bignose

joined 6 months ago
[–] bignose@programming.dev 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Revenue going up, hiring going down, layoffs every quarter and a big push for everyone to use AI. But at the same time basically no real success story from all this increased AI usage. Probably just me, but I just don’t get it.

No, you've got it: Revenue increases, short term, when personnel costs are cut, through layoffs and hiring freezes.

The story told (“workers must return to the office to sit on teleconference all day” prompting more of them to quit, or “your job can be done by robots”, or whatever) only needs to make enough sense that the stock holders are satisfied the executives have a sane explanation for sudden loss of workers. Otherwise it might look like the executives are panicking!

[–] bignose@programming.dev 5 points 1 week ago

Stop trying to trap people inside “the app”. If “the app” is designed to keep people inside and not visit other sites, that's a reader-hostile pattern and a publisher-hostile pattern.

The founding model of using Reddit is “the front page of the internet”. That requires that the rest of the internet is still there, not that the rest of the internet gets sucked into Reddit.

[–] bignose@programming.dev 8 points 1 week ago

10×s developers who could produce 0 code without it

Let me see; ten times nothin', add nothin', carry the nothin'…

[–] bignose@programming.dev 2 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

The spec is so complex that it’s not even possible to know which regex to use

Yes. Almost like a regex is not the correct tool to use, and instead they should use a well-tested library function to validate email addresses.

[–] bignose@programming.dev 11 points 1 month ago

Magit is what allowed me to finally commit to switching to Git full time.

It's such an excellent front-end for Git that I've known numerous workmates learn Emacs just to use Magit.

[–] bignose@programming.dev 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Now we are beginning to see agents: systems that aspire to greater autonomy and can work in “teams” or use tools to accomplish complex tasks.

Given that an “agent” can be assigned work and carry it out autonomously: no, we are not yet seeing any agents. Every one of these bots requires close attention by a human to weed out the huge quantity of mistakes it generates. That's not an “agent” by any useful definition:

Both Anthropic and OpenAI, for example, prescribe active human supervision to minimise errors and risks.

Right. So, it's a bot which even the vendor recommends you don't leave it to work autonomously. Not an agent.

In other news: “self driving” that requires continuous human monitoring and intervention, by multiple humans per vehicle, is not self driving.

Just because the hype marketing of tech corporations bleats a term into the media, does not mean they've got anything that actually does what they say it does.

 

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle said that while the nonprofit organization has always functioned as a library, this new designation makes it easier to work with the other federal depository libraries. That, he said, is a service to everyone.

“ I think there is a great deal of excitement to have an organization such as the Internet Archive, which has physical collections of materials, but is really known mostly for being accessible as part of the internet,” Kahle said. “And helping integrate these materials into things like Wikipedia, so that the whole internet ecosystem gets stronger as digital learners get closer access into the government materials.”

 

The Sapienza computer scientists say Wi-Fi signals offer superior surveillance potential compared to cameras because they're not affected by light conditions, can penetrate walls and other obstacles, and they're more privacy-preserving than visual images.

[…] The Rome-based researchers who proposed WhoFi claim their technique makes accurate matches on the public NTU-Fi dataset up to 95.5 percent of the time when the deep neural network uses the transformer encoding architecture.

[–] bignose@programming.dev 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

No kidding there’s a bubble. When it pops - the tech’s not going anywhere. […] No need for a wall of text, over and over and over.

He's making the point that the entire tech economy is dominated by this bubble, and gargantuan amounts of money is tied up in this with no hope of getting any useful or profitable business.

Yet the mainstream press continues to coddle the egos of Musk and Altman and Zuckerberg and Nadella and Bezos and Pichai, as though their business use of this technology is worth the trillions of investment value they have attracted. It's a fantasy. While that continues, the message is not getting through and the bubble continues to inflate.

For as long as the bubble goes on inflating, yes there is urgent need to keep repeating that message until the mainstream tech and financial press starts accepting it as reality (because that's what investors read), so that people stop hooking our economies into that bubble.

[–] bignose@programming.dev 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Except worse: Confluence tries insanely hard to prevent anyone actually getting at the document source code. So you are expected to use the godawful interactive web editor to make any changes.

 

Now I have this blood pressure monitor device that doesn't work without a logged in app and is a paperweight. I'm lucky I never invested into their ecosystem of health products. Lesson is no matter how popular a brand is, there is no guarantee they will be around. I've lost all my health data and there is no way to get it back.

[–] bignose@programming.dev 2 points 3 months ago

Despite their great value to society, open source projects are frequently understaffed and underresourced. That’s why GitHub has been advocating for a stronger focus on supporting, rather than regulating, open source projects.

What nice sentiments. Perhaps you, GitHub, could start by insisting that Microsoft cease the un-attributed, non-consensual shovelling of open-source software into their LLM training maw. And turn off the LLM that they're attempting to unilaterally sell based on all that uncompensated labour.

Or is your platitude of “supporting open source projects” fall short of actually respecting what we want and need?

[–] bignose@programming.dev 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

a marketing term that is used to sprinkle some magic fairy dust that brings the venture capital dollars.

Like “metaverse” before it. And “blockchain” before that.

Whatever magic phrase will unlock the purse strings of those who control the money, know nothing about where to invest it, and expect unreasonable monopoly returns.

[–] bignose@programming.dev 9 points 3 months ago

Personally, I’m a Luddite and think the new tools should be deployed by the people’s livelihood it will effect and not the business owners.

Thank you for correctly describing what a Luddite wants and does not want.

[–] bignose@programming.dev 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

As others have said: the content is likely to be only of historical interest, because the fields they describe have progressed in understanding a great deal in the intervening decades. As a result, many, many historical books are of effectively negligible interest today.

With that said, historical interest can sometimes be a lot: and those two seem to be from institutions which did seminal work (Rand Corporation, for example).

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