As a father of two young children, LLMs have been kind of amazing. I’ve historically been someone who has project ideas and has fun building them. But for a few years now I just haven’t had the headspace for it — all I’ve wanted to do in the evening is relax for a bit.
In the past month I’ve completed a home dashboard idea I’ve had for years, I’ve built a house management system, a travel planning tool, a guitar chord annotator… it’s been very liberating. I’m not doing the coding, which was fun, but I am doing all of the system design and iteration, which I also really enjoy.
I’m building a video game for our abernic device with my son (no game engine experience, just vibing the game engine ourselves). We’re having a blast. We play up to our progress right before bedtime stories.
The other day I refused to fire it up for him and he had a full meltdown. I told my wife I had never seen product market fit like that before.
It is a little harder with something like a game to maintain motivation and go for perfection when you know your audience is an audience of one but it’s also a relief to just worry about the things he cares about (trains and firetrucks).
I also miss there being something intellectually challenging to a side project but that probably means I just need to learn a real game engine after this.
> An LLM isn't human. I don't really understand this thread of "humans do it so of course an AI does"... Why is it not reasonable to expect it to adhere to rules better than a human does?
Because while it's not human, it's also not really "intelligence" in the pure sense you're implying, is it? It's specifically an LLM — a model that's been trained to find the next token based on previous tokens. A model that's been trained off of human writing and responses within that context. If almost every time someone online asked "do you want ice cream?" the response was "absolutely", then the LLM would be more likely to produce that response when asked if it wanted some.
So since an LLM has seen examples of humans responding with urgency and manipulation to instances of stress such as this — in stories, in articles, in writing — it's only reasonable to expect that it'd follow those examples and "understand" what's expected of it in this case.
> Paying a professional to talk to lawmakers about something that is in your best interest
And I believe that if it were that above-board then many fewer people would complain. But it's not.
Because the professional will host a fancy dinner that you're invited to. Or they'll make an entirely legal contribution to your re-election fund.
And even if you think all of the above is totally fine, you have to consider whose voices are more loudly heard in this kind of system. Do you, or your neighborhood, or even your city in most cases, have as much money as a megacorporation, to fund all of these activities at a similar scale? Do you think it's right for the richest companies and people to have the most say in how the country is run?
> no lobbying or money in politics legally ... there is no way to legally speak your mind or pay someone to do so
You could speak your mind at a meeting with a policy maker, rather than at a $500 a plate dinner you've invited them to free of charge. You could pay someone to advocate for your interests in a smart way, without also contributing a million dollars to someone's re-election campaign. If there was less money flowing into politics, it would be more difficult to sway public opinion at large through expensive campaigns.
My quick summary is that I don’t think only wealthy people/companies should have their voices heard. I just don’t think that attempting to squash lobbying or even “money in politics” is the means to achieve it.
I’ve called my congressman/senator a few times to speak for/against something, and it’s made me wish it was easier for citizenry to meaningfully band together. Im glad I had someone to call, but it was certainly not the access that a fancy political dinner would have afforded me.
I despise and fear corruption, and agree that there an overlap between lobbying and bribery/kickbacks. And I don’t think buying the sitting president’s meme-coin should purchase access. But of course we have (had) laws against such blatantly poisonous arrangements. And many legal arrangements are not much better.
So I don’t mean to say that all “lobbying” is good in all forms, but the term has become so conflated with other illegal or borderline activities, that it’s actually lost meaning, and is actively harming our ability to meaningfully discuss it. It wouldn’t surprise me if this conflation benefits the very criminals that we wish to shut down.
When someone uses ambiguous terms like “money in politics” or “lobbying” to mean everything from running a newspaper ad to slipping someone an envelope full of cash, we will see calls for blunt instrument fixes. Those fixes usually benefit incumbents and existing power structures, and often happen to make it illegal to amplify one’s speech. There are plenty of countries that have very little legal money in their political system, but they also don’t have elections that can be swayed in the first place.
