bogzz

Judging by the frequent frustration I've witnessed whenever visiting two separate friends who own Alexas, no they are not good now.

On another note, I am continuously flabbergasted that even Google cannot get an agentic LLM assistant right. I used to use the Google Assistant ALL the time when it did not make use of LLM's. It was AMAZING. I could just say "wake me up at 7" and it would understand that I meant 7AM the next day, or call "mom", or "set a timer for 10 minutes" while I'm cooking. It was genuinely useful to me.

Google Assistant last week sent me to the Google Search page with my prompt "wake me up at 7am", and Gemini read out loud "setting an alarm for 7am tomorrow morning". But it was bullshit, it doesn't have the power to set alarms, it was just gaslighting me.

I hope it has little arms that gesticulate while it talks, like Stan from the Monkey Island games. Maybe it could have a Trump mode as well.

I will tag you when I share it!!

Off-topic but I caught Gemma 4 32B making a typo on my Mac a few days ago-- it said mononpsy instead of monopsony. It felt like I should win a prize or something, I'd never caught an LLM making that kind of mistake before. It was the quantized Ollama version.

I'm working on a tool for visualizing biological pathways, pulling data from the Reactome knowledge graph for now. Trying out different graph visualization algorithms, it's an interesting problem space as they are all approximations to solving a problem that I believe is NP-hard-- arranging a graph such that all vertices are distinct and you have the global minimum of overlapping edges. Next step is implementing a novel algorithm that I found described in a dissertation that doesn't share its code. Unfortunately it's not deployed yet, but if anyone seems interested I will be sure to share it on HN when it's in an acceptable state.

And they are all on hackernews reading these comments, and often participating.

But the East India Trading Company made money though.

Reading this, I feel like the Eisman character in TBS when he's on the phone and he goes "hey there's a bubble".

What makes it a lot more fun is that Oracle's existence depends on OpenAI making it through the bubble.

I am torn on this issue, because I would love to disincentivize short-term thinking at the executive level, and I initially considered this a decent move in that regard.

The SpaceX IPO is perhaps the latest and most damning outcome of that gutting.

I plan to do this when I buy a new phone, thank you for the great writeup!

Would have been a fun load test had you hosted your blog on the phone.

The nuance takes some of the humor out of the notion of eating beaver ass, though. That weighty tail hides a delectable treat.

This must be payback for us harvesting their delicious anal glands all those years ago.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/03/26/293406191/do...

Instead there would be misinterpretations, misrouting, and deaths of despair when a model misjudges a situation. And it sounds like the model would be the first line of defense before routing, which is the WORST possible implementation of generative AI in a system like this.

Ideally, models could be used here to provide additional information to a human operator (advanced transcription/translation for cases where callers are impaired in speaking, do not speak the same language as the operator, or have a bad connection or heavy accents-- for instance).

Instead, the first line of decision-making in potentially the highest possible stakes for certain callers is delegated to a text generator with no mind, adding a delay to the process.

Hats off to the consultancy and the soulless salesperson who nailed this contract.

[flagged]

The ridiculously criminal government of the Banana Republic of Serbia last year used this technique to prevent drones from being able to take video of a 300,000+ person protest in Belgrade. They spoofed the GPS signal to make the drones think they were flying near the Nikola Tesla Airport nearby so that they would autonomously land.

https://ground.news/article/lazni-signali-rusili-dronove-avi...

She'll understand when she's clawing at the door to be let into the singularity.

It sounds like your wife might get left behind by you.

Everything's computer.

For what it's worth, this is anecdotal as well, but a close friend of mine teaches math at a community college in NM and he routinely catches most of his students cheating on online multiple choice tests like this. He adds a sentence in white and tiny, tiny, text to the questions that either flip their meaning entirely or simply make one of the wrong answers seem correct. When I was visiting him at the end of last semester he was quite depressed when ALL of the students in one of his classes were caught cheating like this.

Ah yes, burn thousands of tonnes of methane (assuming Spacex) to launch a data centre satellite into an orbit, then burn thousands more to maintain it and update compute or burn the entire thing in the upper atmosphere, to avoid contributing to global warming by not burning all of that fuel and dry mass.

They HATEOAS because they Hain'tOAS.

Perfect for a Hydration Break!

You gotta just use more tokens, more tokens means better everything.

Finally, someone talking sense! Personally I first evaluate all of my potential employees by how clean they can lick my boots.

Cancelled my Spotify subscription as well, although on account of being served generated music several times in automatic playlists.

Actually owning music I listen to now feels great, but I missed the automatic recommendations. Setting up a plexamp server right now, but am looking into jellyfin. I love how it's OS and community supported. Does it have a recommendation system?

The kids are alright.

Welcome to Costco. I love you.

You have to admit though, a very appropriate speaker for new graduates in 2026.

Remember when IBM claimed the same about Watson?