2sk21

Yeah - we also don't know if the models from OpenAI and anthropic are back-doored either.

This seems more like a marketing move though following the old dictum that all publicity is good publicity.

You can turn off the "smart" features in the settings page for gmail. I did this and find it to be much more usable!

This is just insane! Why hasn't this bubbled up to the top?

You can, most certainly, drive a car without understanding how it works. A pilot of an aircraft on the other hand needs a fairly detailed understanding of the subsystems in order to effectively fly it.

I think being a programmer is closer to being an aircraft pilot than a car driver.

Indeed - there is a lot of fake "productivity" going on with these swarms of agents

I was reminded of this classic short story by Isaac Asimov, The feeling of Power: https://archive.org/details/1958-02_IF/page/4/mode/2up

I feel grateful that I retired a few years ago and no longer have to make a living being a developer.

This reminds me of the early 1980s, when home PCs were still very new, the main use cases that vendors used to promote were managing household accounts and recipes. These use cases were extremely unimpressive for most ordinary people. It took a long time for PCs to become ubiquitous in homes - until gaming and the web became common.

IDEs used to be extremely expensive back in the 1990s. IDEs such as Microsoft Visual Studio and IBM's Visual age for Java were quite expensive subscription as I recall. subsequently, open source IDEs like Eclipse and VisualStudio seem to have become the norm.

The next generation of SEO - this article is both hilarious and disturbing

This is absolutely mind boggling. Why hasn't this bubbled up to the top of HN?

Reviewing someone else's large pull request is like having a second task in parallel with what you are working on yourself!

Telecom vendors were doing exactly this before the dotcom crash of 2000

I'm curious: Do you scrutinize every line of code that's generated?

I read this point in the article with bafflement:

"Learn when a problem is best solved manually."

Sure, but how? This is like the vacuous advice for investors: buy low and sell high

Indeed, there have been so many new activation functions that I have stopped following the literature after I retired. I am glad to see that people are trying out new things.

I'm surprised that the article doesn't mention that one of the key factors that enabled deep learning was the use of RELU as the activation function in the early 2010s. RELU behaves a lot better than the logistic sigmoid that we used until then.

I would be happy if it could search through my enormous reading list on Safari

I worked summers in a lab in the 1980s that had Silicon Graphics, Apollo and Sun workstations. The Sun was the easiest to program by far so it got the most use.

Yeah - it was pretty chaotic when I was there too. We had to use the internal purchase order system to buy certificates from a CA. It was cumbersome as it required several levels of approval. I have long since quit IBM thankfully and had forgotten all about it until I saw this post today :-)

When it comes to certificates, mess-ups happen frequently in big companies. When I worked at IBM, I initially had the responsibility for obtaining and renewing the code signing certificate for a Java applet that we used in our product. I handed off the responsibility to another employee when I left that group. I was on vacation in the middle of nowhere when I got a panicked call from the product manager asking me to renew the certificate as the employee had quit. I had to spend half a day walking someone through the renewal process - ruined my day.

Article like this are why I keep coming back to HN: I was using an LDR (Light Dependent Resistor) for a similar task but this LED idea is fascinating. It would have never occurred to me!

Great work! Quite an interesting collection of hardware you have built!

I had this back in the 1980s and I learnt a lot about electronics from it. Was one of my favorite kits!

I will never buy a car without CarPlay - it's that simple. I will likely buy an EV at some point but I will never buy a Tesla, Rivian or GM EV since they lack this essential feature. I like that all of my phone's relevant data is accessible and I don't have to do any sync. I listed to podcasts with the Overcast app on my iPhone - the CarPlay interface is excellent. I like having access to a choice of maps on the display.

That was an excellent write up! I am really surprised that the built-in navigation system does not enable you to search for charging + activity. That seems like it ought to be essential!

Agree. If a competitive model can be trained in a few months, its not clear what is really unique here

Nvidia does admittedly have a lock on the market at the CUDA level but not necessarily at the Pytorch level.

My point is that while Cisco was an early winner, Amazon and Google started growing a few years later and were much larger winners in the end. I think there is a possibility that history may repeat with Nvidia -but I have no idea what new companies are going to rise in the AI era.