We would see less money in politics if the government was weaker and could not sway an individual’s or company’s fortunes by millions of dollars at the stroke of a pen, or declare that encrypted communications are illegal, or decide that certain ethnic groups are no longer welcome. But since they can, many companies or individuals or civil liberties groups will do the math and purchase whatever insurance they can to increase the chance their side is heard, whether we agree with that side or not.
I wish I had better proposals to fix the things we agree are bad, because we probably agree on a lot of it. I am mainly trying to call out that saying someone or some group is “lobbying” is NOT the same thing as accusing someone of being inherently corrupt, and the fact that it “sounds” like it is just benefits the actually obvious corrupt criminals and disadvantages anyone else who would want to use money to advocate for a position.
I don't know anything about this company and what it may or may not have done, but to be clear, the link just says that when you star their github repo, they add your email address to their marketing list.
I think that sucks, but it's certainly not what I thought of when I read your one-liner (which implies that they harvest and abuse your actual recorded data).
> AI doesn't add anything to the ability to do mass surveillance
I recommend reading Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus for a deep discussion around this.
He makes the point that what makes this AI age much more dangerous for mass surveillance isn't just the collection of data, which has indeed been possible for a while, but the new ability to have AI sift through that enormous volume of information, an ability which until recently has not been possible in a meaningful way without a ton of manual work to support it.
Older attempts at mass control of a population already involved mass surveillance, even in a large amount of detail, but even when capturing in detail all citizens' activities, there were just not enough people around to be able to dig through that and analyze it. This has been somewhat true even with the help of computers, though computers have certainly already been making this easier.
But now you can just give all that data to an AI with your instructions, and it'll apply some sort of "judgement" on your behalf, completely autonomously, and even perform actions against those folks it finds, again autonomously, without needing to manually build a whole infrastructure to do that with manual rules. That's a very meaningful upgrade for someone wanting to control a population.
That's still actuating using existing infrastructure that already existed. I agree with the summarise + decide part maybe being quicker sometimes but the bottleneck remains collection and collation and actioning infrastructure
It doesn't; that's kind of a first-glance reading of the phrase without really thinking about it.
Something can said to change from a certain standard even if it wasn't perfectly constant to begin with. For example, if I always kept my house at 65-75 degrees for the past year, and now it's 85 degrees inside, I could certainly say that the temperature in my house recently changed and gotten warmer. That might lead me to check whether my AC's working, rather than say "well I guess the temperature has never really been constant, and 85 is within the range of possible non-constant temperatures, so everything's perfectly normal and nothing has changed."
Your analogy doesnt work, becaue the earth has been warmer than it is now several times in the past. so the increased temperature is within the range of normal temperatures.
The problem is not that the earth is warming, it is that it is warming at an artificially increased rate.
The rate of warming is a problem (i.e.: it determines what generations of humans are going to see this), but the major problem is the warming itself, or rather the change.
We (humanity) have gotten comfortable with the way things are, and a change in that is going to mean that things are going to change for us, and we don't like change. Most of our biggest cities are all close to the coast and will be subject to massive flooding in the next 100 years (if not sooner). Much of those same large population centers are also fairly close to being too hot for general survival (without aggressive AC). Our agriculture is all setup for the temperatures we have now, and the rain patterns we are used to. So we are going to have to change both where we live, and how we grow our food (location and probably strains as well).
Global warming is (almost) definitely not going to destroy all life on earth, but many of the forecasts are in extinction-level for most of the large animals. So life in general will continue, and probably humanity (since we are so good at making environment for ourselves), but the (eventual) changes are going to make the world very different, in ways that we are not going to like.
The warming is definitely not the problem (for the earth itself), only for the human race of which I care very little for.
Many different groups of large animals have lived and died off over the ages. It will happen again many times after humans are gone.
I personally welcome nuclear war and anything else which will help wipe out the human race. In a few million years the earth will move on to its next rulers and we will be a distant memory.
I live in the least impactful way possible. I guarantee you my impact on the earth is less then 99.99999% of the population, and I live a very happy life. Im just not scared of it ending, becasue I know when humanity is gone then the earth will have a big future of succesful evolution.
