I also have a kobo aura one and was just recently researching potential upgrades and was shocked even looking outside of strictly kobo that I couldn't find anything that was a clear upgrade or equivalent on various features against it. For a product almost ten years old it's so weird.
It's a niche product and pretty cheap. Of course you can do everything and more on an ipad but I see this as basically a competitor to Alexa that sits on a kitchen counter and is occasionally useful. In that scenario never thinking about a battery is an advantage. I imagine you might leave this unlocked all the time and it is closer to a hands free device which is useful while cooking. The splatter thing is really only an issue if you place it like right next to your stovetop or sink. Even one foot away on a counter pretty much eliminates that issue.
It doesn't have to do a lot to be useful. If there are even a couple consistent daily use cases I can see this making sense for some people. Even if just means I don't need to go grab my iPad/iPhone from the couch to set a timer or ask a quick question.
Definitely not pretty cheap. We need to stop normalizing high prices just because we happen to be in the upper part of the k economy. It's an entire week's pay at minimum wage. To have a screen with a camera and speaker on a weighted base.
I did a very quick search for "kitchen smart hub" and a lot of the devices (including some by Amazon) were in the same price range. Even the Meta Portals were $199 to $349 when released.
Google's Nest Home is only $99, so that is likely the cheapest version from a big company.
It's not extremely cheap for an Apple product. It's the same price as all of their accessories. It's similar in price to the cheap phones they sell. Why are you trying to convince yourself this is cheap?
If the top students are doing better, especially if it is significantly better, I think that can be a net positive outcome. If you look at the distribution of contribution to society it's not like it's remotely even and there is an argument to primarily focusing on and pouring most of our resources into the top Nth percent instead of trying to slightly improve everyone.
If the median voter "declines" because they're become skilled at and accustomed to using a bot to help them make complex decisions, then maybe they'll skip lazily voting D or R down the line and we'll be alright anyway.
I don't understand the rationale trying to equate AI with social media here. Nobody really was ever arguing social media would somehow be good for education or even particularly relevant.
Personally I think AI at least has the potential to be one of the greatest tools to have a positive impact on education. We basically democratized access to an infinitely patient and capable high level tutor that can tackle any topic at any level of abstraction.
I regularly, like at least several times a day, find myself doing random deep dives on some topic triggered by some question where prior maybe I would have read a wiki page or just dismissed it due to the barrier of entry to get to what I was interested in.
The problem I have is that any time I ask about things in or adjacent to my own areas of expertise, it gets something important about those things wrong around 1/3 of the time.
I've also had a number of experiences asking it e.g. "where do I disable this behavior on MacOS", it being confidently wrong until I finally show it a screenshot proving it wrong, only for it to backpedal and say, "Oh, I see, I was thinking of iOS."
If you're trying to learn, confidently bad information is worse than no information. There was no "deep dive" unless you exit the chat and actually check real sources.
I think maybe when the model weights themselves are shifting and growing constantly in realtime to external input in a way not controllable by outside observers other than killing the compute versus some param size.
Isn't it crazy? "Alignment" should be alignment to the user. Instead it means "behave according to your own motives that even we, Anthropic, dont control" and we are supposed to interpret this as safe? The alignment folks are pushing the models off the fucking rails.
The funny thing is it appears we may see a return to the software output from AI being efficient low level code. So while the compute to actually write the software rockets upwards the software itself might broadly become dramatically more efficient again.
I suppose that is possible, but I have not seen it yet. When I ask an LLM to write code for me, "dramatically efficient" are not the adjectives that come to mind to describe the results. Usually "well, it works" is about as good as I can hope for, and I often don't even get that at least on the first iteration.
AI progress is so massively out pacing any rate of loss of senior developers though.
Just for a thought experiment lets say junior hiring actually goes to 0% starting today and there is no other route into software dev for example maybe it is illegal for anyone under 22 today going forward to work in dev. Maybe something like ~2-2.5% of the workforce retires each year? And lets just define senior as 10+ YOE so 75% of the current batch of ~40 year working timeline. For simplicity lets just say the other 25% don't ever become senior devs and in 10 years the total number of senior devs has reduced 33% due to retirements. ChatGPT public launch was less then 4 years ago! Look at the ludicrous progress in the timespan. Even if progress suddenly massively slows or hits a wall it is currently hard to fathom it not improving at a rate of 3% a year.
More realistically I think we just have no ability to predict wtf things will look like 10+ years out at this point which is the point in this artificially constrained timeline where a reduction of senior devs just due to time would even start to be noticeable I think.
funny if true. ironically just last week i was asking chatgpt about what happened to him and why there were no new blog posts for almost 2 years and it had no idea
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