Is your market people with anxiety/OCD about whether they turned off stove?
Your idea would be a hard sell to anyone paranoid enough, since they won't trust your monitor.
An alternative would be to install a safety key switch or a magnetic safety key. The paranoid can then check they have the key on them when they leave the home (like the lady worried about her hair dryer - see below).
The Hair Dryer Incident was probably the biggest dispute I’ve seen in the mental hospital where I work.
Basically, this one obsessive compulsive woman would drive to work every morning and worry she had left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house. So she’d drive back home to check that the hair dryer was off, then drive back to work, then worry that maybe she hadn’t really checked well enough, then drive back, and so on ten or twenty times a day.
It’s a pretty typical case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it was really interfering with her life. She worked some high-powered job – I think a lawyer – and she was constantly late to everything because of this driving back and forth, to the point where her career was in a downspin and she thought she would have to quit and go on disability. She wasn’t able to go out with friends, she wasn’t even able to go to restaurants because she would keep fretting she left the hair dryer on at home and have to rush back. She’d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy, she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped.
So she came to my hospital and was seen by a colleague of mine, who told her “Hey, have you thought about just bringing the hair dryer with you?”
And it worked.
She would be driving to work in the morning, and she’d start worrying she’d left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house, and so she’d look at the seat next to her, and there would be the hair dryer, right there. And she only had the one hair dryer, which was now accounted for. So she would let out a sigh of relief and keep driving to work.
And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and what if it got out to the broader psychiatric community that instead of giving all of these high-tech medications and sophisticated therapies we were just telling people to put their hair dryers on the front seat of their car?
But I think the guy deserved a medal. Here’s someone who was totally untreatable by the normal methods, with a debilitating condition, and a drop-dead simple intervention that nobody else had thought of gave her her life back.
That's not the target customer I had in mind, but that might be good. Was thinking of those who have elderly forgetful parents, or my wife. Or my son--we were nearly late to church because as we were pulling out of the driveway, "I think I left the stove on." Sigh.
I know there is a market for it, there are several competing products, but none use an inductive loop for easier install.
It must depend on the person. I’ve been coding for all my life but have never been GOOD. I thoroughly enjoy coding, despite being frustrated many times.
Literally yesterday I remarked to my tech friends how fun coding with CoPilot is. I actually make forward progress now, and I understand all that the agent is doing.
For me, coding is an enjoyable means to an end. I do enjoy the process, but I enjoy the results more.
You could read the syntax and see what it logically did. But you likely don't always know why it did something, and you definitely don't know why another way wasn't chosen (maybe that way would have better aligned with your long term goals)
I once wrote an article detailing as many prepper uses for an offline phone as I could think of. Dozens of offline apps useful for a survival situation. My favorite might be ATAK, which is from the US military and allows a team to communicate encrypted over Wi-Fi or radios, completely offline. Share GPS coords, camera feeds, messages, map markers, all kinds of goodness.
And if nothing else, you can always rupture the battery and start a fire :-)
I loathe these stupid widgets that show a blank map as soon as you zoom out a little (past the 1000m scale in this case). How can you fail so hard at your only job?
It's actually the opposite, I think. Because of how industrialized the lumber/paper industries have gotten, stewardship of forests has improved over time. This includes replanting in harvested areas.
What we need is reasoning as in "drawing logical conclusions based on logic". LLMs do reasoning by recursively adding more words to the context window. That's not logical reasoning.
It's debatable that humans do "drawing logical conclusions based on logic". Look at politics and what people vote for. They seem to do something more like pattern matching.
Humans are far from logical. We make decisions within the context of our existence. This includes emotions, friends, family, goals, dreams, fears, feelings, mood, etc.
it’s one of the challenges when LLMs are being anthropomorphised, reasoning/logic for bots is not the same as that for humans.
And yet, when we make bad calls or do illogical things, because of hormones, emotions, energy levels, etc we still calling it reasoning.
But, to LLMs we don't afford the same leniency. If they flip some bits and the logic doesn't add up we're quick to point that "it's not reasoning at all".
