I mostly use it for runtime validation for API responses. Found it pretty easy to use. I try pretty hard to avoid "any" in the code, and it's helped clean things up a good bit, which is crucial as we've introduced LLMs into our workflows.
I don't love Pydantic, though. It's probably a skill issue, but it just feels messier/clunkier than Zod's parsing options.
Eh, you see too many of these guys complaining about declining populations for this to be a thing.
I don't think you need Machiavellianism to explain their actions. These people have everything they could need, but death comes for all of us and they aren't getting any younger.
Purely speculating, but if you had everything in the world (except time) wouldn't you put everything you have into building a future with a 10% chance of living as long as you wanted? What would you sacrifice for that?
Lots of those people complaining about population decline aren't really talking about the absolute number. They're dog-whistling about demographic replacement - the idea that minorities are reproducing too fast and whites are reproducing too slow.
I mean, paid traffic will almost always be worse than people actively seeking you out or finding you organically.
But I think there are definitely some opportunities for boosting your marketing/product strategy. Maybe ask ChatGPT for guidance on optimizing your advertising/marketing efforts?
I think there's enough low-hanging fruit (landing page that offers a free trial behind an email sign-up) that it'd probably help.
Didn't freakenomocs claim it (crime rate) was (primarilary) about abortion in the 1970s and less unwanted (and unsupervised/undisciplined) children growing up?
I'm a little surprised to see this perspective on a tech website, because technology has gotten wildly cheaper and better over the past 20 years, and there are a number of free, excellent services that just didn't exist 20 years ago.
Like, internet speeds are far faster than they used to be, cheap phones are much better than expensive phones were a decade ago, TVs used to be an expensive status symbol 15 years ago — and look at them now.
Video games basically didn't index with inflation for years, and it's easy to pick up great older games at cheap prices on sale.
YouTube is free and an incredible resource for learning, entertainment, and brainrot.
Google Maps provides free GPS services, which are incredibly valuable. You even have FreeVee-style streaming services that don't require a subscription.
I'm under the impression (worth a check) that we do have verifiable safety statistics and that Waymos are significantly safer than Teslas at this point?
That's not to say that Tesla's autopilot isn't safer than the average human driver—it might be—but I thought it was settled territory that Waymos are better on safety.
Not really a fair comparison between Tesla's autopilot and Waymo though. You'd have to compare Tesla's Robotaxi but I believe they have been running for a far shorter period and I'm not sure how much data is out yet or how reliable it would be at this stage. The Robotaxi runs I believe a different version of autopilot meant to not have a human driver and has a lot more work that goes into making sure it's highly tested in the area it is being deployed. Whereas the Tesla Autopilot I believe can work in pretty much any area, so it may have more potential issues that come up.
Also a common thing I see happening with the Tesla Autopilot for an accident is that it's often not the fault of the autopilot. It's often the fault of the human driver who takes over last second. Naturally the driver will lie or not even realize they were the problem as they may have had auto pilot active 1 second before the crash. I think it's that natural human instinct when you see something happening to crap the wheel or hit the pedal in that "oh shit" kind of reflex. And that sometimes causes the driver to make a mistake.
I actually was in a crash with a person driving a Tesla vehicle where I think this was the cause. 3 lane highway, they were in the center lane, I was in the left lane, transport truck in the right lane. The transport truck slightly drift towards the edge of their lane and the Tesla driver freaked out and over corrected their steering wheel to the left and came swerving into my lane and was losing control of their car between both lanes until they suddenly slammed on their brakes in front of me. I gotta say, the Tesla brakes combined with the regenerative braking have some impressive stopping power. Unfortunately that also meant they stopped way faster and so suddenly that I hit their rear a bit. I got very lucky that insurance ruled in my favour and had them 100% at fault.
Apologies for the tangent, just trying to illustrate a point via a personal story of how even when the system is working well and keeping the driver safe, they can still make a human-like overreaction which overrides the autopilot and leads to a crash.
I get pretty annoyed when I see news articles with the headlines "Tesla crashed while auto pilot activated", but then there has yet to be an investigation and we actually don't know whether autopilot was in fact active or not yet. It's a clickbait style headline that I think makes people more hesitant about the progress of Waymo and Robotaxi vehicles.