Not everything has to be doom and gloom. Your life and the planet is what you make of it.
It's not meant as a perfect analogy for global warming, but rather an illustration of how a constant state isn't necessary for something to be said to be "changing", which was OP's claim.
My apologies, internet stranger, for thinking I had different goals than the ones you so cleverly picked up on in my one paragraph comment. Clearly you were more correct about my goals than I was.
Rates for my northeast town increased by ~25% in 2024 and are going up by another ~10% this year. It's a hard sell to spend a large amount of up-front money (even after rebates, which decreased this year) to convert to a system that will cost you more than you pay today, and may not work as well in cold weather (every heat pump company I talked to suggested keeping my existing gas heating in place and automatically switching to it when it gets cold enough).
I was also told that the electrical grid in my area is having difficulty keeping up with the push towards heat pumps, which increase load exactly on the coldest nights of the year, when you need heating most.
Costs are a big thing, sure, but for me it's electrical reliability. For better or worse our heating oil and natural gas supply are both more reliable than our electricity supply. I don't need the heat going out in the dead of winter when some wind storm drops a bunch of branches on power lines.
I'm aware that both my boiler and a natural gas furnace have electric blower motors. It's a lot easier to power them from a generator than it is to have a generator than can power a house worth of heat pumps.
You can have both, though. A person doesn't have to make a binary decision of heatpump OR natural gas.
Please remember that traditional aircon is also literally a heat pump. It's perfectly acceptable to have a ducted heat pump and a ducted natural gas furnace both sharing the same ductwork.
In this use, the heat pump and the furnace are just installed series with eachother, with one singular blower motor that is used for both roles. This arrangement is very similar (identical, really) to the layout that combined (heat+aircon) systems have used for many decades.
Power out, or simply very cold outside? Your house still has a natural gas furnace (which can be made work with a fairly small generator), and your rig doesn't require expensive-to-use heat strips for the coldest days either.
I have a house where the first floor is served by a gas/ac combo unit, and the second floor with a heat pump.
I literally see no advantage to the heat pump and wish I didn't have it. It takes forever to heat and cool, comparitively, and likes to ice over when it gets too cold in the winter while running 24/7 doing nothing. The emergency heat eventually kicks in and fixes it, so I'm considering just running emergency heat all winter.
The fact that your heat pump setup is also taking longer to cool suggests there's something fundamentally different between the setup on your different floors, not that there is something bad with heat pumps in general.
A heat pump in cooling mode works exactly like an AC unit, because that's exactly what it is. So if your AC unit on the first floor cools more quickly than you AC unit (i.e. heat pump) on your second floor, it's because A) your floors are different sizes or insulated differently or something else is different about their construction, B) your units are sized differently, or C) your heat pump has some mechanical problem. But the fact that it's a heat pump should make no difference to its cooling performance.
When it’s running in reverse then it’s acting as an air conditioner blowing cold air into the house. So usually the heat strips are used then to reheat the air and prevent it from blowing cold air in the middle of winter. Not strictly necessary but most people demand it.
the aux heat comes in because their output is a multiplier. At 30F, perhaps they produce 4x the heat as the electricity put in. At 0F, perhaps they produce 1.8x the heat. This means the output declines with temperature, until eventually they don't produce enough heat to hold temperature. Enter aux heat.
Cold weather heat pumps help because they stay above 1x for longer, but you also wind up needing to oversize a bit.
>Rates for my northeast town increased by ~25% in 2024 and are going up by another ~10% this year.
Don't forget that those costs are going up in large part because heat pump subsidies are being rolled into electricity prices.
Imagine being a ~$100k HHI household and paying $300+/mo for electricity so that $200+k HHI doctor/lawyer/HN households can have subsidized heat pumps and our sleazy contractors, and the dealers, and everyone else upstream) can over-charge us for the privilege (thereby getting their cut of the subsidy).
It's a miracle we haven't all caught hot lead yet.
A heat pump just makes no sense whatsoever for me in my northeast town. The electric bill alone would outpace the old propane bill, not to mention installation.
