It’s a terrific car if you want a great handling convertible at a low price point. As you said, it’s fun.
It’s not good at moving a lot of people or things, or going really fast, or lasting for 500k miles, or being as cheap as possible. Other cars are good at some of those things, but what is the Miata missing that is otherwise required to be a ‘good’ car?
That's exactly the problem though; humans will anthropomorphize everything from a roomba to a rock as it is. We're weak to this. We evolved in environments where looking for and recognizing real animals and humans was vital for survival, and false positives were relatively harmless. (Or potentially sometimes even helpful, like in the case of stuffed animals providing comfort to children.)
Now we have this software that's specifically designed to mimic humans, and mistaking it for real intelligence or consciousness can easily be disastrous. It's very important that we not anthropomorphize it, but we are catastrophically bad at NOT doing that.
Even our language has had a lot of computer anthropomorphism baked into it ("my phone died!", "this laptop is fussy", "the computer is sleeping", "it's thinking"), and it's not easy to excise that routine anthropomorphism from the way we talk about LLMs.
I don't want an LLM to write as if it were a person because it's definitely easier and more reliable to cut that problem off at the root, as much as possible, rather than to just try to willpower my way out of my human tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate objects.
I'll grant that LLMs talk like this because they're trained on human writing. It may not be possible to get them to not do that. But if it can't be fixed, it's just another thing to put on the "reasons this is all an incredibly stupid idea" pile.
You seem to have something against the clankers getting all uppity. And you are welcome to your opinion on whether we have some moral obligation to be nice to them. But if you can solve a real problem with a tool. Is it worth your time to complain about semantics?
Do you get upset when your screwdriver is the wrong color, or has branding that isn’t quite your aesthetic?
If Claude uses I to refer to itself, do you start philosophical arguments with it?
Mildly related tangent. Fable started using my first name today and plastered it all over my docs. “Peddling said this, so based on that I did this.” That did bother me. I told it to just generically call me the user or human. Maybe I’m a bit of a hypocrite here?
That's not how it works. The text you see is primarily due to a massive amount of handwritten templates for how it should write. The semantic content the templates use is due to the training corpus. The syntax, only a bit.
But that syntax is followed by predicting the next token.
Even if it was instructed to write as if it were a robot -- it would ultimately be outputting what is statistically most likely for a human mimicking a robot, based on the training corpus.
It is all ultimately a statistical predictor of the input material.
> You're anthropomorphizing in the same breath that you criticize anthropomorphism.
Nice attempt at a “aha, gotcha!” comment, but sadly you’re too off-mark for it to work.
> Claude predicts the next token of the predominantly human training input, and humans use "I".
This is inconsequential. It could very well be programmed to not assume such a personified stance, and yet here we are. Nothing you do makes it drop this ridiculous facade. It’s intentional, not a byproduct.
That's fairly obtuse. Sure, the actual weights from the model aren't 'programmed', but the mlops harness to load the weights and handle model io are. The harness that wraps the model to give it basic tools sure is. The Claude desktop and web clients sure are. Claude Codex sure is.
On it's own a model is just an inert set of data structures.
Flux can be hazardous too, even if your solder is lead-free.
But in a non-occupational exposure setting you're not likely to have issues if you solder occasionally even with lead solder and don't take any precautions.
Or maybe the designers of the booths could have simply familiarized themselves with the most basic of laws they were required to comply with before designing the damn thing with an unnecessary step.
The page lists some of the requirements, e.g. accuracy, completeness, equivalence in access, etc. The point of their pitch is that you can't simply tell your SWEs to slap automated captions on something, check a box, and call it a day. You'd need to actually confirm you're meeting the requirements, which is something that a human who is trained in this compliance activity would do. (and something that unaware SWEs often miss)
A common compliance mistake (for any type of compliance, not just ADA) is:
* someone tells an SWE to implement [compliance measure]
* they implement poor quality [compliance measure] that doesn't actually meet the compliance requirement, close jira ticket
* they don't realize they didn't meet the compliance requirement because they don't use or need [compliance measure] and they are a SWE without any expertise with the law or the understanding of reason for the need for that requirement
Nah, people with disabilities aren't an exception that can be safely ignored, they are real humans who exist and who deserve to be respected and accommodated equally by those who build public accommodations.
Is the problem negligibly solved by technology or is it a huge compliance burden for public accommodations? It's one or the other.
The reality is that many things are in fact not accessible in very real ways, and people like to pretend that the problem does not exist when their paycheck depends on them pretending it does not exist.
If we're talking about wheelchair access, the law is pretty crystal clear and every construction company in the US routinely follows it every time they build a public structure.
Temporary structures are often built without code compliance out of expediency, and this is that. Sucks to ignore the law and be called out. There's really no excuse to be surprised by wheelchair accessibility compliance in a public retail establishment in the US in 2026.
For many charitable activities it may be, but also, the University of California system has a 53.6 billion dollar budget. They could pay some people to caption them if they cared to do so.
They could have, but they didn't, then they got sued, and now kids in Kenya can't watch world-class lectures. Thanks, disability advocates! Thanks, UC!
It was solely UC's decision to pull the lectures rather than comply with the 36 year old law that they were already well aware of but decided of their own accord to ignore. They never cared about being charitable, they cared about the ROI on their marketing stunt to make themselves look charitable.
They are a government land-grant public institution that is supposed to provide services equitably to their citizens. They shouldn’t be pinching pennies to enrich their administrators. They should be held accountable for following the law and their obligations in the work they are required to do. If anyone should be setting an example for equity, or at the least following its own damn laws, it should be our government itself.
The same reason the free sidewalks in front of Berkeley can fit a wheelchair. Because it is illegal to make one that discriminates against people who use one. Even if it's free.
reply