OMNY with iOS Express Mode is crazy fast. I don't even have to do anything besides hold my wrist or phone next to the entrance: https://support.apple.com/en-us/105123
In a conversation about careers, a friend of mine casually dropped a simple approach to life that has helped me a lot: you can’t have everything all the time, so make the best of what you got. Some years you will have health and knowledge but be poor, others years you will build wealth but may not be able to uphold your moral values, etc.
I may not have the luxury to ignore bad incentives right now, but I try to make lemonade from the lemons life throws at me so that one day I can.
As a new father, just using so many apps sounds exhausting, let alone building and maintaining them. I would have been very excited about these maybe 10-15 years ago. Now I just want the ability to do things with my phone when my hands are tied up holding the baby.
As a father of two young children, LLMs have been kind of amazing. I’ve historically been someone who has project ideas and has fun building them. But for a few years now I just haven’t had the headspace for it — all I’ve wanted to do in the evening is relax for a bit.
In the past month I’ve completed a home dashboard idea I’ve had for years, I’ve built a house management system, a travel planning tool, a guitar chord annotator… it’s been very liberating. I’m not doing the coding, which was fun, but I am doing all of the system design and iteration, which I also really enjoy.
I’m building a video game for our abernic device with my son (no game engine experience, just vibing the game engine ourselves). We’re having a blast. We play up to our progress right before bedtime stories.
The other day I refused to fire it up for him and he had a full meltdown. I told my wife I had never seen product market fit like that before.
It is a little harder with something like a game to maintain motivation and go for perfection when you know your audience is an audience of one but it’s also a relief to just worry about the things he cares about (trains and firetrucks).
I also miss there being something intellectually challenging to a side project but that probably means I just need to learn a real game engine after this.
Nothing against what you are doing. That’s awesome and exactly the kind of thing I would nerd out about. I was just commenting on my current state of not having the mental bandwidth to do these things.
I was talking to my wife about this a little bit, that the promise of computers has never really been realized in the sense that we don't put power in the hands of the end user.
Like one of the most obvious things that a computer can do is run a task periodically at a time to go maybe fetch information and process it. And yet, the average computer user using any commercial operating system does not understand how to set up a recurring task. Operating systems don't really advertise it or talk about it as a feature. I think this is a good example of the disempowerment of end users by software companies.
LLMs have the potential to change this by allowing people to simply ask their LLM to invoke the right incantation to schedule the task or produce the program. That seems like a great change. I'd like to see more power in the hands of the end users rather than less.
For people that don't want to put in the effort, of course, this will change nothing. But for those that are willing to explore a little bit, I think it can be a big improvement over the software ecosystem that's emerged in the era of the app store.
The average user can and already does that. If they want to regularly fetch their emails and process them, they will install outlook or use the Gmail web app. If they want to regularly fetch and install updates for their games they will install steam.
The "run a task periodically" isn't the difficult part, it's processing the data that is.
And to be honest I don't think llms will empower that many people, the vast majority don't want to put the effort required (and it's definitely more effort than writing a one-shot prompt)
Those are just built in functions in the apps. I think we are more talking about custom automations like ”I want you to download the images on this site everyday and put them in this folder and send me a message on telegram with any new photos” or ”I wanna check this website for searches for X and when a match then message me”. An example I have seen is non-tech people before logging in to a saas app and manually copying numbers to a spreadsheet every single day forever. But with LLM:s they automated it to just work automatically in the background
Exactly. The users of e.g. autohotkey are in a vanishing minority. It's the kind of stuff I'd like to see advertised more in the OS, as though a product manager had on OKR to move that metric. Apps like Apple Music that emphasize consumption (and subscription revenue) get that treatment, but empowering apps that teach automation do not, since there's no (short term) business there.
People are waking up to the reality that AI can actually empower them. Unfortunately a lot are afraid as well, or have a misplaced skepticism. More people should watch the Moonshots podcast and spread the optimistic message. The Elon interview was good in that sense, and probably turned it around for some.
There’s already signs of this shifting, but we need to make it easier to choose the free, open alternatives that are aligned with users (instead of extracting from users, which sometimes overlaps).
The bar for setting up automations is already lowered by having AI agents write integrations, but we need a platform where it can all come together. Apps, automation, data and integrations with an AI agent that can process it all, and present it personally customized to the user. That's the future I'm already living in - my setup has all integrations available to any automation, app, or the AI agent. And setting up new tools on top of it is mostly a non-technical task, except when I have to code the platform it's all living in ;)
Most of the apps I've built take the form of "something I was doing with a long-running note in Notes.app that is now much simpler to deal with because there's a purpose-built program for it". That's what computer programs, like, are?
