low stakes curmudgeon posting
Michigan
Joined March 2011
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Just today found out about Amazon’s “Ask this book” feature for Kindle books, which I believe rolled out in December 2025 but is still only available on the iPhone / iPad app. Great (though obvious) AI application. It’s trained on the book’s text so it can answer questions about the book, including citations of the relevant book passages. If you’re only partway through it can answer based only on what you’ve already read to avoid spoilers, or you can ask about the entire text.
Should be coming to Kindle devices soon, but there’s the practical problem that typing on any e-paper device is still very tedious. On device voice to text would help there, but even the top end 2026 Paperwhite Signature edition lacks a microphone. Probably lacks the hardware to do a good job of voice to text anyway. Obviously the AI model lives on Amazon’s cloud. So anyway, great feature but not so great if I have to swap over to the iPhone app to use it. Much prefer reading on the Kindle’s e-paper display.
Similarly, Grok integration on the latest versions of Tesla software is such that Grok knows the details of the car it resides in, and has been trained on the manual. So instead of reading the manual, just ask Grok. “Hey Grok, how do I…”
AI as an interactive manual should be among its least controversial uses. But maybe people don’t appreciate a feature like Ask This Book because it could be interpreted as an excuse to never read the book, but just ask questions about the book instead. Which would be a way to take in just the aspects you care about, kind of like personalized Cliff’s Notes.
The (in my opinion irrational) AI hate in this post and its replies is interesting to me. Lots of ways AI can be abused, but Ask This Book has the potential to enhance the reading experience. The ability to interrogate the book while you’re reading it is a powerful thing.
Oh look, a new follower! If I follow him back he'll pay me $5000. Or the way they write it in Illinois, 5000$. No points for guessing where the account is based.
Scott Ligon retweeted
I don't care if I sound like a shill, my Tesla is amazing
Every drive is just, wow, the car is driving
Soon drunk driving manslaughter will be over. Text-and-drivers, geriatric loons on the wrong side of the road, road ragers, just gone, a historical problem
Asked Grok about a Nigerian Prince situation and to my surprise, it treated my question with the appropriate level of seriousness (none). But I don’t think the xAI legal team would like Grok’s response one bit.
xitter.cf/i/grok/share/bGVnYWN5_…
iPhone Duo will sell ok, because when you take it out in public, everyone will know immediately that you have the latest and most expensive iPhone.
Self-improving superintelligence. A system whose inner workings no human understands even though humans devised the algorithms used to produce it, used to produce a series of more powerful systems that humans won’t understand at all. Does seem singularity-ish. Interesting times.
The singularity is a high variance thing. We’ve never experienced such variance. Wonders and horrors beyond comprehension. Indefinite lifespan extension or extinction. If you’re generally satisfied with your life now, you should probably oppose it. If not, embrace variance.
Independent of this particular case, which I won't address here, I don't understand the rationale for requiring all 12 jurors to agree. I know it's a basic property of the trial by jury system, but I find the unanimity requirement bizarre. 11-1 and now this arm twisting phase.
A lone juror in the Lindsay Clancy trial is refusing to relent and acquit her, leaving the jury deadlocked after six days of deliberations.
Clancy’s defense attorney says 11 jurors have apparently reached a consensus while one holdout juror is refusing to accept the court’s instructions on “reasonable doubt.”
The attorney petitioned the judge to remove the juror, but the judge declined, saying he could not take sides between the one juror and the other 11.
Follow: @AFpost
@grok Explain to me why the trial by jury system requires unanimous agreement among the jurors. For example why not accept 11-1 or even 10-2 as a verdict? Maybe 9-3 is insufficient but why unanimity and nothing else will do?
