I know distilleries will often contract with one or more other distilleries to create a custom blended whisky to sell under their label to get some revenue while they wait for their first batches to mature. There are distilleries that basically specialize in doing this. I assume the wine market probably has similar strategies. I know 3 buck chuck basically started like this, buying overstock from other vineyards and blending them into a generic white or red wine.
My impression is that a large portion of the industry is already structured as distilleries that actually make the liquor, like MGP, and a bunch of labels that put their names on it (each different). Like how many name-brand items across grocery stores are all actually made by the same company.
You might be good at making whisky but not that great at marketing. Either way the market has a desire for generic, unlabeled product and people go in to fill the need.
It doesn’t surprise me if they found that the emergent behaviors didn’t change given their method. Modifying the simulation to make them behave differently would mean your rules have changed the model’s behavior to “jump tracks” into simulating a different sort of person who would generate different outputs. It’s not quite analogous to having the same Bob who likes fishing responding to different stimuli. Sort of like how Elon told Grok to be “unfathomably based” and stop caring about being PC” and suddenly it turned into a Neo-Nazi Chan-troll. Changing the inputs for an LLM isn’t taking a core identity and tweaking it, it’s completely altering the relationships between all the tokens it’s working with.
I would assume there is so much in the corpus based on behavior optimized for the actual existing social media we have that the behavior of the bots is not going to change because the bot isn’t responding to incentives like a person would it’s mimicking the behavior it’s been trained on and if there isn’t enough training data of behavior under the different inputs you’re trying to test you’re not actually applying the “treatment” you would think you are.
The weight loss mechanism largely just comes from suppressing appetite though, so it still lines up with the penance for sin narrative. It’s not that different from wearing a hair-shirt and whipping yourself if you find yourself having lustful thoughts. Only instead of a whip you just feel kind of uncomfortable and nauseous if you eat too much.
I'd describe the effects as basically the opposite of self-torture. Self-torture is dieting/fasting without the drugs. With them, it's great. No afternoon light-headedness and difficulty concentrating, no hunger pangs, no "hangry" effect, no cravings you have to keep suppressing. Just smooth sailing. (though experiences do seem to vary—as do dosage levels)
That's true of semaglutide, but newer peptides like tirzepatide (a dual-agonist) and retatrutide (a triple agonist) have additional effects like improving insulin sensitivity, and simultaneously slowing the release of glucagon and activating glucagon receptors, which directly increases fat oxidation and thermogenesis.
It’s a shame the evolution to DVD and later Blu-ray went with the VCD/CD size rather than Laserdisc sized discs. It was the right call for the time, that makes them much easier to transport and store and allowed the players to double as CD players and let game consoles double as blu-ray/HDDVD players. All huge perks to encourage adoption.
But now that we are entering a world where physical media is largely an enthusiast past-time I think something laserdisc sized is much better suited for appealing to geeky collectors as a “trophy” or collectible item. It’s more pleasing to flip through them, the size of the sleeve ends up functioning as a display poster. Commentary about “warmth” aside, it’s the same reason music nerds have revived vinyl, with even half the vinyl market consisting of people who don’t even own turntables and just listen to the music off the included digital download codes that come with the records. Plus, the sheer size would mean you can encode a LOT onto this hypothetical next-gen laserdisc before having to resort to compression and exotic layering tricks to increase data density like they do with these 8k Atmos releases now.
The existence of the LLMs will themselves change the profile and proclivities of people we consider “programmers” in the same way the app-driven tech boom did. Programmers who came up in the early days are different from ones who came up in the days of the web are different from ones who came up in the app era.
If interactions with your AI start sounding like your conversation partner shilling hot cocoa powder at nobody in particular those conversations are going to stop being trusted real quick. (Pop culture reference: https://youtu.be/MzKSQrhX7BM?si=piAkfkwuorldn3sb)
Which may be for the best, because people shouldn’t be implicitly trusting the bullshit engine.
My kid was recently gifted a Yoto Box which plays aIndio and he loves it. I can’t help but think that putting ebooks on scannable cards might be a seriously underrated form factor. At that point you don’t need a file browser, networking, or anything. You just need to be able to read text and images off the card.
The Yoto itself does need networking because the card is just an NFC tag that points to a file in a database somewhere that the player has to download. But something similar to a video game cartridge instead could probably work. IIRC a Nintendo Switch game cartridge costs about $10 per unit and in this use case you wouldn’t even need them to be that small so you could maybe get them cheaper.
Yeah my impression is that Kindles last basically forever. They’re like typewriters where you should just buy the nicest one you can afford when you need it and use it until it can’t be repaired.
IMO Kindles were best when they had hardware buttons so I have no interest in buying these new touchscreen ones.
>IMO Kindles were best when they had hardware buttons so I have no interest in buying these new touchscreen ones.
I'm really surprised the cheapest one is $100 now, they used to have a little one for ~$50 that physical buttons on either side of the screen with the old non-paperwhite screen.
One of the most popular eReaders with the BookTok crowd is the Boox Palma, which is an eReader with the form factor of a phone.
It’s actually just an Android phone with an eInk screen, so you can run any android app on it. It’s just that eInk is terrible at everything but displaying static content so it’s not good for much besides being an eReader. Though you can also pull up a PDF reader or read emails if you really want to.
There have been several takes on "Android phone with eInk screen" to date, e.g. https://minimalcompany.com or Kingrow K1. They are fine for reading but for some reason the form factor doesn't stick; or at least I haven't seen any model like that remain in business for long.
Yeah all these “save your time and attention from your smartphone” value propositions run into the problem of just being shitty phones that end up being quite expensive. This goes for eInk phones as well as things like the Light Phone or that Humane Pin.
The fact is people actually just like their phones, and the main problem with them getting zombiefied staring at them comes from specific attention sucking brainrot apps. Aspects of hardware design can be a nudge factor but it’s not the main driver. The problem is TikTok, Instagram, et al and nobody wants to have a shitty phone experience when they could just block those apps. Compromising functionality runs into the problem where you get too much bycatch as most of the addicting functionality overlaps with stuff people want. I may not want apps or a screen but I want maps, and once you have maps and navigation you probably need a screen. Maybe I want to avoid video because I want to avoid TikTok but then I am searching for a How To guide and that ends up linking you to YouTube. I don’t want WhatsApp but I want to receive text messages, but once I’m in a group chat how different is that from WhatsApp?
I recently had this issue with notifications. I turn off notifications on everything except phone calls and messages. But I was trying to marketplace some items and it turned out I just couldn’t communicate with people without live messaging them on LetGo or the BuyNothing app or Facebook marketplace. But once I turned on notifications to get those messages suddenly they’re constantly spamming me with push notifications and emails trying to bait my engagement. The hardware is not the problem.
