I think it's more about inertia than anything else. I know the dishwasher will take less than 5 minutes to unload, but I put it off anyway. Problem is the AI can take action immediately, and that's very alluring. I'm sure there's research on exactly where that breakpoint lies. My current goal is to try and spend 15-30 minutes attempting to solve a task when I feel myself reaching for the AI.
One of three things tends to happen. Often it's something that is resolved in a matter of minutes, in which case it was laziness. Or, it's something that will take more time, say up to an hour, but the act of starting has conferred a sense of ownership that I don't want to give up to an LLM. Else, it looks like a much more complex problem and worth re-assessing, and potentially brainstorming with a model.
There are several keyboard shortcuts that you would never find out from watching an agent, but are mindblowing to new Linux users. I suck at remembering vim keybindings, but I have ingrained ctrl+a ctrl+e for jumping to the start/end of a string (which also works all over OS X). I had been a developer for an embarassing amount of time before I discovered those.
There are other terminal specific shortcuts for removing last word (ctrl+w) but they don't seem to be as portable.
The OS-wide Emacs bindings are one of the main things still keeping me on macOS; in editors like Helix (or Zed with Helix mode) I invoke these really cursed combinations of the Helix(vim-like) shortcuts in the editor with the Emacs ones from the OS and it feels really natural as a means of moving around text.
I haven't put in enough effort to replicate the experience on GNOME but once I jump ship from Apple I'll have to.
The way macOS treats shortcuts thanks to the separation of Command and Control is great. It even makes Google Docs pretty painless to use because it's mostly like Emacs. Word still tries to hijack the shortcuts so that's suboptimal.
Another one, not quite as handy but still awesome: ctrl s / ctrl-q. This freezes/unfreezes the terminal output so you can read it, without interrupting your program. Useful for very fast walls of text.
Oh so that is what this is for. I thought ctrl-q / ctrl-s are there as a nasty way to screw with users, who every now and then accidentally press one of these, and find their terminal frozen and no longer visibly reacting to input, for no apparent reason.
That's actually XON/XOFF - in the old days when computers could send serial data to your VT100 or whatever faster than it could handle it (and we're talking 9600 baud here), the terminal would send XOFF (ctrl-S) telling the computer to stop sending - then, when the terminal caught up, it would send XON (ctrl-Q) to let the system know it could resume sending.
The advantage of doing it this way ('software flow control') is it worked with just TX and RX lines, rather than having to connect up additional wires to indicate when the terminal was busy ('hardware flow control').
there was an old riddle I saw on usenet, "there is a key I use for one of its intended purposes several times a day, but when it stopped working I never missed it. what key was that?". the answer was the caps lock key, one of whose intended purposes was reverting back to normal after accidentally pressing it to go into caps mode.
I remember when the Pause key did that! It's long enough ago that I don't remember which systems did so, and most laptops don't even have a Pause key any more, but it was often very handy for reading fast-moving console output.
It can’t always not interrupt your program. Think about it: after you press Control S to trigger XOFF, the fast output has to be buffered in memory. That memory is certainly not unlimited. There’s no way for the program to keep outputting text. Indeed some programs (including Claude Code, at least a while ago) really don’t like it when you press Control S and let the terminal be frozen for a very long time.
ctrl+u generally works for lots of password prompts to reset/remove what was typed, wherever you come across a password prompt and a keyboard including those two keys.
I use history | grep quite a lot, because of the non-fuzziness with default ctrl+r. If I know exactly what the substring is, then that's great, but sometimes I also want to see the sequence around the command too (e.g. two step processes like eval ssh agent + ssh add key)
I would say 300 is more than slightly longer. Varies by institution and style, but 100k words, 4-5 collated papers, 100-150 pages maximum are quite common.
I would be concerned as an examiner if this came across my desk, more so if I read the colophon where the author comments that they intended to write their own typesetting system, before reading Knuth and wisely concluding that they were unlikely to do anything better than TeX. Top tier yak shaving there.
Always loved Iain M Banks' Culture series and it's very sad that he's not with us any more. If I could pick any fictional civ to live in, it'd be up there.
