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Joined 16 days ago
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Cake day: February 27th, 2025

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  • Every couple of years I try out the latest “assistant”. I ask very simple queries, stuff that you might expect it to be able to handle. It always disappoints hilariously.

    Questions where previous assistants consistently and utterly failed: “What’s the weather going to be like today?” “I want to go to [address], using public transport, can you tell me which routes I have to take?” “What are my appointments today?”

    You’d think these are pretty obvious use-cases, but every iteration of assistants was completely incapable of getting even close to a satisfying answer. I don’t expect LLMs to fare better this time around.




  • This is a well written piece full of astute observations. I have a problem with one point, though:

    The new civilizational struggle is between hard and soft*.* Don’t overthink this. Trump is not playing four-dimensional chess and trying to pry Russia from its alliance with China. American foreign policy is now oriented to whatever gets Trump’s hormones surging. He has a lifelong thing for manly virility. In the MAGA mind, Vladimir Putin codes as hard; Western Europe codes as soft. Elon Musk codes as hard; U.S.A.I.D. codes as soft. WWE is hard; universities are soft. Struggles for dominance are hard; alliances are soft.

    It’s not the difference between “hard” and “soft” that matters here, it’s the difference between “simple” and “complex”. Trump, in every conceivable way, is a simple man, and his followers find that one of his most attractive traits. He, like them, neither understands nor accepts complexity and that informs his world-view and actions.