BobbyTables2

I’ve also wondered about this.

Industrialization allowed people to shift human labor from agriculture to factories and such.

Seems like intellectual labor became more possible as people looked beyond subsistence but also more valuable since a greater population could drive demand for more than just subsistence related activities.

If both aren’t done by many humans, what’s left? Sports training and massage therapy? Sports training might not even be safe…

OTOH, my current lifestyle is already weird if I think about it. Developing software for a machine that I cannot make myself, whose raw materials I cannot obtain, using energy I cannot produce on my own — somehow entitles me to get a particular amount of goods and services from others including food, healthcare, entertainment, landscaping, and manufactured goods.

We live in interesting times…

At least the evil bit was a dedicated field at a known place…

AI guardrails can’t even dream of that!

Imagine if it was just the absence of “I’m evil” in the payload.

Read The Fine Manpage

ld.so

It’s really rich when banking/finance apps are fully happy doing 2FA to the phone when using its own browser…

Yeah — loose the phone and it’s pretty much game over.

That’s right up there with Scotty in the classic Star Trek always multiplying time estimates by 4 so he looks like a “miracle worker”

A LLM is a search engine…

Especially with a large customer base.

Rotate new features across 0.01% of the user base to conscript them into being QAs.

Telemetry probably even means the user doesn’t have to submit a report…

Sure but we don’t pretend otherwise…

Exactly, an expert system marketed to nonexperts…

How creditable would Claude be if it couldn’t answer “1+2=3?”

Worse, this is really human beings trying to pretend that their AI is AGI.

Pity Feynman didn’t write a Distributed Systems textbook…

I just assumed Bun users also suffer from psychological damage…

Didn’t Texas pretty much do the exact opposite thing recently?

Nuts to imagine a full hour movie made for under $1000.

Sure, while not exactly negligible, sure could beat hundreds of hours spent filming, audio editing, and all the other post-production work that would produce an amateur work.

Indeed.

Even as a pedestrian, I hate crossing a small road using crosswalks at a 4 way stop.

More than once, I’ve been nearly run over — even by vehicles that came to a complete stop.

Others were too distracted and plowed nonstop going 40+mph through the 4way stop.

I actually prefer to cross in the middle of the road on my own terms.

Basically an advertisement …

Indeed! I’ve always considered it as a quick check that the other person is not about to suddenly explode on you.

I serious doubt Google is doing this for the spare datacenter capacity.

This is a ridiculous amount of money.

Have to believe a non-tech company could hire an entire team/company to build datacenters for this kind of money.

Make no mistake - this has to be “do evil” territory.

Wonder if they steal the fence too!

What a bunch of borons!

I saw it come up with a really clever solution to an obscure problem seemingly based on a single hard-to-find blog post where that wasn’t really the focus. (It actually improved upon the author’s implementation too)

Using it to proofread a manual on a highly specialized thing I wrote also surprised me. Excepted utter failure but it pointed out my own consistencies and had a lot of good findings.

I have trouble believing how this is possible even with a decent understanding how it works.

It also makes me start to question if human intelligence is all it’s cracked up to be.

Kids today don’t even know where the files are stored or anything about partitions, drives, directory structure or even how much disk space is available.

They have some files, synced to OneDrive and do everything else fully online (Canva, etc.)

Most of them have never seen a computer with a drive other than C:

The QNX approach is also pretty much how the dynamic linker loads shared libraries today in Linux .

“An era of really expensive memory”. That sounds familiar…

Vintage 16x9 TV memories (;->

I wish my VCR was that good in LP mode back then!

That is pretty good!

Hmm. Now that we have 1 terabyte 1000MB/s NVme drives, we can really be nostalgic about the 1.44Mb 3.5” floppy drives that have about 30KB/s throughput…

Might even be practical with the latest trends in storage pricing…

I wouldn’t be so sure.

Seems like every configuration file format starts off simple. Look at YAML - the basics started off pretty sensibly.

And then people decided they wanted to get fancier with anchors and aliases. Even GitLab has its own form of conditionals and variables, which is all a bit of a hack (only works in certain places).

Even Apache fell into this with its XML based config format.

So we end up with numerous “bespoke” programming languages for configuration management. Of course enterprise people don’t edit these directly - they script Ansible workflows to remotely perform the surgery.

Sadly, could have skipped all that and just have embedded a Lua/Python/etc. interpreter into servers to do the configuration management. Would be simpler than trying to programmatically edit bespoke config files.

Sure, one will say all the bespoke attempts are optimized for a specific use the way a general language isn’t. Except that only fits a narrow class of toy examples which wouldn’t have needed their machinery in the first place!

Remember Windows INI files? Back in the good ol’ days when code was code and data was data….

I mean more that the elementary/secondary school years are largely wasted in terms of what could have been taught.

Yes, some things are taught and sometimes learned, but only superficially.

Even basic economics and financial literacy is taught way too late. These kids have been ogling phones, tablets, apps since they were in Kindergarten and then learn a few basics over a decade later?

Acceleration in Physics is not a difficult concept. Yet, it’s often taught late in secondary school - 6 to 8 years after teaching fractions.

Each year Math classes largely repeat the previous year with just a small extra wrinkle (except for the crazy year known as Geometry).

Pre-algebra, algebra I, algebra II, advanced math, Calculus I. That’s 5 years to poorly learn lines, parabolas, and integrals — longer than an entire college education.

Imagine if we taught grammar that way. All Of Elementary education would be stuck in the simple tenses! The future perfect continuous would be taught Senior year!

I’m not advocating teaching Calculus in 2nd grade but I think we should be doing better.

Unless one gets a large van, daily life becomes less convenient beyond 2 kids.

Midsize sedan/SUV aren’t great at more than 2 parents + 2 kids (especially with car seats!)

Vacations are also more expensive since a lot of hotel rooms don’t allow more than 2 adults + 2 kids.

More is also harder on the parents !

As someone with a vacuum flask, I can assert orbital data centers are definitely NOT a good idea.

They should keep some FlexSeal up there !