And it won't even work during some of the coldest winter weeks when you _really_ need it to work.
Maybe I would consider it if I was in, like, Nevada or somewhere.
The notion that heat pumps don’t work at low temperatures hasn’t been true for years. I think you may be surprised to find that just about any heat pump you look at has good efficiency down to very low temperatures.
That’s true, but still doesn’t always make heat pumps the most cost effective choice to operate. For example, last winter I paid an average of $0.24/kWh for electricity vs $0.05/kWh for natural gas. Even if a heat pump had a perfect 4.0 COP all winter, gas would be ~15% cheaper. Electricity prices really need to come down before it will be viable for everyone.
This varies quite a bit based on location for instance here in Florida natural gas is $0.13/kWh while electricity is about $0.12/kWh, also where I live there is no piped NG so it would be propane delivered to a storage tank which is even more expensive.
Also the winters are mild here so basically everyone has either a heat pump or the further south you go it's just heat strips because heat is rarely used so not worth the cost.
So any kind of blanket statement about heat pumps vs gas heat would be folly, but due to improvements in cold weather heat pumps and solar power are allowing them to make much more sense in more places.
There are many advantages to decoupling fuel combustion from its energy use, burning NG at a power plant relatively efficiently with much better emission controls, then distributing on electric grid for use more than just heating, while allowing the home to heat from many different energy sources and allow for grid down backup as well.
Does your 0.05/kWh include the distribution costs? The thing to do once you go to heating with gas is to just switch completely to electricity and turn off gas. In my experience (admittedly not in the US, but several other countries) distribution cost often more than double the $/kWh for natural gas (especially if you only heat part of the year).
Not to mention, lots of places have time of use electricity pricing which makes it even worse. This is the problem with running my heatpump when its cold, some of the coldest times (right before dawn) coincide with peak time-of-use prices
I’ve tried. For it to be at all viable on my property, I’d need to cut down a bunch of trees. I’d rather keep the trees and pay someone else with solar panels.
I mean, in many countries, often either the government or a company closely allied to the government has been granted a legal monopoly on selling electrical energy, so buying electricity from other people is illegal.
ASHRAE—an HVAC organization—has data on the coldest and hottest days for areas so that you can design things for the coldest or hottest 1% of the year (4 hottest/coldest days):
I think that if you have an older, leaky/ier, less-insulated house you may need to 'brute force' heating your (probably older) domicile. But if you have a <4 ACH@50 air tightness, and reasonable insulation levels, a good portion of the US population could make do with a heat pump.
Mitsubishi publishes data were they have 100% heating capacity at -15C, which some models being 100% at -20C and -23C:
It is warmer than -16C/3F at Chicago (O'Hare) for 99% of the time (i.e., except for 4 days a year), and warmer than -18.7C/-2F for 99.6% of the time (2 days).
ASHRAE are the folks that publish the heating/cooling standards that are used in building codes for estimate heating/cooling equipment capacities (Manual J) and selecting the right equipment (Manual S).
Here's a PDF with a lot of locations in the US and CA (and other countries further down), and if you look under the "Heating DB" column, you'll find very few US locations that have -30F under the 99% (or even 99.6%) sub-columns:
So unless you're in AK, MN, or ND, long runs of temperatures colder than -20F/-30C don't happen too often. Of course if you have a leaky house with little insulation, you're throwing money out the window/door, so the first consideration for a good ROI is better air sealing and insulation.
I think the comment was saying below 30F and below 10F. Much warmer than you're saying.
Also..
> It is warmer than -16C/3F at Chicago (O'Hare) for 99% of the time (i.e., except for 4 days a year), and warmer than -18.7C/-2F for 99.6% of the time (2 days).
If my heat doesn't work for those days, I'm kind of boned. Four days per year without a working heat pump? That's a mess.
At face value, then in the worst case that's just 4 days per year of using resistive heat to keep a home warm.
Which is, of course, very expensive to use -- but it's only expensive for those 4 days. Resistive heat can be avoided for the other 361.2425 days in a year.
