Fuck HP. My wife has an HP printer at work that she can’t print to without an app.

The app drains her iPad battery in 4 hours so she had to remove it but kept it on her phone.

She can’t print to our Brother at home because the app intercepts the share/print capability.

Such a piece of shit company.

Just piling on at this point, but we made 2 changes last spring that made summer so much more tolerable in our house.

1. More insulation. I bought a cheap thermal camera on Amazon and found entire closets and a bathroom with no insulation. Those rooms are a solid 10+ degrees cooler now.
2. More ventilation. Half my house didn’t have any soffit vents, but had attic vents. Adding soffit vents made that half the house 5 degrees cooler all on its own.

And we haven’t found ourselves needing it, but a mini split has popped up a lot here already and is a great idea.

I used to be in credit risk for a very large stock market company.

Calling the bottom of the market is the same as betting big and getting 21 in blackjack.

Super cool when it happens, but not skill. The number of grown men I had to hear crying because they were dollar cost averaging down to the bottom until they went broke still disturbs me.

I’m happy this worked for you, but it was not skill.

I still remember six figures being the key to posterity. And now you may still starve.

Lots of boring applications that are beneficial in focused use cases.

Computer vision is great for optical character recognition, think scanning documents to digitize them, depositing checks from your phone, etc. Also some good computer vision use cases for scanning plants to see what they are, facial recognition for labeling the photos in your phone etc…

Also some decent opportunities in medical research with protein analysis for development of medicine, and (again) computer vision to detect cancerous cells, read X-rays and MRIs.

Today all the hype is about generative AI with content creation which is enabled with Transformer technology, but it’s basically just version 2 (or maybe more) of Recurrent Neural Networks, or RNNs. Back in 2015 I remember this essay, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of RNNs being just as novel and exciting as ChatGPT.

We’re still burdened with this comment from the first paragraph, though.

Within a few dozen minutes of training my first baby model (with rather arbitrarily-chosen hyperparameters) started to generate very nice looking descriptions of images that were on the edge of making sense.

This will likely be a very difficult chasm to cross, because there is a lot more to human knowledge than thinking of the next letter in a word or the next word in a sentence. We have knowledge domains where, as an individual we may be brilliant, and others where we may be ignorant. Generative AI is trying to become a genius in all areas at once, and finds itself borrowing “knowledge” from Shakespearean literature to answer questions about modern philosophy because the order of the words in the sentences is roughly similar given a noun it used 200 words ago.

Enter Tiny Language Models. Using the technology from large language models, but hyper focused to write children’s stories appears to have progress with specialization, and could allow generative AI to stay focused and stop sounding incoherent when the details matter.

This is relatively full circle in my opinion, RNNs were designed to solve one problem well, then they unexpectedly generalized well, and the hunt was on for the premier generalized model. That hunt advanced the technology by enormous amounts, and now that technology is being used in Tiny Models, which is again looking to solve specific use cases extraordinarily well.

Still very TBD to see what use cases can be identified that add value, but recent advancements to seem ripe to transition gen AI from a novelty to something truly game changing.

Been looking at therapists for my teenage daughter, she’s been debating therapy for a couple of years and has recently fully committed.

We have good insurance and are financially secure, and holy shit it’s still going to cost an extraordinary amount. I don’t understand how anyone struggling with financial insecurity could even consider having access to therapy as an option.

What a fundamentally broken system, there is not a single type of care that exists that is accessible to the people who need it.

The example that comes to mind is the Birthday Problem.

If you are in a room with 22 other people, there is a 22 in 365 chance one of them shares your birthday. Relatively unlikely. But there is a 50% chance there are two people in the room that share a birthday. Much more likely.

That jay will double cross the owl, they are not to be trusted.

As I’ve heard this explained, enterprise admins have scripts, and to a less important extent muscle memory, tied to Control Panel layout and command lines, and that’s not a group you want to irritate.

The study forbes referenced appears to be essentially “how to design offices for gen z”, presuming they really want to use an office.

The tips to drive virtual engagement are pretty standard management material at this point.

Would have liked to see some real evidence to “boomerang” being philosophical, that felt like a cheap misuse of the term to seem more relevant than “what kind of games should be in the break room”

For those not in North Texas, the three school districts listed are all neighboring districts 15 miles or so north of Fort Worth. They are all high income, predominantly white areas doing everything they can to keep it that way.

Racism in Southlake Highschool unified the city against diversity, with some of the earliest school board meeting takeovers to protect white people saying the N word way back in 2021.

Keller ISD is going big on the book banning, but to deflec, the superintendent was certain to point out it’s not the district, but the parents banning the books. And the board of trustees voted 5-0 to prohibit pronouns in school despite listening to parents in favor of use of pronouns.

Oh and Colleyville, you bastion of religious and racial and gay rights acceptance.

“I hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man.”

He’s not wrong.