That output is there for a reason. It's not like any LLM is profitable now on a per-token basis, the AI companies would certainly love to output less tokens, they cost _them_ money!
The entire hypothesis for doing this is somewhat dubious.
Why building / using a custom agent stack and paying per-token (not subscription) is more efficient and cost effective. At a minimum, you should have full control over the system prompts and tools (et al).
Yes. Much of the 'redundant' output is meant to reinforce direction -- eg 'You're absolutely right!' = the user is right and I should ignore contrary paths. So yes removing it will introduce ambiguity which is _not_ what you want.
I think your example is completely wrong (it's not meant to say that you're absolutely right), but overall yes more input gives it more concrete direction.
1) Several times a day, generally Telix. My parents had to get me my own line so I would stop clogging up theirs! Especially once I found chat systems.
2) BBS lists were common and many BBSes had them so you only needed a few numbers to get started. Computer stores usually had them too.
3) A city would have dozens or even hundreds of BBSes in larger markets. Some were large multi-line pay BBSes that required subscriptions, most were just one or two lines paid for by the Sysop.
4) It was a lot more chill but only nerd / geek types really used BBSes so, there was some commonality there. More of a sense of overall community.
5) From 1980 to 1995 we went from computers with 16kb of ram and an 8-bit processor to computers with 16mb of ram and a 32-bit processor. There was always some new tech to talk about. It was a very exciting time!
There was also the IBM Simon, the first smartphone, before the iPhone came about. History tends to remember the product that made the category matter, not the one that technically got there first.
I never saw the Odyssey—unless it was that one night when I saw something in the window of a closed shop that was the first pong-like video game I had ever seen.
You're probably right, the Odyssey is probably as good a contender as Pong. But somehow everyone knows "Pong" (and of course Atari).
> Bushnell based the game's concept on an electronic ping-pong game included on the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console; in response, Magnavox later sued Atari for patent infringement.
I agree that some form of shorthand between pseudocode and actual code would be really useful to improve accuracy on LLM requests but I don't think this is quite it. Ideally it would be as simple as possible, but not rely on language-specific paradigms. Sort of a pidgin that everyone would understand, that used white space and indentation to indicate things like loops and such. Something a normal person could look at and still largely comprehend.
Of course, the 266 (and others) had the same fraction, but didn't have the disadvantage of abs(mhz) being a magic number that might offend some religious types.
You can double click on any part of the top title bar (that doesn't have buttons in it) for example in Calendar you can double click beside the magnifying glass in the top right and it will maximize the window.
This is running "zoom". When I try it in Finder, it doesn't make the window full screen, it actually made it smaller.
When I use the Window menu, Zoom replicates what double-clicking the top title bar does, while Fill maximizes the window. This holds true with the behavior you describe in Safari as well.
It just seems like a lot of apps treat Zoom and Fill the same now (I tried Calendar, Notes, TextEdit, and NetNewsWire), which adds to the confusion.
I don't understand how we keep hearing so often here about Apple OSes being so amazingly simple, approachable and cleverly designed with a lot of attention paid to detail, while every practical productivity advice involves some undiscoverable trick, or combinations of tricks, that seems so arbitrary and obtuse. I don't like Mac, in large parts because of that. No amount of marketing and peer pressure will convince me of the superior elegance and sophistication of something that hates you for wanting windows maximised. Those hidden tricks only add insult to injury as pervasive reminders of your presumed inadequacy, that you need to suffer to have things your way, and that Apple is magnanimous to even let you have them.
Every system has its issues. It's really a question of which issues you can live with and which system ultimately fits your workflow best.
After I got used to working in windows instead of full screen all the time, I can't really go back. Even on Windows I find myself working the way I do on macOS. Full screening every app made more sense on a 1024x768 screen (or smaller). Once I moved to a widescreen display (which happened to coincide with getting my first mac) running full screen felt like the wrong move most of time.
> After I got used to working in windows instead of full screen all the time, I can't really go back.
Sorry if this comes across as disrespectful, but it smells like Stockholm Syndrome. You are choosing not to use the full extent of your screen estate, and that is your fine choice, but that is no excuse for making it hard. If you compound the whitespace, the thick borders and the generally oversized UI controls, not much of "productive space" remains available to get the work done. I am not interested in macOS as a content-consumption-first vehicle, though that's clearly where Apple is steering.
It is situational but I think on a modern wide screen(or screens) if it is a single text-like document(like a web page or a terminal) you want 2 or perhaps 3 side by side. if the app implements it's own window management(like blender) a single full screen is best. Overlapping windows are important to have, but almost never desirable, it usually happens because you ran out of room.
