djhn

But a thumbnail generator is a 1 hour task at best if you’re on a solo greenfield project and it’ll still be a 6 week project at an enterprise, even with AI.

I think I should also clarify, I work in the training of encoder-decoder transformer models. Before the ChatGPT era I worked on on encoder-only transformer models. I'm not unfamiliar with the literature and general discourse. I just do not use LLMs for programming.

I can take on a slightly weaker form in good faith: professionally it’s a non-starter until private, open source inference can be self-hosted and the ROI is clear enough to invest in that.

And on the ROI side, trying things out regularly, I haven’t seen the positive ROI in the limited time I’ve dedicated to exploring the tools. I’ve restricted experimenting to 4 hours per month, because spending more than 2.5% of the month chasing productivity improvements that realistically seem to be 10-20%, will quickly eat into those gains. After accounting for token costs, it ends up being a wash.

What kind of code is infrastructure in this context? Devops in a software company? Internal tooling in a software org?

At many (otherwise) world-leading facilities even just reviewing the patient history is a slog. There is rarelly any ability to keyword search the records or even filter the records by location, title and occupation of the healthcare professional making it, etc. Especially very ill people will have hundreds and hundreds of recent entries.

And stepping through those entries isn’t like browsing a modern local-first app [1], where you will just scroll through dozens of entries in milliseconds. It’s not like the slightly older and slightly slower Gmail interface. You’re clicking on each record and waiting 400ms-3s for it to load, as if instead of a 25Gb fiber connection you’re on dialup requesting the record from Epic’s headquarters in the US and proxying them via Australia.

[1] https://bugs.rocicorp.dev/p/roci

Evidence? Harsh accusation.

I might have too French of an attitude towards parenting for American taste, but as long as the crying and screaming isn’t based on anything real (and as long as you’ve childproofed the children’s room well enough it shouldn’t be) the child will be fine and what y’all need is sufficient distance between the bedrooms, some nice, solid brick walls in between the the rooms and some earplugs.

What could a 6-24 month old possibly do from their bed in their room, to disturb your sleep in your bed in your room? Bring a trumpet to bed and badly play Miles Davis?

What happened to lights off, door closed, do whatever you want in complete darkness in the bed that you aren’t able to climb out of?

I agree with the sentiment. And I think we’ve accidentally stumbled upon how the prompt-writer should be viewed: the buyer, or sponsor of the output. A punter, if you will, would be even more appropriate. The financial commitment is minor amd the process is largely a gamble.

This is a fun analogy, even if it’s just novel to me.

With any kind of creative work for hire, from architecture to advertising, from jingles to commisioned sculptures, the client’s taste and budget, more than almost anything else, determine the outcome.

Take Cannes Lions as an example of a competition and awards ceremony that essentially exists to define what ’good taste’ means within that industry. The client’s team is prominently credited alongside the creative agency. They get to climb onto the stage for the speech and they have a voice on whatever video clip is made about the project.

Partly this is to encourage more ambitious and spendy work for the industry at large. But everyone involved certainly knows, that the same creative team, with the same creative idea, could have ended up making something much worse working with a different client team.

I can’t stand AI slop, yet I think I’ve unintentionally argued in favour of people creating it, as long as it’s… good by some measure?

Do these… ”groups”, which would rather you not lump chewing tobacco together with other tobacco products… manufacture and sell chewing tobacco?

Is there a book for a lay person you could recommend on this? Something a bit more rigorous than Yuval Harari, Bill Bryson and the like but not aimed at fellow historians only.

Yet another reason to doubt claims that ”software is solved”.

Anthropic did retire an interview take-home assignment involving optimising inference on exotic hardware, because Claude could one shot a solution, but that was clearly a whiteboard hypothetical instead of a real system with warts, issues and nuance.

Throughout history people have taken precautions against ceilings disintegrating. One might even say, ”strong engineering controls”.

