Even if they required it that's no guarantee people actually do it. I have lived for a couple of years at an address different than the one I was registered at. Illegal in my country, but easy to conceal. (I had to because the apartment I lived in didn't strictly allow people of my sort to permanently reside in it.)
This was a point Deming often emphasised: there is no true population count in a country. What we call "the population count" is really just whatever number falls out of the method we have chosen to perform the count.
For any counting exercise of middling complexity there are multiple methods to perform it that will generate different numbers. There's not one way to count even lecture attendees!
A count is always objective. It's fine to disagree with the method used, but one can't just say the number is wrong and not propose a better method.
This was the reason I switched from Windows to using Linux full time back around 2006. Windows used to be somewhat peaceful bu around then it increasingly started interrupting me instead of me generating interrupts for it. I gather Windows hasn't gotten better since then.
At least with Android it is mostly the apps that generate interruptions, so I can choose apps that do not, and control notification permissions for those I need.
> it increasingly started interrupting me instead of me generating interrupts for it.
Yep, this is it right there. When human interface guidelines were being drawn up in the 70s and 80s, they didn't need to include anything like "computers must not speak unless spoken to" because it was so damn obvious.
My software-dev persona brain "Oh, see, but these days, we now need to make sure users remember to patch to the latest security update", and I respond: REALLY? You shipped me broken software and are now interrupting me in the middle of work to make it my problem? When did this become acceptable?
Windows is unusable. I kept a long time because of "family member will wanna use Excel" but that is not a thing anymore. Alternatives are good. Very little Windows specific software I need anymore. Really just Backblaze better pricing is all I care for.
Awesome article. If anyone wants to learn more about wildfire firefighting from the boots-on-the-ground perspective, I can warmly recommend Matthew Desmond's On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters.
It taught me a lot that surprised me and is also mentioned in TFA, such as
- The main weapon against wildfires is dirt, not water. Wildfires burn so vigorously that trying to extingush with water is like pissing into a bonfire.
- Water is used to cool down firefighters, though. It is also used in places the fire hasn't yet reached to slow down its progress.
- Firefighters don't say "vegetation" or "trees" or "moss", they say "fuel".
- Controlled burns are an effective thing even though it meets political resistance.
- Firelines are like dirt roads except completely bare of fuel.
- Crown fires are terrifying.
- Looking for smoldering underground after a wildfire is important and extremely labour intensive.
- Fires travel faster downwind and uphill.
- The PPE a wildland firefighter carries may give them a few more minutes of oxygen if they end up surrounded by fire but it won't save their lives in most situations.
> Never use out-of-the-box images of CRT computers
Thanks for the feedback! I'm very new to GenAI imagery and still finding my feet.
Seeing the results, I definitely considered compositing a real photograph of a computer with the rest of the landscape, but ended up deciding against it on account of a lack of time.
Cool - GenAI image generation is a deep rabbit hole that you're about to fall into!
Super happy that you pit LLMs against relatively recent IF to mitigate cheating through pre-existing training data as well.
FYI I've been running a SOTA model comparison site for about a year now that looks at prompt adherence across local (Qwen-Image, Flux) vs proprietary (NB Pro, Seedream) that might help give an idea where the capabilities are today.
Oh, wow, thanks! I've only been using Midjourney but the other models you showcase really do adhere much better to the details of the prompt. Do you know how I can get them to adhere to style suggestions better? They seem to be biased toward photorealism but that's not the vibe I'm going for. (I tried both Gemini 3.0 Pro and Seedream.)
You can try manually describing the style (for example, using modifiers or referencing similar art mediums like chiaroscuro, acrylic, etc.), and this can work.
Alternatively, if you have a specific style in mind:
Collect several image examples of the style you like, then either run them through CLIP or feed them into a multimodal model such as gpt-image-1.5. Ask it to generate a list of stylistic modifiers (keywords) that you can then append to prompts for NB / Seedream.
However, if the style is sufficiently underrepresented in the training data, no amount of prompting will fully overcome that limitation. Here's an example where I tried to see if NB Pro could recreate some of Yoichi Kotabe's earlier work but it just defaulted to a pretty generic looking illustrative style:
This mirrors reflections I've had recently as well. I have been, for the most part, focusing on what you would call "content for acquisition", i.e. easily relatable, somewhat shallow, extensively researched articles that show off what I can write at my best.
But in trying to aim for a regular cadence in the past year, I've realised I cannot maintain that level across the board. So I've started to write things that aren't as "good", in my flawed subjective judgment. Yet surprisingly often those are the things I get positive emails about, from readers who are glad I took the time to put things into words.
I am trying to come to terms with the idea that some of my more enthusiastic readers might really be happy to read even things that aren't up to what I consider to be my standards. But it's deeply uncomfortable. Triggers my impostor syndrome like little else.
Another common mistake I see "thoughtfluencer" bloggers make is they think they need a brand new idea per post. This not only isn't sustainable, it's bad for the audience.
Instead, I think a successful blog is really about finding your, at most, 3 - 5 big ideas and instead showing the audience how they apply in many different context. For example, Matt Levine returns to a few commmon catchphrases across years of his writing: "People are worried about bond market liquidity", “Everything Is Securities Fraud” etc. that crop up in odd and wonderful ways in totally new contexts across years of writing. Forming a relationship with his writing is deepening your appreciation of these concepts.
He’s said in multiple interviews (like on his own climbing podcast, Climbing Gold) that he’d do it for free with no publicity. He’s been trying for a very long time to get permission to do something like this, just because it’d be really cool.
The fact that Netflix was behind it might’ve made it possible to get permission to climb this specific tower though.
Money! He has a family to provide for and his unique skillset is "climbing below his grade but with no support", so that's the service he offers the world.
(I get that there are more motivations underneath free soloing in general, but I doubt Taipei 101 with a million cameras is the climb he'd choose if it were not for the money.)
...which is easily misconstrued as "feeling less fear" which I don't believe for a second. If that was the case he'd be dead by now.
But it's certainly time we admit everyone feels feelings diferently. Even something basal like pain experience is hugely individual with large variation.
I certainly believe he feels less fear. Doesn't mean he wants to die. I'm sure at an intellectual level he enjoys life and doesn't want it to end. I just doubt he gets the innate "nope nope nope" of fear that 99% of people would get when contemplating an activity like this.
reply