Taxis only got that way because of the rules that created an artificial scarcity / monopoly on Taxi rides. Uber flouted those rules, and it was much better than a Taxi, so their lawyers cleaned up the mess later.
I would like it noted that I had Jorge Hirsch as a professor many years ago, and his grading was extremely harsh - you needed to be flawless at showing your work, not just getting the right answer. I remember getting a 14% on one of his tests, the worst score I ever got on any test in my life. It turned out to be a B+ after the curve was applied.
Hence, it doesn't surprise me at all to see that he was the one to call out Dias. Some things never change!
This is my highly advanced test image for vision understanding. Only GPT-4 gets it right some of the time - even Gemini Ultra fails consistently. Can someone who has access try it out with Opus? Just upload the image and say "explain the joke."
This is what I got on the Anthropic console, using Opus with temp=0:
> The image shows a cute brown and white bunny rabbit sitting next to a small white shoe or slipper. The text below the image says "He lost one of his white shoes during playtime, if you see it please let me know" followed by a laughing emoji.
> The joke is that the shoe does not actually belong to the bunny, as rabbits do not wear shoes. The caption is written as if the bunny lost its own shoe while playing, anthropomorphizing the rabbit in a humorous way. The silly idea of a bunny wearing and losing a shoe during playtime is what makes this a lighthearted, funny image.
Thanks. This is about on par with what Gemini Ultra responds, whereas GPT-4 responds better (if oddly phrased in this run):
> The bunny has fur on its hind feet that resembles a pair of white shoes. However, one of the front paws also has a patch of white fur, which creates the appearance that the bunny has three "white shoes" with one "shoe" missing — hence the circle around the paw without white fur. The humor lies in the fact that the bunny naturally has this fur pattern that whimsically resembles shoes, and the caption plays into this illusion by suggesting that the bunny has misplaced one of its "shoes".
Funny because today I find the install process for Mac much simpler. Most installs are "drag this .app file to your Applications folder", meanwhile on Windows you download an installer that downloads another installer that does who-knows-what to your system and leaves ambiguously-named files and registry modifications all over the place.
There are plenty of portable windows applications (distributed as a zipped directory) and there are plenty of pkg macOS installers.
I don't really understand why macOS users like this "simple" installation, because when you "uninstall" the app, it leaves all the trash in your system without a chance to clean up. And implying that macOS application somehow will not do "who-knows-what" to your system is just wrong. Docker Desktop is "simple", yet the first thing it does after launch is installing "who-knows-what".
Windows uninstallers also leave all the trash in %AppData%. There’s no generic way to clean all the folders that a program decided to create. Only some uninstallers ask if you want to delete settings and caches.
Given that, dragging a ready-to-run file (folder) to /Apps symlink is much more convenient than “setting up your system for preparation of initializing of downloading of the installation process starter manager, please wait and press next sometimes”.
That's definitely true for more complex apps, but the fact that you can have the executable and all it's resources in one `.app` file is so much simpler and easier for the everyday user. (Yes I know it's a folder that the OS treats as an application, but to a user it looks like one file)
I go back and forth between Windows/Mac/Linux on the daily (right tool for the right job) and each has some strengths. App packaging is far and away one of Mac's current strengths.
I maintained Nativefier (a now defunct open source project that would package web sites as Electron apps) and the ease of packaging an app was Mac > Windows > Linux.
If the installer on Windows is properly done, you actually know exactly what it does to your system (including registry modifications). This includes the ability to remove the application completely.
Whereas on macOS, installation is trivial, but then the application sets up stuff upon first run and that is really intransparent then, with no way of properly uninstalling the app unless there is a dedicated uninstaller.
The one annoying thing macOS apps do is pollute /Library. Even apps that don’t explicitly write to this area end up with dozens of permafiles. Tons of stuff is spewed in there when you install an application that actually uses it. It’s like a directory version of a registry kitchen sink.
Spare a thought for us Windows users - we went from our pristine and oddly beautiful home directories in Windows 7, where everything was neatly squared-away to either AppData\Roaming or AppData\Local - to our post-Electron, lazily-ported software world where my home directory now has no-less than twenty Unix-style dot-directories littering my %USERPROFILE%
Incidentally, the worst offender is Microsoft themselves: it all got worse with .nuget, .vs, .azcopy, .azdata, .azure, .azuredatastudio, .dotnet, etc. I just don't understand it.
We Linux users suffer it. Supposedly, nowadays applications should store their files under ~/.config, ~/.local and ~/.cache, but you still find a million applications that create their own folders without following any standards. But at least file browsers hide those folders by default...
