I've been smoking cigars for the past 15 years. I was lucky enough to have smoked only cuban cigars (which are legal where I'm from), so I know them very well.
Nicaragua and Dominican Republic are garbage compared to Cubans, still to this day. Several times while in the US (where I've lived in the past few years) I tried to smoke non-cuban cigars. Not once I found something that was remotely close to the worse cuban I've had.
My basic understanding is because of two factors:
1. The tobacco doesn't grow anywhere else like it does in Cuba. It's an island with very specific combination of soil and weather that can't be replicated. The tobacco leafs are huge in Cuba and that makes a big difference when making a cigar which ideally should use as few leafs as possible.
2. The best workers that know how to select, blend and roll a cigar are still all in Cuba. Other countries tried to replicate but they don't come close in terms of skills and knowledge.
I don't have sources for the two factors above but my experience tells me it adds up.
I only heard people complimenting non-cuban cigars here in the US. Nowhere else. Which sounds fair or else the entire cigar industry would have gone bankrupt without access to the best stuff. Overtime you won't find people in the US who understands what a cuban cigar is like because they have no exposure to it.
While the tobacco itself is unbeatable, Cuban cigars have quality control issues. You regularly run into draw issues, for example. Aging is typically required for best experience, which also isn't easy.
I smoke Olivas and Arturo Fuentes regularly, despite having access to Cubans.
I agree with your statement on quality control issues. Also fake cigars are a huge problem. I've heard about many cases of cigars made in Cuba by "freelancers" and then sold in repurposed boxes and labels. Those aren't terrible cigars, but definitely not great.
I'll try those 2 you mentioned and see if it's to my taste. Dona Flor, made in Brazil, are pretty decent. Unfortunately they are not easy to come by near where I live.
Oliva Melanio Serie V comes in various sizes from robusto up, with maduro variants (I don't think Cuba does maduros). It's generally well regarded, smokeable, and I haven't seen one with significant issues. I often have non-maduro robustos in my humidor.
Arturo Fuente Hemingway Short Story is quick, and an alternative to the Trinidad Reyes in that respect. Different taste profile, of course.
In both cases — not Cubans, so no grassiness, and heavier, but not bad at all.
Beautiful indeed. It still baffles me how some people have a such gift with words. They can tell stories and make you have feelings, just magical. I know it's a lot of hard work to write like this.
I can write code alright, but I couldn't write words like the author, even if I practice for 100 years.
There’s a charm to treating talent as some elusive gift bestowed on others. It elevates the mystery and power of what’s written; you can really get lost in the flow of words. But rest assured, you too given enough reading, writing, and collaboration can write just the same as the author. It’s not magic.
I see with completely different eyes here. This is a sort of manifesto that tells me where the heart of the founders is.
It also inspired me to do better and look at my own company and myself as a fellow founder. I agree with almost everything he said and I'd like to see my company as being a "Calm Company" too. It's a great opportunity to measure my ideas against other's.
I wish more entrepreneurs would post like that, even if it's not 100% selfless. I think the trade off of getting more eye balls for sharing his vision is totally fair.
Time and again I keep seeing articles like this in HN and it's the reason I'm so addicted. It's such a good filter on all the chaotic crap it's out there.
It's actually worse than that because although LLMs are capable of a lot, they still hallucinate quite frequently and sometimes are just plain stupid.
Recently I was trying to manipulate data in Google Sheets and was using ChatGPT to help. In the beginning is was fantastic, I was very productive because I didn't have to stop and think about formulas, read crappy documentation, or analyze data transformation. ChatGPT just gave me the right answer in a split second, as long as I kept asking the right questions.
Then I stumbled upon a particular issue that wasn't really too complicated but ChatGPT could not give me a correct answer. Unknowingly I spent 3 days trying to fix problems with the solution and every time I got an answer that was slightly wrong, not in subtle ways.
I have 20 years experience as a software engineer and still, I continued to waste time in this loop. After 3 days I decided to apply my engineering skills and solved the matter in 30 min. Now I know the solution and it was way simpler than I thought.
