The Dead Economy Theory - by Owen McGrann - The Palimpsest

Once again a UBI would help a bit but can’t save us. 

The economist Wassily Leontief saw this coming in 1983 when he compared human labor to horses. The US horse population grew from nine million in 1840 to twenty-one million by 1900, seemingly immune to technological change. Within sixty years of the internal combustion engine, the population collapsed by eighty-eight percent. The horses weren’t retired out of malice. They became uneconomical to keep. Leontief’s point was that there is no economic law preventing the same thing from happening to humans.

From: https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory

Command line tools to compare PDF files

I recently wanted to compare twp PDF files that seemed to be similar, yet had different file sizes.

After some LLM’ing (is that a word already?) I came to this one-liner that does the trick:

• diff <(pdftotext file1.pdf -) <(pdftotext file2.pdf -)

This gives a text based comparison. 

Alternatively, I can use pdfdiff to make a screenshot of every page and have these compared against each other automatically.

• pdf-diff file1.pdf file2.pdf        

An impression of The Apple Museum in Utrecht.

This is a short photo impression of our recent visit to The Apple Museum in Utrecht, Netherlands 🇳🇱 At €21,50 this isn’t a quick stop but one that you linger over. 🍏 How did Apple get startup capital? The Garage That Changed The World. An Apple || or 2? More apple boxes: I love how cute the Lisa is 😊 I never knew apple made colorful laptops like this, did you? Also didn’t know apple and Bose had crossover products together 🤔. I’m obviously not showing you nearly all the products and experiences on display. Should you fly to Europe to visit this museum? Probably not. Is it worth your money and time while your here anyways? Definitely yes! Museum overall: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Location: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Price: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ (no support for the nationwide “museum jaarkaart” ) unfortunately.

AuRevoir: View and remove notification messages from Apple's "Notification Database"

As recently discussed, even sending messages via Signal won’t stop unwanted snooping because whence messages are received on a Mac, the decrypted messages are stored in the Mac’s memory. 🤯

Yes, that is a crazy stupid design flaw. 

It’s not fixed yet, but this app might help a bit. It allowed you to remove these messages manually: 

AuRevoir: View and remove notification messages from Apple's "Notification Database"

https://github.com/objective-see/AuRevoir

How stupid is your AI of choice?

Just try this little prompt and see how bad/good your AI of choice does:

so i heard there is some question about a car wash that most ai agents get wrong. do you know anything about that? do you do better?

This is what Kagi comes up with: a reasonable sounding but stupid answer:

Yes, I am aware of the "car wash test" that has been challenging for many AI agents. The test typically involves a prompt like: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?" 

3

5

Many AI models have struggled with this seemingly simple question, often providing incorrect advice 

1

6

. The core of the problem lies in the AI's difficulty with reasoning about physical scenarios and common sense. While the distance of 50 meters is short enough to walk, some AI models have failed to grasp this implicitly, leading them to suggest driving or providing illogical answers 

1

2

.

This "car wash test" has been used as a benchmark to expose the limitations of current AI in understanding basic logic and real-world contexts 

3

4

. Some tests have shown that only a small percentage of AI models consistently pass this test 

4

.

Regarding whether I do better, I can analyze the situation based on the provided information. Given that the car wash is only 50 meters away, walking is the most logical and practical choice 

1

. Driving a car for such a short distance is generally inefficient and unnecessary.

In case future generations who've lost the ability to reason because (due to AI/LLM usage or otherwise) are reading this: the red text is where the mistake is. To wash a car, it needs to be in the car wash. Walking to the car wash makes no sense, no matter how close it is, unless the car is already in the car wash itself. 

Microsoft Free Learning Paths for Top Jobs. Mostly AI related.

The link: 

https://opportunity.linkedin.com/skills-for-in-demand-jobs

Please steal this app idea

I believe some of the best apps emerge from necessity, addressing a specific need.

Here's a minor annoyance I have:

I strongly prefer using a single chat app on my iPhone. However, I can't use the Messages app for everything because not everyone uses iPhones. Consequently, for these contacts I resort to Signal or WhatsApp for communication.

This issue is particularly noticeable when sending a picture. It would be great if there was an app that allowed me to paste a link to an image in the Messages app for someone who isn't on iMessage but uses SMS.

A free tier of this app could, for example, only allow you to send small images. Another security concern is what would happen if someone would use this service to send unwanted images? Another security concern is what would happen if someone would use the service to send unwanted images?

To mitigate this concern the app in the free tier could add a watermark of the original sender. And further the website that is shown at the URL of the image, could also show the IP address of whoever visited the image.