mathw

I have seldom been so shocked by a comment as by having my very existence made the moral equivalent of a state-sanctioned murder.

The purpose of the death penalty itself is vengeance. It does nothing to prevent crime, it just promotes a culture of violence. How can a government condemn murder when engaging in it themselves?

Livestreamed or not, this is immoral and Australia are quite right to try to block it. All countries should be seeking to do the same.

1) it absolutely isn't "uncensored"

2) absolute freedom to post whatever you like and have it shoved in people's faces by the algorithm is harmful

3) usually when people are "hungry for the raw, real truth" they're actually chasing a bunch of conspiracy theories

That is exactly what it means.

And to get people to ignore that DHH is a massive racist.

Are you living with your head under a rock. AI has absolutely made my life worse, and is set to do so further. I know very few people who are seriously enthusiastic about it.

"All evidence suggests more AI is better" is ignoring an awful lot of the evidence, and the doom is already happening all around you and you just can't see it.

It took me far too long to realise that writing on paper is better than typing.

No we won't.

Everything looks brown, it's crammed together, those not-photos make it feel really cramped in the third column, it looks like every other AI-generated menu and it's lost the clarity the old menu had.

And yes, there's a very long history of food places using unrealistic images of someone else's version of the food on the menus. That doesn't mean that it's okay to now use LLM versions of the food, because I never thought it was okay to use those stylised photos either.

Also why do they have sea life in it at all, surely that's not something that's meant to be in the pool.

Yes, because LLMs make stuff up all the time. Still. Anybody who's using an LLM for search isn't serious about the answers.

You could just not use LLMs and retain your brain function.

If you can't review the code faster than you could write it yourself, write it yourself.

The only way to even start to counter that is to make it a firm company policy that if you use an LLM to hallucinate any documents you absolutely must thoroughly review them yourself before you send them to anybody else, and that you are still responsible for the quality of LLM-generated content.

Getting an LLM to vomit out a bunch of documents and sending them straight to another colleague is absolutely unacceptable behaviour.

Not much ROI, if any. My employer's been making some studies and come up with very modest productivity gains - so of course they want us all to use it, but I'm not sure they're taking the true costs into account. Especially not once token pricing actually reflects reality, and we all get brain rot from using the things instead of thinking. If this thing doesn't collapse before we can run a solid coding assistant model on a developer's machine, maybe it's got some legs.

That doesn't seem very likely.

The legacy of LLMs will live on in various models doing various specialist things (they seem like a really good progression on speech synthesis for example) but the current edifice will come crashing down and if we're very very very lucky they won't take the global economy with it.

Ah the good old "move the thing you're about to click on just before you click it" thing. Soooo many UIs have this problem and it is driving me crazy. I feel like there needs to be a rule that once you've rendered a clickable thing you can't move it until the user does something that might reasonably cause it to move.

Exactly that - the headline is unsupported by the article, but works very well as clickbait.

And this changes over time, because for me cyan IS a basic colour term and I'm a native English speaker.

Your analogy with CI/CD is flawed because while not all were convinced of the merits of CI/CD, it's also not technology built on vast energy use and copyright violation at a scale unseen in all of history, which has upended the hardware market, shaken the idea of job security for developers to its very foundation and done it while offering no really obvious benefits to groups wishing to produce really solid software. Maybe that comes eventually, but not at this level of maturity.

But you're right it's probably unenforceable. They will probably end up accepting PRs which were written with LLM assistance, but if they do it will be because it's well-written code that the contributor can explain in a way that doesn't sound to the maintainers like an LLM is answering their questions. And maybe at that point the community as a whole would have less to worry about - if we're still assuming that we're not setting ourselves up for horrible licence violation problems in the future when it turns out an LLM spat out something verbatim from a GPLed project.

Of course, nobody is claiming that there aren't lots of Firefox crashes which are caused by bugs in Firefox. Quite the opposite, based on these figures. What people find interesting is that the amount they're suspecting are down to hardware faults is way higher than most people would have expected.

Reactive UIs may have been made popular on the web, where they're an absolute nightmare, but native code does them better still.

Best time I ever had in a job was writing WPF applications in C# using ReactiveUI. Once we really understood the underlying model we were plugging stuff together so easily. It is a really good model, but I can't see how React is a good example of it.

Of course I had lots to complain about then, WPF had bugs, C# has a number of big problems, but it was, overall, very nice.

It would be excellent to reduce Windows memory requirements using the very tools which are making memory so expensive...

Oh wait no that would be incredibly painful for everyone. Yes reducing memory requirements would be great but not at that cost.

Maybe it's because there's no overall benefit to these things.

There's been a lot of talk about it for the past few years but we're just not seeing impacts. Oh sure, management talk it up a lot, but where's the corresponding increase in feature delivery? Software stability? Gross profit? EBITDA?

Give me something measurable and I'll consider it.

It's a minor point but the Earth doesn't radiate all of that heat to equilibrium, that's why we have climate change.

Scaling up PV production to the point where we could convert the entire Earth's electricity generation to solar is incredibly significant.

Yes there's the problem of intermittency, varying sun availability and so forth - which is why solar will never provide 100% of our power and we'll also need grid-scale storage facilities and domestic batteries and all sorts of stuff - but just imagine being able to make that many panels in the first place! Literally solar on every roof, that's transformative.

But sure, let's send it all to space to power questionable "AI" datacentres so we can make more fake nudes.

Less damage... with his CSAM-making bot. Yeah. Less damage.

Absolutely. Labour betrayed their core voters, who are looking for something else, but won't touch Reform UK because they're even more disgusting than the current right-wing Labour-in-name-only government.

Applying those things equally to people regardless of skin colour, gender identity, sexuality or any other line along which people have historically been discriminated against isn't important?

Come on, mercury vapour sounds like sooooo much fun! Where's your sense of adventure?

/s

I'd dispute this, as I count myself as a tech enthusiast but I'm an enthusiast for tech which works well. I increasingly find myself having to put up with stuff that doesn't work well, and this AI investment instead of fixing the stuff that Windows is routinely doing to make my working day harder is infuriating.

Also, in my experience, it's the non-tech-enthusiasts who are diving into LLMs because they don't understand what is actually going on and it basically looks like a repeat of the whole thing about ELIZA a few decades ago. Just this time it's vastly more expensive and has to run on a datacentre and can write you an essay instead of just rephrasing your question.