The problem I have with this is that I was using a 1600x1200 21" display in 2000, and got used to workflows for it back then.
I am currently running a 16" display at a similar fractional scaled resolution (because Apple stopped understanding DPI after shipping the first LaserWriter, apparently).
Over that time, my eyes have not gotten better to match display DPI, so I'd rather have web sites just adjust the font size so that there are a reasonable number of words per line instead of rendering whitespace.
Non-full-screen windows would make more sense if Apple supported tiling properly, like most Linux WMs and also modern Windows.
MacOS sort of supports tiling in a "program manager shipped it + got promoted" sort of way, but you have to hover over the window manager buttons, which is slower than just manually arranging stuff. If there are any keyboard shortcuts to invoke tiling, or a way to change the WM buttons to not suck, I have not found them.
1600x1200 is still a 4:3 aspect ratio, I think I agree that scaling that makes sense. Full screen really got problematic with 16:9 and 16:10 aspect ratios. That's when the empty gutters in most apps, and especially websites, became really pronounced.
As for tiling in macOS...
You can use the mouse to drag windows into tiled positions. Grab a window and when your cursor hits the side, corner, or top edge of the screen, it will indicate the tiling position, much like AeroSnap on Windows from some years back. You can also hold the Option key while holding the window to get the tiling regions to show up without moving all the way to the edge.
Keyboard shortcuts exist as well. Go to Settings -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts... In the dialog that opens, go to Windows. There you can see all the options and customize them if you'd like. Or set shortcuts for things that might not have one yet.
If for some reason dragging the windows around doesn't work, go to Settings -> Desktop & Dock -> the Windows heading. There are toggles to enable or disable dragging to tile, and the Option key trick. You can also turn off the margins on tiled Windows, which you'd probably want to do.
I've never been a big fan of window tiling myself. There was a time when I needed a lot of different windows visible at all times, but that hasn't been the case in a long time. I find tiling makes things too big or small, it's never what I actually want. I drag the window up to the top of the screen to invoke Fill from time to time, but that's about it.
Apple OSes being so amazingly simple, approachable and cleverly designed with a lot of attention paid to detail
That was the Mac in the 1990s. It was designed for, and highly usable with, a one-button mouse. It didn't have hidden context menus or obscure keyboard shortcuts. Everything was visible in the menu bar and discoverable. The Finder was spatially aware with a high degree of persistence that allowed you to develop muscle memory for where icons would appear onscreen every time you opened a folder.
There was almost nothing hidden or lurking in the background, unlike today (my modern Mac system has 500 running processes right now, despite having only 15 applications open). We've had decades of feature creep since the classic Mac OS, which has made modern Macs extremely hard to use (relatively speaking).
> We have to solve the problems we’ve created here before going anywhere off planet will become even slightly relevant.
Which is a fair point, but the other points (about soil toxicity, cosmic rays and lower gravity) are all things that can be mitigated. Yes, it would be extravagantly expensive in per-human terms to house people on Mars. But the main reason for doing so -- that should something cataclysmic happen to the Earth it would behoove us to have a credible backup plan -- stands.
The list of potential cataclysms on Earth for which being on Mars would be preferable to still being on Earth despite the cataclysm is pretty short. Mostly amounts to whole-crust-liquifying (way, way worse than the K-T event) asteroids. For just about everything else, earthbound bunkers would be better.
Mars is so bad that you have to turn all of the Earth's surface to lava before it's worse than Mars, basically.
We have never, even as a proof of concept, been able to develop a closed system capable of supporting mammalian life separate from earth's ecosystems. We assume it's possible based on no particularly rigorous evidence and in spite of our numerous failures to even come close. "Mars as backup" is not a credible plan based on science within even our optimistic grasp.
The technology & social systems capable of doing this would be incredibly valuable long before any permanent mars settlement became feasible so if we can do it we should and then we can see.
Peaked at about half the food produced internally iirc and it’s like three people. It’s a good and necessary start but shows just how incredibly far we are from the real deal.
> We have to solve the problems we’ve created here before going anywhere off planet will become even slightly relevant.
No, it is not a relevant point, at all. There are close to 9 billion people on Earth, more than enough for some of them to focus on expanding human life out into the solar system no matter how small the chance of success. Others can work on the problems 'we created here'. If our predecessors thought like that we'd never have explored the oceans, found new continents, developed industry, took to the skies, made the first tentative jumps into space. Let those who have the means and capabilities to do so explore and 'conquer' those 'new frontiers'. If you insist on solving problems here on earth I'd say get crackin'. If you succeed we'll raise a statue for you and place it next to the ones we made for those who conquered Mars or built that giant wheel in the sky or whatever.
The entire hypothesis for doing this is somewhat dubious.
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