massysett

I read the first “bug” about some icons being microscopically off-center and then I started to scroll through the rest, trying to figure out if the whole piece was some sarcastic response to someone who is baselessly complaining about the release being a buggy mess.

But I guess the author is seriously complaining about an icon being off center and saying that makes it buggy mess. Seriously?

Yes, it’s possible for a person to create software he doesn’t understand himself. In the old days this was pasting from Stack Overflow and changing things until it worked.

In the old days even if I knew how the software worked when I wrote it, I’d have no idea how it worked when I looked at it weeks later.

It’s also easy to modify software without knowing how it works. This produces modifications that hopefully appear to work, but that break other things, sometimes unknown things.

This is even worse now that tap to pay has proliferated. Customers who are not Walmart regulars (and some that are) will wave their credit card, phone, or watch over the terminal and wonder why it’s not working.

Cashier must explain: No tap. Best case is the customer shrugs and inserts card. Bad case is the customer is confused or argues about it. Horrible case is that the customer must fish through his belongings for a credit card or cash and takes minutes to realize he has neither.

I guess Walmart figured that these scenes repeating daily was not worth whatever its strategy was.

Which makes it all the more bizarre that LLMs have this problem. Claude Code runs the code it generates through a compiler, why can’t an LLM run its product through a cite checker? I’ve seen LLMs fabricate citations.

If it's good antique furniture, your executor will auction it. I used to frequent an auction house in DC (it has now moved to Rockville) that auctioned this sort of thing all the time once a week. Clearly there were regulars who scooped stuff up, I suppose to sell in their antique shops.

It is difficult for people to throw things away.

Many things invoke "but this is a perfectly good..." I had a LaserJet monochrome printer. I knew I would never use it because I now have a color model, and if the color one broke I would replace it immediately. "But this is a perfectly good printer." It sat for a few years on a shelf before I finally tossed it. Resale nets too little to be worthwhile.

Other things represent work. This is old files in the office. My workplace was full of file cabinets with drawers of papers. It was decades of accumulated knowledge. No one would ever read them or use them. But throwing them away seemed disrespectful of all the work that went into those papers. For these things, I think of my daughter's math homework. It is extremely valuable and lots of work went into it, and there is zero reason to retain it the instant it comes home.

Other things represent memories. They embody a long friend or lost relative, or a vacation, or an occasion, or a feeling they caused when worn, used, etc. Discarding it seems to disrespect the memory. I try to keep these things to a minimum - keep representative samples, and digitize to the extent possible.

This is why discarding things is hard. I don't want storage space and have none, but I completely understand why people would rather shove apparently useless things into a storage locker. It's easier to pay to store it than to discard it. I go a step farther and say that it's worth it for folks to pay to store these things. It's worth $80/month or whatever it costs to have that stuff sitting in a storage box, even if they know they will never ever use or even look at them.

I don’t see why it is interesting to claim that a piece is AI generated, especially in light of the concession in your last paragraph that you liked the article.

AI is a tool. It outputs things only when asked to. Asking it requires skill. Saying “This is AI generated” is like pointing at furniture and saying that “power tools were used to build that” or at a program and saying “that’s not assembly, a modern garbage-collected language was used to build that” or at a meal and saying “this was cooked in a kitchen with a modern temperature-controlled oven” or at a paper and saying “this was obviously typeset in LaTeX, not roff or plain TeX.”

So what? Give me a shop full of power tools and I can’t build any furniture, give me Python and a bunch of libraries and I can’t write Mercurial, and give me any LLM and I couldn’t have written this piece.

Does the conceit come from the idea of “some LLM wrote this, so anyone could”? This is like walking through a modern art museum and seeing some obvious-looking piece and saying “I could have done that.” Well, you didn’t.

My cable internet is 2.5G. So it’s nice to get that full speed when I have a wired connection.

To be honest though, my usage does not benefit from the speed. The only benefit is to the reptile part of my brain that says “speed. Must have the fastest possible, and since I’m paying for it, even though maybe I should downgrade it, I want my speed.”

The expansion cards always seemed a gimmick to me: it's just a USB-C port, loaded down with the extra plastic necessary to claim it's an expansion port. I guess some folks find it more convenient than a dongle, but when I'm using a laptop for portability it's rare I want anything other than USB-C. (When the laptop is sitting at home or in the office on a desk, just plug in a Thunderbolt dock and get all the ports I could want.)

I’m surprised that anyone would love Amazon so much that they resort to using third-party search so they can continue buying from Amazon. Rather than just shopping elsewhere!

There are many product categories where I know that shopping on Amazon will be a miserable experience riddled with crap goods and useless search, so I go elsewhere. Never even occurred to me to use an LLM to make up for Amazon’s own deliberate decision to serve me crap.

This all supposes that the sports team owners really are that: independent owners. Sure that’s what we call them, but it’s more accurate to say they are equity partners in a common enterprise.

It’s not interesting to say that a sports league controls whether there is a new team. Of course it does, just as an existing supermarket chain decides where to open new stores, or an airline decides what cities to fly to. Competition for a sports league comes from other leagues (not necessarily in the same sport) or from different forms of entertainment entirely.