What surprised me was how dumb the whole process was. My questions certainly weren't the problem - as bad as they possibly were, the solution wasn't too far off. Not only ChatGPT had become a crutch but it put me in a situation that no human-tutor would ever put me.
So removing the pain of quick interactions with a tutor has benefits but the technology is not quite ready to be considered as true guidance in forming (or even helping) someone's understanding of a subject.
I've been using ChatGPT a lot for general language but when it requires logical thinking it falls pretty flat.
I've experienced this exact frustration loop before, but I've also got a major counter-example.
I've been using GPT4 as a tool to interrogate lesson transcripts for a language I'm learning and mention in the prompt to specifically focus on things mentioned in the transcript, if it's not in the transcript, check the helper script I update as I move on through the process (which does sadly take up more and more context window) and figure out if my answer is in one of those previous lessons, and to not guess. Hallucinations are quite rare, I don't think I can name an egregious instance of it in the 25 lesson I've done of approximately 20 minutes in length each, though I'm sure it's happened.
It's also pretty good at suggesting drills based on the contents of the lesson, there are probably a whole bunch of lesson plans in the training data.
The end result has been progress at a pace I could only dream of previously, and it doesn't matter if a question is too basic because I'm asking a computer. There is zero concern of any question being embarrassing because it's only between me, GPT4, and the OAI engineer who happens across the conversaiton.
I absolutely have the same overall feeling, when the task at hand is related to text processing (including understanding and spinning off new takes or ideas from it).
But when the task at hand involves logical thinking, that's when I believe the LLMs of today are still a very much work in progress.
So I'm skeptical of trying to use them as tutors for now. I'm sure things will evolve quite quickly from now.
"I spent days trying to solve X by doing Y, then it turned out I could have solved it by doing Z instead" is an experience I've had countless times before LLMs were a thing. Sometimes you really do need these three days of stumbling before you can build up the confidence to do the easy solution.
(Then again, I don't know the specifics of your case.)
In addition, I feel like you build a sort of intuition after a while and detect when the conversation with the LLM has hit a dead end. When to stop and take a step back, think what it is you're trying to do and try to go down a different path. The LLM can even support with that, it's on the human to kick that off, at least at this point in time.
> Although I want to believe this problem is more exacerbated with LLMs than with human-tutors.
Well, yeah, but the central insight here is that LLMs enable a worse-is-better approach with a tighter feedback loop. They're not as good as a regular tutor, but a regular tutor costs money, gets impatient, is only available at set hours, etc.
Part of the appeal of learning-by-LLM is that you can get a flash of motivation at 2 AM and go "hey, I should totally learn about X, that would be cool!", open up ChatGPT, ask some very naive questions, and get just enough to get started.
(It's funny, when I wrote this yesterday I thought "this is an unrealistic example", and yet here I am, at 1 AM, asking ChatGPT a bunch of questions about Google's XLS. I'm pretty sure the answers I got were hallucinations, but at least it helped me formulate the questions for when I go to the mailing list.)
Poorly phrased. It did happen long ago, but they're also so far away that the light that was emitted back then is just reaching us now. Astronomical distances are so vast that looking at things that are further away also means seeing them as they were further back in time. JWST increased our capabilities of looking further, and therefore lets us see objects that are further in the past than ever before. What the astronomer meant was that the photons we are capturing come from galaxies so long ago that we can observe them in the process of being formed.
i'm guessing "old" from our current temporal vantage point. they are far away so the picture we see of them is "old" because it took a long time for the polaroid of them to reach earth via snail mail. like you took a picture postcard of your kitten and mailed it but it got lost then later it gets delivered. the photo is old but the kitten in the photo is young.
Then suddenly you buy a car that has several kg of equipment that are not yours, but theirs, just so you could activate it with a subscription at a later point in time. Great! But now I'm the one paying gas/electricity to carry that extra load around that does not belong to me.
How is it possible that they can get away with it without any lawsuits? I'd want to be compensated for carrying other people's crap around town.
