“One sort of optional thing you might do is realize that there are six seasons instead of four. The poetry of four seasons is all wrong for this part of the planet, and this may explain why we are depressed so much of the time. I mean, spring doesn’t feel like spring a lot of the time, and November is all wrong for autumn, and so on. Here is the truth about the seasons: Spring is May and June. What could be springier than May and June? Summer is July and August. Really hot, right? Autumn is September and October. See the pumpkins? Smell those burning leaves? Next comes the season called Locking. November and December aren’t winter. They’re Locking. Next comes winter, January and February. Boy! Are they ever cold! What comes next? Not spring. ‘Unlocking’ comes next. What else could cruel March and only slightly less cruel April be? March and April are not spring. They’re Unlocking.”
The non descriptive names are better because they can be consistent across different countries not depending climate
July in Croatian - Srpanj
August in Czech/Polish - Srpen/Sierpen
because for obvious reasons harvest time in Croatia is one month earlier than in Czechia
though your example for April in Polish makes no sense
April in Polish - Kwiecien
May in Czech - Kveten
I'm pretty sure flowers are blooming (it's not about flowers, but about blooming) in Czechia earlier than in Poland, so the names should be reversed
though even English/German/Slovak months are not without their issues, October should be eight, November ninth, December tenth based on their Latin names, this video makes fun about it, but honestly I seriously like the proposed system:
The French Republican calendar used a few years after the revolution was also in this spirit. However these names do not export well across the world, notably a problem when as a colonial power like France you export your language and customs.
>> To finish, I do just sort of straight up hate the idea that we're comparing this moment to the invention of electricity. It's on the face of it absurd.
Do you feel that any technology is comparable in it’s impact?
Most of modern medicine, by which I mean each discovery and invention in their own right, stand alongside electricity. Particularly vaccines.
AI isn’t there yet. You could turn off AI tomorrow and there’d be a shock but people would quickly switch back. You could not do the same for electricity, medicine, combustion engines (or steam engines/turbines), computers, the internet, modern building materials, etc. You try to swap back off any of those and the modern world (literally and figuratively) collapses. Turn off AI, and there’d be a financial collapse but afterwards everything would return relatively easily to an earlier way of doing things (ye know, the way from just 4 years ago, and which is still 99% of how people do things :) )
I think the Internet is the more apt analogy. But even with electricity, you could have taken it away within the first couple decades of its popularity and society would have shrugged it off. Once they got used to that telegraph thing, not so much.
Yeah, I agree, but AI isn’t there yet. It’s too early to call it one way or the other. There’s plenty else that’s as important as electricity in my view, and maybe AI will join those ranks in 15 years or so when it’s gone through the hype loop and when the economy has recovered from the now-basically-inevitable AI- and war-fueled turmoil of the next decade.
Sure, but compare this to "turn[ing] off" combustion engines a mere four years after commercial adoption rather than 162 years later (now). Back then, going back to horses wouldn't have been as big of a deal as it would be now.
That's primarily a function of the time for adoption, though, not the utility of the technology. In 20 years, people would not be able to so easily say that they could turn off AI with no impact.
That..what..no. The question was whether there are any comparable to electricity, of which I have put forth a number of examples. And also offered my opinion that it is too early to judge whether AI will be as significant or not.
There are loads of technologies that, despite being decades old, do not qualify. So, no, it’s not “primarily a function of time”. It absolutely is about the utility. We can only be in a position to judge utility when sufficient time has passed, and AI ain’t had enough time yet to prove its utility. Given enough time, it might prove as useful as electricity, or it might just sit alongside computer operating systems - never quite making it onto anyone’s “this changed the world” list, even if it has as much utility as an OS.
I disagree with this take. I get that LLM produced text is filled with crappy, over the top writing in pretty much all cases, but if a prompter/writer/blogger is using it iteratively, the LLM output is going to be way better than their writing. Also, if a person is using LLMs to write articles, do you really want to see their likely even worse writing?
It's absolutely nutso that we (the users) have to guess what the actually limits are. And now they through this into the mix. I love using Claude Code, but if they don't offer some transparency soon re:token limits (other than a status bar), ... I don't know what I'll do, but I will continue to not be happy.
This is actually a really good response though. Because the act of having a device blaring demonstrates contempt for everyone one around them. It's hard to act in a hateful way to someone who just offered you something for free.
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