I don’t think it’s all grift - there are absolutely places where LLMs are the best tech out there, but it’s probably not going to take everyone’s jobs any time soon (at least not on merit - in sure there are plenty of places that’d accept a 50% drop in quality for a 90% drop in price)

I’ve seen a pretty compelling case study of a company using an LLM as a “tier zero” support tech - instead of getting a tier 1 tech to classify a case, decide if they had the tools to address the issue or if it needs to go to tier 2, work out if it was an instance of a known issue etc before they actually start working on the problem, give the LLM some examples and get it to do the triage so the humans can do the more complicated stuff. It does about as well as a human, for a fraction of the price.

Work paid for me to go to a “getting started with AI for businesses” seminar run by [redacted reputable organisation name] and holy crap the FOMO.

• The whole premise of the thing basically boiled down to “LLMs are a massive game changing technology that is going to make huge amounts of human tasks obsolete and if you don’t get in on it now your competitors will and you’ll be bankrupt in a decade” which… idk. Useful technology for sure, but this isn’t the AI singularity. The vibe I got was all these people are old enough to see the fortunes won and lost when the internet exploded, and are terrified that this is going to be that all over again and that they’ll end up left behind.
• People massively personify LLMs without thinking through the actual detail in how they work. Someone asked a question about how you can rely on information the LLM gives you, and the suggestion was to just ask it how confident it is which isn’t really how LLMs work - they are fancy auto complete, it has no theory of mind or actual reasoning - it can’t know if what it’s saying is true or not, but because it is being presented as something you can converse with, it feels like there is some deeper cognition that you can interrogate

its more likely than you think

The early twenties intermediate dev on my team was explaining the other week that if you remember a time before smartphones and broadband, you are old

I personally am familiar with 2 organisations with millions of dollars in annual revenue that deploy critical line of business applications like this in 2024

Sounds like a great idea - I suspect the biggest obstacle will be finding someone at the home who is confident enough in what to do with it to be willing to accept it.

I’ve run into similar issues with schools where they are hesitant to accept donations of things like that because they don’t want to be saddled with equipment they don’t know how to use and maintain. Maybe worth seeing if you can raise a bit of money for a second hand Xbox or something?

Fun fact, a significant proportion of the people doing these scams are victims of human trafficking who are being forced into it with threats of violence

git-annex maybe?

We would like to apologise for any unpleasant experiences or doubts caused by the miscommunication of these terms

We are sorry we got called out

Dealing with this at the moment - in an org that’s been pretty lax at writing anything down about what and why as far as internal software goes, trying (with support from C-suite) to get people to actually write up any amount of detail in their requests is like pulling teeth.

I tend to take that position as well; if it’s not defined, I get to define it. If I ask for feedback or review and get silence, that means you approve.

https://blog.neon.kde.org/2024/05/09/kde-neon-rebasing-on-ubuntu-noble/

It’s coming. It takes a bit of work to make it happen

Because accountants mostly.

For large businesses, you essentially have two ways to spend money:

• OPEX: “operational expenditure” - this is money that you send on an ongoing basis, things like rent, wages, the 3rd party cleaning company, cloud services etc. The expectation is that when you use OPEX, the money disappears off the books and you don’t get a tangible thing back in return. Most departments will have an OPEX budget to spend for the year.
• CAPEX: “capital expenditure” - buying physical stuff, things like buildings, stock, machinery and servers. When you buy a physical thing, it gets listed as an asset on the company accounts, usually being “worth” whatever you paid for it. The problem is that things tend to lose value over time (with the exception of property), so when you buy a thing the accountants will want to know a depreciation rate - how much value it will lose per year. For computer equipment, this is typically ~20%, being “worthless” in 5 years. Departments typically don’t have a big CAPEX budget, and big purchases typically need to be approved by the company board.

This leaves companies in a slightly odd spot where from an accounting standpoint, it might look better on the books to spend $3 million/year on cloud stuff than $10 million every 5 years on servers

I’m in New Zealand and it prompted me to set up my Sony WH-1000XM5s with Find My Device on my Pixel 7a last week, but kept erroring out when I tried to do it

Extractive economies based on production of commodities are unsustainable in the long term!?

(shocked_pikachu.gif)

Natural (unenriched) uranium isn’t especially radioactive and while there is plenty of exciting chemistry that could happen, none of it would be quite as immediately exciting as what would happen if you tried to freeze oxygen solid enough to make a dildo

The biggest step forward since the invention of teledildonics

If I die before I wake / At least in heaven I can skate / Cos right now on earth I can’t do shit / Without the man fucking with it

The APs reporting seems to indicate “probably not” - both Israel and Iran are refusing to comment or acknowledge the strike, which gives both sides a way to step back without having to lose face. If Iran or Israel were intending to escalate, they’d be shouting from the rooftops about “see! Look what happened!”.

Still pretty scary though, wouldn’t take much for a miscommunication or misunderstanding for this to rapidly escalate even if no one wants it to.

As a software dev who has lost weeks of his life dealing with timezones, leap days, daylight savings time, date math and other associated nonsense I fully support this being the way the world is. I don’t want to go through the transition to get there though

Tiktok has some super arbitrary automatic filters that look at description + ORC text in the video and will black hole anything that matches certain words.

Like anything, there ends up being folklore about what words trigger the filtering (cos there is no public list) so people end up censoring stuff that might actually be fine, but it’s hard to know for sure