If a feature requires constant development (like self-driving) then it makes more sense. But even that has been subverted these days with SaaS companies that charge a subscription but only offer new features as upgrades so your version doesn't really improve that much unless you pony up.
>Then suddenly you buy a car that has several kg of equipment that are not yours
Well, you could read the contract, see that clause, and choose not to buy that particular car, couldn't you?
It's likely that there are other cars available to buy that don't have clauses like that in their contracts. But even if there aren't (either because this car manufacturer has a monopoly on cars where you live, or there's a cartel operating in which all car manufacturers secretly agree to adopt this type of clause): Do you feel you have a right to buy a car without a clause like that in the contract?
If your answer to that is "Yes, I have that right": Suppose for the sake of argument that this car company is a monopoly. What happens if it goes out of business, or decides to stop making cars altogether? Should they be prevented from doing so by law, in order that your right to buy such a car remains undisturbed?
If you live on a remote island, do you likewise have a right to buy a car with no such clause in the contract?
I'm interested in understanding what rights you feel people should be entitled to when it comes by buying things, and how you would have the government deal with the downstream implications of legally guaranteeing those rights.
I've been following this "good example" for both my kids who are 10 and 2 years old and I can say it works very well. At least for the addictive behavior. We still allow them to watch movies and cartoons plus games in TVs and iPads but no phones for them.
My wife and I have a policy that when we're eating no screens are allowed unless it's an emergency. I think this probably has the biggest effect of all. Also we have zero social networks (except professional ones).
I'm so tired of going to restaurants and seeing the entire family looking at their screens. The bigger the kid the bigger the screen. Technology really has killed social interaction and I try my best to raise my kids out of this mass hypnosis everybody seems to be in.
When we go out to eat my table is always kind of a mess because my two year old is all over the place. And that's fine. We can deal with it and we have some fun. I really don't buy he argument to giving kids a screen during meals so the adults can talk. Kids must engage in any conversation they want or simply sit and listen to adults talking. That's how they learn. If they're constantly zooming out then they won't learn how to behave properly.
I find it too convenient that adults who never had problems with this kind of addiction (because those devices did not exist) continue to feed their kids with algorithms.
Once my kids get to an age that they are more responsible I'll handle them a device and set boundaries. Since we (the adults) have been showing boundaries since the beginning I think it will work just fine.
I watched a movie today and ended up ordering pop corn + soda + water. 1 pop corn, 1 soda, 1 water freaking bottle (250ml). They charged me $30 + tips.
I think National Geographic (which I'm a subscriber) can charge 10x more without losing 90% of it's audience. It's the price to pay to receive good articles at your home and it's definitely worth tons more than drinking and eating junk in the dark.
I definitely relate to that. I only started saving money seriously (with proper planning) after reading about FIRE (financial independence retire early) in a blog. Reading about that idea completely changed my mind about the true purpose of putting money aside while I was still young.
Before reading about FIRE I thought the idea of retiring silly because I was 100% sure I'd never stop working, even after turning 65. So saving money never made sense to me.
The blog about FIRE explained with a total different point of view which is not about retiring really but it's about having the choice to do only the work you really want to and being independent to make your own choices regardless of needing a paycheck.
Nicaragua and Dominican Republic are garbage compared to Cubans, still to this day. Several times while in the US (where I've lived in the past few years) I tried to smoke non-cuban cigars. Not once I found something that was remotely close to the worse cuban I've had.
My basic understanding is because of two factors: 1. The tobacco doesn't grow anywhere else like it does in Cuba. It's an island with very specific combination of soil and weather that can't be replicated. The tobacco leafs are huge in Cuba and that makes a big difference when making a cigar which ideally should use as few leafs as possible. 2. The best workers that know how to select, blend and roll a cigar are still all in Cuba. Other countries tried to replicate but they don't come close in terms of skills and knowledge.
I don't have sources for the two factors above but my experience tells me it adds up.
I only heard people complimenting non-cuban cigars here in the US. Nowhere else. Which sounds fair or else the entire cigar industry would have gone bankrupt without access to the best stuff. Overtime you won't find people in the US who understands what a cuban cigar is like because they have no exposure to it.