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JFingleton

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Software Engineer 22+ years Father, Husband, Technologist

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Incus is fantastic. I think Proxmox is where everyone is migrating to after the VMWare/Broadcom fiasco, but people should seriously consider Incus as well.

When the UK was in the EU, hardly anyone I know voted in the EU elections, and equally they weren't covered by the media. I believe there was so little interest in the EU elections and it felt so far removed from the uk that I'm not sure it really counted as "democratic" (perhaps someone will correct me here?).

I'm hoping voters in European countries feel differently, I suspect not though.

I always thought a police state would demand identification at every street corner (perhaps I'm wrong?) and any minor breaking of the law being dealt with severe justice. The UK has always been against a "state ID" unlike a lot of European countries, so I'm not completely convinced the description of "police state" is accurate. In fact I think it's the opposite given people can freely break the law despite cameras being on every street corner.

The UK is basically an end-of-days advanced state: bureaucracy taken to the extreme, with a heavy dose of nanny-state "mind the gap" messaging.

Bureaucracy kills any kind of infrastructure project (see HS2), so don't expect any improvements any time soon.

We do have some nice cities: Manchester, York, Edinburgh, Oxford, Cambridge. (I've probably missed a few from this list). London feels pretty far from 30 years ago - and not in a good way.

A properly designed app would leverage multi threading to place any long running jobs in the background, allowing the user to carry on with other tasks.

Spinners should not exist in a local first app.

I'm in my mid-40's and I'm in the best shape of my life. However it's taken a lot of hard work and sacrifice, that I weirdly enjoy:

* Cooking all meals from scratch (I try and reduce UPFs as much as possible).

* No bread or pasta ever. Fresh non-supermarket bread and pasta is probably OK for you...

* Less alcohol (only on special occasions). Modern no-alcohol beer is actually very enjoyable.

* Lift weights 3x a week. I built a home gym in my garage, with a TV mounted on a wall. It's a great time to unwind, watch YouTube and get fit. It's alone time I look forward to.

* Walk every lunchtime for 20 minutes, rather than browsing the Internet

The key thing about exercise, is that if you don't enjoy it then you won't do it. For me, the alone time watching Youtube or listening to a podcast is the pull-factor. For others it'll be a sport playing in a team.

Food is the major factor in your general health, and we really have fallen into a trap in the Western world with our food habits. Fortunately we have a choice in this regard.

Given that the US is now governed by Russian assets

Donald Trump has consistently and forcefully argued that European NATO members must significantly increase their defense spending. He has long criticized European nations for not contributing enough to their own defense and relying too heavily on the United States.

Why would you do this if you're a Russian asset..?

Zero days can go for $$$, or you can go down the bug bounty route and also get $$. The cost of the LLM would be a drop in the bucket.

When the cost of inference gets near zero, I have no idea what the world of cyber security will look like, but it's going to be a very different space from today.

From Matt Lucas himself regarding Little Britain:

'Speaking in October 2017, Lucas stated that if he were to remake Little Britain he would avoid making jokes about transvestites and would not play the role of a black character, saying, "Basically, I wouldn't make that show now. It would upset people. We made a more cruel kind of comedy than I'd do now... Society has moved on a lot since then and my own views have evolved".'

Basically the risk taking has gone in modern comedy.

It is interesting how google turned the tide on GenAI race, and seems to be leading the pack

I think this is perhaps due to Google combining Google Brain and DeepMind, and putting Demis Hassabis at the helm?

I agree, Google is very much leading the pack in AI now. My worry is that they have mentioned recently that they are less inclined to release research into the open if they think it will give their competition a step-up. Demis is more scientist than business-man, so perhaps there's hope that he will be willing to continue to release research.

Same. At 40 I simply can't expend any of my limited time or energy with games, when I could be doing something productive/wholesome (which for me is lifting weights, reading and learning). It's a shame as I used to love playing RPGs and FPSs.

Gemini 2.5 Flash 1 year ago

They are not humans - so yeah I can totally see having to "go to school" to learn how to interact with them.

Gemini 2.5 Flash 1 year ago

Prompt engineering is a thing.

Learning how to "speak llm" will give you great results. There's loads of online resources that will teach you. Think of it like learning a new API.

I'm not sure why people are expecting a language model to be great at chess. Remember they are trained on text, which is not the best medium for representing things like a chess board. They are also "general models", with limited training on pretty much everything apart from human language.

An Alpha Star type model would wipe the floor at chess.

AI 2027 1 year ago

"They are stuck in 2020 office jobs and weekend open source tech, programming-wise."

You say that like it's nothing special! Honestly I'm still in awe at the ability of modern LLMs to do any kind of programming. It's weird how something that would have been science fiction 5 years ago is now normalised.

I'm not sure that's quite correct about the Turing test. From Wikipedia:

"Turing did not explicitly state that the Turing test could be used as a measure of "intelligence", or any other human quality. He wanted to provide a clear and understandable alternative to the word "think", which he could then use to reply to criticisms of the possibility of "thinking machines" and to suggest ways that research might move forward."