Highly-structured outputs (like what you'd need for tool calls) seems like it'd be easier to put out than arbitrary text, no? At the very least, even something like BERT could make the decision of “Would any of my available tools be useful here?” and delegate to some deeper-thinking model to structure that tool call.
> Given that it lacks both broad world knowledge and tool calling integration in any way, that seems kind of like a dead-end.
In its current form probably. I think the key to taking this further would be to split the listening model from the speaking model, and have some model(s) in between that can do those database/knowledgebase queries and tool calls and such and influence how the speaking model response to what the hearing model perceives. That's probably pretty similar to how ChatGPT Live and similar are operating (STT→LLM→TTS), but Dessa demonstrates that it doesn't have to necessarily be text/language, specifically, as the intermediary — and therefore it doesn't have to necessarily be an LLM, specifically, as that intermediate model.
Pretty sure in most/all the cases mentioned, they were available as extensions long before Zen had them. In particular, both Zen's and Firefox's built-in vertical tabs feel like a bit of a downgrade from Tree Style Tabs (which I continue to use on Firefox, and also used on Zen last time I tried it).
Depends on what one values. I tried TST and Sidebery among other extensions for Firefox, but their "bolted on" feeling always bothered me. That can be somewhat fixed with userChrome mods, but those tend to be fragile and it's not unusual for them break with updates, and even with the mods they're not as integrated as native vertical tabs.
For my personal usage I find the deep nesting of TST to get in the way more than it helps and so the simpler model of Arc/Zen where nesting only happens intentionally is nice.
Indeed you need to write some firefox css to use either TST or Sidebery. But it's pretty rare for it to break. It actually broke a few days ago, I fixed it in a few minutes - ctrl+shift+alt+i opens the developer tools for the browser UI itself, then it's a matter of selecting the faulty element and writing the CSS to hide it or whatever. Or, ask a LLM to write the CCS for you. Or check out https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/ since probably someone has posted a fix there
> even with the mods they're not as integrated as native vertical tabs.
I was maintaining such a setup for a while and didn't have such luck. Sometimes it'd fully break and sometimes things would shift around due to other CSS changing, but whatever the case it's more than I had the patience to babysit.
> Hmm what's Sidebery missing?
The extensions themselves aren't lacking, but they suffer from being extensions and not part of the browser proper, which makes for occasional weird interactions and glitches and the "seams" between extension and host becoming tangible from time to time. Things just work better when the browser "knows" about the tabs being vertical and having deeper organization than is possible with horizontal tab bars, or is even designed around vertical tabs being the only option (like Arc/Zen).
I used and love TST (plus a huge number of extensions - TST is an extension that is extended with further extensions!) but it's complex and clunky.
Sidebery can do the 80% of TST that matters, with a better UI and UX and saner defaults. Also it has a feature to save and restore all tabs, with the whole tree structure preserved (even though I think it should be its own extension)
Only problem is that I suspect that Sidebery has severe memory leaks (not entirely sure it's the culprit though)
Many adults have mutually incompatible ideas of what would make the world better. Many adults are willing to use violence to make their version of the world become a thing. It's not really as simple as saying it doesn't have to be this way.
Could essentially be saying, obey and work. A lot of people won't agree that is the ideal life. If that's not how you interpreted it then you have my point.
Being a good person, being a good citizen, and making the world better are all really sides of the same (somehow-three-sided) coin: do what you can for yourself, for your community, for your society. They apply even in the complete absence of hierarchies and higher authorities (and are indeed the very core of anarchism: making societal decisions bottom-up from individuals and the communities thereof, not top-down from some supreme executive authority).
> I once tried to come up with a single-word purpose for education, and I landed upon the word “resourceful”, because I reasoned that if you “were able to use arbitrary resources to uncover and solve problems”, you had no more need for schooling. In the age of Google, email, and the internet, a person was educated when they could wield them. But now I see my vision of resourcefulness perfected in the AI agent and its tool loop. Maybe resourcefulness will go the way of the Dewey Decimal System which in turn supplanted memorization and an oral tradition.
I disagree here that agentic AI somehow replaces the need for humans to be resourceful. LLMs and their harnesses are just more resources for humans to use to uncover and solve problems, and resourcefulness is more important than ever for navigating a world increasingly riddled with slop (of the AI-generated variety or otherwise) and enshittification. A properly-functioning education system should absolutely emphasize resourcefulness as the primary skill to teach students, even (especially!) in the post-AI world.
> Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal
I disagree. Making money is a means to an end, that end being one's ability to live a comfortable life as a member of society. If other means are able to achieve that end, then that reduces the need (or even desire) for money.
While I'd cynically agree that modern society as structured today will fight tooth and nail to keep those other means from being viable (because the current powers-that-be are such specifically because they were able to accumulate the most money), that doesn't have to be the case. We can and should demand better.
You can demand whatever you want, but most people are not going to be with you. Very few people at least in the US are going to agree with the communist perspective that a street cleaner or security guard should be paid the same amount as a doctor. You can suggest some form of workable socialism, which would be good, but I am mainly referring to the transition phase between now and some sort of utopian future where resources are unlimited and robots do all of our physical and mental labor. That transition period is going to last decades or for the rest of our lives and most of the early period, at the very least, for our kids.
“the communist perspective that a street cleaner or security guard should be paid the same amount as a doctor”
Nobody in this thread (AFAICT) is arguing for that. By all means, people who contribute more to society should be rewarded for it. The only thing being argued is that everyone deserves to enjoy a baseline standard of living, on top of which they might receive additional benefits in exchange for the work they do. As automation continues to expand, providing everyone with that baseline standard of living unconditionally becomes more and more practical to achieve, in which case it becomes more and more unethical for society to refuse to do so.
Humans as individuals and groups will fight tooth and nail to "have more" because that is our nature. Money was a brilliant invention that allowed people to get what they want without forcefully taking it from someone else, or having a particular skill or thing that you could barter.
No they won't..like, observably they won't. This is a problem almost every entrepreneur who looked at small businesses as a start up opportunity ran into immediately: most small businesses are run by people who are exactly happy with where they got to, and so showing up and promising you'll expand the business goes over as well as a lead balloon.
Open street map servers aren't really meant to be used in end user applications. They are primarily to support the editing of the map data. Usage like this should be with a provider like Mapbox, or your own supplied tiles.
I've recently found out that this is not quite true - while the primary purpose of their tile servers is mapping and editing applications, they do allow third party apps to use the servers as long as they follow usage policies: https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/
Especially in the western half of the US. Exactly four, half of them here in Nevada, none of them in California despite Google itself being headquartered there.
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