I wish the author had state out right that they were not using LLMs much, since their opinion on them and their output has no value (its a new technology, and different enough that you do have to spend some time with them in order to be able to find out what value they have for your particluar work[0].

The is especially the case when you are about to complain about style, since that can easily be adjusted, by simply telling the model what you want.

But I think there is a final point that the author is also wrong about, but that is far more interesting: why we write. Personally I write for 3 reasons: to remember, to share and to structure my thoughts.

If an LLM is better then me at writing (and it is) then there is no reason for me to write to communicate - it is not only slower, it is counterproductive.

If the AI is better at wrangling my ideas into some coherent thread, then there is no reason for me to do it. This one I am least convinced about.

AI is already much better than me at strictly remembering, but computers have been that since forever, the issue is mostly convinient input/output. AIs makes this easier thanks to speech to text input.

[0]: See eg. https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/centaurs-and-cyborgs-on-the....

If an LLM is better at writing than you are, you should work on improving your writing.

This is especially true for students.

Quite likely, further progress will lead to LLMs writing "better" than at least 99% of humans.

I think this will be no more of a contest than playing chess has been: humans don't stand a chance, but it also doesn't matter because being better or worse than the AI is besides the point.

> ... their opinion on them and their output has no value

This is ridiculous. Even if the author has never typed a single character into a prompt box, he can still come to perfectly valid conclusions about the technology just by observing patterns in the outputs that are shoved into his face.

"I wish these astrophysicists had stated up front that they've never created a galaxy. How can they have a well-formed opinion on cosmic structures if they only ever observe them?"

I really like my speech-to-text program, and I find using ChatGPT to look up things and answer questions is a much superior experience to Google, but otherwise, I completely agree with you.

Companies see that AI is a buzzword that means your stock goes up. So they start looking at it as an answer to the question: "How can I make my stock go up?" instead of "How can I create a better product", and then let the stock go up from creating a better product.

I used it to place some old vacation photos.

These were taken without EXIF for GPS (because the cameras did not have GPS), and it was still very good. With anything turisty it got them immediately, and with my photo of a house on the Muese river it got it nearly perfect. When I added a few more photos I was able to nail it down to a couple hundred meters.

I did it all with 4o (the old model), the only issue is that if it starts to search the internet it will then lie to you that its not able to read pictures.

When did you try it?

Because they have been working on all those issues. They even have their own translation now.

I would love to do that for my homelab, but not all docker containers trust root certs from the system so getting it right would have been a bigger challenge than dns hacking to get a valid certificate for something that can’t be accessed from outside the network.

I am not willing to give credentials to alter my dns to a program. A security issue there would be too much risk.

Its available for free in Windsurf so you can try it out there.

Edit: Now also in Cursor

In his case, the contract had something different, and they did not pay the actual invoice - that's the shady part.

With contractors, you have more freedom of choice when you write the contracts, but whatever contract you agree on, you still have to honor the contract as agreed.

Oh my bad, I thought you referenced contractors in general. In that case I agree: agreements are to be honored.

I don't buy it.

If they had an API Booking would not likely return their data to you, they would almost certainly have an API that you would search and which would then return the same result you get on their website. Probably with some nice JSON or XML formatting.

Booking makes a small amount of ads, but they are paid by the hotels that you book with. And yes, today they already have to compete with people who go there see a hotel listing and go find the actual hotel off-site. That would not really change if they create an MCP.

It might make it marginally more easy to do, especially automatically. But I suspect the real benefits of booking.com is: A) that you are perceived to get some form of discount and B) you get stamps toward the free stay. And of course the third part which is you trust Booking more than some random hotel.

I actually think it would be a good idea for Booking to have an API. What is the alternative?

I can right now run a Deep search for great hotels in Tokyo - that will probably go through substantially all hotels in Tokyo. Go to the hotel's website and find the information, then search through and find exactly what I want.

Booking.com might prefer I go go to their website, but I am sure they would prefer above all that you book through them.

In fact I think the idea of advertisement is given above impact here, possibly because its a popular way for the places that employ the kind of people who post here to make money, but substantially all businesses that are not web-based and that do not sell web-based services for free don't make their money through ads (at least not directly). For all those places ads are an expense and they would much prefer your AI search their (comparably cheap to serve) websites.

Basically, the only website owners who should object to you going to their website through an AI agent are those who are in the publishing industry and who primarily make money through ads. That is a small number of all possible businesses.

This seems a case of extracting a lot of information from very little data.

The economy is in a weird situation. The situation is extremely fluid. And people who can afford to buy groceries, partially with a subscription service, are also the kind of people who are less likely to be affected by the economy.

There you have it. There is an alternative explanation that fits the same data. In fact I'll argue it fits a little bit better since the other chain's foot traffic was up only 0.3 percent. If people had fled from Target, you'd expect this one to go up quite a bit more.

It's like 10-13 weeks of data that directly corresponds with a new US administration, how long should we wait?

Exactly. It's a new administration who has done some, shall we say, questionable things to the economy. That is going to have an impact on people. Which means they're going to spend less money in stores, especially those who have a more uncertain income.

What is more likely? That people care about some rather obscure policies or that they care if they are able to keep their job?

You can compare it to other companies in the sector that didn't so publicly come out trashing their DEI programs to know if that's an additional factor and when you do you see Target has fallen farther than the rest in most metrics.

Target has 30 million customers per WEEK so this is truly mathematically significant and believable.

Cool. Those that mean I could just run the query through the router and then load only the required expert? That is could I feasibly run this on my Macbook?