In the US (as of August of 2025), the average price of residential electricity per delivered kWh is $0.1762 [1].
If using resistive heat averages 4kW during each of those 4 days (it's probably either more than that, or less than that, but ballparks are ballparks), then that's about $16.92 for each of those days. Or: $67.66, per year.
> At face value, then in the worst case that's just 4 days per year of using resistive heat to keep a home warm.
The design philosophy for using 1% is that you may end up having to run your heating (or cooling) 24/7 to keep up with temperature delta between outside and desired inside, but it will keep up with the demand.
The rest of the time (99%) the mechanicals only run intermittently. Also note that the 1% would not necessarily occur every year: it is just the historical average. The charts also have the 0.4% extremes if you want to be extra conservative, but most building codes specify 1% because that is what experience has shown is a good trade-off.
Part of the process (in the US) is to use what is called the Manual J to determine/estimate/calculate how much energy is needed to maintain a particular temperature (typically ≥70F/21C in winter, ≤75F/24C in summer):
> The Cooling Design Day is effectively the "worst case" day for your air conditioning loads. The "worst case" hour of this day determines equipment capacity, fan sizes, and subsequently duct sizes. This largely impacts first cost. The Design Hour also impacts peak KW demand which often has a huge impact on the utility bill.
So gas hash higher reliability and is cheap for the times you need heat the most, whereas heat pumps might not work and are not cheap at the times you need them the most?
I’ve had a gas furnace keep me and the water heated multiple times in a cold weather power outage.
> So gas hash higher reliability and is cheap for the times you need heat the most, whereas heat pumps might not work and are not cheap at the times you need them the most?
The major manufacturers have systems that will use the heat pump when the temperatures are not 'crazy', and kick in fossil at a certain point:
Depending on the cost of power and fossil fuels, you can program it to switch over once the COP becomes too low to justify running up kWh on your meter.
But whereas in the past heat pumps would have their COP drop around 40F/5C, modern systems can be fairly efficient at much lower temperature nowadays:
That's one of the older style units. Starting in 2007 when Mitsubishi introduced their "Hyper-Heating Inverter" heat pumps, and continuing with Fujitsu and Daikin following with similar technology in the 2010-12 timeframe, and others a few years later, heat pumps got way better in the cold.
Mitsubishi's maintain 200%+ efficiency down to -4℉ (-20℃) and 150% down to -22℉ (-30℃) [1]. Only a few towns in the continental US get below that, and even those aren't going to get cold enough long enough to make it worth it an an all electric home to switch to your emergency electrical resistance heating.
Their capacity doesn't start dropping until you get down to 23℉ (-5℃), dropping to 76% at -13℉ (-25℃).
Though it’s worth noting that that first 2 ton rated unit is putting out 0.5 tons (6k BTU/hr) at that temp and rating.
That’s not going to be particularly helpful for a structure that needed 24k BTU/hr during warmer temps, meaning the owner of the unit is likely mixing in a lot of 1.0 BTUs to meet the heat loss at -13°F.
> Though it’s worth noting that that first 2 ton rated unit is putting out 0.5 tons (6k BTU/hr) at that temp and rating.
I just did a quick search for "all" units and sorted the result list/table by COP@5F. If one was actually shopping/designing a solution then a more nuanced search criteria would be used.
Further, you'd probably want to do a (US ACCA) Manual J calculation to first determine how much energy is needed (j = joules)
I've got one about 8 years old, and it does just fine down to 0°F (it hasn't gotten colder than that here). It doesn't even have any kind of auxiliary heat.
It's fine. The only difference when it's super-cold is that the air coming out of it isn't as warm, so the heating cycle stays on for a longer proportion of the time. But it keeps it 70°F inside no problem at all.
I don't know what sort of heat pump systems are common in the US, but Sweden (and AFAIK Norway and Finland as well), are probably >%80 heat pump for single family homes (most apartments are community heating at least in the larger cities). So it's absolutely now problem to run a heat pump even if it is very cold outside, but if you want to improve efficiency in areas that are super cold you can drill into the ground for a heat sink (those are called Bergvärme in Sweden).