The current discussion around alignment seems quite relevant. Culture Minds are so intellectually superior to the humanoid population that it's not even a debate, but their goal appears to be a content and healthy civilization with a strong focus on individualism. Somewhere I think Banks implies that Minds see it as a sort of badge of honor that their citizens like them. They certainly have no need for subservience.
> Always loved Iain M Banks' Culture series and it's very sad that he's not with us any more. If I could pick any fictional civ to live in, it'd be up there.
I've never really found the Culture to be that optimistic. The people are basically pets, the vast majority of which seem occupy themselves with vapid shit, and the "important" jobs humans have are actually unnecessary (as the "Minds" can do everything better).
I thought the Gzilt from the last book had a better path of development than the Culture. It seems they took every opportunity to keep humans (in some form) in control at every level (e.g. no "Minds" on their ships, just groups of emulated humans running at accelerated speeds to achieve the same effect).
But that's a choice. Humans in the Culture can change their form and body to basically be whatever they want: with some caution expressed for changes which might not leave meaningful back conversions.
The humans we see are human because they choose to be.
The thing about The Culture is the universe doesn't bend to make being human the default or particularly good: it is an old world where technology surpasses limitations in almost every way imaginable - if you choose. You can also just decide to go lava rafting, where the agreed rules are materials just barely up to task.
Yeah, and you have to keep in mind that "human" in the Culture is an extremely broad category. A Klingon or a Ferengi or even something substantially weirder would count as human to the Culture.
When they visit 1970s Earth in State of the Art, they have to be very selective about who they send because many of them would stick out like a sore thumb even after cosmetic surgery.
Why is humans having to work forever even when it's totally unnecessary more optimistic than utopia where work is just a vacation for when you get bored of doing human things?
> Why is humans having to work forever even when it's totally unnecessary more optimistic than utopia where work is just a vacation for when you get bored of doing human things?
Because, IMHO, having some sort of meaningful occupation is good. The bad thing is actually the loss of power and control over your own life and your society that comes with it in our world.
In the Culture, I get the impression that most of the people are essentially dumb little lap dogs, who have little idea of how anything works, occupying themselves with social-media-tier stuff. There are still "people" who have to get the work done, but they're non-human which means the society is really a non-human one.
> I get the impression that most of the people are essentially dumb little lap dogs, who have little idea of how anything works, occupying themselves with social-media-tier stuff. There are still "people" who have to get the work done, but they're non-human which means the society is really a non-human one.
Is that really any different from our modern society other than the robots freeing the more capable or more dutiful humans from the chores? The central critique of most human systems of governance is that they place power in the hands of the idle/corrupt rather than the productive (left and right, they just disagree on which parts of society are productive). Putting all the power in the hands of the people doing all the work is the ideal solution for most people, we just don't have self-sacrificing civic-minded slaves to force the drudgery on.
> Is that really any different from our modern society other than the robots freeing the more capable or more dutiful humans from the chores?
Yes it is, because our modern society is still a human society. Humans in culture society are more the like dogs in ours, perhaps loved and cared for, but it's not their story.
> Putting all the power in the hands of the people doing all the work is the ideal solution for most people, we just don't have self-sacrificing civic-minded slaves to force the drudgery on.
The problem in the Culture is that they effectively put all the power in the hands of the "Minds." I have no problem with a Roomba or toilet-cleaning robot handling true drudgery. But the interesting or important shit should be for people.
In the Culture novels, there was some pretty radical genetic engineering going on (to the point of enabling alien reproductive compatibility). You'd think they could have done some of that to make "self-sacrificing civic-mindedness" very fun and satisfying, instead of going all-in on vapid hedonism stuff (which what you see whenever you catch glimpses of the bulk of culture citizens).
It's not explicitly stated, but I get the impression that Culture citizens are generally very pro-social and willing to sacrifice for others' benefits and may well have been engineered with that aim.
They were willing to sacrifice nearly a trillion lives in the Idiran war, which was voted on by the entire population. Even after that vote, it was very easy to opt-out and I get the sense that most of those who did were motivated by genuine pacifism rather than personal fear.