> It's often the fault of the human driver who takes over last second.
Per The Guardian:
“Two years prior, the NHTSA had flagged something strange – something suspicious. In a separate report, it documented 16 cases in which Tesla vehicles crashed into stationary emergency vehicles. In each, autopilot disengaged “less than one second before impact” – far too little time for the driver to react. Critics warn that this behaviour could allow Tesla to argue in court that autopilot was not active at the moment of impact, potentially dodging responsibility. […]”
“The real surprise came after [Mark Rober’s] experiment. Fred Lambert, who writes for the blog Electrek, pointed out the same autopilot disengagement that the NHTSA had documented. “Autopilot appears to automatically disengage a fraction of a second before the impact as the crash becomes inevitable,” Lambert noted.”
I kinda feel like "It's often the fault of the human driver who takes over last second" means it is still Autopilot's fault. It either needed to alert and hand-off control to the user well before the situation got bad- or stick with control. Getting into a bad situation and just handing off control is the worst possible way to do things. The human needs time to update their situational awareness, the Tesla needs to explain what is causing its concern to the human, etc. If it can't do that effectively- and quickly enough in the pre-accident moments- then it needs to not be used at all because it is more dangerous than just a human driving on their own. 20 years ago I did robot-human driving collaboration experiments for the US Army and I can tell you based on our experiments this is a really hard problem, but those experiments are why Tesla's entire approach has seemed suspect to me from the beginning.
It's either functional or not, this sort of half-assed system is the worst of all worlds. And I say this as someone who has routinely trusted his family in a Waymo. But I think that the Tesla approach is much more dangerous.
So what I am referring to is more when they look at the data and they see there was human intervention that took place. Whether it be they pressed a pedal or jerked the wheel or whatever. I'm sure the system could handle the situation better on it's own, but the human reaction, especially when you've been driving yourself for many years is to take control and take action when shit hits the fan.
I think overall though as self-driving becomes more mainstream the system will only get safer. Not only will the computer systems themselves have better software and hardware to make them smarter, but there will be less and less human drivers doing stupid things that they have to account for. The roadways will have more predictable and sane self-driving vehicles on it.
I think the problem we have right now is that you almost do need these half-assed systems that still rely on human interventions to get over the initial hurdles of having people accept this technology. People want to feel like they still are in control while using something they may not fully trust. And regulators in many areas often also have this same desire. While I don't think we currently are at the ideal situation for self-driving, I think we are definitely getting there. I think Tesla's self-driving features really opened up the minds of people that human-less self-driving is a viable option that we can explore and that it can also be done safely.
I'm sure a time will come where we can switch to selling fully automated cars that people can buy for themselves with no human intervention needed, but I think we still aren't at that phase yet. People are starting to accept things like Waymo, but I still think many people would not accept having no control of their own personal vehicle when navigating around, even though I think it would be safer that way.
Eh, the technical examples are impressive. But normal people really don't like AI. And I don't think that's going to improve if we really start to see job displacement.
I see a future here for digital advertising, for design mock-ups, for political propaganda, for robotics model training/world simulation, for fan movies, etc.
But the film industry is struggling to get eyeballs and butts in seats already; using a tool that most people inside-and-outside the industry loathe isn't the answer to fixing that.
At most, I could see it used for pre-viz/pre-production work in Hollywood.
So the styling and animation work looks really cool (when isolated), but they distract from the content itself, IMO.
I think it'd work better if you featured the animated background effect toward the top of the page and shifted toward static graphics (or much subtler animations) as the user scrolls.
And I don't think the zoom-out effect on the listing cards has the intended effect; I found myself wanting to get a better look at the papers and was a little disappointed/annoyed when they got smaller and harder to see as I pulled them into view.
The colors/shadows/layout all looks really nice, but I feel like the animations (as-is) ultimately detract from the experience rather than add to it. Thanks for sharing, though!
They're just so handy! I do think LLMs tend to use them in a specific way, though.
So maybe tweaking your usage (ex. no spaces around them) or using a technically incorrect en-dash might offer the desired effect while subtly signaling that your message isn't AI-generated.
