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I get that, and it's good to be cautious. You certainly need to be careful with what you take from it. For my use cases, I don't rely on "reasoning" or "knowledge" in the LLM, because they're very bad at that. But they're very good at processing grammar and syntax and they have excellent vocabularies.

Instead of thinking of it as a person, I think of it as the world's greatest rubber duck.

If the guesser wins routinely, this suggests that the thinker can access about 220≈1 million possible items in the few seconds allotted.

I'm not sure this premise is sound. Are there not infinitely more than 2^20 permutations of the game?

This would be true if the questions were preset, but the game, in reality, requires the guesser to make choices as the game progresses. These choices can be quite complex, relying on a well developed theory of mind and shared cultural context. Not all the information is internal to the mechanics of the game.

The unspoken rules of the game also require the thinker to pick something that can plausibly be solved. Picking something outlandishly obscure would be frowned upon. The game is partly cooperative in that sense.

If you were to reduce the game to "guess the number I'm thinking of between 0 and infinity", then it wouldn't be very fun, it would not persist across time and cultures, and you wouldn't be studying it. But you might get close to a 0% win rate (or...maybe not?).

I'd guess that most of the "few seconds" the thinker spends is actually to reduce the number of candidates to something reasonable within the context of the game. If that's true, it says nothing whatsoever about the upper bound of possibilities they are capable of considering.

Idea for further research: establish a "30 questions" game and compare win rates over time. Hypothesis: the win rate in 30 questions would fall to similar levels as with "20 questions" as players gained experience with the new mechanics and optimized their internal selection process.

our brain will never extract more than 10 bits/s

Aren't there real recorded cases of eidetic memory? E.g. The Mind of a Mnemonist. I have not re-read that book with a mind toward information theory, so perhaps I am overestimating/misremembering the true information content of his memories.

It's as open as most Android brands. I don't use any of Boox's services or apps. I installed F-Droid and use open-source apps from there. I use Librera as my ebook reader, with Syncthing to sync my book library between my desktop, ereader, and phone. It's possible to set up the Play Store but I don't bother, personally.

It's not a 100% smooth experience but I'm very happy with the F-Droid compatibility. I absolutely refuse to get locked into a walled garden.

I've done this to give myself something akin to Cliff's Notes, to review each chapter after I read it. I find it extremely useful, particularly for more difficult reads. Reading philosophy texts that were written a hundred years ago and haphazardly translated 75 years ago can be a challenge.

That said, I have not tried to build this directly into my ereader and I haven't used Boox's specific service. But the concept has clear and tested value.

I would be interested to see how it summarizes historical texts about these topics. I don't need facts (much less opinions) baked into the LLM. Facts should come from the user-provided source material alone. Anything else would severely hamper its usefulness.

Related feature on my wish list: I'd love a way to basically fork a feed based on regex pattern matching. This would be useful for some premium feeds that lump multiple podcasts together. For example, one of my Patreon feeds includes three shows: the ad-free main feed, the first-tier weekly premium feed, and the second-tier monthly premium feed.

I don't want to filter them out because I DO want to listen to all of them, but for organizational purposes I don't want them lumped together. I'd prefer to display these as two or three separate podcasts in my display.

Another example is the Maximum Fun premium BoCo feed. They include the bonus content for ALL their shows (which is...a lot) in a single feed. I only listen to about half a dozen, and even that is a bit of a mess in one feed!

Great points, thanks.

Can you clarify what you mean by "local decryption"? I thought Proton and Tuta work pretty much the same way, but perhaps there's a distinction I'm missing.

One thing I like about Tuta is that it has the option to cache your messages in localstorage in your browser so you can do full-text search. FWIW, I think Proton added a similar feature recently, though I have not tried it. I imagine neither would work very well with large mailboxes; probably better to configure a real email client.

Do they offer cloud storage now? From what I can see on their web site, it's 500GB...just for email. I mean sure, that's cool, but it would take me several lifetimes to accumulate 500GB of email so it's not much of a selling point to me.

It's a good email service, anyway. I've been using the free tier for a few years. Similar to Proton, and in theory Tuta is more private because they encrypt the headers as well as the message body.

First I'd like to clarify how I interpreted OP's phrase: I think they meant "check out book" to specifically mean "borrow from the library". Seems like you came to the same interpretation, but I just wanted to mention that for anyone else who might be confused reading this, because "check out" has broader usage that could just mean "look at" without any implied reference to a library,

In that context, "visiting the library" is a prerequisite of checking out a book, so it's less extreme. You cannot possibly check out a book without first visiting the library, but you can (as you point out) visit the library without checking out books.

"Nobody visits the library" would imply that nobody checks out books, while "nobody checks out books" does not imply that nobody visits the library.

The part after "let alone" should already logically follow from the part before. If you were to break down the task into steps, it should follow the pattern of "nobody finishes step 1, let alone step 2".

Step 1: Visit a library

Step 2: Check out a book from the library

Does that make sense?

Also worth mentioning: you might still need to add the "most recent visit" column under the View menu. And if you dare to actually load any of those pages, they'll move all the way to the top, and will not remain in their original location. It's really annoying.

Never liked him, but I acknowledge that he had some effective economic policies during his time as mayor. He was at least competent and sane. He went completely off the rails a long time ago, though.

He's often credited with cleaning up Times Square, which was known for prostitution back in the 80s. But honestly, he reaped what his predecessors sowed to a large degree.

He used 9/11 like his personal sword and shield. He was lucky to be in a prominent position related the biggest and least controversial issue in America. I don't imagine he ever would have been on the national stage otherwise. He was pretty much at the natural end of his career before then.

NYC has a history of conservative mayors, which seems a bit odd since we're so solidly liberal in federal elections. It sure doesn't help when we get a Democrat as infantile and corrupt as our current mayor, Eric Adams. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_prosecution_of_Eric_Adams

Whisper is open source. GPT-2 was, too.

Absolutely this. Phones are the primary device for Gen Z. Phone use doesn't develop tech skills because there's barely anything you can do with the phones. This is particularly true with iOS, but still applies to Android.

Even as an IT administrator, there's hardly anything I can do when troubleshooting phone problems. Oh, push notifications aren't going through? Well, there are no useful logs or anything for me to look at, so...cool. It makes me crazy how little visibility I have into anything on iPhones or iPads. And nobody manages "Android" in general; at best they manage like two specific models of one specific brand (usually Samsung or Google). It's impossible to manage arbitrary Android phones because there's so little standardization and so little control over the software in the general case.