Regarding cost, in most of the countries I've lived in a large fraction of the cost in the gas bill was the distribution cost. So once you switch to a heat pump, you also switch to electric cooking and even if heating with electricity would be significantly more expensive you would still win. Is that different in the US?
It varies significantly by locale. I've seen people post online about how it made little sense to keep just one gas appliance because of significant savings. I'm in Iowa, which typically heats on natural gas in urban areas. I have a natural gas central furnace and water heater. My clothes dryer is electric, and I have a 3 head heat pump which I use for comfort in a couple rooms. The house is an early 2000's standard builder-grade home.
For September, $12.31 of my $27.01 gas bill was variable based on my consumption.
In December, $84.82 out of my $99.65 total was consumption driven.
I've run numbers on whether it'd make financial sense to go electric for heating, and the break even point is in the 30-40 degree vicinity. With temperatures 20 and under a healthy chunk of the year, unfortunately the added expense doesn't make financial sense.
Heat pumps are just air conditioners in reverse. They use the same amount of electricity whether heating or cooling. While many people have air conditioners, and grids seem to be able to handle them in the summer, an assertion that the grid can’t handle them in the winter is doubtful. Plus there are fewer people using them in the winter (just because fewer are installed). Most people in the NE heat with oil, gas, or wood, so that would reduce the electric load (compared to summer) even further.
There would be an increase only if people were supplementing the heat pump with electric heat, which to be fair is a possibility.
There’s a lot of misinformation about heat pumps, especially by HVAC people who don’t have a lot of experience with them, so they tend to recommend what they’re more familiar with.
But yes, understanding the electricity cost is essential when considering one.
> They use the same amount of electricity whether heating or cooling
This is completely wrong. The amount of power depends on the temperature delta. When cooling, you are typically not cooling your home to 30 degrees Celsius below the outdoor temperature. However, when heating, you are typically heating your home to around 20 degrees above outdoor temperature. Heating consumes more power than cooling.
It is approximately correct as long as the temperature deltas are approximately the same for heating vs cooling.
(And as long as we're dispelling generalizations: Those deltas do vary wildly based on local climate, such that they're impossible to generalize and typify.
For instance: The city of Saint Paul, Minnesota [USA] has a very different climate compared to the city of São Paulo in Brazil, with accordingly-different heating/cooling deltas.
I would be curious to know the difference. In summer you might find 30c outside and inside 20c so a difference of 10c. In winter it can reach -30c and inside is 20c. This is 5x more!
I’m not an expert, and it would depend on the system you have anyway, but AFAIK the main differentiator between a cooling air conditioner and a heat pump is a “reversing valve”. You may simply need to change the mode to reverse it, then you get cooling. From what I understand, it would be unusual for it only to work in heat mode.
I agree with some aspects, and think the author perhaps misunderstood some others.
> If I collect 100 XP, what does it mean for my language skills? For that matter, why do I collect extra XP when I receive a potion? Can the XP I collect be used in a way to carefully guide me towards the specific language skills I would explore next?
Using XP to guide the user towards a particular path is an idea, but it's just not one that Duolingo uses. The purpose of XP in Duolingo is simpler: people like numbers to go up, so they get XP for using the app. It also enables an ecosystem of rewards; I'm generally not a competitive person, and there have still been days where I took a few more Duolingo lessons because I was close to completing a "daily challenge".
Similarly, friend streaks, leaderboards, etc, all have innately appealing hooks. They won't all appeal to everyone all the time, but one of them will appeal to someone some of the time. If they get you to practice for 5m a day more than you would've otherwise, I think they've served their purpose.
Broadly, I agree with other comments about expectation management and time commitment. Could you get yourself to a solid level of understanding in a new language only by using Duolingo? Possibly, but you'd need a lot of dedication and hard work, and much more than 5m a day. If you really wanted to learn a language, and had the time, there are much more effective ways to get there.