Tell me about it. Holding a 4mo old right now, nap trapped :-) Speaking of which - Claude Code wrote me a web proxy for HN that rewrites CSS for the dark mode - precisely for this situation. Written and deployed with Claude Code remote control too, also while nap trapped.
In the agentic era, there is no need for maintenance - each artifact is immutable and just-in-time. In case you need a new version, spin up a new artifact.
The human analogy would be that I don’t remember everything in the books I have read, but I do recall reading a particular book and can always look it up.
So, is there a way to train a neural network and then tune it forget a lot of the facts that can be easily retrieved, but keep the intelligence.
I guess that's why is an active research area, and an interdisciplinary one, what is intelligence? Is what have you practiced a ton of times? Is what you have purposely and efficiently practice? What is the implication of "purposely" doing something and how much memory is involved into it? If memory is involved how much of it is relevant? What is problem solving or wisdom? creativity? How much diversity in your memory do you need for creativity?
So what should you cull and how much?
There's already techniques in CNNs to trim unused or less active neuron paths to reduce a model's size, but how do you (and how much) do it in a general LLM? A product that will be used without supervision from a child to an 80yo elder?
I read a lot in middle school and can't recall any of them. What books did you read in college? What books did you read in high school?Maybe you have photographic memory.
My father worked in the HPCL refinery in Chembur. I got to go visit on Republic day when I was a kid, but they stopped doing visits. He worked in the distillation tower at first, but then moved into diesel desulphurization. I wish it wasn't but its a dangerous job, and he narrowly escaped several accidents, including a horrible naphta fire that took many lives.
As a young grad student, I remember going to a talk by Bennett where he explained how a Quantum Computer allows manipulation in a 2^N dimensional hilbert space, while the outputs measurements give you only N bits of information. The trick is to somehow encode the result in the final N bits.
I felt this was a much better layman explanation of what a quantum computer does than simply saying a quantum computer runs all possible paths in parallel.
> I felt this was a much better layman explanation of what a quantum computer does than simply saying a quantum computer runs all possible paths in parallel.
That comic is great I understand qubits a bit better now: it has 4 degrees of freedom but can be mapped onto the 2d surface of a sphere because of normalization (circle rule) and global phase symmetry which each take away one of the four DOF
I need a longer think on the interference/computation connection though
Don't let the terminology intimidate you. The interesting ideas in quantum computing are far more dependent upon a foundation in linear algebra rather than a foundation in mathematical analysis.
When I started out, I was under the assumption that I had to understand at least the undergraduate real analysis curriculum before I could grasp quantum algorithms. In reality, for the main QC algorithms you see discussed, you don't need to understand completeness; you can just treat a Hilbert space as a finite-dimensional vector space with a complex inner product.
For those unfamiliar with said concepts from linear algebra, there is a playlist [1] often recommended here which discusses them thoroughly.
Yeah all the names and terminology really do make it seem harder than it is. Took me a long time and I’m still learning. 2d Hilbert space is same as 2d Euclidean space but each dimension has 2 degrees of freedom (real + imaginary). Might even think of it as 4d space, for vector imagining purposes, but that would probably be wrong and someone would call you out
Better start with Simon's algorithm (solving Simon's problem) [0]; it already contains a lot of ideas that you need to understand Shor's algorithm, while not having a lot of technicalities. Then progress to Shor's algorithm, and then to Kitaev's algorithm [1] (link from [2]). The latter solves the Abelian stabilizer problem - this problem contains the more abstract mathematical essence of a lot of quantum algorithms.
I don't think we get rid of the CPU. But the relationship will be inverted. Instead of the CPU calling the GPU, it might be that the GPU becomes the central controller and builds programs and calls the CPU to execute tasks.
How do you win moving your central controller from a 4GHz CPU to a multi-hundred-MHz single GPU core?
If we tried this, all we'd do is isolate a couple of cores in the GPU, let them run at some gigahertz, and then equip them with the additional operations they'd need to be good at coordinating tasks... or, in other words, put a CPU in the GPU.
Surprise: there are already CPUs in the GPU - they're called things like "Command Processor" (but not only) - they're often tiny in-order ARM or RISC-V cores.
Sounds reminiscent of the CDC 6600, a big fast compute processor with a simple peripheral processor whose barreled threads ran lots of the O/S and took care of I/O and other necessary support functions.
What if we create a situation in a lab that can be labelled as a collapse of the wave function by interaction with a macroscopic object. Except the macroscopic object is under our control and we can reverse the collapse.