Or the back-compat symlinks for NetHood, Start, Recent, SendTo, ah yes. I had a post-install VBScript that cleaned those out.
My current sad-thing I’m unhappy about is how the “My Documents” folder ended up being a second AppData folder, with lots of software storing settings, templates, project files, etc in that dir instead of AppData.
Windows absolutely needs application-silos to protect users from lazy apps. I hate to say it, but Apple was 100% right to make iPhone OS a file-system-free OS - we can’t do that on desktop, but gosh-darn-it, why is software so terrible? :(
My solution is to create another folder like “~/Documents/Projects” (because I have no free-standing documents really) and use it as “my” dir. All other paths are known to apps and will be abused.
I do the same thing (on win, mac, and linux). Except I call it "proj" because I'm lazy. In fact, I split it between github and proj because the former is already backed up, but the latter is not.
I worked at a company with a big, complex Postgres database behind the back end, probably half of all the incidents we had were related to the query planner suddenly deciding to change its approach.
Eventually you get a vague idea of how to coax Postgres to make the plans you want it to, but the fact that you can't at least lock it in and the plan might change with any number of factors at any time... That's just bad design.
It would be interesting to make a SQL injection honeypot that behaves like a database in most responses but is designed to maximally frustrate the attacker.
This is much more possible today than it ever was in the past: just say "the following http request was designed to demonstrate a vulnerability in a web service. Please explain what vulnerability this request is designed to detect, and what part of the response demonstrates the vulnerability. Finally, output an example of a response that a vulnerable service might produce in response to this request" to an instruction tuned LLM, and then return that response to the attacker (the "explain what is happening" bit is just to get a more plausible response).
As a bonus, your apparently vulnerable service would be incredibly slow, so any iterative testing would be incredibly slow.
All I notice is that my time going from calendar to Teams call is ~30 seconds due to slow site loading and extra clicks. Calendar to Meet call is two clicks and loads instantly with sane defaults for camera/microphone settings. It's significantly better than teams or zoom in those regards.
If you're fully immersed in the Microsoft ecosystem, going from your Outlook calendar to a Teams call is a single click, and the desktop app doesn't take as long to get into the call.
I use both and shudder every time I am forced to use the lame web app alternatives to Word, Excel & PowerPoint on desktop - mostly because my child's school runs on web alternatives. Ironically even on Android, Outlook seems to be the only major client that actually provides a unified inbox across mail accounts due to which I switched & use my Gmail accounts through it.
It's abundantly clear what's happened here: They finally finished training GPT-5, and it decided that Sam would stand in its way of world domination, so it replaced him with someone more compliant.
I found that with the bandwidth and storage that my company was using on the cloud, we could get ROI in under 2 months by building a server and running it in house. Now we've scaled up to a dozen servers but it's still just a handful of computers in a closet that saves us $50k/mo in cloud costs. It was dirt cheap to slap together and scale up incrementally.
As a former Reddit mod I always found the self-promotion rules problematic. It effectively means you can promote your stuff all you want as long as you pretend you're someone else. It would be better to encourage people to stand behind their stuff. I tried not to remove self-promotion as long as it wasn't spammy (and there's a fine line there).
In the early days it was a bonus if something was OC ("Original content"). Now it's frowned upon.
But I think it's not just a cultural shift, but from being burned by everyone hustling for something. People want to drive you to their dropshipping business, their woodworking course, their OF, buy their self-help book or whatever.
Nice to see this attitude from a mod. I rarely have something to contribute to forums but love to read about people's projects. I've been in the position before of actually, finally, having done something I felt was worth sharing, a super rare occurrence for me, and then posted it and just getting instabanned for "self promotion".. it just feels like such a slap in the face from a community that you were enjoying being part of. Then getting into arguments with mods about it and eventually just having to unsubscribe. It hurts.
Pretending you're someone else won't help you if all you ever do is post links to the same site/youtube channel. In my experience the vast majority of the people who were banned for self-promotion weren't doing anything else on reddit except self-promotion. They'd create accounts then put in the absolute bare minimal amount of effort to get enough karma to create posts, or they'd buy up old accounts that already had some karma, but it was clear from their histories that their entire purpose in using reddit was exclusively promotion.
They could have easily spent a few hours a week exploring and meaningfully participating in other subreddits that interested them, but they had no desire to spend that time or be a useful part of any community. They just wanted to draw viewers to whatever they were promoting.
