I've been a heavy user of dictation, off and on, as my wrists have gotten better and worse. I've mostly used the built-in Mac and Android recognition: Mac isn't great, Android is pretty good, neither has improved much over the past ~5y despite large improvements in what should be possible. OpenAI has an open speech recognition model, whisper, and I wanted to have a go at running it on my Mac.

It looks like for good local performance the best version is whisper.cpp, which is a plain C/C++ implementation with support for Mac's ML hardware. To get this installed I needed to install XCode (not just the command line tools, since I needed coremlc) and then run:

I recently flew through CLT and spent more time delayed than in the air. There were summer thunderstorms, and with the lightning it wasn't safe for workers to be out. This meant no loading, unloading, docking, refueling, anything. On the way in we sat on the tarmac for 3hr waiting for lightning to let up; on the way back we sat in the terminal (much better) while the incoming flight suffered through our prior fate.

Ground delays due to electrical storms are common, and each minute of closure is extremely expensive for the airlines in addition to being painful for the passengers. We don't stop inside work when there's lightning, why can't we get the same protection for ground workers? This is something we know how to do: give the electricity a better path to ground.

About twice as many Americans think AI is likely to have a negative effect as a positive one. At a high level I agree: we're talking about computers that are smart in ways similar to people, and quickly getting smarter. They're also faster and cheaper than people, and again getting more so.

There are a lot of ways this could go, and many of them are seriously bad. I'm personally most worried about AI removing the technical barriers that keep regular people from creating pandemics, removing human inefficiencies and moral objections that have historically made totalitarian surveillance and control difficult to maintain, and gradually being put in control of critical systems without effective safeguards that keep them aligned with our interests. I think these are some of the most important problems in the world today, and quit my job to work on one of them.

Despite these concerns, I'm temperamentally and culturally on the side of better technology, building things, and being confident in humanity's ability to adapt and to put new capabilities to beneficial use. When I see people pushing back against rapid deployment of AI, it's often with objections I think are minor compared to the potential benefits. Common objections I find unconvincing include:

I often want to include an image in my posts to give a sense of a situation. A photo communicates the most, but sometimes that's too much: some participants would rather remain anonymous. A friend suggested running pictures through an AI model to convert them into a Studio Ghibli-style cartoon, as was briefly a fad a few months ago:

House Party Dances

Our older two, ages 11 and 9, have been learning fiddle, and are getting pretty good at it. When the weather's nice we'll occasionally go play somewhere public for tips ("busking"). It's better than practicing, builds performance skills, and the money is a good motivation!

We'll usually walk over to Davis Sq, tune the fiddles, set out the case, and play. We'll do a series of fiddle tunes from Lily's list, playing for 20-30min. Today I remember playing Sandy Boys, Angeline the Baker, Marie's Wedding, Cluck Old Hen, Coleman's March, Oh Susanna, Kittycat Jig, Hundred Pipers, and Trip to Moscow.

Since this is a performance we play one tune after another, with only short breaks to decide what to do next. If one of the kids doesn't remember how it goes or gets lost in the form, it's on them to figure it out and get back on, which is a skill I'm very glad for them to be learning. I'll play fiddle with them, switching between melody and rhythm to support where it's needed while still letting them show what they can do.

People often stop and watch for a bit, sometimes dance a little. Some people put in a little money, most don't, which is all fine. Today the kids made $28 in 25min, split evenly since they both played the whole time; given the diminishing marginal utility of money and my wanting them to be incentivized to play, I don't take a share.

One thing I didn't anticipate, however, has been the effect on household economy: they have much more buying power than either of us did at their age, or than they did even a couple years ago. Sometimes this means spending their money in ways that are thoughtful and seem well worth it (when our oldest wanted to save up $80 to get her ears pierced we went out busking a lot) while other times they're more free with their money than I think is prudent (a drink from a vending machine because they didn't want to use a water fountain). It's their money, though, and I think it's good for them to get a sense of how to spend it. Still, I'm thinking some about how to build more of a sense of fiscal responsibility.

When our kids were 7 and 5 they started walking home from school alone. We wrote explaining they were ready and giving permission, the school had a few reasonable questions, and that was it. Just kids walking home from the local public school like they have in this neighborhood for generations.

Online, however, it's common for people to write as if this sort of thing is long gone. Zvi captures a common view:

You want to tell your kids, go out and play, be home by dinner, like your father and his father before him. But if you do, or even if you tell your kids to walk the two blocks to school, eventually a policeman will show up at your house and warn you not to do it again, or worse. And yes, you'll be the right legally, but what are you going to do, risk a long and expensive legal fight? So here we are, and either you supervise your kids all the time or say hello to a lot of screens.

His post also references ~eight news stories where a family had trouble with authorities because they let their kid do things that should be ordinary, like walking to a store at age nine.