer means to you, which leaves the entire thing open to interpretation. I would say practically everyone is capable of using a computer to complete an enormous range of tasks. Is this not “proper” usage in your opinion?
You are conflating "use" and "control". I mean literal proper control of a computer, meaning the human controls (also programs), and especially understands, every aspect of what the computer is doing and can do. This is what a real AGI would be capable of, presumably. This includes knowledge of how programs are executed or how networks and protocols work, among a lot of other low-level things.
One thought is once it can touch the underlying system, it can provision resources, spawn processes, and persist itself, crossing the line from tool to autonomous entity. I admit you could do that in a browser shell nowadays, just maybe with more restrictions and guardrails.
I don’t have any strong opinions here, but I do think a lower cost to escape the walled gardens agi starts in will be a factor
Not just the os, but browsing control is enough to do 99% of the things he would want autonomously.
Bank account + id + browser: has all the tools it needs to do many things:
- earn money
- allocate money
- create accounts
- delegate physical jobs to humans
Create his own self loop in a server. Create a server account, use credit card + id provided, self host his own code… can now focus on getting more resources.
Officer 0336 is raking it in for the city. I wonder if there is a correlation with the areas which generate a lot of tickets and other city datasets. Perhaps crime rate or average household income?
You'll probably find a high correlation with the street cleaning dataset (if there is one). Nearly all of the tickets at the top of the leaderboard are street sweeping violations.
I wonder if street cleaning is net profitable for the city once you factor in tickets. That would make cutting the cleaning frequency [1] a doubly bad idea.
"undergoing maintenance" but spot check of data looks correct to me.
Street cleaning tickets are given efficiently and enforcement is conducted to minimize the time that people can't park. 2-4 parking officers drive in front of the street cleaning vehicles and ticket everyone parked. if you're watching at the time you'll see almost every car on the street pull out in front of the officers, circle the block and park right back in the same -- but now clean -- spot. those that don't get tickets.
Some day the forward facing cameras on your car will read the street cleaning signs and warn you before you park and notify you if you are still parked there when street cleaning day/time is approaching. The nuance is that you are allowed to park after the truck has gone by (in SF).
It's is amusing that you question whether parking citations correlate with crime rates. The reason they give out tickets for this is that these people have parked unlawfully.
One, yes, the separate charge of civil tax fraud is not tax evasion and is not a crime.
Two, the IRS is a civil agency. It can only bring civil actions, even against alleged crimes. The DOJ, on the other hand, takes criminal referrals. (We tend to see civil siblings to criminal counterparts across our body of law.)
Going back to OP’s question, when people refer to a high-crime neighbourhood, they aren’t talking about parking violations.
Yeah, that's my point. It's not a neutral point of view. Unlawfully operating cars is the most widespread and impactful behavior in SF, followed by wage theft, tax fraud, and tenant harassment. And all the other stuff that gets discussed as "crime" is in 4th place or lower.
> Unlawfully operating cars is the most widespread and impactful behavior in SF
If you think you can convince your fellow citizens to criminalise parking tickets, go for it. I doubt it has that much support. (But I don’t doubt that confidently!)
You're not afraid to admit what's marketed as a fine or deterrent is simply a weirdly targeted tax but you're annoyed that it's sometimes avoidable due to only sporadic assessment of it.
IDK what plane this policy spectrum exists on but man is horseshoe theory clearly alive and well on it.
Officers are a limited resource, so their deployment matters. Are they assigned to areas that most benefit citizens, or those that most benefit the city? Is the focus on maximizing ticket revenue, or addressing the most dangerous violations, like blocked bike lanes? Are they primarily a revenue tool, a public safety measure, or just extra eyes on the street? Do wealthier neighborhoods receive more enforcement, effectively buying themselves safer streets? Basically I'm wondering does parking enforcement benefit SF residents uniformly?
Different neighborhoods may want different types/amount of enforcement as well. Some neighborhoods may have tiny driveways and are happy that a lot of cars can get away with parking "illegally" due to non-enforcement and put up with the resulting narrow paths where one car has to pull aside to let another car past. Other neighborhoods might have almost no cars ever parked on the street and people get angry if anyone parks in front of "their" curb, even though it's a public street and anyone can "legally" park there.
This kind of difference in desire from area to area should be reflected in municipal codes and have clear signage. But sometimes these neighborhood norms are only reflected in de facto enforcement, not in de jure written legal code.
This has a parallel in the form of HOA's. Most of the justifications I hear for HOA's are that they prevent "$THING_1", "$THING_2", and "$THING_3" ... but all of those are already prohibited by municipal code and can be addressed by making a call to 311. However, citizens of many cities often don't have faith in police / code enforcement to respond with a proper ticket. Sometimes I wonder if all those HOA fees were going to the city if that would pay for diligent non-HOA enforcement.
Well, if you look at this data, virtually all of the tickets are for leaving your car in a street sweeping zone at the wrong time. So they are functioning as adjuncts of the street sweeping regime. Then you should think about this history of street sweeping in San Francisco. I think you might find that it is the opposite of your preconception. The wealthiest neighborhoods got rid of street sweeping decades ago, specifically because they didn't want to have to move their cars so much.
Sometimes yes. I've also received tickets from parking enforcement for legal parking and good luck disputing that without getting into a lawsuit. I literally had a ticket issued at a timestamp of when I was on the other side of the city.
So there could easily be secondary correlations between areas filled with people who are willing to fight invalid citations and that might correlate with wealth / crime rates.
You'd really be up shit creek if parking illegally were a crime because there are all sorts of protections afforded to those accused of crimes not afforded to those accused of parking violations.
I think we’ve always shaped ourselves based what we’re capable of building. Think of how infrastructure such as buildings and roadways shape our lives within them. What I do agree with you, is how LLMs are shaping our mental thought how we are offloading a lot of our mental capacities with blind trust in the LLM output.
I agree that these visuals rarely drive decisions on their own. They’re more like supporting tools… useful for framing an argument or guiding a narrative in a presentation, especially when static.
Unless it’s interactive or tied to live data the usefulness of the visualization produced is limited.. it’s a shame and it’s something this tools should pivot towards
> Once concepts are selected, Sphere walks the knowledge graph and generates SQL queries to retrieve data from the warehouse, no manual joins or technical mediation required.
If I had to guess this is how eng pitched it to the business to carve out the time to build this tooling. As with all these internally built schemas, ui’s, tooling, etc… they’re never gonna post how much this is actually used relative to the work arounds ds and eng use in their day to day.
The price is in the 500+ domain graph services federated into our GraphQL enterprise gateway, which will all be exposed to Sphere through UDA. That's real.
Maybe some reverse attribution to determine how much credit to give different sources in the old top k results. Maybe a llm that is trained on fact finding, and giving proper % of credit. But this would probably require a collective contract in place to benefit site owners, which means its never going to happen.
> these tools are not only useful for writing the final code
This sparked a thought in how a large part of the job is often the work needed to demonstrate impact. I think this aspect is often overlooked by some of the good engineers not yet taking advantage of the AI tooling. LLM loops may not yet be good enough to produce shippable code by themselves, but they sure are capable to help reduce the overhead of these up and out communicative tasks.
you mean like hacking a first POC with AI to sell a product/feature internally to get buy-in from the rest of the team before actually shipping production version of it?
“‘It’s still learning’ is a misnomer. The model isn’t learning—we are. LLMs are static after training; all improvement comes from human iteration in the outer loop: fine-tuning, prompt engineering, tool integration, retrieval. Until the outer loop itself becomes autonomous and self-improving, we’re nowhere near AGI. Current hype confuses capability with agency.
