I often feel like the use cases, demos, etc. that these Silicon Valley employees put out are based around their needs and how they operate.

"Oh hey! Here's a demo of an AI planning out a 1-week trip to Paris!" No one in Middle America would just hand their credit card to an AI and let it come up with such a trip!

I wish SV companies took more of the middle-class (and lower-middle-class) into consideration when coming up with such demos.

(Note: I live in SF)

And nobody with actual taste is going to take any of those recs seriously in the first place.

I mean, not auto-purchasing with the card, no. But my wife has definitely used chatGPT to plan activities on the trips we've already booked.

I hooked up Google Maps to ChatGPT and that was definitely helpful for this; without them it would seemingly just guestimate driving distances, but with the MCP it was able to determine exact driving/walking times and also render maps with waypoints for activities around the lodging.

I used https://github.com/cablate/mcp-google-map for the MCP (and patched it to generate URLs for the maps).

Maybe the model does some tool calling on its own to figure out the times?

You can opt in on a per-request basis.

Burning Man is ...... what you make of it.

The last time I went, there was this dude in a camp next to where I was camped. The entire week I was there, I only saw him sitting and drinking; he was totally hammered the entire 7 days and didn't go anwhere (AFAICT). That really saddened me: he could have done the same back home wherever he had come from; what's the point of coming to BM if you're going to just sit in one place and get drunk?

I really wanted to take it all in, so I stayed away from drinking or smoking, and had a great time! There is so much to see, so many creative people to interact with. You can end up having a deep conversation on just about any topic under the sky with random people. I ended up chatting with this Physics graduate student about, of all things, quarks (an area of specialty for him). He ended up patiently explaining various things to me, as if we were long-lost friends.

My recommendation: jump in with both feet in the spirit of contribution and cooperation. Have fun, respect boundaries, contribute however you can.

I like the fact that they are so ... observant. A specific crow (I recognize him due to the missing feathers around his collar) will spend a while sitting on a tree outside my window, observing me for no reason. I do feed them generally by leaving peanuts in a specific area in the backyard early in the morning, and I'm sure this one partakes in the feast; but I have never rewarded his presence in any form, and yet there he is, in the middle of the day, just hanging out on the branch of the leafless tree, just sitting there, observing me. If I turn around and make eye contact, he often flies away. But I can see him in the reflection on my ipad's screen, and if I don't turn around and make eye contact, he will stay there for a while. It is fun interacting with "smart" creatures who have their own personalities and active social lives.

I was told (by my partner, who works with birds in many capacities) that they consider a "direct" or head-on look to be something of a threat, as a predator would do. Consider looking at them sideways, with only one eye -as they would to each other- and see if it makes a difference.

Something as simple as stepping on a twig, brushing on grass, the crumpling of a plastic or some kinds of clothing can be enough. It makes sense, since their bodies are much more fragile and distance is easy. Their ears are almost like ours internally, with different structure.

That would explain why they sometimes seem perfectly relaxed until you look directly at them

I did this with the rabbits in my yard. They would always freeze and then bolt when I looked right at them. So I started getting closer and closer to them without making eye contact, and then they started to get much more comfortable around me and my family. Now they don't tense up and run away whenever I happen to get near, which I think is nice, keeps them less stressed out while they destroy all of my native wildlfower seedlings.

The iPad reflection trick is hilarious. You are basically observing him observing you while carefully pretending not to observe him.

sounds like my dog. he knows when to sit and stare at me to wait for his usual food routine and, occasionally, treats. once he realizes that no it isn't time for either, he goes away.

Mine will just sit somewhere else where he thinks I surely must see him now, and lick his lips when I look at him just to make a point. Sometimes I wonder if he’s considering hitting me with his bowl because I’m obviously too stupid to understand his super obvious question

Isn't he just checking/waiting for the food to come out? If he's the first to it, he gets the best haul.

The food comes out early in the morning (8AM). This guy I often find watching me around noon. So the food has long been consumed and forgotten.

As a natural night owl who works at a job that starts at 6:30, I wish I could still całl 8 “early”.

What else is he gonna do? Our ancestors spent a lot of time around observing things because the days are long and there’s no WiFi.

Sad to see no mention of Gemini ...

Do they especially train for scientific performance?

They seem to, from my experience

Reddit seems to have let this AI demand go to their heads.

I had multiple Reddit accounts, simply because I did not want my more "professional" account linked to the other accounts (some for more controversial opinions, some for more adult talk, etc.) Apparently that's a problem for them. So they banned most of my accounts. If I really was up to no good, I'd have used VPNs, etc. to hide my activities. But I just wanted to segregate my personas. e.g. I like discussing local SF and California politics, and often times take controversial positions. I don't want my activities as a respectable(?) member of the Linux Kernel group to be colored through my activities in these other groups. But now I can't do that.

Oh, and back in the day Reddit (when it wanted to pad its user numbers) didn't care for an email address or a phone number. Now, 15 years later, it suddenly wants to confirm the email address!

And don't even get me started on the moderation at Reddit. Typical example: "Hey! We deleted your comment. If you have any questions about it, email the mods." except ... they deleted the comment and now I don't even know what was wrong with it! :-D

Interesting, because multiple accounts for the same person is explicitly allowed by Reddit:

https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/204535759-I...

What is written and what is done in practice is always different. "Anti-fraud" and "security" are things you can drive a truck through.

Which is why, like often in these stories, there is probably more to it.

It's good to be skeptical. But in my case, there is not much more to it.

You're lucky you only got email address. I got selfie+ID. No thank you.

Peppermint oil has traditionally been used in India for digestion, so you may be on to something. I remember this particular brand growing up: https://www.amazon.com/clp/B001NQ7S9G (no relation).

I don’t think that’s peppermint. That’s pudina so spearmint. Mentha spicata.

Hacking means much more than just breaking into systems ...

I'm old enough to have lived through at least seven definitions of "hacker."

Including the one in the late 1970's when a hacker was someone who took public domain software and then sold it commercially with their own name on it.

What if the result is a counter-example? A fact that disproves the conjecture? Is that not publication-worthy?

The best part was you could `finger @machine` and it would list all the users currently logged on, their idle times, etc. Then you could follow that with `talk user@machine` and start chatting with them.