I still use them — mostly for pauses — but I'd like to think my voice sounds distinct enough from an AI that people can tell.
I've only ever been using "regular" dash, a minus, for that. How do you even type yours? If I ever needed differently-sized dashes (and I don't know the difference between them) I always used wiki to copy them.
(disclaimer: I feel like this obsession with dashes is special to native English speakers, which I'm obviously not)
silly specific: the minus sign is a separate character. The dash equivalent is the en dash (–), versus the larger em (—) and smaller hyphen (-).
The en dash is also used in things like scores (3–2 Turkey), votes (the bill passed 58–42), or connecting words where the second part is longer than one word (the Australia–New Zealand alliance.) You can remember the latter as, "a hyphen isn't big and strong enough to hold on to more than one word.
If you're on a mac, pressing Option+- is the en dash and Option+Shift+- is the em dash.
My first language is Dutch (Flemish). I didn’t even know there were three different dashes. The em dash is something I didn’t know exist, or were used, until llms came about. The hyphen is something we use when we make a list, that’s just the minus symbol right?
So em dashes are for pauses or highlighting things I guess?
The en dash you explained in your reaction.
Is there any other use for the hyphen except for making lists?
Only a small subset of native english speakers. Most don't use dashes at all, of those that do most just use minus for everything, some exceedingly small group cares about typographical details and thus distinguishes the different sorts of dashes.
It's an attention to detail thing that you'd definitely want to get right in a physical textbook or the like.
Depends on your OS. Mac is the easiest, it's just ---, Linux depends on your distro, if it uses KDE, it's <right-win>--- —. Windows is a little awkward, I think you need <right win>+the code point.
It’s an obsession with literature and/or typography nerds specifically.
Option-shift-hyphen types an em-dash, option-hyphen an en-dash. You can also hold the hyphen key (on a Mac or iPhone) and it will allow you to select either. Em dashes are used—like—this—as something spiritually akin to a parenthetical. En-dashes are used within ranges: Feb 14–17.
I for one am striving for clarity and couldn't care less about being confused with AI.
However I've only ever used regular dashes. How do you type an em-dash? Is it OS specific? I've taken to using Emacs insert-char with a list of frequently used ones in my scratch buffer. My memory for Unicode is unreliable.
Keyboard layout specific. Macs with their default English layout use “option-shift-dash” which is really easy to remember (and relatively discoverable, as such things go) which is why using proper m-dashes (not just double-dashes) used to be a strong indicator a poster was using a Mac, before LLMs took the character over.
On iOS you type it by pressing dash and holding until alternative options come up, same way you type e.g. accented characters.
Macs have two possible ways. If you have key repeat enabled, option+shift+dash. Some newer Mac users may have the mode on where holding a key pops up an iOS-style bubble of alternate options, in which case they will just hold hyphen.
In emacs, c-x 8 RET prompts you for unicode character names (or hex) so for rare use you can just spell it out. There's also C-x 8 _ m for em dash and C-x 8 _ n for en dash. (Hit c-x 8 c-h to get a full list of those bindings, like any normal secondary map - they're about as idiosyncratic as the XCompose bindings, but you might find some of them "stick" in your head better (I personally like "C-x 8 1 / 2" better than "Compose 1 2" even if it's a lot more typing...)
Ooh, thanks! I blindly type c-x 8 RET, then finding myself stumbling through 9 different entries for Phi, but I hadn't explored the prefixes. I just realized I could create a custom which-key entry-point with my favorites in a prefix.
Also just learned about compose key apparently, and I noticed that I can program this split keyboard I'm using to turn that into a chord, anywhere!
Then an LLM told me that I can 3D print my own custom keyboard with 32 programmable layers. Everything is an infinite rabbit hole these days, how wild.
Macs have a native way to do dashes: option- hyphen for en-dash and option shift hyphen for em-dash. On Windows there are some application-specific ways that make sense, e.g. in Office, but outside that you’re on your own and have to use the “hold alt and type the character codes” method! Or charmap.
I don't love Pydantic, though. It's probably a skill issue, but it just feels messier/clunkier than Zod's parsing options.
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