Grok has the most useful voice mode (ChatGPT voice mode is very dumb, grok seems to use same model as main chat), so if I want to use voice this is the AI I use.
Also I use it for all uncomplicated topics because it gives precise short answers without fluff. Very refreshing.
I have mold problem in one of the bathrooms. What would be your recommendation? Seal off bathroom and run UV, then vent? Or do I need to do entire house? I can also seal off bathroom and bedroom. Thanks!
First you need to figure out if it’s a surface infestation because of condensation or if it’s a constructive thermal bridge. The latter can be solved by raising the surface (wall, ceiling, etc) temperature through insulation or more inefficiently special heaters designed for this purpose.
In both cases, the contaminated material is removed down to the plaster or masonry. Wood, wallpaper and similar materials will likely be deeply contaminated and must be removed. For areas larger than 1 sq meter, it’s better to get a specialized contractor which will use HEPA vacuum cleaners, special bags, etc to ensure that the mould spores don’t spread in other rooms.
For small areas the agents of choice are bleach or hydrogen peroxide, both available in products for home use.
I was looking at Tucson to Seattle trip on a relatively short notice - all sleeping tickets were sold out multiple weeks in advance. And due to the length of the trip it’s not practical with non-sleeping seat.
For fun, I just got prices for taking my family to Tucson from Portland, a trip we took last week by airplane. It was relatively expensive from what I'm used to for a trip between two cities on the same end of the country, about $2500 total. Nonstop, just under 3 hours flight time. Amtrak would be about half that for a coach ticket. But as you point out, a coach ticket for a 40-45 hour trip is impractical. So I picked a family room (when possible, which was not on every segment). $7000. HAHAHAHAHAHA. I could waste money on first class plane tickets and still pay less than half that.
My fever dream for the past two decades has been an interstate "road train" roll-on/roll-offstation network where cars are towed at moderate speed for comfort (45-55 mph) on extremely long flat bed trailers between cities so people don't have to pay attention to the road between cities and can sleep or relax.
due to the length of the trip it’s not practical with non-sleeping seat
I don't know what this anti-train propaganda is going on in this post, but this is laughable. All of the seats are sleepers on Amtrak at least. I went from Cincinnati to San Diego without a sleeper.
Different people have different standards. I've done many sleeper trips and several coach trips across the country over the years. Coach was fine when I was a teenager, now that I'm approaching 40, I'll pass.
Round-trip coach on Amtrak from Indianapolis to Las Vegas* in my early 20s is definitely a fun thing I'll never do again.
One of the friends I was with threw in the towel and bought a plane ticket home, though to be fair she was traveling with her 18-month-old daughter at the time and it's honestly a testament to youthful indiscretions that she even went along with the plan in the first place!
Personally, I find driving to be a much better way to see the US than trains, especially if you avoid interstate highways.
Living in Indiana with much of my family on the east and west coasts, I actually prefer driving
Like Amtrak, driving is rarely cheaper than flying, especially when traveling alone on a multi-day trip if you're not willing to sleep at rest areas and don't have friends to stay with at convenient points along the way.
For reference, from Indy, on the interstate, NYC is an easy one-day trip (~12 hours), and LA is a long but viable two-day trip with a stop in Denver (~15 hours/day), but SF and the Pacific Northwest are pushing it even in two days. Taking non-interstate routes can take much longer, especially when traveling through the mountains or major metro areas.
* Actually from Chicago to Needles, CA, with a bus between Indy and Chicago and a van between Needles and Vegas, because Amtrak didn't even offer service to Indy or Vegas at the time.
As long as there is no verification of the results and their relevancy in reaching higher numbers it means as much as nearly having won the lottery by guessing 9 of the 12 numbers correctly: you did not win the lottery.
I recently started having my AI assistant help clean up my email gradually. (Using stumpy.ai for what it's worth.)
The way I do it is every morning we go through recent emails in my inbox one at a time. If I want to mark it as spam, delete it, add it to my calendar, whatever, I explain to the agent why in detail. Over time it builds up an understanding of how I handle a lot of things, it needs to show me less and less, and it handles more and more on its own.
I also told the assistant to check my email on its own once per hour and auto-action what it can. That helps keep junk from building up, and it alerts me via SMS if something high priority shows up (e.g. user reporting a bug).
Point is there was never a point where it just ran for a long time and magically cleaned everything up just how I'd have wanted. I have like 7k emails in my inbox, that wouldn't be practical. But the number is going down now gradually, instead of up. I've had a chance to teach it and let it establish trust that it's doing things the right way. Which feels safer.
this is the approach that actually makes sense to me. gradual trust not yolo from day one. curious though, can you see what it learned about your patterns or is it a black box? like if it starts auto-archiving something you actually wanted, how do you debug that
Why an agent? Why not simply filter by unread, select all and mark as read? I recently did this with my email accounts which has many thousands of unread emails.