I agree that some people use intuition or pattern matching to make decisions. But humans are also able to use logical reasoning to come to conclusions.
Whether LLM is reasoning or not is an independent question to whether it works by generating text.
By the standard in the parent post, humans certainly do not "reason". But that is then just choosing a very high bar for "reasoning" that neither humans nor AI meets...what is the point then?
It is a bit like saying: "Humans don't reason, they just let neurons fire off one another, and think the next thought that enters their mind"
Yes, LLMs need to spew out text to move their state forward. As a human I actually sometimes need to do that too: Talk to myself in my head to make progress. And when things get just a tiny bit complicated I need to offload my brain using pen and paper.
Most arguments used to show that LLMs do not "reason" can be used to show that humans do not reason either.
To show that LLMs do not reason you have to point to something else than how it works.
If LLMs were actually able to think/reason and you acknowledge that they’ve been trained on as much data as everyone could get their hands on such that they’ve been “taught” an infinite amount more than any ten humans could learn in a lifetime, I would ask:
When coding they are solving "novel, unsolved problems" related to coding problems set up.
So I will assume you mean within maths, science etc? Basically things they can't solve today.
Well 99.9% of humans cannot solve novel, unsolved problems in those fields.
LLMs cannot learn, there is just the initial weight estimation process. And that process currently does not make them good enough on novel math/theoretical physics problems.
That does not mean they do not "reason" in the same way that those 99.9% of humans still "reason".
But they definitely do not learn, the way humans do.
(Anyway, if LLMs could somehow get 1000x as large context window and get to converse with themselves for a full year, it does not seem out of the question they could come out with novel research?)
Unfortunately the whole thing is ip6 only. A side effect of how I wired everything up. I run the whole thing from my closet over an free he ip6 tunnel.
Two laptops is easier than you’d think if you have the right bag.
My work lap is so locked down I cannot do anything personal on it, so when I go into the office I always carry two laptops, and the personal one is an old thick heavy dinosaur; it’s got to be at least five pounds. However, with a good bag that has a (non-padded) belt and sternum strap, it is not difficult. The belt carries most of the load and my shoulders don’t hurt; they hardly feel anything.
I deliberately park in the farthest spot at the other side of campus (about a half mile, and up four flights in the garage) to get in exercise steps with the heavy pack.
It’s good exercise but I absolutely need a belt and sternum pack to do it. Wouldn’t dream of trying that with only shoulder straps.
Heh - going on 20+ years, my "running joke" is if the only exercise I truly get is lugging my laptop(s) around (sometimes as many as 3, depending on client-load) + "kit" (Kobo eReader, cables, powerbricks (although if it is an ongoing thing, I leave those onsite or rely on docks), powerbank, and various other gear (occasionally an active "gimbal", occasionally an HT radio + it's gear) - then at least one of them might as well be extremely heavy...
Haven't seen many "laptop-focused" backpacks that have both belts and sternum straps, would love any recommendations.
Tell that to airport check-in staff haha. A laptop and charger are around 3kg and there's only so much clothing I can take out of my suitcase and wear to make it passed check-in.
But I hear you. It's annoying that I can't reuse perfectly good hardware, but it's fine - we make do.
The added scrutiny at some border crossings can be problematic too. Explaining to the inspectors at the Turkey/Bulgaria border why I had two phones and two laptops (and dissuading them of the suspicion that I was smuggling electronics to friends/family) through language barriers was a pain.
I do tell that to airport check-in staff :-) I just take both laptops out. I only do carry-ons and no checked bags and am able to stuff everything needed into one mid-sized tac pack.
> I deliberately park in the farthest spot at the other side of campus (about a half mile, and up four flights in the garage) to get in exercise steps with the heavy pack.
As a side note, this is an excellent habit, sadly I noticed people discover that avoiding effort is not always the best strategy when their muscle mass decreases, and adding elements of strength exercise to their daily routine can be more effective than going to the gym, for various reasons.
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