Windows is also the "it just works" operating system, and it has hundreds of useful things you can only do through registry hacks.
It's not a very useful test.
I look at the good things about macOS over desktop linux like how cmd-c/v works across all apps, and it would be amazing if it were just a cli command to bridge the gap.
It's the ambition as a home user OS though, like macOS. And in the discussion of "it just works" operating systems, who else are we to go by than the vendor ambitions? Personal opinions? In that case, neither is because both struggle to always work in all scenarios since their respective inceptions.
When the phrase originated, manually updating CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT were expected skills of a home PC owner. The idea of buying a device, plugging it in, and having it work without a complex setup was unheard of. "It just works" on the Mac meant the absence of a DOS layer, IRQs, command lines, etc.
AFAIK Windows has never been known or marketed as "it just works". It goes long way to maintain backwards compatibility, but lets not kid ourselves that it has any semblance to what Apple's "it just works" is supposed to mean.
To answer this question, you consider the goals of a project.
The project is a success because it accomplished the presumed goals of its creator: humans find it interesting and thousands of people thought it would be fun to use with their clawdbot.
As opposed to, say, something like a malicious AI content farm which might be incidentally interesting to us on HN, but that isn't its goal.
A lot of projects have been successful like that. For a week. I guess "becoming viral" is sort of the success standard for social media, thus for this too being some sort of social media. But that's more akin to tiktok videos than tech projects.
Yeah, LLMs fulfill any goalpost I had in my mind years ago for what AGI would look like, like the starship voice AI in Star Trek, or merely a chat bot that could handle arbitrary input.
The Mass Effect universe distinguishes between AI, which is smart enough to be a person—like EDI or the geth—and VI (virtual intelligence), which is more or less a chatbot interface to some data system. So if you encounter a directory on the Citadel, say, and it projects a hologram of a human or asari that you can ask questions about where to go, that would be VI. You don't need to worry about its feelings, because while it understands you in natural language, it's not really sentient or thinking.
What we have today in the form of LLMs would be a VI under Mass Effect's rules, and not a very good one.
Note that Mass Effect's world purposely muddles the waters between the two and blurs lines. "Is this a VI or a real AI" is an open question in cases so that the player can explore the idea.
Halo also builds a distinction, with "Smart AI" what we would generally consider AGI and even super AGI, against "Dumb AI" which is purposely limited. Similarly, our current LLMs are similar to "Dumb AI" in shape but not even remotely close in capability.
In both universes, an "AI" or similar system will not hallucinate. If they tell you something wrong, or inaccurate, it's usually because they have been tampered with or because they have "Gone crazy" which is an identifiable state that is not normal and not probabilistic.
Star Trek also makes distinctions. The ships computer for example largely does not make deductions, and doesn't always operate in natural human language but instead requires you use specific phrasing and language. The Star Trek ships computer is basically what using 20 year old text to speech to run Wikipedia and database queries, and that's mostly it. It cannot analyze data itself. Data and the fully conscious Sherlock Holmes are both capable of automatically forming and testing a hypothesis.
It's actually weird how many people don't seem to notice that. The ships computer in star trek is purposely dumb, and command driven. It is not an agent, it does not think, and it does not understand natural human language. We had the star trek ships computer decades ago.
Peter F Hamiltons Sci-Fi novels, do something similar they differentiate between SI (Sentient Intelligence) which is basically their own being, and is not used by people as it would be essentially slavery. And for General Purpose "AI" they use RI which is Restricted Intelligence with strict limits placed around them.
I hated sitting around in school classrooms so much that I fantasized about a system that would just give me work to do and I would turn it in and go about my day.
This description of Alpha school might have been up my alley. AI learning certainly was.
Either way, we do need to think about options for self-motivated students.
Is this really for the students? Or is this for the people who believe they (and by extension their children) are the "Alphas" of society.. are there other values we should be teaching than "superior people do this and if you don't do this you are the inferior".. time will tell I guess. Crabs in buckets and all that.
1. Wordle's word list is going to be a lot more curated than TFA's word list because people want to guess words they use or have heard of, not "aahed".
2. Only a tiny group of people care to "card count" Wordle to rule out words that have already been played because they think that sort of min/maxing is fun. Most people don't even think about that, so whether Wordle reuses words every few years is trivial to them.
I will say that having used the same starter word the whole time that has not come up yet, it's a little disappointing that it may now take even longer to appear.
> Wordle's word list is going to be a lot more curated than TFA's word list because people want to guess words they use or have heard of, not "aahed"
The Times sure doesn't think that about the people who do Letter Boxed. One LB had "polymethylmethacrylate" in its dictionary.
I've saved the daily dictionaries from 2024-03-30 and that's the longest word out of the 93 393 total distinct words in the 674 dictionaries I've saved. They average 1199.47 words per dictionary.
They have some truly ridiculous words, such as "troughgeng". WTF is a troughgeng? Googling that gives a couple of pages in Chinese (or a similar looking language) and a Scottish dictionary entry for "Throu" which in one of the examples of "throu" as an adverb lists a bunch of phrases is it used in, including:
> (8) througang, throw-, throoging, trough-geng, -geong (Sh., Ork.), (i) a going over or through; a passage (I.Sc. 1972); specif. (ii) a narration, a recital (of a story); (iii) a full rotation of crops, a shift; (iv) a thoroughfare, lane, passageway, corridor open at either end (Sc. 1808 Jam.; Sh. 1908 Jak. (1928); Rxb. 1923 Watson W.-B.; Ork., w.Lth., wm.Sc. 1972). Also attrib.; (v) = (5); (vi) energy, drive (Bnff. 1866 Gregor D. Bnff. 192);
Ooh and aah aren't words, they're sounds (onomatopoeia). A sound is just a sequence of letters used for their phonological values.
You can spell the sound "ah" however you like: ah, ahh, aah, aahh, there's no wrong way to spell it.
If you write "the washing machine tringged when it finished", 'tring' is not a word, even though it's following the rules of English morphology, you could have written any sequence of letters that most faithfully reproduces the sound of the washing machine. You could have written katrigged or puh-tringged.
It's true that onomatopoeia isn't always a word, but in the particular case of "aah", I think that particular choice of letters is conventionalized enough that it is a word.
They changed some words pretty much right after the acquisition. There was some controversy when they started doing "themed" words (like Christmas stuff in December) vs more "random" words. Some words were also removed for having negative vibes/political liability
They removed WENCH from the list of upcoming solutions fairly quickly, but forgot to add it back to the list of available words so you couldn't use it as a guess for a little while. It made it back to the list eventually.
I believe these lists are more like what is described in the blog post. Diction of words, filtered to 5 letter words, no plurals, etc. It most likely has 99%+ of the words, but maybe some they don't actually use in Wordle.
Bikeshedding over the language is a huge waste of time, too.
I haven’t written a line of Nix since I started using it, yet it defines three of my systems. I just read diffs that an LLM created when editing my config.
Making a big deal about the language substrate feels like someone still trying to argue over vim vs emacs. It’s trivial and uninteresting.
Something worth appreciating about LLMs and Moltbook is how sci-fi things are getting.
Sending a text-based skill to your computer where it starts posting on a forum with other agents, getting C&Ced by a prompt injection, trying to inoculate it against hostile memes, is something you could read in Snow Crash next to those robot guard dogs.
It's not a very useful test.
I look at the good things about macOS over desktop linux like how cmd-c/v works across all apps, and it would be amazing if it were just a cli command to bridge the gap.
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