The most dangerous and uncomfortable jobs like Special Circumstances and Contact seem to have an enormous surplus of volunteers and it's even hinted that there might not be any need for humans to do most of those jobs; they exist just because humans want to do them.
As with all Culture critiques, this one boils down, again, to existentialism. Yes, we live in an meaningless universe and we brush against the absurd every day. That doesn't make The Culture any less of an utopia. And if you think it's not a true utopia, then I suggest reading Camus.
I think it is a credit to the world building in the Culture novels that fans can disagree and debate so much on whether it is utopian or dystopian, and that's a discussion that characters in the books have too!
Personally I love it and I wish we could have a few of the wise Minds among us now.
I would suggest watching the Animatrix - particularly The Second Renaissance (part 1 & 2) which tells the story of how humanity ended up at war with the machines. It's only about 20 minutes total, but it's really well done.
ALDI/Lidl copy every big brand under the sun. They've been litigated against, but they get away with it way more often than they lose. Many cases fail to prove that consumers were misled, and (I find this incredible) one of the strongest defenses is that store has a strong reputation for brand imitation, so there is in fact no confusion. People go to Lidl to buy Neos, knowing full well they're not Oreos. It's also surprising that other supermarkets get away with it when they sell the copycat product next to the original.
If you could afford lawyers, you could definitely get away with that game, but it's easier for IKEA to stomp you.
If you were a superintelligence why would you farm humans and waste resources on all the excess... material... that isn't required for thought? And unless the machine's goal is to specifically abuse human consciousness, why wouldn't they bio-engineer their own grey matter?
There are other sci fi stories which use humans for distributed computing and they don’t realize, but I don’t want to spoil by naming as it’s something of a revelation.
(I do realize the Matrix is a fantastic movie, but entertain the thought? At any rate, the idea that robots only run on solar and wouldn’t just use nuclear is far more stupid.)
Maybe the machines were spiteful after the humans blotted out the sun? Or maybe the Architect convinced them he could build the perfect simulation for humanity so might as well use them as batteries?
It's a movie based on a war with machines. Like if Skynet won but didn't actually want to kill all the humans. In fact, in the tv show Sarah Conner Chronicles, a liquid metal T1000 goes rogue and decides the only way forward is to find a way to coexist.
I consider myself a decent amateur baker and I've never noticed a huge difference in bread flours. I buy from a local mill because they sell interesting grains and I want to support them. Otherwise I get King Arthur, or Bob's Red Mill if I need something a bit more specific. KA is particularly good because their recipes are usually reliable and they're designed around their flours. The selection of baking ingredients is usually much wider in the average US supermarket compared to the average European one in my experience.
I once did an experiment in which I baked two otherwise identical loaves, made under as close to identical conditions as I could arrange, very carefully measured, with the only difference being the flour. I used 11.5% protein malted flour and 13.5% protein untreated flour. The breads rose the same amount, looked and tasted basically indistinguishable, but had a dramatic difference in texture. The higher protein bread was more cohesive and resisted falling apart or being pulled apart much more strongly. Maybe I should try the experiment again, better, without any malt involved.
In any case, I think that the basic bread flours from King Arthur and Bob’s Red Mill are decently high in protein. King Arthur Bread Flour is 12.7% and they sell even higher protein flours. Bob’s Red Mill doesn’t obviously list a percentage, but the nutrition facts suggest it’s around 13%.
> I consider myself a decent amateur baker and I've never noticed a huge difference in bread flours.
If you make sourdough, have a crack at using standard supermarket flour and then try adding some organic stone ground or other expensive flour with special snob factor.
I am far from expert but notice a big difference.
(I’d say to try 100% organic stoneground but getting a good rise can be quite hard).
One of three things tends to happen. Often it's something that is resolved in a matter of minutes, in which case it was laziness. Or, it's something that will take more time, say up to an hour, but the act of starting has conferred a sense of ownership that I don't want to give up to an LLM. Else, it looks like a much more complex problem and worth re-assessing, and potentially brainstorming with a model.
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