I prefer Dan Shapiro's 5 level analogy (based on car autonomy levels) because it makes for a cleaner maturity model when discussing with people who are not as deeply immersed in the current state of the art. But there are some good overall insights in this piece, and there are enough breadcrumbs to lead to further exploration, which I appreciate. I think levels 3 and 4 should be collapsed, and the real magic starts to happen after combining 5 and 6; maybe they should be merged as well.
Car levels autonomy is fake. Everything including Level 3 is not a real autonomy it is hard rules + some reaction to the world, and everything above 3 is autonomy with just s slightly human security guardrails to attempt the real autonomy.
At this moment where we have human who just sit there before verify enough 9 after comas of error rates, the entire level conversation is dead. It's almost a binary state. Autonomous or not.
Similar happened with software levels. Even Level 2 was sci-fi 2 years ago, 1 year away from now anything bellow level 5 will be a joke except very regulated or billion users systems scale software.
In response maybe we should design TCPAclaw. It is specialized in honeypotting all of the random cold call spam, tracks down the source of unsolicited contacts; including registration state, legal contacts, and registered agent(s). It then drafts and sends a TCPA letter and waits for one of two things to happen: Either a $500-$1500 check arriving in your mailbox, or the demand deadline elapses. In case of demand deadline elapse, TCPAclaw files a small claims suit in the appropriate court of jurisdiction.
That's... not a bad idea. The downside is the bot would be doing a lot of these and false-positives would be... embarrassing (like a real investor outreach).
Didn't make it past the first paragraph of AI slop in the README. Have some respect for your readers and put actual information in it, ideally human generated. At least the first paragraph! Otherwise you may as well name it IGNOREME.
This summer I helped for a few hours to build Beaver Dam Analogues (BDAs) at Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. I am really looking forward seeing the positive ecological impact when my future grand children trek Philmont. Building BDAs is good fun. You should try it.
Interesting, tell us more! Do the beavers use/upkeep them, or are they purely to create pools where there are no beavers to do so? If the former, is it needed because there aren't enough beavers or not enough wood/vegetation for them to build?
Do the beavers "adopt" the structures? Or are they too dissimilar to their constructions? I imagine the main goal is actually less about the beavers than it is restoring habitat that beavers otherwise create. Do you ever build them in places where there never were beavers?
I have this funny picture of beavers refusing to enjoy the dams because they didn't build them. No "pride of ownership".
Beavers were hunted so intensely that they completely disappeared decades ago in the area. Without the beavers building dams and thus slowing down the flow of creeks, more and more erosion took place and area that used to be wetlands dried out. With the gradual drying the willow tree disappeared, which is one of the major food sources for beavers. So while beavers are starting to repopulate, they don't move in where there is no food available.
So Philmont is building BDAs in order to slow down the creeks, providing suitable habitat for willows - and once this food source is once again established, the beavers should return and take over maintenance of the BDAs.
Honestly might give that a go, yeah. Brand new, low stakes, throwaway projects are one of the few things these tools are actually genuinely pretty useful for.
Bad data on graphs, demos that would have been impressive a year ago, vibe coding the easiest requests (financial dashboard), running out of talking points while cursor is looping on a bug, marginal benchmark improvements. At least the models are kind of cheaper to run.
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