Duolingo isn't really built towards encouraging that kind of intense learning, because they know most people who download the app are looking for a bite-sized learning experience, and are willing to accept bite-sized results in return. For myself, I can say that after a couple of years of leaning Spanish on Duolingo, with no previous experience in the language, and an average effort of probably ~10m a day (many days less, some days more), I can read texts if they aren't too complex, follow a casual conversation, and communicate basic things. That's way more than I would've been able to do if I wasn't using the app.
> For myself, I can say that after a couple of years of leaning Spanish on Duolingo, with no previous experience in the language, and an average effort of probably ~10m a day (many days less, some days more), I can read texts if they aren't too complex, follow a casual conversation, and communicate basic things. That's way more than I would've been able to do if I wasn't using the app.
This has been exactly my experience with it. I would probably progress faster if I had others to speak with, but for just doing the lessons offered, I'm pretty happy with my results.
By contrast, when I was studying Spanish using something more similar to the Assimil method, I was reading full length novels and watching Yo Soy Betty, La Fea within about six months.
It's not just me. There's been some research on this sort of thing, and it tends to find that just about the only thing that's slower than Duolingo is traditional classroom language education.
Admittedly I was doing more than 10 minutes a day. But that's because I was legitimately having heaps of fun. I wanted to spend a bunch of time with Spanish, and I didn't need any weird gamification tricks to help me sustain that level of motivation.
Yeah, same for me using Assimil for French (along with a few other tools). Six months in I could read L'Étranger in French.
My next project once I can pass the C1 test is to use their French -> Spanish course. I kind of recommend them to anyone that will listen, as their method worked really well for me.
For me I mostly use Duolingo as a mechanism to encourage myself to spend time learning each day. I find that it's helpful for reviewing a lot of basic vocabulary, but I typically supplement it with other stuff (listening to music, watching shows, youtube language channels, AI conversations, etc). I find I make the most progress when I choose to do things that are challenging which Duolingo really is not.
This. The idea is super cool in theory! But given how these sort of things work today, having a toy that can have an independent conversation with a kid and that, despite the best intentions of the prompt writer, isn't guaranteed to stay within its "sandbox", is terrifying enough to probably not be worth the risk.
IMO this is only exacerbated by how little children (who are the presumably the target audience for stuffed animals that talk) often don't follow "normal" patterns of conversation or topics, so it feels like it'd be hard to accurately simulate/test ways in which unexpected & undesirable responses could come out.
I'm trying to use my imagination, but what exactly is the fear? Perhaps the AI will explain where baby's come from in graphic detail before the parent is ready to have that conversation or something similar? Or, for us in US, maybe it tells your kid they should wear a bullet proof vest to pre-K instead of bringing a stuffy for naptime?
Essentially, telling kids the truth before they're ready and without typical parental censorship? Or is there some other fear, like the AI will get compromised by a pedo and he'll talk your kid into who knows what? Or similar for "fill in state actor" using mind control on your kid (which, honestly, I feel like is normalized even for adults; eg. Fox News, etc., again US-centric)
I'll respond to the content, because I think there are some genuine questions amongst the condescension and jumping to conclusions.
> telling kids the truth before they're ready and without typical parental censorship
Does AI today reliably respond with "the truth"? There are countless documented incidents of even full-grown, extremely well-educated adults (e.g. lawyers) believing well-phased hallucinations. Kids, and particularly small kids who haven't yet had much education about critical thinking and what to believe, have no chance. Conversational AI today isn't an uncensured search engine into a set of well-reasoned facts, it's an algorithm constructing a response based on what it's learned people on the internet want to hear, with no real concept of what's right or wrong, or a foundational set of knowledge about the world to contrast with and validate against.
> what exactly is the fear
Being fed reliable-sounding misinformation is one. Another is being used for emotional support (which kids do even with non-talking stuffed animals), when the AI has no real concept of how to emotionally support a kid and could just as easily do the opposite. I guess overall, the concern is having a kid spend a large amount of time talking to "someone" who sounds very convincing, has no real sense of morality or truth, and can potentially distort their world view in negative ways.
