The Next Step for AI - Full Personal Interaction Capture

The open web has been and will continue to decline. The incentives to create content are further decreasing due to AI tools that answer user questions based on web search and content. Even just maintaining public access to existing content will not be obviously economical in the medium term. The text part of the web is mostly captured, images and video are under way. Since killing the open web and future content for AI training is bad, I wondered what the next big step is. The step that puts the AI data feedback loop on a sustainable path.

In my view the main goal is to capture all personal input and output via microphone, camera and computer-use observation. This would represent a step-up in data set size and quality, and get AI closer to human performance. The value add would be a cooperative AI integrated in this manner. I.e. it listens, watches and contributes through loud speakers and computer/phone use.

With this, AI platforms will cocreate and try to fully predict the article that a person has not written yet, and the book that may be written one day. Perhaps this would even yield better results as these are often unnecessarily verbose. Besides, most people won’t read the whole piece anyways. So some meta version, adapted to personal preference when viewed, seems better. Such a system requires profit sharing as an incentive or perhaps platforms can get away with just taking it. The implications for sovereignty and law are big.

When the conversations, computer-use and cameras of a large group of people (ultimately everyone) is digested, it would likely become possible to rediscover or redefine the social hierarchy. On the surface, the AI does not immediately know the relative importance of what it is looking at. It is implicit in page rank, titles, relationships, money, job descriptions, followers, social standing, contracts and labels. But it should be possible to find this relationship in the training data, and even generate a novel, perhaps more equitable, version. This could facilitate connecting skill, ideas and capital more efficiently. Again the implications are enormous.

The only company within reach of capturing all personal input and output, as well as being able to fully integrate AI cooperation is Apple. They have the devices, smart glasses on the horizon and a basic foundation with Continuity for seamless, cross-device, personal AI cooperation.

Load Local Vimrc Automatically From Parent Directories

It is common to have different indention settings for different programming projects. For example:

    /path/to/my/project/.vimrc:
    autocmd FileType cpp setl ts=4 sts=4 sw=4 expandtab

Add the following snippet to the end of your Vimrc, so that when opening Vim, it will traverse all parent directories and open any local Vimrc file it finds. To avoid infinite recursion, traversal ends in $HOME.

    let b:dir=resolve(expand('%:p:h'))
    let b:home=resolve($HOME)

    while b:dir != $HOME && b:dir != '/'
        if (filereadable(b:dir.'/.vimrc'))
            execute 'source '.b:dir.'/.vimrc'
        endif
        let b:dir=fnamemodify(b:dir, ':h')
    endwhile

Note that the starting directory is of the first file in your Vim command. Not the current directory, and not all directories of all files given.

I prefer simple solutions over plugins, but for completeness sake I need to mention that localrc.vim and localvimrc do the same, and likely better.

Dell XPS 7590 SSD Benchmark

While I was shopping for a new laptop, I wanted to know which SSDs Dell includes in their XPS 15" models. So I called sales support. It turns out they don't know, and as of 2019, you lose warranty if you change any part. They should stop calling it CRU then! I don't know whether or not there is a seal or how they make sure you didn't tamper with the machine, or if this policy is even enforced.

So going with the included, unspecified disk was the only safe option. In my case it turned out to be a Micron 2200S NVMe disk, which is likely the same as the 2200. According to AnandTech the warranty endurance is 300 TB written, which is OK for a 1TB disk. A Samsung 970 Evo Plus has 600, my old Intel 600p has 200 TB.

 

It took me a while to figure out which laptop to get. In short, for me, Dell's XPS 15" cost 700€ less than the Lenovo X1 Extreme or P1 and Dell offers US international keyboards. Lenovo offers only European layouts in Germany. And you can't change them yourself in these two models.

In hindsight I'm not sure about my choice, anymore. The 4K screen is badly supported in KDE/Kubuntu. Everything is off, dialog sizes are weird, all icon sizes are weird, margins and icon placement in buttons is off. The mouse cursor switches between normal-size and half-size depending on the window you are hovering over. And if you attach an external monitor, KDE's settings offer only one global scaling factor for all screens. I.e. everything is huge if you set it 2x for the 4K internal display. The keyboard is way worse than Lenovo's and is missing the Home, End, Page-Up and Page-Down keys that I heavily use(d).

Maybe going with the Lenovo X1 Extreme or P1 with a more affordable 1080p screen and the English (EU) layout would have worked out better.