The "essentially static hosting" isn't the cost centre (although with 5 million MAU, it's nothing to sneeze at). The real costs are on the input side - they have an ingestion pipeline that ensures standardised paper formatting and so on, plus at least some degree of human review.
No, I mean that the pipeline requires software engineers to build/maintain, and salaries are (as in basically every tech organisation) the dominant cost
Make it an external service then, and leave the thing that's already working great to just be.
The reason authors like and use arxiv is that it gives 1) a timestamp, 2) a standardized citable ID, and 3) stable hosting of the pdf. And readers like the no-nonsense single click download of the pdf and a barebones consistent website look.
You have to keep in mind that an increasing portion of their time and labor is going towards moderation and filtering due to a mass influx of nonsensical AI generated papers, non-academic numerology-tier hackery, and other useless drivel.
Spinning the service off forces other the labor out onto other universities rather than leaving them to solely Cornell
Is the problem the storage cost for hosting them, the HDDs? I'm sure they can be offloaded to cold storage because most of that slop won't be opened by anyone.
Arxiv doesn't need moderation. Nobody is asking for Arxiv moderation. It needs minimal checks to remove overtly illegal content.
When you stop moderating input, that's when someone builds a fuse filesystem on top of it. We had those for discord (dsfs), twitterfs, redditfs, yt-media-storage, etc. It's also when someone starts using it to distribute malware, like websites built on a combination of GitHub and a cdn.
We are talking about a different kind of moderation. People want to filter out incorrect information that in their opinion damages the reputation of Arxiv, eg covid stuff. It's not about dumping binary data.
This is a motte and bailey fallacy. The real question is about moderation with the goal of checking truth and the scientific content. Obviously illegal content and ddos type overloading attacks need to be blocked.
Very different philosophies are clashing here. Arxiv came about in an age of different zeitgeist. We may never get back to that moment.
> Is the problem the storage cost for hosting them, the HDDs?
No. Around half the cost is infrastructure. The other half of the cost is people. i.e. engineers to maintain infra and build mod tools for moderators to operate.
> Arxiv doesn't need moderation. Nobody is asking for Arxiv moderation.
This is just not true. Tons of people ask for arxiv to have moderation. Especially since covid, etc when antivaxxers and alternative medicine peddlers started trying to pump the medical categories of arxiv with quack science preprints and then go on to use the arxiv preprint and its DOI to take advantage of non academics who don't really understand what arxiv is other than it looks vaguely like a journal.
And doubly so now that people keep submitting AI generated slop papers to the service trying to flood the different categories so they can pad their resumes or CVs. And on top of that people who don't actually understand the fields they are trying to write papers in using AI to generate "innovative papers" that are completely nonsensical but vaguely parroting the terms of art.
The only reason you don't see more people calling for arxiv moderation is because they already spend so much time on it. If they were to stop moderating the site it would overflow into an absolute nightmare of garbage near overnight. And people wouldn't be upset with the users uploading this of course, they'd be upset with arxiv for failing to take action.
Moderation is inherently unappreciated because in the ideal form it should be effectively invisible (which arxiv's mostly is).
If you want to see the type of stuff that arxiv keeps out, go over to ViXrA [1] or you can watch k-theory's video [2] having fun digging through some of the quality posts that live over on that site.
The PDF formatting is all but standardised. They ingest LaTeX sources, which is formatted according to the authors' whims (most likely, according to whatever journal or conference they just submitted the manuscript to).
I'll concede that the (relatively novel) HTML formatter gives paper a more uniform appearance. They also integrate a bunch of external services for e.g., citation metrics and cross-references. Still hard to justify such a high cost to operate, but eh.
Also, the "human review" is a simple moderation process [1]. It usually does not dig into the submission's scientific merits.
A critical component of the arXiv-CE project is moving our services entirely off of Cornell University’s infrastructure — this goal is also known as Milestone 1. Milestone 1 completion is projected for the end of fiscal year 2026.
Assume if you are a library, and every day, half baked so-called books brought to the librarians where they have to make sure it is meaningful, readable and printable, 3000 of them, they accept and put them in the right bookshelf, and entire internet reads every one of them on the shelf multiple times by the AI bots, search engines and researchers.
They are not only making a new library, they are also maintaining both and syncing two libraries because Cornell cannot handle the volume of access by bots.
It is not static. It is essentially running two ships side-by-side, and two ships need to appear as one from the outside. And, the new ship is still only half built. The new ship is being designed, and being built. 27 seems small to me.
Also I use it for all uncomplicated topics because it gives precise short answers without fluff. Very refreshing.
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