And yea, there's also exposing kids to subjects they're in no way equipped to handle yet, or encouraging them to do something that would result in harm to themselves or to others. Kids are very suggestible, and it takes a long while for them to develop a real understanding of the consequences of their actions.
Bravo, this is an answer beyond the outright fearmongering that actually makes sense and I wasn't considering. I still struggle with how it's much different than social media in terms of shaping what kids believe and their perception of reality, but I do get what you're saying - that this could be next level dangerous in terms of them believing what it says without much critical thinking.
Can this not occur on Youtube/Roblox and other places where kids using tablets go? Mass generalizations about what I observe -> I don't see why/how parents do the mental gymnastics that tablets are acceptable but AI is to be feared. There's always going to be articles like this, it's a big world everything will have a dark side if you search for it. It's life. [Actually, I think a lot of parents are willing to accept/ignore the risks because tablets offer too great of a service. This type of AI simply won't entertain/babysit a kid long enough for parents to give into it.]
I have a 6 year old FWIW, I'm not some childless ignoramus I just do my risk calcs differently and view it as my job to oversee their use of a device like this. I wouldn't fear it outright because of what could happen. If I took that stance, my kid would never have any experiences at all.
Can't play baseball, I read a story where kid got hit by a bat. Can't travel to Mexico, cartels are in the news again. Home school it is, because shootings. And so on.
A 6yo can not meaningfully give informed consent to ToSs or privacy polies of YouTube and Roblox so even supervised is ethically problematic depending on how it's done. Unsupervised is obviously not safe and I do not see anyone here arguing that.
I don't think that argument needs to be made here, I mentioned it because it's something I observe daily in the real world. I talk to parents who let their kids use these things, I inquire about their reasons for doing so and their level of oversight. It's something I've personally taken an interest in as a parent myself who has a no tolerance policy towards it; I like to know other people's justifications for allowing it. Many of them do not supervise the use BTW. Even people I consider great parents otherwise, they may setup some parental control stuff initially but then the kid is off with their device in another room.
When it comes to privacy policies and ToS, I think a 6yo is reading into it just as much as their parent does. And by that I mean just looking for the [Agree] button.
> Perhaps the AI will explain where baby's come from in graphic detail before the parent is ready to have that conversation or something similar?
I mean, that's not a silly fear. But perhaps you don't have any children? "Typical parental censorship" doesn't mean prudish pearl-clutching.
I have an autistic child who already struggles to be appropriate with things like personal space and boundaries -- giving him an early "birds and bees talk" could at minimum result in him doing and saying things that could cause severe trauma to his peers. And while he uses less self-control than a typical kid, even "completely normal" kids shouldn't be robbed of their innocence and forced to confront every adult subject until they're mature enough to handle it. There's a reason why content ratings exist.
Explaining difficult subjects to children, such as the Holocaust, sexual assault, etc. is very difficult to do in a way that doesn't leave them scarred, fearful, or worse, end up warping their own moral development so that they identify with the bad actors.
I have a 6 year old. I don't let him use the internet or tablets or phones, so I get it, question was out of curiosity of other people's thought process. I just lack the imagination to know what other people are actually afraid of as I often find people have what I consider far fetched boogeyman imaginations. Yet, they allow their infants to play on an iPad for hours, etc. which I find no more/less risky especially as they become older and can seek out content they prefer. My ban on it for my kid is more so based on my parenting opinion that boredom is a life skill and beneficial to young minds (probably all ages actually) and constant entertainment/screentime is unhealthy. I don't ban the devices because I'm afraid of the content he may encounter, I just want him to enjoy his childhood before it's inevitably stolen by screens.
I think my theory is kind of correct, people generally 'trust' a YouTube censor but an AI censor is currently seen as untrusted boogeyman territory.
In the past month I’ve completed a home dashboard idea I’ve had for years, I’ve built a house management system, a travel planning tool, a guitar chord annotator… it’s been very liberating. I’m not doing the coding, which was fun, but I am doing all of the system design and iteration, which I also really enjoy.