The assistant parallel is an interesting one, and I think that comes out in how I use LLMs as well. I’d never ask an assistant to both choose and get a present for someone; but I could see myself asking them to buy a gift I’d chosen. Or maybe even do some research on a particular kind of gift (as an example, looking through my gift ideas list I have “lightweight step stool” for a family member. I’d love to outsource the research to come up with a few examples of what’s on the market, then choose from those.). The idea is mine, the ultimate decision would be mine, but some of the busy work to get there was outsourced.

Last year I also wrote thank you letters to everyone on my team for Associate Appreciation Day with the help of an LLM. I’m obsessive about my writing, and I know if I’d done that activity from scratch, it would have easily taken me 4 hours. I cut it down to about 1.5hrs by starting with a prompt like, “Write an appreciation note in first person to an associate who…” then provided a bulleted list of accomplishments of theirs. It provided a first draft and I modified greatly from there, bouncing things off the LLM for support.

One associate was underperforming, and I had the LLM help me be “less effusive” and to “praise her effort” more than her results so I wasn’t sending a message that conflicted with her recent review. I would have spent hours finding the right ways of doing that on my own, but it got me there in a couple exchanges. It also helped me find synonyms.

In the end, the note was so heavily edited by me that it was in my voice. And as I said, it still took me ~1.5 hours to do for just the three people who reported to me at the time. So, like in the gift-giving example, the idea was mine, the choice was mine, but I outsourced some of the drafting and editing busy work.

IMO, LLMs are best when used to simplify or support you doing a task, not to replace you doing them.

I took that comment to be summarizing the platform’s perspective, rather than their own. I think it’s common sense that people will watch/engage with things they don’t like, but the algorithms don’t care about how you feel or why you watched something; they see engagement and they give you more of that thing to drive more engagement. As far as the unfeeling numbers go, engagement might as well be liking; they don’t need to distinguish a difference.

I didn’t know that so I looked it up. Source

“In the next hundred days, I will learn to go off the prompter and Joe Biden will learn to stay on the prompter.”

That’s good to know!

And to put numbers to your points, London’s population density is 14,600 people per square mile, while urban Houston is only 3,340.

And if you want to talk about the broader metropolitan area, then London goes down to 3,900 people/sq. mi., which is close to Houston’s urban area. However, if we look at Houston’s equivalent to that the density drops to 862/sq mi.

Also, London’s metro is 3,236 square miles. Houston’s is 10,062.

Anyone who compares these as equivalent is disingenuous or ignorant (not necessarily maliciously so, but likely just unaware or oblivious to the massive sprawl that Texas cities have).

There are 2-4 HOV/toll lanes in the middle depending on where you are in the city. I only see 2 in this photo, and they aren’t called out in OP’s title.

There are some demographics where its usage is extremely common. I’ve come across multiple people who are on FaceTime calls while in public. Just walking around on video and speaker, talking to someone else. I can’t conceive of using it this way, but in some social circles it’s totally normalized.

This page has some interesting quotes. Reading through, it sounds like it’s hovering at or below the top 5 most common video chat tools. There’s a lot of bias towards quotes about 2020 usage so that’s obviously skewed, but that year at least 9-25% of various demographics were cited using FaceTime daily.

I use FaceTime 2-3 times a year to talk to my nephew, and maybe 3-5 times a year to screen share or show my mum things. But I do use Teams video calls literally 5 days a week (I try to avoid the video part when I can, but there are a few in leadership who really push for it. My company is never doing RTO, so I’ll accept a bit of video calling for the sake of permanent WFH!).

I think replacing the physical home button with a haptic button on the iPhone 7 also helped them improve their IP rating (i.e., water resistance). I could be misremembering that, though, and I have no idea if it’s relevant in this case.

And if you stay that many versions behind, you carry a gold mine of vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Your phone might work, but it’s far from a safe or good idea.

902 security vulnerabilities published for Android 9, 179 of which are “critical” (9+) vulnerability scores.

Including “This could lead to remote escalation of privilege with no additional execution privileges needed. User interaction is not needed for exploitation.”

Yeah, no thanks.

Who are you arguing is to blame now? What other parents?

Yeah, our plan is paid for a year as well. If they drop our service quality before the year is up, that sure seems like a breach of contract.

OP knows they aren’t the same thing. Their point was that if the subscription model came with promise of repair, maybe there’s a purpose/value in it for the consumer. But without that, it’s pure greed.