I’ve avoided updating my computer for years over one overpriced component of another. GPU and now DRAM.

“They’re still under audit.”

This is the dumbest thing I’ve read all month that didn’t come out of Donald Trump. OP, I don’t know if you’re naive or in on the grift or… well… if this is representative of your intellectual potential. But just no. I work with AI every day.

There is nothing intelligent about LLMs, much less divine or superhuman. The emergent capabilities are neat. AI is a story teller, and it will generate falsehoods if the story reads better that way.

Respectfully, I would suggest that drama within a subreddit is perhaps too niche for /technology. At least without any explainer as to why this is of broader interest. I’m not clicking through to find out because IDGAF about what’s going on with random subreddits.

Maybe the community at large feels differently.

Agreed but at some point I am forced to work “at gunpoint” because I have a wife and kids who need a house and food and cars. I’m jealous of anyone in a position to simply quit.

I work for a company that works for another company in the hospitality industry. The software system is being updated (in part of a much broader system change) to no longer allow non-binary or unspecified gender. We aren’t writing that part, but have to support it. I consider it a shortsighted and cruel change. But I’ve also spent a 7 of the last 30 months looking for work. I’m over fifty and I’m currently trying to build my retirement savings back up from zero after that.

I’m not walking away just because of this change. Instead I’m making sure our software is easy to change back when world is ready for that once again. That’s the best I can do, and I’ve worked for companies engaged in much greater evil.

When I got hired on a contract for Uline I’d never heard of them. Then I found out that are huge contributors to the Republican Party and I was glad when they decided to replace me on that contract, but I couldn’t just walk away. That was the most morally conflicted I’ve ever been at a job. But it gave my family the means to thrive, and that is my first goal.

Bill Gates is a bad example. That motherfucker was the most evil corporate asshole in the 90’s. He has rehabilitated his image, but net positive is a bridge too far.

As for the rest, I appreciate the nuance. But Bill Gates can go fuck himself. It’s easy to be generous with money stolen from somewhere else.

I don’t agree with your premise. However, I don’t have a good argument against at hand.

There are intangible benefits to a person, and I feel like the number of roles where AI could perform well enough and mistakes don’t cause customer satisfaction issues, regulatory compliance issues, or incur civil liability are vanishingly small. But could they be 10% of jobs? Even 5%? I don’t think so.

I could see an argument that if you have a team of 10 people, AI could let you cut one and expect the other 9 to pick up the slack. But how many teams even have ten people on them? Because I don’t think a team of 5 can lose one person and still be capable of the same work. I guess it might depend on the industry — I do have IT blinders on here.

I say this as someone generally bullish about AI: bullshit. I use it all the time. It’s helpful when you already know what you’re doing. Anything you do with AI at scale is going to have a number of fuckups, even if it’s mostly reliable — and for most purposes I wouldn’t even go that far.

I see it all the time. I ask Cline to have Claude do a bunch of things and create a markdown file… and it does everything, including generating the markdown, but forgets to put it in a file and then acts confused when you say to put it in a file. If that was some financial report or contract, it could tank a whole business.

My team gets a lot of stuff done per quickly and reliably. They are probably better developers than I ever was. I don’t need to know how they spend minute by minute.

You can disagree, but I find it helpful to decide whether I’m going to read a lengthy article or not. Also if AI picks up on a bunch of biased phrasing or any of a dozen other signs of poor journalism, I can go into reading something (if I even bother to at that point) with an eye toward the problems in an article. Sometimes that helps when an article is trying to lead you down a certain path of thinking.

I find I’m better at picking out the facts from the bias if I’m forewarned.

Not OP, but…

It’s not always perfect, but it’s good for getting a tldr to see if maybe something is worth reading further. As for translations, it’s something AI is rather decent at. And if I go from understanding 0% to 95%, really only missing some cultural context about why a certain phrase might mean something different from face value, that’s a win.

You can do a lot with AI where the cost of it not being exactly right is essentially zero. Plus, it’s not like humans have a great track record for accuracy, come to think of it. It comes down to being skeptical about it like you would any other source.

I guess it’s great advice if you live in New York or Disney World. I have a forty minute walk to the nearest bus stop and depending on where I want to go in town and how many transfers it takes, it might take me 2 hours to get somewhere in my mid-side town.

Meanwhile, I can reach anywhere in town in twenty minutes by car, and I can carry $800 of groceries in my trunk. And I don’t freeze my ass off in the snow.

“You mean like always? Cool.”

1. No
2. I am horrified.

The ability to quickly make necessary policy changes is at odds with the ability to vet controversial changes. So there is no yes/no answer, but a threshold or multiple thresholds.

As an example, if another pandemic hits, you want to be able to quickly make policy changes around teaching the breakout, making, testing, etc. you don’t want a 6 month review period. And then you have… whatever the fuck the current disaster of an administration is.

He really hates Jimmy. I don’t normally watch Kimmel but I love that he gets under Trump’s skin.

Trump isn’t attacking the insurance industry. He is soliciting a bribe by threatening them.

This is not a problem that has a technical solution. This requires a business solution—stop doing business with that vendor. Whatever service agreement exists between your companies is either not being enforced or was negotiated by a drunken mule.

Throughout the course of history, many have fallen to recklessly misplaced confidence, but rarely on a global scale. Hold our beer.

I’m going to pour myself some bourbon and try to forget I ever read this.

Shame on them. I mark my career by how long it takes me to regret the code I write. When I was a junior, it was often just a month or two. As I seasoned it became maybe as long as two years. Until finally i don’t regret my code, only the exigencies that prevented me from writing better.