You can train it on all the source code, meta data for that source code, and documentation you want but it will never understand programming. It’s a text predictor that was trained on both sides of a bunch of debates. Contradictions mean nothing to it, but it usually only predicts what one side of the debate will say to champion its side, which means it will use confident and absolute language to “sell” whatever side of the debate it looks like the previous tokens are headed towards.

It is impressive what it can output sometimes and it makes a decent debate/exploration partner, but it will always have a chance at predicting a useless series of tokens or contradicting the previous thing it just said because a) its training data only trains it to predict tokens from statistics, and b) its training data includes some of those contradictions directly.

I have lost count of the times I’ve been “thinking out loud” about something with an LLM and realize something about what I’m thinking about that contradicts what it is currently saying, then I’ll add my new perspective and it agrees entirely, despite the contradiction. Sometimes it tries to resolve the contradiction, sometimes it just abandons what it said previously entirely, sometimes it adds more to the perspective that I hadn’t considered.

That’s fine for just shooting the shit about some random topic but horrible for a tool intended to provide expertise and reliability, when the response matters because it feeds into something else and you want to automate it. Should a tool just inject “are you sure?” after each response? What if it makes it second guess something that was correct? What if it’s one of those debates and it will endlessly switch sides when it faces any opposition? That’s a waste of resources and time.

Funny thing is I’m expecting this to eventually go back to scripting for automation. An LLM has a higher chance of outputting a script that does what you want (depending on the task) while you hold its hand than it does of consistently giving the correct output when it is thrown into an automated system directly. But you get “goodish” results much quicker just trying putting the LLMs everywhere, even if there’s some selection bias on the results (“didn’t work, didn’t work, oh it worked, great!”).

For someone fluent in all involved languages, sure.

But from the sounds of it, OP’s company outsources the translation but doesn’t fully trust the output they get back. They’re back to square one for verifying it, because if they knew both languages enough to verify, they could do the translations themselves.

The problem AI is trying to solve is “how do I access a skill I don’t have cheaply?” It’s only because it’s bad at that problem that it has shifted to “how can we use AI to get more production out of the skilled workers we still need to babysit the AI that is unreliable at everything?”

I’m sure you could involve a torch in there somehow to raise the stakes even more. Grilled Cheese Flamble has a certain ring to it.

It’s kinda like the push to return to office. It was driven by corps having invested in the “can’t fail (ignoring the last previous crash)” real estate market and buying their offices. If everyone suddenly works from home instead of in the office, then those investments go bad because demand for office space is way down. So they tell people to go back to the office, hoping to return to that “every business needs offices!” status quo and save their investments. Though the demand is false (especially combined with layoffs), so it won’t necessarily cause any new corp to want that office space. If they don’t have the sunk cost, then they don’t need to accept the rest of the fallacy.

With AI, it’s the same but just replace building investment with R&D as well as data centre investment. A lot of the companies really pushing AI are the ones that will profit from people going along with that. They really want to build a dependence amongst users as well as a good reputation for execs so they can get a return on the investment. Then there’s also the True Believers (who think LLMs are brilliant AIs that can solve anything if given the right prompts) and the FOMOs (who don’t know much about it but see the world moving towards it and don’t want to miss it because if it was a real AI, missing it could be a massive mistake). There’s also some people who just don’t have various skills and want the AI agents to fill those gaps (and probably don’t have a very good idea about what the LLMs are actually doing in those gaps).

At this point, I think it’s a mistake to go all in on this tech. LLMs aren’t reliable, and their ability to “perform” is more about their flexibility than being well-suited for any task. They’ll go directly from saying things that seem “insightful” (they have no insight) to making the dumbest “mistake” (a mistake requires intent, which they lack, they just predict tokens). But there’s all kinds of false and true (albeit misguided IMO) demand right now and it’s still in early pricing mode (remember the intent is to make that investment money back).

Oh and there’s also China which has been making more efficient models and open sourcing some of them. If they continue to do this, there’s a decent chance those investments will never give the desired returns, at least not to those who are trying to sell tokens. Or those who depend on those selling tokens, like any hardware companies selling hardware under the assumption that it will then make the money to pay for itself (which I believe both nVidia and AMD have done).

It’s mirroring the dotcom bubble with that last bit because network cable companies started loaning the money to pay for their cables to ISPs, expecting returns that never came.

Only if it’s been trained on discussions about it.

I would love if this attitude caught on with enough people to make the marketing industry implode.

I am aware of when I have a vague familiarity with a product or brand and know that that familiarity doesn’t equal good. These days it could mean anything from best in class to absolute shit. The only thing they have in common is that a lot of money was spent on marketing.

Other than that, I need to either take a gamble or do deep research into the thing I want to do (though I’m learning that the real thing I want to look into is the result I want because I might be starting with the wrong process to get there, but after that will still be research on the process and tools to do it, followed by what materials and features are good for that).

Funny thing is that in the end, I do want advertising. Only difference is I want advertising that can be trusted when marketing is often either pushing outright lies when it thinks it can get away with it or has flipped around their message so much so that they can talk their product up without outright lying. I want a reviewer that will call garbage garbage (or even better, go into detail about why they think it is garbage) and not have to worry about whether that means some producers won’t want to send them free shit to review.

He could end up with a fancy bunker door that leads to an unfinished tunnel.

How does being grumpy about something help? It’s just an emotional state, not a solution.

Nintendo? Like the playing card company?

It doesn’t spread person to person so it won’t have the explosive growth and spread to all corners of the globe like covid.

