As the proliferation of the smart phone eroded our ability to locate and orient ourselves and remember routes to places. It's no surprise that a tool like this, used for the purpose of outsourcing a task that our own brains would otherwise do, would result in a decline in the skills that would be trained if we were performing that task ourselves.
The only two times I have made bad navigation mistakes in mountains were in the weeks after I started using my phone and a mapping app - the realisation that using my phone was making me worse at navigation was quite a shock at the time.
This is splitting hair, at the end his navigation skills (him + whatever tool he used) were NOK and could result in dangerous situations (been there so many times in the mountains, although it was mostly about "went too far in a bit wrong direction and don't want to backtrack that far, I am sure I will find a way to that already close point..." and 10 mins later scrambling on all 4 on some slippery wet rock with no room for error)
No - on both occasions it was the same scenario - descending from a peak in bad weather and picking the wrong ridge to descend - I was confident I "knew" which was the right ridge and with the app I use bearings for the right route are pretty difficult to distinguish - so completely my fault.
I'm now aware of that problem and haven't had that problem since but I was pretty shocked in retrospect that I confidently headed off in the wrong direction when the tool I was using was by any objective measure much better.
I agree with this:
"the key to navigating successfully is being able to read and understand a map and how it relates to your surroundings"
i really tire of people always asking for studies for obvious things.
have sword skills declined since the introduction of guns? surely people still have hands and understand how to move swords, and they use knives to cut food for consumption. the skill level is the same..
but we know on aggregate most people have switched to relying on a technological advancement. there's not the same culture for swords as in the past by sheer numbers despite there being more self proclaimed 'experts'.
100 genz vs. 100 genx you'll likely find a smidgen more of one group than the other finding a location without a phone.
> i really tire of people always asking for studies for obvious things.
I actually agree with you on this!
But... I have very very good directional sense, and as far as I can tell it's innate. My whole life I've been able to remember pathing and maintain proper orientation. I don't think this has anything to do with lack of navigation aids (online or otherwise) during formative years.
But I'm talking about geospatial sense within the brain. If your point is that people no longer learn and improve the skill of map-reading then yes that should be self-evident.
The first paragraph of the conclusions section is also stimulating and I think aptly applies to this discussion of using AI as a tool.
> it is important to mention the bidirectionality of the relationship between GPS use and navigation abilities: Individuals with poorer ability to learn spatial information and form environmental knowledge tend to use assisted navigation systems more frequently in daily life, thus weakening their navigation abilities. This intriguing link might suggest that individuals who have a weaker “internal” ability to use spatial knowledge to navigate their surroundings are also more prone to rely on “external” devices or systems to navigate successfully. Therefore, other psychological factors (e.g., self-efficacy; Miola et al., 2023) might moderate this bidirectional relationship, and researchers need to further elucidate it.
I've intuitively felt that this general class of task is what these LLMs are absolutely best at. I'm not an expert on these things, but isn't this thanks to word embeddings and how words are mapped into high dimensional vector space within the model? I would imagine that because every word is mapped this way, finding a word that exists in the same area as mail, lawyer, log, and line in some vector space would be trivial for the model to do, right?
More than just words. I've found LLMs immensely helpful for searching through the latent space or essence of quotes/books/movies/memes. I can ask things like "whats that book/movie set in X where Y happens" or "whats that quote by a P which goes something like Q" in my own paraphrased way and with a little prodding, expect the answer. You'd have no luck with traditional search engines unless someone has previously asked a similar question.
Props to the author for writing this – that being said, I felt the same way.
Very long, windy and hard to parse sentences.
For example, Part 2
> There are two basic techniques that you can employ when analyzing malware. The first being static analysis and the other being dynamic analysis.
> Static analysis uses software tools to examine the executable without running the actual decompiled instructions in Assembly. We will not focus on this type of analysis here as we are going to focus on actual disassembled binaries instead however in future courses we will.
