Interesting. I'm surprised they haven't prioritised/deliberately trained for this more because of how useful it is to ask codex to generate some images/assets/sprites when building sill games. It would dramatically enhance how polished it's games were.
That said for single images the old model was already okayish for prototypes
This is a quick prototype, made for my 7yo who loves buses.
A few tips:
- Click the freeze icon to be able to zoom and pan without it changing the location of the lens
- Double click to position the lens
Thanks for feedback about the data. The bus stop and route data comes from the Department for Transport’s Bus Open Data Service (BODS), using the national GTFS feed. It seems some things like Manchester metro creep in.
All these caveats aside, as soon as I got this working it felt like a promising direction. I will pay attention to everyone's comments and suggestions and iterate! Thank you!
Incidentally there's a bunch of other free stuff I built for my 7yo on the root domain
It'd be nice to be able to permalink to the view for a specific location
While that'd be useful for things like telling someone else what buses they can get, planning a trip, etc, what I actually tried to do was to link to the Killermont Street bus station in Glasgow; Aztec Camera had a sentimental song about late night departures from there - leaving your friends and heading south to look for work - that runs:
As the ships and the steel
Slip away to the cry of "Compete"
There's a message for us
We can get there by bus
From Killermont Street
And indeed you can...buses all over the place. But I can't link to it :)
it's showing a lot of rail/etc. replacement bus routes, which I wouldn't consider typical as they (hopefully) only run very rarely - such as the "DLR" replacement bus route, and "RB1" replacement bus route for the thames clipper in london
Thanks for this! Really fascinating to see how coverage differs.
I expected the UX to work more like:
- Freeze is on by default (or there is no concept of 'freeze'). I can just move around without my screen turning to a lightning strike of random routes.
Surprised no one has mentioned Gemini. That's the highest value add feature for me. I have pixel watch 3, which I got cheap second hand. Gemini is a little laggy but still useful. If the experience was similar to the latest open AI voice model when used on a phone, it'd be incredibly useful
Incentives are important for allocative efficiency, whether that be the price of a banana or the incentive to do a job that pays more. Of course, they're imperfect and there are some cases where incentives lead to rent-seeking rather than genuinely economic efficiency. And there is often a divergence between private value and social value. But these are exceptions to the rule. If everyone ignored price signals, society would be less well off.
This doesn't mean we should all attempt to do the highest possible paying job available to us, but it does mean there's a genuine loss to society if (say) a high paid software engineer decides to quit and start a bike repair shop i.e. the economic pie will be smaller an so will the tax base. So when making the decision we should at least be conscious of this.
As an economist, I do kind of agree with the premise of the article, but in a different way. As consumers in particular, we can do much better than following incentives.
For instance, we can use the car less, even if it's a bit inconvenient. It's much nicer to see more people out walking, on their bikes or on the bus, leads to less noise and congestion. So there's a positive externality. Or I could buy a smaller car, even though bigger one is more convenient.
Similarly, if you're lucky enough to have a high paying job, you can buy all sorts of status symbols. Or, you could choose to consume less than you earn, and give the difference to charity, or invest in something of social value.
Whether you agree with this or not, economic theory provides a clear framework to think about all of this, both the price signal and the difference between private and social incentives. What bothers me (as the article touches on) is that people often have a simplified view of economics which is essentially that 'market incentives and price signals broadly lead to good outcomes (or at least, better outcomes than communism!), and therefore economics always morally endorses buying things at market prices'. There's nothing in economic theory that says that spending £50k more on a car because it's got a fancier brand is a reasonable moral choice.
Having recently read Wilson's translation, I was immediately put off at the introduction and leapt to the conclusion it was bad. It just doesn't sound anywhere near as good to my ear.
However, there may be more to it than I thought. No admittedly the following is ChatGPT's opinion, but I think it's valid and made me think again:
> The second is the better translation as English poetry; the first (Claude's) is the better translation if you want to see the Greek more directly.
> If I were studying Homer, I'd strongly prefer the first. It continually reminds you that you're reading an ancient poem whose concepts don't map neatly onto modern English.
Translation is an art form that is rapidly becoming lost, not because AI is doing it, but because there are too many translators who have apparently been trained (or likely, were never trained in it as a formal study at all) that it should be written in a way that emphasizes the translation as a standalone work more than anything else.
A good translation should attempt to communicate what the author meant, as closely as possible, even if there is no equivalent in the target language.
A good translation should be beautiful all on its own.
It's the balance of the 2 that makes a translation successful.
If you erase the author's true meaning just because you don't want to slow the reader down in having to take a moment to read an explanatory footnote if they're confused, you have failed to translate it, and have likely editorialized it.
Why do many English-speaking people know 'wabisabi' as a concept? Because someone bothered to explain it to them, and they bothered to listen. That act enriches the reader.
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