Interesting. On this page, the one dad is wearing a Boston Red Sox hat. But in a photo on The Guardian article that same dad is wearing a New York Mets hat. I guess people can change after all.
And to consider AI agents are still mostly entirely limited to generating code in token-heavy programming languages designed to be written, tested and debugged by humans.
Not just the languages but frontend/user interfaces as well. You can see the potential for the future when using Claude Design->Claude Code->Agents live testing in BrowserOS. It's all modeled on existing humans patterns of using Figma passing to devs then testing after the fact before starting the loop again, while a lot gets lost in translation in between the designs and the code.
We'll like have some standard AI-focused UI libraries that are harnessed into a design gen system where an AI can pull all the real levers, while also developing a large training data set around it.
A while ago I signed up as a sighted person on Be My Eyes. I didn't get as many calls as I had hoped, but I was glad to help out on the few that I could. One call was to read envelopes of incoming mail, another was to read pill bottles, and then there was the two funny guys on big cozy chairs with shopping bags of cereal boxes and wanted to know what was what. I remember one guy really didn't like one type. The app had a unique feature for the sighted person to turn on the camera of the vision impaired person.
I still have the Be My Eyes app installed but haven’t had a call in over a year - I think it’s a testament to how powerful AI vision models have become. I find it cool that AI works well enough for vision impaired people to solve all their problems.
However there was something very human and nice about helping out a stranger with a small random task from time to time. I fondly remember one older lady who spilled a box of blueberries on the kitchen floor and I helped her hunt them all down by guiding her around. It was 10 minutes of connection with a random person doing something fun and which is till remember fondly 4 years later
Ever since Be My Eyes introduced there AI features it's my understanding that there's been a lot less need for volunteers. I'm totally blind, and started using the app once they added in AI. It works great for for things like reading food labels after my kids have movved things around, determining if the tv has been left on, etc. I think I would use the volunteer feature if I still lived alone, but I don't.
They always had significantly more people willing to help than in need of help. Which is good, not going to knock that. I signed up for it many years ago but didn’t get a single call, so eventually I just uninstalled it.
Sadly, judging by the info I read on the website now, it seems to be focused on using AI assistance.
Not going to lie, it deeply worries me how quickly society is just accepting offloading what used to be meaningful human interactions to AI. I hate to imagine what a society looks like once the people in it solely rely on AI for navigating life.
Sorry for the bleak reply. I was genuinely excited to read about the service as you described it and would love to hear that the human assistance side of it still works even if the website only showcases the AI.
I see it less bleakly and in a more hopeful manner. For people who signed up to help, I guess it might've felt like a social thing. But I imagine most of the people who relied on the services were looking less for the social aspect and wanted more independence in life. There are probably loads of blind people who are very thankful that they're increasingly able to go outside and live fully functional lives thanks to having a phone and some AI stuff to let them do whatever they want without feeling like they're depending on someone for assistance.
I'm someone who absolutely hates generative AI, but AI that assists people in living happy lives outside is something I'm completely in favor of.
There would have to be a person pretending to be blind on the other side of the phone call, recording your answers. At that point is it not just easier to have that person do the labeling themselves?
> Thank you for joining the Be My Eyes community! Be My Eyes connects blind and low-vision users with volunteers who can provide visual interpretation of smartphone images, to companies that provide them with services or employ them, and to artificial intelligence (“AI”) tools that analyze and describe images submitted by our users.
I thought you were being cynical, but yeah the ToS basically says that as well.
This is a really big shocker to most people, especially in America. We see these big huge farmlands with rows and rows of corn. We hear the propaganda that farmers are the backbone of this nation and we can't live without them. Songs sing in our heads, "amber waves of grain, from sea to shining sea". People get a warm and fuzzy feeling. Country music psyop perpetuates this. Meanwhile a substantial portion (as noted here) is garbage. It's genetically modified crap from a fortune 100 company that requires fertilizer and herbicide from the same fortune 100 company and any seeds harvested contractually cannot be re-used so the grower needs to re-buy every year. And it's not for human consumption! A lot of it isn't even for animal consumption, it's for ethanol or other uses. Whole situation just kinda cracks me up.
The farmer wants the gmo crop. They see the yields they get and go hell yeah. They can't use the seeds next year because these are often hybrids taking advantage of hybrid vigor. These crops get more out of existing fertilizer applications. This is the whole point of them: inputs cost less, yields go up, more profit.
Look at this figure of corn yields per acre (1). Yellow is the "old age" where yields were stagnant. Red is when fertilizer began to be used. Now the huge slope change, has been in exploiting genetic hybrids. GMO allows protection of desirable hybrid traits that might be lost in breeding, introduction of traits to to other strains. Traits of interest are primarily around lessening usage of fertilizer, lessening usage of insecticides, as these are all input costs the farmer would rather not pay especially if they can get the same yield without paying. Thank you GMOs for keeping this linear change in yield even over the last 15 years! Could you believe we improved our corn yields substantially over these 15 years? Remarkable the work biologists do in the quiet of their field.
But of course, lay people just think it is a big conspiracy. They don't understand any of this. They think GMOs are copyright but that belies a lack of education of the last century of agriculture development, since that doesn't make sense as farmers have been using hybrids and ordering new seed some 70 years now in certain crops. It is the nations who have to resort to reusing seed and these inferior strains that are suffering poor yields and food insecurity. Over here, we feed far more with far less land under the plow every year. Their yields are still stagnant at historical levels. And climate change is coming for them, while we are understanding the very genetic basis of our yield improvement. They will be using seeds we engineer for them to be high yield in their changing environment to survive widespread famine in the coming decades. GMO is the greatest human invention, more important than even computers.
No I will not argue with someone who thinks that country music is a psyop to make people ok with growing corn for animal feed and fuel, it is not a productive use of my time.
I mean, it's both things. Humans are just really good at agriculture by now. Most countries, even those that we perceive as poor, produce crops well in surplus of their own nutritional needs and can often scale up to produce multiples more.
It's no exaggeration to say we can support feeding 100x the human population with current agricultural land and techniques (assuming you can modify their diets). Largely due to GMO, fertilizers, and industrial farming.
X restricts what you can view without logging in. Many folks don't want to log in to X, for obvious reasons. Posting an xcancel link is kinda like folks posting various `archive` URLs to bypass paywalls, work around overloaded servers, etc. That's an extremely common practice here that usually goes without comment.
There is a term “islandness” which may help to explain the allure - and many research papers on the topic. For me it’s a “smallness” that is the ideal.
> However, opponents were in short supply. It was a case of waiting for visiting opponents, and sometimes years might go by without any opportunities to play foreign opposition. Their first match was against a South African fishing vessel and they lost 10–6.
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