area51org

One thing people often don't realize or ignore: these LLMs are trained on the internet, the entire internet.

There's a shit-ton of bad and inefficient code on the internet. Lots of it. And it was used to train these LLMs as much as the good code.

In other words, the LLMs are great if you're OK with mediocrity at best. Mediocrity is occasionally good enough, but it can spell death for a company when key parts of it are mediocre.

I'm afraid a lot of the executives who fantasize about replacing humans with AI are going to have to learn this the hard way.

Maybe it's things like 4-year tenure, or shorter tenure, or something else.

But I think it's a matter of motivation, Bob.

The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care. It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? ... my only real motivation is not to be hassled. That, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.

We've seen what happens when we pretend the market will somehow regulate itself.

Depression isn't just feeling sad. It's not necessarily caused by anything external. You cannot necessarily just "figure out why" you feel bad; that's really not how it usually works.

I wouldn't go that far, but there was a now-famous study (Princeton?) that showed that doing aerobic exercise for maybe 30 mins every day, about five days per week, was equally effective at alleviating depression symptoms.

One fundamental difference: Wikipedia is not a for-profit corporation. OpenAI is. That probably matters.

For all intensive purpose's their one in the same.

Quote may be cliched, but still it's valid.

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

I had that issue, and I think I still might have it in my closet. (Weren't those Robert Tinney covers amazing?)

I always wanted to try out Forth but had no real opportunity. Maybe I should now?

What would you propose? Donating money to blackhole political organizations? Taking to the streets? None of that, or much of anything else, will "do something about this". There is no doing anything about this. It's also just meaningless posturing, just another tantrum by a man-child.

Samba is used for Windows support.

Anyone care to boil this down?

Not necessarily true, as the success of streaming shows. The problem comes when the unbounded greed of the billionaires in charge leads them to inflate prices beyond their customers' ability and willingness to pay.

The aggravating part about this: that was not the intention of the copyright clause. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

Authors and inventors. Authors and inventors.

Not companies. Not entities, or even individuals, who purchased the "rights" and now "own" works. That has nothing to do with the intent here, which was to encourage actual authors and inventors to make more stuff. Walt Disney has been gone for more than half a century; he's not going to be able to come up with another Mickey Mouse.

"Intellectual property" is an oxymoron. Pray, tell me, which part of my brain does Disney own? Do they own the part that knows what Mickey Mouse looks like?

Having lived in that era: no one "complained endlessly", or even at all, about the internet. It was seen as magical. When compared to not existing at all, being slow wasn't all that awful.

That seems very dependent on which company you work for. Many would not grant you that kind of flexibility.

Presumably because there's a perception that if there are lots of rich people, they can afford to be gouged.

This begs the question of how many rich people there actually are, though.

Why code when you can just ask the computer to do what you want and get the results.

Because then you won't know the design of the code or how it even works.

The hard part of coding isn't writing the code itself. It's the design of the code that takes skill, and if you leave that part completely up to AI, you are taking your life in your hands. Bad idea.

"Journalism" is now often just a euphemism for shock porn and clickbait.

At the end of this Atlantic article, the author admits:

Luckily for humans, though, skepticism of the strong interpretation is warranted. For one thing, supercharged productivity growth, which an intelligence explosion would likely produce, is hard to find in the data. For another, a New York Fed survey of firms released last year found that AI was having a negligible effect on hiring.

In other words: did we scare ya? Good, because it got you to read this far. Nothing to actually see here.

Stupid question, maybe, but IANAL: is this even legal? Isn't it illegal to pay others to bury your competitor?

This kind of smokescreen only works for so long. Once it all starts failing and profits dip, things will change.

As an Apple Music customer, I am heartened to hear that they do not promote AI songs and that they pay artists more.

My company isn't. Apparently, "We've heard of Microsoft" == "They won't do anything wrong with our data" in the minds of non-technical lawyer types.

Don't leave out ChatTelex and ChatCarrierPigeon.

Fair enough, but this isn't about how cool it was that there were warring factions. There were reasons that the divide existed, and most of the reasons involved the behemoth Microsoft throwing its weight around and trying to bully the world of technology. People who ran Windows were seen as complicit, and in some ways, they actually were.

Especially at the time, saying that both sides were obviously bad people because they had a beef with each other is a little like saying the Dark Side and the Jedi should have just stopped being assholes to each other. It's not that simple.

with instructions read from punch card memory

If that isn't a stored program, I don't know what is.

I don't know that the problem is short attention span. Poor communication has always been with us. I am sure Luu has compelling insights—what I was able to get through seemed interesting—but he is a poor communicator. It's not just that he presents a wall of text; his wording and his approach to communication tell me that he thinks if he just gets his thoughts recorded, that's enough. It is not enough.

While we're at it: enough with the brain teasers and weird analogies. These, too, have nothing to do with actual day-to-day work and are really just a way to exercise power over candidates.

He actually did know how to code. He and Woz created the classic video game Breakout while working at Atari. (I have no doubt Woz did most of the heavy lifting.) It's not that he didn't know how to program, it's just that coding was not his strong suit.

Agreed that the author doesn't seem to understand what is and is not a conspiracy theory. The article starts off by calling the ancient alien astronauts "theory" a conspiracy theory. Who are the conspirators? I don't mean Tsoukalos, he just spreads the myth. But if it's a conspiracy theory, there had to be conspirators. And there weren't, because there is no conspiracy. A conspiracy is not the same thing as a myth.