neepi

Oh now that is interesting.

Source here as well https://github.com/suitenumerique

Yes. Lucky if you even get noticed.

I haven't found anything that needs fixing.

This is the standard voice of someone who's never had to deal with a badly maintained or managed open source product or an asshole maintainer or had to run a fork for 6 years because no one will merge a trivial fix in. Or had a LibreOffice bug open for a decade.

Yeah I can really get in there and spend 2 years ripping the horrible UI out, then have to run a fork because it's not of interest to the maintainers and will never be merged.

At that point I'll just use MS office. Costs me 10 minutes salary a month.

I assume it went as well as an acquaintance of mine found out. Wanted to go Linux and open source so dumped O365 and got Fastmail, libreoffice in to start with. His two office staff found rather quickly that they were up shit creek as they didn't know how to do anything and stuff didn't work quite how they expected it to. So they ended up switching back to O365 in under a couple of months. This was for a company that cuts out bits of foam and sells them.

A lot of computer users are drones. They have no conceptual idea or care about what they are doing. Moving stuff, even simple things, is crippling for productivity.

Now scale that up to hundreds or thousands of people. In local government people don't like to talk about the failures at all because there is fallout so we probably won't find the truth about what really happened but I suspect it wasn't all about politics and cash backhanders and MSFT investment.

If you really want to move off MSFT you will probably have to start again and run two completely isolated silos.

It's not that bad. My ex-partner has my old 2017 iMac and it is still supported with patches on Ventura. She's bought an M3 MBA that she hasn't set up yet because she can't be bothered.

As for Microsoft, much like the last few versions of windows, people will just continue to use it anyway. I am!

Actually you can use them as external displays but requires some hackery. See https://ohmypizza.com/2023/04/converting-a-5k-imac-into-an-e...

But yeah agree entirely there. When upgrading from my somewhat cranky old 5k iMac a while back, I decided I'd never buy another iMac. The 24" was out. So I bought a Studio Display and a mac mini. At least I can upgrade the computer separately, which has happened already (M2 mini -> M4 mini). I expect the Studio Display to last a long time as you can actually buy parts for it.

Mine didn't because it meant she could spend more on shoes. Anyway she's gone now...

It's about making the most of opportunity, something which is all around us and needs to be utilised.

Yes. They don't know what AI actually is and what the capabilities are and the companies selling integrations are running on hope rather than technical competence and suitability. So it gets applied to unsuitable problem domains and fails.

That is precisely my point.

One of my former contract outfits is there right now. Two failed projects so far, one of which impacted customers so badly that they ended up in trade press. The other one wrote off 5% of revenue with nothing to show.

No you can't solve everything with a chatbot because your CEO needs an AI proposition or he's going to look silly down the golf course with all the other CEOs that aren't talking about how theirs are failing...

They took two days and used react components and all sorts of shit and we nearly missed the deadline due to it.

The page I did was less than 4K with all content and css embedded and took me 10 minutes.

There's doing the job and there's costing the company a boat load of money doing the job.

Having been poor for most of my life, it's what you didn't pay for that keeps you afloat generally. If it blows up, I will move to the Lenovo M70s I found without a hard disk or RAM the other week. I put an 8 gig stick in it and it works so will get some more off ebay.

I have a fairly high end M4 Macbook Pro but prefer to live as if I don't most of the time. All of us can take a big fall in life so it makes sense to keep one foot in both worlds.

So I needed a nice looking static page kicked up on a CloudFront endpoint the other week. Just one single static page which had corp branding on it and had some blurb, a title and a link to a dataset we publish occasionally on it. This is so we can send it out in an email.

I left it to our web team with that explicit requirement and they came back with a bloody react front end. Went back to them with a WTF and it turns out they actually can't do static html any more. No joke. I nearly died inside.

As I'm crap at HTML and CSS, ChatGPT did the job in the end and I cleaned it up a bit.

Perhaps it's the people?

It could but I respect my potential userbase too much to make it more convenient for me and less convenient for them.

Yep same. Amazing what you can pull out of the skip these days and run for nothing. I lifted a couple of dead Lenovo P720 workstations out and managed to get a working dual Xeon silver 32 core machine with 64Gb of ECC RAM.

Uses a bunch of power but two orders of magnitude less in cash than buying another ECC ram desktop over 3 years.

If it blows up it cost me nothing other than an hour of part swapping.

I had an idea years ago for an app but came to the same conclusion after some market research and a risk assessment so didn’t bother. I do not regret that decision for a moment.

I either have to put enough time into the idea to do it full time or do a shitty job. I can’t win either way without incurring massive risks so I will continue to part time two jobs and invest the earnings from those wisely instead.

I had LTO. It's expensive and painful. Just multiple copies on good quality SSD is fine. Needs to be left powered up occasionally to do maintenance.

Yeah good luck with that. Seriously.

This is sad but true.

I disagree. Quality depends on your market position and what you are bringing to the market. Thus I would start with market conditions and work back to quality. If you can't reach your standards in the market then you shouldn't enter it. And if your standards are poor, you should be ashamed.

Go kart or porsche is irrelevant.

I would not assume that this methodology applies to applied engineering, as a former actual real tangible meat space engineer. Things are a little nuanced and the nuances come from a combination of communication and experience, neither of which any LLM has any insight into at all. It's not out there on the internet to train it with and it's not even easy to put it into abstract terms which can be used as training data. And engineering itself in isolation doesn't exist - there is a whole world around it.

Ergo no you can't just say throw a bicycle into an LLM and a parametric model drops out into solidworks, then a machine makes it. And everyone buys it. That is the hope really isn't it? You end up with a useless shitty bike with a shit pelican on it.

The biggest problem we have in the LLM space is the fact that no one really knows any of the proposed use cases enough and neither does anyone being told that it works for the use cases.

That seems to be a completely inappropriate use case?

I would not hire a blind artist or a deaf musician.

Ah yes the race to the bottom argument.

My only take home is they are all terrible and I should hire a professional.

Ah yes the constant adversarial relationship.

As an owner of 30+ year old CDs, that isn't necessarily the case. Some of them don't work particularly well these days. I went through a streaming thing for about 10 years but am moving back to physical media now. When I went to re-rip my CDs to FLAC I found some serious issues with a number of CDs which were chock full of errors around the edges.

Anyway after this I decided, fuck it, screw reliable storage or buying things on media. I'll buy it in a digital form and keep moving it around in less reliable media (mostly SSDs) until I'm dead.

I don't care about ownership. I care about not having to buy things twice and care about things I've bought being taken away. That's slightly different.

I gave my kids iPads.

But I also parented them.

The term AI was invented because Claude Shannon was fed up of getting automata papers.

Ego > engineering.