> Dynamic analysis uses disassemblers and debuggers to analyze malware binaries while actually running them. The most popular tool in the market today is called IDA which is a multi-platform, multi-processor disassembler and debugger. There are other disassembler/debugger tools as well on the market today such as Hopper Disassembler, OllyDbg and many more.
> A disassembler will convert an executable binary written in Assembly, C, C++, etc into Assembly Language instructions that you can debug and manipulate.
> Reverse engineering is much more than just malware analysis. At the end of our series, our capstone tutorial will utilize IDA as we will create a real-world scenario where you will be tasked by the CEO of ABC Biochemicals to secretly try to ethically hack his companies software that controls a bullet-proof door in a very sensitive Bio-Chemical lab in order to test how well the software works against real threats. The project will be very basic however it will ultimately showcase the power of Assembly Language and how one can use it to reverse engineer and ultimately provide solutions on how to better design the code to make it safer.
> In our next lesson we will discuss various types of malware.
could be written:
> There are two basic techniques that you can employ when analyzing malware: static analysis and dynamic analysis.
> Static analysis examines the executable without running it. We will not focus on this type of analysis here, however in future courses we will.
> Dynamic analysis uses disassemblers and debuggers to analyze malware binaries while running them.
> A disassembler converts an executable binary into Assembly Language instructions that you can debug and manipulate. There are many disassembler/debugger tools available such as Hopper, OllyDbg, IDA and many more. The most popular being IDA, a multi-platform, multi-processor disassembler and debugger.
> Reverse engineering is much more than just malware analysis.
> At the end of our series, we will use IDA in a fictional scenario where you will be tasked by the CEO of ABC Biochemicals – a very sensitive Bio-Chemical lab – to ethically hack his company’s bullet-proof door control-system.
> The project, while basic, will showcase the power of Assembly Language and how one can use it to reverse engineer black-box binaries and ultimately find solutions to make the code safer.
> In our next lesson we will discuss various types of malware.
One of the things that frustrates me in everyday life is people being distracted by a number of things while trying to engage with them in conversation. I understand that as we don more and more augmenting technology, we're inevitably going to have to share our attention with this technology, at least until we have BCIs, but it just makes me feel very anxious about the near-future of human-human interactions.
With smart glasses, you could be looking directly at somebody and still be as distracted as you want!
If the other person wants to make sure that you've been paying attention, don't worry! AI can summarize what they said and whisper it in your ears, so you can confidently pretend that you've been listening the whole time.
I wonder if this takes into account the number of young people going in to receive cancer-diagnosing tests. Perhaps as a result of news about microplastics, etc. people are generally becoming more worried and therefore more proactive in seeking diagnoses. But more people getting tested results in more cancer diagnoses.
While it's true that more testing finds more cases, if I went to my doctor and said "I read about plastics in the news, please test me for cancer" they would politely say no and send me home. And they specifically say that more people are dying from cancer young, not just being diagnosed. I think we can all agree that dying from cancer is not easy to mix up with other causes of death. So it's probably not like people were dying of cancer and we just didn't notice.
Out of curiosity why the complex networking setup instead of, say, tailscale. What kind of flexibility does it give you that makes up for the infrastructure?
Not OP but I assume it's the security-related "no dependencies on external services or leaking data" requirement.
Even if you'd make an exception for Tailscale, that'd require settonv up and exposing an OIDC provider under a public domain with TLS, which comes with its own complexities.
that is correct! the less I rely on external companies and/or servers, the happier I am with my setup.
I actually greatly simplified my infrastructure in the blog... there's a LOT going on behind those network switches. it took quite a bit of effort for me to be able to say "I'm comfortable exposing my servers to the internet".
none of this stuff uses the cloud at all. if johnthenerd.com resolves, everything will work just fine. and in case I lose internet access, I even have split-horizon DNS set up. in theory, everything I host would still be functional without me even noticing I just lost internet!