Edit: this one might, though it isn’t clear yet and if it does, it seems to require close contact or at least isn’t as explosive as covid.

And AI is going to put that into overdrive.

For a little while, I helped with some intern and recent grad interviews and holy shit some people didn’t have a clue. Had one guy on a remote interview that had a friend there helping him answer questions. It was obvious because he didn’t even mute his mic and we could hear them. And it was extra pathetic because his friend wasn’t even feeding him anything useful, like Bevis was helping Butthead with a software engineering interview.

We had a short break and when we resumed, he had at least figured out to mute his mic between questions (not that that helped, as muting yourself frequently when you’re one of the main speakers in the meeting alone is a red flag without some reason that should be obvious when it isn’t muted). Only resumed because I was fairly new to interviewing, if I got one of those today (and still did interviews), I would have ended it early.

You “everything is AI and I must complain about it” people are worse than the “nothing ever happens” people. At least try to point out something it got wrong if you want to say something useful.

DRAM*

NAND is what (some) SSDs use.

You’re right about the sky, though I think the tree does have a line but the blur hides it (I can see it when I include the line in the roof but not when I block it). I’d say that it is more sophisticated than paint, but that an image editor was used to take the cloud from only one of the images.

I disagree that the tire text is garbled. https://www.bfgoodrich.ca/en/auto/garage/articles/making-of-the-ko3-tire here’s a picture of a similar tire with the same text. AI might have been used for some of the editing of that transition, but I don’t think the source images were genAI.

Nah, I just wasn’t looking close enough, it’s just a simple paste of one image on top of another from the same angle. If you follow the line where the truck ends upwards, you can see a similar line on the roof of the building and the tree in the background doesn’t quite line up perfectly (but it’s close enough that our brains assume it’s fine).

That might have even been done in paint rather than gimp or ps.

I love how this is simultaneously a great and horrible photoshop. Like the splice is obvious in the foreground but I can’t see it in the background at all. Like I have no idea how this was done.

A different approach to the not liking water, get a good filter. I used breta filters for years but a few years back installed an under sink reverse osmosis filter because the water here is so hard that it just tastes bad whether left hard or softened. I knew water could be better because I grew up with decent water and liked it even back when I preferred pop or juice.

I wonder if anyone who claims to dislike water has only ever had subpar water. Note that I include a bunch of bottled waters in that, as I vastly prefer my RO tap water to any store bought bottled water, though some were on par with breta filtered water, though I’ve always hated the waste involved in buying bottled water (other than those big ones you can refill and stick in a water cooler, which can also be RO water if you have a good water place to get it from).

If you do go for RO, make sure the system you get has an extra stage that adds some minerals back into the water. The RO on its own actually leaves the water too pure to be safe to drink regularly, as it causes osmosis to pull nutrients out of your cells (or something like that). I’d also only suggest it in an area where water is plentiful, as it does use more water than what you get from the filter, though adding a passive pump can improve efficiency.

No, I’m saying the ones who say it’s evil to bring kids into this world are hypocrites if they themselves want to keep existing in this world but think a child couldn’t possibly want to exist in it.

Like anti-natalist, not just child free. I don’t think anyone has a duty to have kids and think not wanting kids is a great reason to not have them. I even disagree with doctors who refuse to sterilize people who would rather remove that possibility than keep the risk (and think the doctors should be shielded from any consequences when a patient later regrets that decision). I’d also call it fair if you said some people have no business having kids.

But there’s some people online who take that position to the next level and say that anyone having kids these days is wrong to do so.

It’s pathetic, considering how existence itself was a struggle for the past 3 billion years, then gets easier over the last like 100k, and now there’s new challenges and anti-natalists want us to just give up because it is hard?

And inconsistent because they don’t want to give up themselves, but want everyone else to not give future generations a chance.

And I didn’t say they should kill themselves, but if they believe existence is so painful and hopeless that creating new life is wrong, why haven’t they? Though that “if they are serious about it” is the crux of my position: I believe they are being dramatic or overcompensating for those other assholes that insist having kids is our only purpose and that everyone should have them and gets in their business about not wanting kids themselves.

I also believe that kids born during a collapse will probably have an easier time handling it (emotionally) than those of us who got used to life before a collapse. It’s just hard to say if that will apply to kids born soon or if it won’t be the case for some decades yet.

A variation of this that I realized fairly recently is that striving for excellence doesn’t mean the journey towards it is garbage. I can both feel pride in what I’ve done while also acknowledging where it could have been better with the intent to either circle back and do it better in the future (for like house projects) or avoid that mistake next time (for creations).

Like I did a cross stitch of a wolf and it skewed a bit because it had a lot of half-stitching (without going into too much detail, a full cross stitch equalizes the forces the threads put on the canvas while a half-stitch puts an uneven force on it). So for my current one, I got hoops that I previously didn’t think I needed, which hold the canvas in place outside so the threads are less likely to put a high force where they are.

And my next one will involve a better ordering strategy because my fairly random approach caused some areas of the canvas to bunch up more than others. Less noticeable than the wolf’s skew, but still a flaw I’d like to fix going forward but I’m not beating myself up about the current one.

Assuming this is even relevant to the context you mean lol.

The whole “not much of anything else” mellows out as they get older, and you can even share those interests with your kids. I loved the whole process of going to amusement parks with my daughter, watching her go from enjoying but also being terrified of the small ones, to getting used to those but doing the same for the medium ones, being nervous about going upside down, then seeing it wasn’t such a big deal and now loving the big ones as much as I do and we got to experience the most intense one I’ve ever ridden for the first time together.