Some of the best known laws from the ~1700BC Babylonian legal text, The Code of Hammurabi, are laws 228-233, which deal with building regulations.

229. If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction firm, and the house which he has built collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put to death.

230. If it causes the death of the son of the owner of the house, they shall put to death a son of that builder.

233. If a builder constructs a house for a man but does not make it conform to specifications so that a wall then buckles, that builder shall make that wall sound using his silver (at his own expense).

That doesn’t sound like ceilings never disintegrated!

I feel compelled to concur with fwip, dpark and breezybottom. LLMs and the chatbot interfaces built for these text generating models are very good at writing fiction, including writing fictional roles and acting out those roles. Don’t get too carried away by this fiction.

Starting a fire with a hair dryer, without disassemblibg it, seems almost like a challenge. What are you going to ignite with 80-90°C warm, rapidly cooling air?

Thanks, your setup is probably closer to what I'm looking for than fleetdm.

If it’s not essentially BYOD and you’re provisioning and monitoring security somehow, would you happen to have any quick tips for hassle-free linux MDM? I’m looking for something appropriate for a similar sized microenterprise.

My mistrust of digital locks isn’t based on negligence from the reputable(?) manufacturers (Abloy? Reputation is in the eye of the beholder).

It’s who else has access: property and facility management, maintenance, etc. In the age of physical keys, I trusted these SMBs to be relatively capable, let’s say 7/10, in protecting those keys from most local would-be criminals and opportunists. That goes down to 2/10 for protecting digital assets, like remote unlock capabilities, from cybercrime.

As soon as there is a viable market connecting cybercriminals with local criminals, whether it’s vertically integrated organised crime or something like carding forums, physical access exploitation is bound to become a problem.

Which approach are you saying is a phase people grow out of?

You probably know this, but a note for the benefit of people who don’t. The entire git history, including metadata, can be modified. Unless you have an independent offline remote to compare to, this method is not 100% guaranteed to detect tampering in all cases, for example if the nixpkgs repo is compromised (or your machines’ connection to your git forge is being MITM’d)

The success rate of computers doing those tasks has gone from 0% to 70%-90%, but reaching 100% might take a very long time.

You and GP must live in the Bay area. Not once in my life have I seen someone coding on a plane, let alone next to me.

I consider Azure risky and I would love to hear more about the companies and sectors that would laugh (with me). So which ones are you talking about?

LLMs will often helpfully predict made up tokens for the content of the data fields.

For 100% of jq use cases I have the data wouldn’t fit into context. But even for the smaller things, I have never, not even once, had an LLM not mangle data that is fed into it.

Take a feed of blog posts (and select the first 50 or so just to give the model a fighting chance). I’ll give you 80% likelihood of the output being invalid JSON. And if you manage to get valid JSON out of it, the actual dates, times and text content will have changed.

Human brains might work as lower power consumption, higher efficiency cores for less demanding work.

Ukraine draft age limit is now 25. It was lowered from 27 in 2024. If you are young and heading to university, you’re safe (for now). Even if the age limit is lowered, it will likely apply to NEETs first.

When people say ”time is money”, there is usually an amount of money that makes you go ”… but then again a lot of money is also money” and give up some time in exchange for that money.

Wartime resources are similar, in the sense that they’re at least partially fungible. Maybe the amount of money the Gulf states are willing to pay for borrowing those people buys you a lot of the other stuff.

It’s sad that it’s come to this, but your addendum with credentials and a non-slop declaration worked. Three years ago it would have seemed unnecessarily self-aggrandizing. Today I wouldn’t have clicked the link without it.

I would not assume that giving my kids $400 million would be a net benefit to them.

Now to be fair I might be wrong, since I’ve neither researched this nor given it much thought. Maybe there is research on deca- and centimillionaire heirs that shows positive effects of money on life satisfaction, happiness, health and other life outcomes. However I suspect it works similarly to sheltering kids from adversity, failure and hardship in general: disadvantages them psychologically and leads to more problems down the line.