In case the author is, like so many people, sensitive to this kind of criticism, I will say this:

Thank you for giving the world your free software. Feel no compunction to undertake extra work to please people who criticize your work. They are not paying for your software and are not paying your bills. If your install eats enormous amounts of ram or uses a programming language they do not like, that is their problem. In your case for example they are free to get Bloomberg.

If you want to do free work to please critical people, ok. But I wouldn’t bother. Thank you for all the work you did to write your software and then the even more work you did to share it. I write my own software but don’t bother sharing it because it’s a lot of work, so I appreciate you.

? I’ve done hiring and we review all undergrad and graduate transcripts every single time, so I am hardly grasping at straws.

But will an LLM write dense Common Lisp? A lot of that density comes from well-designed domain-specific macros. An LLM will have no incentive to write these on its own, though it could if a human prods it sufficiently.

> You really think and employer is going to look at UofM and say "Oh, they gave their students a 1 semester reprieve, obviously they are of lower quality"?

Yes. This will be evident on the transcript. It won’t reduce a student from “must-hire” to “do not interview.” But it could make a marginal difference when two students are compared.

One has all A and the other has all P. If the all A is Ohio State and the all P is Michigan, if I’m otherwise indifferent I might hire Ohio State.

I read NYT. Perfectly usable with ads.

Meh. My tinnitus is a result of high-frequency hearing loss. The hearing loss is not noticeable - maybe I can't hear something just below what dogs can hear? - but the tinnitus is noticeable.

I have no idea how it happened - I never used headphones much, I don't work around machines or jet engines, etc. One doctor said it's just wear and tear.

It doesn't bother me though. I figure that nobody has a full stack of bricks when it comes to health, and here's one of the places I'm short. Compared to some of the places where other folks have health problems, this is not a biggie.

I read your link and still don’t agree that these ads are “bad”.

I think these ads built brand awareness. The point of the MidWest Micro “Clue” ad was not necessarily to spur you to buy a MidWest Micro system today. The purpose was so that when you were in the market to buy a system, and you saw one of theirs on a magazine cover or (in the case of Gateway) at a mall storefront, you said “oh I’ve heard of them,” and then you buy one.

12 pages of marketing gimmicks builds awareness. Two pages of specs doesn’t. That I remember Gateway and MidWest Micro but not many of the others of the reams of price lists in Computer Shopper is a testament to this.

So random youtuber gave you something of value - something that saved you hundreds of dollars from not having to get a professional repair - yet you have something against random YouTuber getting paid?

Or you could not consume the content.

YouTube is tolerable with ads. If I found it intolerable, I would pay. Or not visit.

I don’t use adblockers. If a site has too many ads to be usable, I don’t visit it.

> I would love for something to force a speed and power rating on USB-C plugs.

This already exists. Cable makers can certify their cables and mark them with their data speed and wattage.

I buy only certified, marked cables. If I see an unmarked cable, I assume it’s slow and low-powered…which is good enough for some things.

How do the cars do when breaking a rule is necessary? For instance, a car is broken down in the one forward lane of a two-lane road, requiring the waymo to cross the double-yellow line to get around it. Or, a signal is red for so long that obviously its car detector isn’t working.

The whole point is that the friend wouldn’t know what an agent is. The friend would have heard that AI is changing the world and she would have went into ChatGPT or maybe Claude or Gemini. Presuming that the ideal is that anyone should be able to use these tools for anything (which I do not agree with) the chatbot needs to say “you need to use my agent mode.”

This is not a wrong tool, wrong job issue. The issue is that people think any moron can use an LLM and get professional results.

Some people want a new car all the time. Leasing is not a bad way to do that.

Wanting a new car all the time is the expensive decision, not leasing, which is merely a manifestation of that decision.

As someone who drives a ten-year-old car that probably has several good years left, I completely understand why someone would not want my boring life. This is the fallacy of people who recount stories of the “millionaire next door” who has high net worth. Many people do not really want wealth. They want to consume a lot: travel, new cars, restaurants, clothes.

Heh, I saw the title and the domain, and I thought it was referring to wealth transferred from poor to rich by all the credit card fees that merchants pay that are refunded to well-off cardholders through rebates. Poorer customers do not get lucrative rebates, it they use debit and get none at all.

I had what I thought was a completely ridiculous prompt: “Build me a replacement for Microsoft Word.” ChatGPT did what I thought was the right thing: it responded asking along the lines of “you don’t really want that do you?” and explained how Word is decades of corner cases, bug fixes, obscure features, and business processes that have been built around it.

I was stunned that Claude simply started spinning its wheels in an attempt to actually build something.

“You need to look up Oneplus to see how many people were using their devices till they announced exit from Western markets.”

The final part of this sentence shows why there is absolutely no need to look up Oneplus.

I am always very polite with my chat bots. Mostly because the interface does mimic human conversation and I’m afraid that if I’m rude to the bot, I’ll get used to being rude and then I’ll start being rude to people.